The Night Dahlia Read online

  The “boat” waiting for us at a private slip was a forty-eight-foot Cantius speedboat. Like everything else the Ankous owned, it was expensive and high quality, just like yours truly, except he was only renting me.

  We headed out to sea, and I had the onboard hostess fix me up with a cold Corona. I unbuttoned and took off my shirt, tossed it in a deck chair, lit up a cigarette, and felt the sun, the cool sea air, and the spray kiss me.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t think to drag the couch out here on the deck or run the Stars and Bars up the flagpole to make you feel a little more at home,” Burris said. I looked over to the knight. He was standing with his arms crossed, scanning the horizon, his eyes hidden behind his Maybach sunglasses. He looked like a cross between Othello and the Terminator.

  “Expecting an assassination attempt from seagulls?” I asked, burping a little from the beer.

  “The Ankous have political enemies and business rivals,” he said. “I have no doubt they all know about you since we scooped you up. They may decide to grab you to find out what you’re up to, see if it gives them a tactical advantage, or they may decide just to kill you to derail whatever it is they think you are doing for the family. So relax, get drunk, and enjoy the ride. One of us has to do his job.”

  “I bet you are a fucking madman at the company Christmas party,” I said, and turned back to enjoy the breathtaking view. We were crossing the blue, glass waters of the Saronic Gulf.

  Four beers, half a pack of cigarettes, and plenty more stimulating conversation from Burris later, we were slowing and making our way along the Gulf of Argolis, toward Baltiza Bay on the eastern side of Spetses. Off to our starboard was a yacht so big it made our forty-eight-footer look like a dinghy. The ship was gliding along at a leisurely pace with hundreds of beautiful partygoers hanging off its rails, drinking, drugging, and dancing on its decks. The sound system on the yacht was throbbing as it blasted “BonBon” by Era Istrefi across the bay, probably killing aquatic life with the decibel level.

  To port you could see the labyrinth of the city the isle was named for. Whitewashed, boxlike buildings were stacked side by side and seemingly atop one another, rising up the hillside of the island. Tiny terraces and colorful, shuttered windows breaking the almost-geometric solidarity of the cozy homes and shops. I could see tourists and locals streaming through the crowded, winding, cobblestone streets tucked tightly between the structures. At the water’s edge were marinas with boats of every size and shape imaginable, bobbing gently in the turquoise waters, as well as seaside cafes with patrons enjoying seafood and beers under large, shady umbrellas. If thirteen-year-old me had been here, I’m pretty damn sure I’d never have left. It made me try to connect a little with Caern. Did she leave all this willingly, or was she taken? And if it was of her own free will, what had driven her out of paradise?

  Our boat took us up the eastern face of the island, past crowded public beaches and pristine private ones. The sand on the shoreline gleamed like powdered gold, kissing water of liquid sapphire. I think I understood why Ankou had a home here. This place was as close to any I’d ever seen on Earth to match the otherworldly beauty of Faerie.

  We went around the northern tip of the island, and I saw villas dotting the sides of the hilly island, nestled among the myrtle and pine trees. I saw groves of lemon and fig trees on terraces of land along the hills. Eventually we docked at the private pier that also housed a small and powerful-looking cigarette boat and a hundred-and-thirty-foot yacht. Men who looked more like soldiers than dock hands caught the mooring lines and helped tether us to our section of the pier. There was a winding set of wooden stairs that led up the hills to the rear of the beach house. Burris and I carried our bags up the winding staircase. Servants offered to carry everything up, but we both tacitly refused.

  The house was a luxury fortress with a stunning view of the sea and the mountain the house rested at the top of. We were shown to our rooms and told that dinner would be ready around six. I dropped my single, battered, old canvas bag with the zipper that stuck sometimes on the floor next to the bed. The bag was the color of sand and covered with poorly drawn runes and the logos of old bands like the Stones, Kiss, the DKs, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, all in black Sharpie. It was my bag of magic tricks, and it was the oldest thing I owned. It had left the trailer park in my hand when I was the same age Caern had been when she had disappeared, thirteen. Jesus, that was a long time ago. A lot of miles since then. Most folks who knew me well enough for me to give a shit about their opinion would say I was still in all the essential ways a thirteen-year-old. Sad, but pretty much true.

