Neon Stonehenge - Ch. 11

Chapter Eleven - "Not My Doing"

Bella's reading had shaken me, no doubt about it, and now I understood why both my father always seemed so rattled when he visited her, and why my sister came by regularly. There was a lot of foreboding about what she'd told me, a sense that this case ran much deeper than I understood, that it had been a long time in the coming, none of which made any sense to me.

How the hell could this be a long-term plan? The elf and the cop had been together a while, but that was still only a couple of years. Absolutely nothing compared to the big-scale planning done by powerful wizards and long-lived dragons.

Stil, the way being a detective worked was you had to pull on any thread you found, and sometimes it was the right thread the first time, but more often than not, it would pull you towards a handful of other threads, and you just had to pick them up one at a time and go through them methodically to figure out where the truth really waited.

That meant Viktor Kolmach was basically all I had in terms of a lead, which is not the state I want to have an investigation in. There were some loose strands - the idea that maybe the K4 were trying crowd in on the Dark Docks, but that felt like such a minor kind of thing for all this mess. There were a lot of easier ways to get influence over the Dark Docks, and the fact that there had been two murders in less than a week meant I was going to be incredibly paranoid about who I chose for the job. Was that the point? Make me overly suspicious, so I would pick someone outside of the normal? Try to get in my head so far that I was second guessing my own decisions and going for someone far outside of who I might normally? Or were they trying to get me down to a specific name on my list? And what the hell did a missing fae girl with a cop boyfriend have to do with any of this?

I knew there were pieces of the puzzle I was missing, and so despite the fact that I'd spent the entire drive over to the building in Sunset Heights considering all possible paths I could think of, all I had to go on was Viktor, and I hated that. The building was a three-story apartment building with a couple dozen units in it, and I wasn't sure if Viktor was even in the building or not, so I found a sort of nook across the street, a little recessed and off the sidewalk, and set up a surveillance spot, crafting a quick Watcher's Chair to sit in and draping a spell of avoidance over my presence using a couple of tools my father had left behind in his work kit.

At some point in my life, I hoped to develop something useful enough that it would get added to The Detective's Kit, which was what my father had done with a couple of tools, most notably, the Blood Specs, which could recognize and compare blood types with a sample, and the Watcher's Chair, which I was sitting in right now. The thing about the Watcher's Chair was that it was designed to move and shift on its own every so often, so a person on a stakeout couldn't fall asleep or drift off. Dad had spent his fair share of time camped outside of buildings, bars and hotels during his tenure in this job, and once when he'd fallen asleep, a suspect had gotten away, so he'd made sure that wasn't going to happen again.

Stakeouts are never particularly fun, but this one seemed even more difficult, simply because I wasn't sure if the guy was even there yet or not, so I settled in to get comfortable. While I waited, I went through and performed maintenance on the SoulEnders, taking them slightly apart to clean each piece little by little. It wasn't such a difficult task that I couldn't stop at any moment, but also kept my mind occupied, so that the monotony of waiting didn't drive me crazy.

A couple hours into the stakeout, Viktor arrived. A yellow cab pulled up in front of the building and he hopped out, heading towards the building itself. That's when I grabbed the thermal goggles from Detective's Kit. They were just a modern invention we'd learned to use for our own purposes. There's a rumor that vampires are cold-blooded but that's not entirely true. While it is true that the average vamp has a typical body temperature of about eighty degrees, it wasn't so cold as to blank out on a thermal camera. In fact, it was sort of easier to watch for the lower temperature areas, like following a black spot against a field of light.

Viktor moved into an apartment on the third floor, and there was a second person in the apartment, although they were laying down, and based on their position, they weren't doing so well. I suspected it was some homeless drifter that Viktor had picked up and lured back to his place to operate as a feedbag while he was here. I wanted to go up and bust into that apartment so damn bad, it was eating me up inside, but if I did, there was every possibility that I'd end up putting Viktor down permanently instead of being able to get information from him.

I needed to wait. Hell, I needed to bug his apartment, and I needed to wait, and I needed to figure out who he was working for. There were so many things I needed from this guy, and one rogue problem could end up wiping them all away.

