Speakeasy Dead: a P.G. Wodehouse-Inspired Romantic Zombie Comedy (Hellfire Universe Historicals) Page 7

  Young G.’s mouth formed an enlightened, “Oh!” He took the danish and trotted happily up the cement steps and into the rear entrance of the Dry Goods building.

  Footsteps crunched near my car. I hunkered into the pitiful shadow between the cement stoop and the chickens while Stoneface Gibraltar circled the Nash. He peered inside, squatted beside a tire and then, pulling his elbow back like a train piston, drove the spiked brass knuckles straight through the rubber. The red Nash tilted, first one way and then the other, as Stoneface punctured all four tires in turn. He stopped directly across from me, plucked the remaining danish out of the vehicle, and ate it in three bites.

  “Not bad.” The gangster licked his fingers. “Not as good as we got back home in Chi-town, but not too bad.” He started my way.

  Oops.

  Fortunately, I was home-team and knew the playing field.

  Falstaff’s Main Street is mostly brick and sandstone businesses, wedged close together. Some share walls, but some are separated by narrow gaps, and one such gap lay just downhill between the Aimsleys’ building and the Tucker Tailors.’ Experience had taught me that Clara and I fit through this gap, whereas Cousin Priscilla did not. A goon like Stoneface wouldn’t stand a chance.

  I left my hiding place and darted behind the chicken coop, squeezing between the dry-goods building and the mesh, snagging my vest buttons on the chicken wire.

  “Hey, you!” Stoneface Gibraltar shook his fist at me across the coop. It would have been the height of childishness to answer with digitus impudicus, and I’d like the record to state that I did no such thing.

  Stoneface bellowed. He thrust his arms wide, laced all ten digits into the mesh, and jerked the whole frame of the coop over his head. Chickens fluttered in all directions. Stoneface crumpled the frame and tossed it aside. I sprinted for the gap between buildings, stuck my foot in a water dish, tripped on a nesting box, and hit the ground crawling.

  Stoneface lunged. A chicken flapped vigorously, driving him back. The gap was mere inches away. I laid on speed just as another nesting box flew through the air, clipping the back of my head, knocking me flat.

  Strike one!

  Small lumps of gravel poked my nose. The crowd began to roar.

  Was I on base? An egg rolled over and smashed against my cheek. Must be the minors.

  I closed my eyes.

  An instant later, the umpire pulled me to my feet. “You and that cousin gettin’ cute?”

  “Which cousin, coach?”

  He slapped my face. Strike two!

  “Clara?” The fans went wild. “Is she playing?” That wasn’t good. Young C. hit like a girl. Which is to say, she punched me when we didn’t win.

  “Youse two wants to get rough? Take hostages? You think, maybe, you can’t be scared?”

  “I’m always scared.” The umpire’s uniform blurred to pinstripes and back again. No, not an ump. I blinked at Stoneface Gibraltar’s white fedora, sporting a forest of chicken feathers along its brim.

  My cap was gone. My head throbbed. I rubbed my scalp, astonished at the lack of blood.

  Stoneface yanked the scarf from my neck and tied my wrists in front of me. I bent and vomited eggs Benedict onto a bird.

  Strike three!

  An engine rumbled. Gears clashed and ground as the Ford van lumbered up the gravel and then came to a shrieking stop, ramming the Nash into the remains of the chicken coop, shearing the rear fender clean off the car.

  “Uh oh.” I blinked at the damaged vehicle. “Gladys is not going to be pleased.”

  A moment later, Luella’s lovely face appeared in the door.

  I squinted. Or was that two lovely Luellas? Possibly three.

  “Somebody’s coming,” she said. “Something. We need to go.” She looked at me. “Oh, hi, Bernie. What happened to your neck?”

  “Bruised myself,” I told her, “shaving.” My knees buckled.

  Stoneface hauled me to the back of the van and tossed me inside. I staggered against a wall of crates. Darkness slammed shut around the smell of human suffering and booze.

  The engine roared. I heard a squeal of poultry, a terrifying feline howl, and then the van lurched forward, throwing me against the door. I tripped on something bulky and toppled onto a human lump. Fractured bones and matted knots of hair moved under my cheek.