  I figured one of the grotesque goodies in my bag would help me narrow down the search for the girl. First, I needed to check out her place, which Burris had assured me had not been altered in any significant way since her vanishing act in 2009. I unlaced and kicked off my steel-toed boots, fell back onto the bed, and was asleep in short order. I awoke with the knight standing over me, jabbing a finger into my chest.

  “Dinner,” Burris said and walked through the open door. He didn’t bother to close it. I rolled off the bed, shut the door, and grabbed a quick shower. I finally changed out of the Houston clothes and traded them for a Rick and Morty T-shirt and jeans. As I sat at the edge of the bed and slipped on my boots, I thought about the problem of ditching my asshole chaperone. I retrieved a little something from my bag and headed down to eat.

  The spread was as top shelf as everything else had been. I pushed some food around my plate and had a few glasses of wine. Burris ate sparingly and narrowed his eyes at me across the table. “Yes, I’ll eat my veggies,” I said, draining my glass of wine. The knight sighed and sipped his beer.

  “You’re a waste of time and money,” he said. “Fortunately, Ankou has plenty of both.”

  “Never ‘Mr. Ankou,’” I said, pouring myself another glass, “it’s always just ‘Ankou.’ Why don’t you kiss your boss’s ass like all of his other drones, Burris? Burris … what the hell is your first name, anyway? Did they give you one when they grew you in the lab?”

  The edges of Burris’s lips curled a millimeter. “Vigil,” he said. A hint of northern street accent slipped out as he continued. “My grandma told me my mamma named me that because it was a long, hard labor, and Mom and I both kept vigil. I’m loyal to my house. I’m willing to take a bullet for Ankou; I’m not here to prop up his ego. That’s enough.”

  It was my turn to give him a smile. “Maybe you’re not as big a tool as I thought you were, Vigil.” I palmed the small bottle that I had taken out of my bag from my jeans pocket, hiding it with my linen napkin. I allowed my hand to pass over my wineglass, and a few drops of liquid from the bottle fell into my wine as I raised the napkin to dab my lips. I raised my glass with my free hand to toast as I put the napkin and bottle back under the table. Vigil raised his bottle of Mythos beer, in kind. “Dulcis Bacchus sanguinem et sanguinem, Gaia, sensus vestri: ut mulgeatis mea implebitur. Hoc donum tibi.”

  “Odd toast,” Vigil said. “Sounds like a spell.” I shrugged and drained my glass.

  “It was on a little bottle I saw once. It was supposed to hold some of the god Bacchus’s blood. I always thought it was like a prayer to the Greek god of partying.”

  “Well, no partying tonight,” Burris said. “Tomorrow morning, we drive into the city and go over Caern’s apartment. I want you straight. Time to start earning your pay, Ballard.”

  “I need to go over the place alone,” I said, refilling my glass and gesturing to one of the servants with the empty wine bottle. The guy took the bottle, nodded, and went around the corner. “I’m good at doing this, but I have my own way of going about it, and my way is a solo act.”

  “It isn’t now,” Vigil said. I started to reply. Instead I drained another glass of wine.

  “Whatever you say, partner,” I said as they returned with another bottle of wine.

  We retreated to the den. I made a play for the remote, but Burris snagged it first. I figured I was do
omed to an evening of watching ESPN, but to my surprise, he stopped when he spotted Reservoir Dogs. “I love this movie,” he said, stretching out on one of the couches with his second beer. “I’ve seen it a hundred times.”

  “Same,” I said. An odd question tumbled into my brain. “So who do you think is the good guy in this? The cop or the thief?”

  “Both,” Vigil said, “and neither. They both have a code and they both honored it. Sometimes a code is all you have to keep you human, keep you standing upright and breathing.”