About thirty minutes later, I watched on the thermals as Viktor moved over to the drifter and drained him or her of the remainder of their blood, growling a little as I knew that as much as it pained me to do it, I had to let that person die to save hundreds or even thousands of lives later, but it's never a thing that sits well with you, watching a human being expire, knowing you could've saved them. It was part of the job I hated most - having to decide who lives and dies, having to weigh the value of a single life versus that of the masses.

When I was young, my uncle had taken me out to the stables that our family owned to visit a horse that had injured itself out in the grazing fields, seeing that it had broken its leg. He wanted to teach me a lesson about how sometimes, death is inevitable, and that trying to prolong or avoid it only complicated matters. I told him that we as a family knew many mages with a multitude of healing spells, but my uncle told me that the leg bones of a horse, once broken, often shattered, and were nearly impossible to put back together again. I could clearly see the horse was in a great deal of pain, and my uncle tasked me to end the horse's suffering. Before I realized it, my father was standing behind me, holding out one of the SoulEnders.

It was the first time I took a life, with or without the use of the eldritch weapons I carry with me now.

It was far from the last.

The lesson my uncle had instilled upon me was that while fighting the good fight was a noble cause, it was also important to make sure you weren't fighting an unwinnable fight. Once you'd lost sight of whether or not a fight was winnable or not, you'd already lost, even if victory was still possible.

That was the primary difference between my sister and I in all things - she always favored a more aggressive strategy, whereas I was more cautious and calculating. Both had their merits and flaws. Charlotte also would've gone stomping up there the minute she saw the person lying on the floor, and damned be the case. She did not accept the idea that innocents sometimes needed to die. It was perhaps the main reason she was Huntsmistress and I was the Gunslinger. We were different tools for different tasks.

After Viktor finished his meal, he wrapped the body up into a bag and carried it downstairs with him, starting to walk down the block. I draped the cloak of invisibility around me and started to get into foot pursuit of him. I suspected he was going to just dump the body somewhere along the way to where he was going, and sure enough, about six blocks away from his building, he stepped behind another apartment building, opened the top of the dumpster and tossed the bag into it as casually as if it was filled with feathers and not the desiccated body of someone who would no longer be able to talk to their parents ever again.

I sent a text to Elton, the city's premiere body disposal artist, and gave him directions to come to the specific dumpster, collect the body, identify it then give it a proper burial with according to whatever religious rites he expected the person to have, although not to let it drift in front of law enforcement. I knew all too well how Gao would've frowned upon my letting this person die, but the call was mine to make, no matter how distasteful that was.

We ended up walking quite the ways across San Francisco, heading all the way over to Ocean Beach, although it was late enough at night that although the beach was technically open, there wasn't much of anyone out on it, other than a handful of homeless people camping out and a couple of thugs wandering around, looking to hand out shakedowns and take loose cash from careless tourists.

Except I got to witness one of the weirdest things I've ever seen that night.

Viktor walked down over the sandy dunes and right up towards the edge of the water, where the ocean waves turned the sand dark as the saltwater cut through the silt and churned it before our very eyes. The vampire walked to the edge of the ocean, and then he simply waited.

He didn't have to wait long.

A minute or so later, a merman walked out of the ocean and straight towards Viktor, moving through the waves as if they weren't even there. I'd seen merfolk before - they could transform to and from their fish tails at will - and I'd never seen one quite so well dressed before.

The man was of typical height for the merfolk, a little over seven feet tall, with skin a coral blue, perfect to help them blend in and disappear beneath the waves, his hair dark black, braided together with tiny shells and beads but in neat rows running along the top of his head and down the back of his neck. His ears were pointed, much like an elf's. That feature had long contributed to the theory that merfolk and elves shared a common ancestor point, much like man and apes. His neck bore the tell-tale gills of his people, visible flaps which allowed him to breathe in water. His clothing was serpentine in nature, scaly and designed to let the water just run over it without causing much in the way of drag. That said, the plumage, the color choices, they were brazen, bright, almost confrontational, full of oranges, yellows and reds. There was also a very large purple stone hanging from a gold chain resting around his neck, and I could see the rock was covered in sigils and carvings, most of them inlaid with gold or silver. He also had a fine black mustache waxed into points at the ends. Although I'd never seen him before in my life, I was convinced he looked incredibly familiar.