  Mr. Vargas!

  I scrambled off, falling again as the van took a sharp turn. The janitor’s pointy shoes kicked my shins. Somebody groaned. I turned and gazed into the rictus, froth-flecked grin of the liquor thief from the basement. We hit a pothole, flipped up like flapjacks, and landed in a writhing, shrieking mass of limbs.

  I kicked and struggled, banging my head against the door.

  Stars flashed. Something sharp sank into my hand.

  Something like teeth.

  I hit my head again.

  You’re out!

  VIII: How You Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm

  Make new friends, but keep the old. Some might stop the others from devouring your soul.

  —The Girl’s Guide to Demons (Campfire Demon Sing-Along edition)

  Clara:

  GENIES ARE NOT NECESSARILY evil. According to the Girl’s Guide, they’re just ordinary people who sold their souls to demons and wound up working as indentured servants after they died. I had no reason to think badly of Ruth. She’d been a good sport, and she was technically mine until the dance finals were over tomorrow evening.

  Still, I’d have to be nuts to let her run off on her own.

  “Quick, Beau!” I ran to the ladder that our burglars had left propped under the coal chute. “Give me a boost!” I tried to soften the command. “Please? If you don’t mind?”

  “Arf, arf.” Beau let go of George Junior and trotted my way.

  “And then take care of George?” I asked sweetly. “Pretty please?”

  The zombie gripped my shins and hoisted me straight up through the coal chute.

  Yikes! He seemed a lot stronger than an ordinary man. “Thank you.” I grasped the edge and swung myself into the alley, taking a moment to straighten my hat and squint into the sun. “Ruthie?”

  No cheetah. No Mr. Vargas. No booze.

  What there was plenty of were chickens. Chickens and children, running, squawking, flapping, climbing fences, scratching the painted trim of Mr. Wu’s Fine Advices, the building just downhill. Three doors up, behind Aimsley’s Dry Goods, lay the crumpled remains of a chicken coop. Next to my cousin’s battered red car.

  “Bernie?” How had Bernie managed to mow down a chicken coop? “Ruth?”

  Something growled under the Tucker Tailors’ porch. I raced uphill as three-year-old Toby Aimsley squatted to look.

  “Bad kitty!” Toby picked up a stone and threw it. “Let go Miss Penny!”

  A cloud of feathers puffed into the light.

  “Very bad!” The child reached for another stone.

  “Ruth, stop that!” I caught Toby and pulled him into my arms at the exact moment a spotted paw swished through the space he’d occupied.

  “Don’t you dare harm a single hair on these kids!” Chickens were one thing. I could pay the Aimsleys for them. But if Ruth started slaughtering people, Hans would end up owning my soul.

  “Don’t hurt anyone!” I commanded. “In fact, I want you back at the Fellowship as fast as is humanly possible. Wait for me there.”

  That ought to do for Ruth. I set Toby down. He squatted and swept his hands under the porch.

  Where was Bernie? Probably back in the basement, I guessed, looking for me. But where was Mr. Vargas’ body?

  “Miss Penny?” Toby frowned at the feathers in his arms. “Where you go?”

  I marched the child uphill to where his brother, eighteen-year-old Ned, tall and broad-shouldered in summer overalls, was tugging pieces of splintered wood out of a jumble of fence posts and chicken wire.

  Toby toddled off in search of chickens.

  “Have you seen…um…anyone?” I asked, peerin
g inside the Nash. One busted fender was lying on the ground. The tires were flat. But there were no cousins or zombie janitors inside.

  Ned’s brown eyes flicked at the car. “No, ma’am.”

  “No ma’am?” I arched an eyebrow. We’d grown up in this alley, Bernie, Luella, Ned, and me; we’d been the Four Musketeers: Luella, aristocratic Athos, dark-eyed Ned always the sober Aramis, and Bernie an undersized Porthos or deadly, silent Grimaud, depending on my mood. We’d been inseparable companions. That had petered out three years ago when Porthos started college and Aramis had to quit high school to work in the family store.