  “And sometimes it gets your ass killed,” I said. A weariness settled over me and I realized how many oaths I had broken, how many promises I had failed or threw away on an altar of selfishness and self-aggrandizement. I knew who I was dealing with now and it made me a little sadder. I had hoped Vigil was an idiot, a drone. He wasn’t.

  Vigil glanced over to me on my couch, nodded at the screen where Harvey Keitel was being a total badass. “It ain’t no Pulp Fiction, but this cool?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “cool.”

  I downed two more bottles of wine, a bottle of Sans Rival ouzo, and a few beers. Vigil stopped watching the flat screen, which was the size of a small movie theater screen. He looked at me, shook his head, and finally excused himself for the night.

  “You’re going to hate me in the morning,” Burris said as he climbed the stairs.

  “I already do,” I said, waving as he disappeared upstairs. After he was gone, I waited about twenty minutes and then whispered the final trigger of the spell that was spun with the drops of god’s blood. “Hoc donum tibi.” Before the last syllable had faded, the working took, and I was sober, stone cold sober, and poor Burris upstairs had just inherited my drunken buzz I had spent all evening building for him.

  I wandered over to the villa’s garage and was not disappointed. Top-fucking-shelf. I decided to pass on the Lamborghini and the Bugatti parked there, opting to take one of the motorcycles, a sleek, black NCR M16 Streetfighter. I eschewed the helmet—yeah, yeah, I know, but we’ve already established that I’m an idiot—tying my hair back and out of my eyes. The instrument panel included a hands-free cell phone, GPS, and a compact but powerful-looking sound system. I wondered which button fired the phasers. This thing cost a hell of a lot of money, and it was a far, far cry from the old Suzuki dirt bikes I used to ride and race when I was a kid.

  I pushed the ignition, kicking the bike in the guts. It snarled back at me. I snapped on the headlight, fiddled with the satellite radio until music spilled out of the speakers, and spun out of the garage into the darkness. I followed a bumpy private road for about a quarter of a mile. It finally connected to a main road with a stunning view of the island and the sea below. I accelerated the Streetfighter and felt the wind on my face, the dance of gravity and velocity pulling me toward oblivion or balance, life or death, when I took my first curve. Fuck, yes. I finally felt free and myself for the first time in days.

  I had gotten Caern’s apartment’s address from Burris while we had watched TV, and I headed northeast, back toward the city on the other side of the island. I was going to enjoy the solitude on the way there. A single supernova headlight flashed behind me. So much for solitude. Another bike broke free of the wilderness and came off the same private road I had been on.

  “You fucking kidding me?” I muttered. The satellite radio was playing Kanye’s “Stronger.” I accelerated and took another turn. The bike’s headlight vanished from view only to reappear a second later as the driver took the curve fast trying to catch up. “Okay, asshole, I hope your insurance is paid up.”

  There was a straightaway, and I twisted the accelerator on the quarter-of-a-million-dollar bike. The speedometer was climbing closer to ninety. The bike was light as hell, and it had a fucking two-hundred-horsepower rocket attached to it. The headlight of the other bike diminished. I slowed to take a steep turn that dipped downward as the road hugged the mountain’s edge. The turn came out into a short straightaway and then another turn, opposite of the last. The headlights were back by the time I cleared the second curb and were closing. Son of a bitch. The driver had taken those turns at close to full speed to catch up.

  I gunned the accelerator, and the bike almost popped a wheelie. I was heading into another tight curve. I dipped the bike low to correct for the speed going through the turn. The grindstone of the road flashed inches from my face for a few seconds. Then I was up, loose rocks from the edge of the turn flying as I came out into another straight strip of highway and kept flooring it. The other bike took the turn, I glanced back to see the driver’s leg flash out in a spray of gravel, and then the rider was clear and back on my ass. I was pretty sure now that the other bike was the fucking red Ducati from the garage, and that made it pretty clear who the rider was. How the hell he had shaken off the spell, I had no clue.