As much as I wanted to get close to the two of them, the beach itself made approaching prohibitive. Footprints in the sand left by nothing tend to be rather suspicious, so each motion I made across the beach had to be carefully plotted and planned. If I got too close to the water, the obvious breakage I would make because of it would give me away immediately. That meant I wasn't going to be able to get close enough to hear what was going on.

The two men were arguing, and it was clear that neither was happy, based on their body language, but Viktor was still deferring to the merfolk, who I'd gotten close enough to see was holding a small bag in his right hand, a sort of sealed leather sack around the size of a bowling ball, tied shut with enough force to be watertight, it looked like. They also weren't speaking English, or Russian. My guess was that it was a native merfolk tongue, simply because I didn't have any familiarity with their languages, and the tones were strange and gurgling. Viktor had his hands up in the air defensively most of the time, while the well-dressed merman was pointing with his left hand a great deal, sometimes at Viktor, sometimes to his left, up north, which I realized was almost directly towards the Dark Docks.

I was liking this less and less by the minute, and as tempted as I was to just draw down and shoot these two to wound, the merfolk basically just needed to fall backwards and he'd be carried out by the first wave that came in, meaning he'd be gone before I could close the gap enough to capture him. No, this still wasn't my opportunity, but at least I'd seen someone higher up the food chain now. I couldn't ID him, not yet, but I'd gotten a very good look at him, which meant I'd be able to sketch him out later and show that picture around.

The merfolk finally handed the bag to Viktor indignantly, then turned around and jumped into an oncoming wave, disappearing back out into the Pacific Ocean just as suddenly as he'd appeared. I clearly heard Viktor yell, "Asshole!" in heavily accented English before he turned and started walking back towards the streets, away from the beach.

Once we were off Ocean Beach, it was much easier to follow him again, as he continued walking due north, and I got a horrible feeling I knew exactly where we were heading. If you head north from Ocean Beach, there isn't a whole lot except the Sutros Bathhouse, the Cliff House and, you guessed it, concealed from all but the most prying of eyes, the Dark Docks.

Between Battery Lobos and Point Lobos, there's a concealed waterway that leads into an underground cove, just beneath the USS San Francisco Memorial. In fact, that El Camino del Mar parking lot has a portion of it that lowers into the ground, becoming a ramp for trucks to drive in and out of the Dark Docks, and there were a couple of concealed staircases around the area for foot traffic. To anyone but the most trained eye (or those who had been invited to ignore the illusion), the façade was impossible to see beyond.

As we got closer and closer, I finally buckled and called for support on my cell phone, dialing up my sister. "Hey little brother, what's going on?" her peppy voice said across the line.

"How soon can you get to the Dark Docks, sis?" I said to her.

The fact that I'd gone without teasing or jokes told my sister we were already in go mode and there wasn't time for the usual pleasantries. "Ten minutes if it's bad, five minutes if it's dire enough to merit a Gibsons charge."

"Ten will be fine," I told her. "There is a small chance I'm being overly paranoid, but I'd rather be overly uptight than have what I think is happening go down."

"Why, what do you think is going down?"

"I think Viktor's trying to stow a bomb on a ship leaving the Dark Docks."

"Yes, that would definitely qualify as an emergency," she said. "I'll be there in nine."

"I thought you said ten?"

"I started moving the minute you called," she said with a laugh. "Call you when I'm close."

As she hung up, I saw that at least some of my concerns were warranted, as Viktor walked up to a checkpoint and cast a sharp spell on the lone security guard manning it, knocking them out, not killing them, which I thought was an interesting choice, as I'd expected him to just leave nothing but bodies in his wake. Maybe he was worried about an alarm going off if a guard died on duty, but I don't think the Dark Docks have any level of security like that, although maybe they should.

