Mister Petty #5
Objectively, it took seconds. From my point of view, it was a bad, bad hour. My body pulled in energy from everywhere, drawing extra mass from the spaces between realities. And when I was done, I was nine feet tall, covered in black scales, a thousand pounds of muscle and claws and fangs.
Steam curled up from my scales. Air heaved in and out of my massive new lungs, pluming in the cool subterranean air. Slabs of gorilla-like muscle quivered to be used.
And I was feeling grouchy.
The ghouls showed up a minute later.
They’d done some shifting of their own. Arms had lengthened, backs gnarled, claws extended. Muzzles had thrust out from their faces, fangs growing. Hungry, slavering, carnivorous monsters.
But when I came out of the dark, half a ton of steaming black scales, ripping claws, tearing fangs, and red, glowing demonic eyes, the monsters found out the difference between amateurs and professionals.
It got ugly.
It also got all over the walls and ceiling.
One of the ghouls got away by tearing itself loose from its own arm, clenched in my jaws.
It ran while I finished off a couple of wounded.
Ghouls are like roaches. They take a lot of killing, generally by dismemberment.
I made sure the job was done, and about the time the fleeing ghoul got to the surface, there was a loud boom, and then two more.
I ambled up to the mouth of the tunnel, where Viti stood, holding a semiautomatic shotgun over a badly wounded ghoul. It had taken one round to the chest and one to each leg and was trying to drag itself away on its remaining arm.
I came out of the tunnel, bloodied, because you don’t tangle with half a dozen ghouls without paying a price. Viti’s eyes widened, and she almost raised the shotgun. Hard to blame her.
I grabbed the wounded ghoul’s leg and dragged the ghoul back down into the tunnel with the others. It yowled weakly, thrashing.
Then I finished the job.
Later that night, I met with Sheryl Petty on the waterfront in the Port of Chicago.
Barge shipping traffic from the city isn’t what it was back in the town’s heyday, but it still exists.
It’s slow. Which suited my purposes perfectly.
You work with the shady side of Chicago, you know guys at the port, especially the ones there late at night. I made sure she got let through.
Mrs. Petty pulled up in her sporty little European car (pink, obviously), tires crunching on gravel as she stopped under a buzzing halogen light outside one of the many, many warehouses.
She’d dressed for the part, in a long coat, sunglasses, and with a kerchief over her hair, as if she’d been sent over from central casting as “clandestine meeting Barbie.”
“Mister Grey,” she said. She tried to look cavalier as she fitted a cigarette into her holder and lit it, but her hands were shaking. “Are you going to make me a happy woman?”
“Depends on your point of view,” I replied.
My arm and belly burned silently from wounds that would take a few more meals and several more hours of sleep to heal, and it might have made me ill-tempered.
Even so, she’d hired me. She deserved a chance to turn aside.
“You want bad things to happen to your husband?”
Her eyes narrowed. “That’s right,” she snapped. “That’s right, I do.”
“And you’re sure about that?”
“Completely.”
I exhaled through my nose. “So be it. Come and see.”
I led her into the warehouse, past a clerk’s office, and into the dim, cavernous main storage area where cargo containers and large shipping crates were stacked twenty and thirty feet high.
“My God,” Mrs. Petty breathed. “I mean. There’s no one here.”
“Not entirely true,” I said. We went to the far end of the warehouse, where vast rolling doors were closed snugly against the night, and there, in a frozen goods shipping container the size of a tractor trailer, were Viti, Maurice Petty, and Cammy Montecrist.
Maurice and Cammy sat on the floor back-to-back. They’d been restrained with zip ties, their mouths covered with adhesive tape. Viti stood over them both, holding a silenced pistol down by her side.
Sheryl Petty took in the sight, her eyes widening. “What? My God, what? Cammy?” She rushed over to her sister.
“I thought you’d want Maurice’s lover to suffer as well.”
Maurice sighed through his nose. Cammy’s eyes widened, and she started shaking her head.
Sheryl froze, shocked. Then her eyes went even wider, and glassy, and her face turned very, very red.