  There was the angry bleat of a car horn, and I snapped my head forward to see a convertible Jag barreling down on me. I had drifted over to the other side of the road; at this speed a split second was too long to get distracted. I swerved at 120 miles an hour and accelerated instead of braking, even though my instincts were screaming to stop. I was about six inches from the car’s paint. I managed to keep it on the road. The guy driving the car flipped me off and screamed at me; his voice was lost in the tunnel of velocity.

  Another turn coming up at 140. I could feel the Streetfighter bucking like a titanium bronco, fighting against the contact patches on the tires, wanting to leave the pavement, to fly into the sky. As fucked up as this was getting, I felt the same way. I had wished a few minutes ago that I had a drink or two in me to loosen me up, but now I was high on a much stronger drug. I was going to lose this crazy motherfucker, and there was only one way to beat a crazy motherfucker. I looked over at the coast below. The waxing moon was rising, not full, but so large and bright it felt like you could touch it. The sea, the stars, the wind, the speed—I drank it all in, felt it burn in me like no pill or powder, no drink or smoke ever could. The turn was coming up, wide and sharp, dipping lower toward the rocks and sea far below.

  I hit the turn at 165, a literal half-second to scan the road below and ahead, then I snapped off the headlight, plunging me into darkness. There was no thinking, no feeling. All that existed was the moment. It was, I was. Act, no time for consequence, no time for weighing choices. My leg shot out from the left peg, and my steel-toed boot caught the guardrail solidly as I used it as a guide. I kicked off the rail and then counter-steered, turning the handlebars left instead of the instinctual right. Everything was rhythm now, the blink of an eye, a single thud of a heartbeat, the throaty growl of the engine. I straightened out the front wheel. There was the dizzy, sick feeling of my stomach settling in my balls as the road vanished under me with a hiss of gravel, the bike going airborne, finally getting its wish to leave the road behind, but only for a second. Impact, I turned into where the road should be. I was still up and still going into the yawning darkness. I had the accelerator jammed forward, trying to make as much time and get as much distance while he was, literally, in the dark as to where I was. I had no idea how much straightaway until the next turn. Time to Obi-Wan it. My third eye, my Ajna, opened wide, and I was driving on pure mystical radar, which contrary to the movies and TV only gets you so far, especially when you’re not calm, not ever at fucking peace, and have adrenaline tearing its way through your blood like a freight train.

  Far behind me was the rev of the Ducati’s powerful engine as it cleared the curve jump too. I saw the bouncing headlight, heard the distant scream of the tires for traction and a whoosh of scattering gravel. He had almost gone over. The man was fucking deranged, clearly. I sensed the straight was about to give to another curve, another drop. I hit the turn, tires and suspension angry, jerking, and wailing in protest at the speed and the angle as I launched off into space again. I didn’t need mystic instincts to know I had pushed this game as far as I could.

  I snapped on the headlight and saw I was plummeting toward the
end of a long straightaway I had just bypassed by going airborne. The bike landed, and I stood up on the pegs as it hit, then dropped and fought to keep it on the road going into the beginning of a new yawning curve, headed to the bottom of the mountain.

  My speed had decreased considerably, but I now had a good half a mile or more of curves and road between me and Vigil. I accelerated out of the turn and along the straight line of the coast that was leading me toward the city. I checked behind me several times, but I seemed to have lost the knight. I gave the road behind me the finger, and kept on keeping on.

  * * *

  The streets of Spetses were still crowded with tourists, mostly young, mostly beautiful, and all loaded in more ways than one. This whole place was a playground for the ultra-rich, people who had no clue what it did to a human being to have to sweat the rent or decide if they should buy food for their kid or buy the meds the kid needed. I couldn’t help feeling like an intruder on this island as I glided the Streetfighter through the traffic. Most of these folks’ biggest concern tonight was which restaurant or club to blow their money in. I didn’t belong here, I never had.

  I know my own poorer-than-fucking-dirt background informs my opinion on all that. I had known plenty of rich folks sadder than fuck for real, and good reasons, but there was no denying sad and rich beat the shit out of sad and poor any day of the week and twice on Sunday.