After Viktor proceeded down the stairs, I checked on the guard then headed downward into the depths, the narrow circular stone staircase not leaving much room for people to come and go, which was by design.

The Dark Docks had started as a smuggler's quarters, but eventually it had been clear that we as a community had a need for an import/export center that could handle the magical and supernatural, so the druids had taken over the area, although control of it had been handed off to an independent overseer long ago, so to guarantee there wasn't anyone accusing us of putting our thumbs on the scales.

Once we were beneath the surface, the illumination was all provided by smokeless candles that burned with a light blue eldritch fire, casting enough light to allow everyone to see, but not so much as to draw attention. Despite the fact that the Docks weren't heated, all the enclosed space was kept warm by the ship engines.

The whole space felt more like a cave than anything else, but there was a dozen or so ships within at any one point, and today was no exception. Vessels from Southeast Asia, Australia, India and Northeast Asia were all parked, getting cataloged, unloaded and loaded up again to get shipped out once more. All the ships were small by cargo ship standards, but that was because what they were transporting was more important than doing work in volume.

Security internally was basically non-existent, because the ships generally had their own protection, and that was enough. But whatever Viktor had in mind, I was sure it wasn't going to end well for whoever was down here.

None of the ships I saw were particularly distinct from one another, so I suspected Viktor was attempting to find one in particular, because he kept pausing to check the names of the boats as he found them. It had been a few years since I'd been down in the Docks, but at least a couple of the ships almost looked like they'd remained here for years, but that couldn't possibly be right.

I kept Viktor in sight as best I could, but he started moving quickly. I had to sprint after him, because he seemed like he was at the endgoal of whatever his plan was. Before I knew it, we were in the back part of the Docks, furthest away from the entrance. The boat he was approaching had the name of The Nicholson and as soon as Viktor saw the name of the vessel, he pulled a silenced gun out and popped three bullets into the guard that was rushing him before I could get close enough to act.

That was the point where I could no longer look the other way and I dropped the cloak, pulled the SoulEnders out of their holsters, flipped the switch to set them to Deaden rather than Disrupt or Destroy, and clipped him in the shoulder to make his arm go limp, dropping the gun immediately. He didn't turn to look at me, sprinting towards the walkway leading up and onto the boat, hauling the bag with him. That shocked the hell out of me, because normally the minute a SoulEnder round clips into flesh, even if it's set to the mildest setting, it's enough spiritual damage to drop a person to the floor, not let them keep on running. Something was definitely wrong.

Viktor was shaken and as soon as he got up onto the deck of the ship, he dropped the bag that the merman had given him and started untying it. "You're too late, Gunslinger," Viktor shouted at me. "As soon as I push this but--"

As he pulled his hand out of the bag, holding a small remote, I didn't give him time to finish the sentence, switching the SoulEnder to Disrupt, and putting a bullet right through the remote, as it sparked and stopped functioning.

Viktor spat, tossing the remote aside before starting to reach into the bag, so I switched the SoulEnder back to Deaden, and put another round in his other shoulder, watching it go limp, as I charged in towards him, but as I did, I saw him glance up at me with hatred beyond those vampiric eyes. "See you in hell, Gunslinger," he said to me. Then he said some word in I think Atlantean, because suddenly there was a sudden crunching sound, as his body began collapsing inward, compressing, killing him somewhere along the line, as he moved from vampire to a ball of flesh and bone shards about the size of a basketball, blood and ichor still oozing from it.

"That's a new one," I muttered as I walked over towards the hunk of flesh and tissue that had been a person up until a few seconds ago. "Atlantean suicide magic for vampires... was there some king of a cultural exchange program nobody told me about?"

A moment or so later, a guard on the ship rushed over towards me, seeing the SoulEnders in hand, glancing down at the ball of Viktor. "I wasn't aware you could do that, Gunslinger," the guard says to me. He's a big, burly troll, which means he's part of the defensive crew that never leaves the Docks.

"That's not my doing," I tell him, a deep sigh escaping my lips. "I'd wanted to interrogate the guy, not watch him crumble into oblivion."