With a birdlike pounce, she closed the distance on Cammy and began slapping her across the face, hard, repeatedly.
One of the blows tore the tape off the corner of Cammy’s mouth and she began cursing.
Viti and I traded a look and walked back to the entrance of the cargo container.
“You bitch!” screamed Sheryl Petty. Then she started slapping Maurice, too. “You bastard!”
Maurice noticed when I took hold of the cargo container door. He screamed through the tape, nodding desperately toward me.
Sheryl whirled around.
“Balanced scales,” I said quietly. “Sheryl, you were siphoning off your husband’s money and you hired a genuine monster”—I put my hand on my chest modestly—“to make him miserable and/or kill him horribly. Maurice, you make a lot of things possible for bad men doing bad things, and you were banging your wife’s sister.
And, Cammy, you were conspiring with ghouls to steal from both of them and planning to leave them high and dry. You’re all…just terrible people.”
All three of them stared at me. Sheryl began to take a step toward the exit of the storage container, but Viti raised her pistol and gave her a flat, emotionless look.
Sheryl froze.
“Your coat. Scarf. Sunglasses. Please,” Viti said in a neutral tone.
Sheryl goggled. Then woodenly removed the mentioned items of clothing. Viti collected them, her eyes cold.
I nodded. “Now. Had Sheryl not hired me, Cammy would have run off with all the money. The ghouls would have killed her, taken the money, blackmailed Maurice, and used him to get at Marcone, and I think you know how that would have ended for you, Maurice.”
“What about me?” Sheryl demanded. “What would they have done to me?”
“I dunno,” I said. “Killed you and eaten you, maybe? If they noticed you at all.”
“Oh,” she said in a much smaller voice.
I gave them all the unsettling smile. “Of course, Sheryl did hire me. So. You’re not going to be killed and eaten by ghouls. Instead, I’m sentencing you to Sartre’s hell.”
“What?” Sheryl demanded. “What do you mean?”
“You’ll see,” I said.
And I shut the shipping container door and locked it.
“How thick is that insulation?” I wondered aloud.
“Eighteen inches,” Viti said promptly. “Can’t you hear them screaming and banging?”
“No,” I said.
“Precisely,” she said.
“You put the supplies in there?”
“There is enough water and enough calories to keep them alive until they reach St. Louis and the container is opened. Assuming they share them rationally.”
“They’ll have a lot to talk about on the way,” I noted.
Viti slipped her pistol away and put on Sheryl’s coat, scarf, and sunglasses.
She fished Sheryl’s keys out of the coat pocket.
While I walked, I put on Maurice’s face.
Security cameras would take pics of us on the way out, but they would only see the Pettys.
“What we have just done is illegal, is it not?”
“Very.”
“But right?”
I waggled my hands. “For some values of right, I suppose. They’re awful people. They deserve one another. I’m just making sure they get what they deserve.”
“When they are freed, they may seek vengeance,” Viti noted.
“Have a hard time with that,” I said. “I’m fairly sure Marcone’s people have already cleared out their bank accounts, using the information from the report you wrote up.”
“Ah. Sheryl might kill the other two while they are restrained,” Viti noted.
“She might,” I agreed. “That will be her choice. She did hire me to get even, after all. Of course, if she does, she’ll deserve the ride while the bodies stink, and what happens to her when she’s found in there with them in St. Louis.”
Viti frowned. “So, we have delivered justice?”
“We have delivered appropriate vengeance and fulfilled the letter of my agreement,” I said.
“Which is good?”
“Which is complete,” I said. “Honestly, you’re going to find that good and bad get really fuzzy, really quick, outside of very simple equations,” I mused. “Besides, I’m not the kind of monster you hire for petty crap like this.”
Viti frowned as we got into Sheryl’s car, with her driving. “Is their fate not rather severe for such a thing?”
“I’m not above being a little petty myself, I suppose.”
“Is that balance?” she asked.
I shrugged. “It’s life. You hungry?”
“Starving.”
“We made money,” I said. “Let’s eat.”