"He the one that shot Calvin?"

"Calvin the guy back down at the base of the gangplank?" I ask, receiving a nod in return. "Yeah, sorry about that. I was hoping I could follow this guy further back up the food chain for all the good it did me, but now it looks like it's all ending right here."

"Better it end before it hits me," the troll grumbled. "I'm Simon, by the way. What's in the vic's bag?"

"Bomb of some kind, I'm guessing," I said, as I opened up the bag, and found that while it was likely exactly that, it was more magic than science, less tech and more craft. I switched one of the SoulEnders back to Disrupt and put a few rounds into it, making sure whatever mechanisms in there wouldn't accidentally turn on. The device inside the bag sputtered up some smoke but otherwise didn't do anything. "What's special about this ship?"

"This one?" Simon said to me. "Nothin'. This is the Dead Letter Office. The Nicholson never leaves the port - it just contains all the packages that have never been claimed, waiting for someone to come by or for the next Decade Clear Out."

I frowned, looking down at the ship beneath me, even as I heard Charlotte running up towards me, a couple of her Hunters in tow. "You okay, Dale?" she said to me, gesturing at the ball of Viktor. "And what the hell is that?"

"That was the guy I was chasing up until about five minutes ago," I said.

"I knew you could be ruthless, little brother, but even for you, this seems vicious."

"Why does everyone assume I did this?" I laughed. "Guy did it to himself when he couldn't set off the bomb he'd hauled here."

"The bomb?"

"Deactivated," I said, waving my hand casually. "Used the SoulEnders to disrupt it, so it won't be doing anything." I glanced back over at Simon. "Hey, when's the next Clear Out?"

"Couple weeks from now," he said to me. "They're scheduled to start inventorying everything tomorrow."

I shook my head. "Someone cares enough about something on this boat enough to blow up the whole damn Docks, so you'd better call all hands and get everyone in here, because we're going to find out what it is."

Simon scowled at me a little bit. "That ain't the way the Clear Outs work, chief," he said. "The boxes are all sold unopened, and people get what they get. It's like our own little Storage Wars."

"How many boxes you got down there?"

"Somewhere between forty and eighty boxes, and about a dozen shipping containers."

"Yeah, I think this Clear Out's going to be a little different, 'cause I'm gonna need to have all the boxes opened first," I said to him. "You can reseal them and blind box them after that, but there's something inside of the berth of this ship that's worth hundreds of lives in someone's estimates. I'm not going to risk having that going up on auction for some random schmuck to buy and get themselves killed."

"You'd have to talk to the Lady Of Tides about that before I can let you down there, bossman," Simon said.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the Tidestone, holding it up. "There's no Regent right now, dear chap, so I guess I really am the bossman for the time being. Let's get down there and start opening and cataloguing."

Charlotte, Simon and I headed down below the deck, and were confronted by a wall of crates, boxes, cartons and shipping containers. We started with the shipping containers, which was good, because as it turned out, we didn't really have to go through all that much of the stuff in the ship's hold after all. Once we opened the third shipping container, it was clear we'd found exactly what it was we were looking for. Simon dropped his tools, my sister openly gasped and I couldn't help but laugh.

"Yeah, I think we can all agree, this is what we're looking for," I said.

"Dale..." My sister said. "I don't... I can't..."

I walked inside of the storage container, my hands pushing strands of seaweed aside, as I moved towards the secured dais in the center, a solitary ten-by-four-by-two chamber resting upon it. I walked through the space, feeling the remnants of protective magic that had long ago expired, stepping up to the compartment, reaching down, wiping the crystal top off from all the dust that had long settled in place, revealing the hibernating face below.

"Dale, how long as this been here?"

"According to the shipping manifest, eight years, which makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it, and starts to put together some, but not all of the pieces of this case that I'm working on," I told her. I reached down and tapped the crystal, knowing it wouldn't wake up the occupant, not until the proper incantation had been given. "Don't worry, your majesty, we'll have you up and about in no time."

"Dale... who is it?"

"Who do you think?" I told her. "It's the Queen of Atlantis."