  “No ma’am?” I repeated. “Pardieu! Am I become so grand?”

  Ned’s smile flickered. He really was a handsome boy. “Milady’s outfit looks grand enough for the King’s ball,” he offered gallantly. But then his face took on the serious expression of someone who knows lost poultry today means missed dinners tomorrow.

  “Excuse me.” He bent over the ruined chicken coop. “I’ve got to get this fixed.”

  We hadn’t talked much lately. I scuffed a guilty toe in the gravel. Ned was self-conscious, I knew, about dropping out of school, and I’d been spinning in Luella’s social whirl. Also, the Aimsleys were Presbyterians, and the Woodsens most emphatically were…not.

  “Here, let me help.” I grabbed a flapping section of chicken wire fence.

  We tugged and twisted, collecting an audience of poultry-toting kids. Fourteen-year-old Homer Aimsley found a crowbar and began prying up old stakes. Nine-year-old Annabelle brought out a pair of wire cutters. Little Grover, wearing a giant PRESS hat, appeared on the back stoop and began printing earnestly on a small pad.

  “Hen hunt hits hazard,” Grover dictated as he wrote. “Cage crushing castaf…. Castaf….”

  “C-a-t-a-s-t-r-o-p-h-e.” Ned spelled the word. “Annie, pass me the snippers.”

  We had a six-foot section of wire mesh nearly straight. Ned cut it free, and we dragged it aside. I peered into the alley, fretting. What was George Umbridge doing in our basement? Stealing booze obviously. But why was he, a top student at Howard Medical School, the most upright man I’d ever known, falling-down drunk? Drunk or even—judging from the crazed look in his eye—drugged out of his mind? I frowned. Because he’d never help Luella steal booze in his right mind. My best friend adored her older brother, but she could be pretty ruthless about getting her way.

  “Hold this.” Ned gave me the cut end of the fence and began forcing another section straight.

  The wire mesh bit into my hands. I hung on tight.

  “Automobile atroxity,” Grover announced, and then carefully respelled atrocity at Ned’s direction. “Hit and run mutates Nash fender.”

  I needed to get back. But the Aimsleys needed someplace to put the chickens Bernie had left homeless.

  Ned tossed aside some broken wood and straightened three more feet of mesh. My arms trembled as the section I held tried to twist.

  “Gangster excapes with goods.”

  “Grover,” I asked, “were you out here before? Did you see what happened?”

  We had four feet of fence, rippling against the ground. Ned forced two more feet straight.

  My hands were numb. “I think you better cut it.”

  “Okay.” Ned reached for snippers. “Annie—”

  A piece of wood snapped in the jumble. Ned dropped the fence and whisked his sister aside as a four-inch splinter shot toward her face. The tangled fencing sprang at me. Ned dove and pinned it creating a wave that whiplashed through the mesh.

  Darn! I hung on. Darn! Blood trickled down my right hand.

  Ned grabbed the snippers and began cutting.

  Darn! A bit of wire had driven straight through my thumb. Drat. I searched for ways to cuss in Presbyterian.

  Ned glanced at me and snipped faster. The trickle of blood became a stream.

  “Soap bubbles!” I stamped my foot.

  He finished cutting. The fence relaxed, and I set my edge on the ground. It didn’t hurt yet and so, in best Priscilla fashion, I grabbed my thumb with my free hand and yanked it off the wire.

  That hurt.

  “Soap bubbles!” I leaned forward to keep blood off my dress. “Bubbles with dirty, rotten dishrags!”

  Ned took my shoulders and helped me to the stoop. He spread his handkerchief to save my dress and then sat down beside me, holding my wrist as blood ran on the gravel. “Let it bleed,” he said. “Less risk of lockjaw.”

  “Lockjaw.” I shuddered.

  Annie ran into the building for antiseptic.

  “Bowling beauty obskewered,” Grover wrote aloud in his notebook.

  “Not now, buddy,” Ned told him.

  I bit my lip and watched the flow of blood. Lockjaw. This sort of thing usually happened to Bernie. I was beginning to really wonder where he’d gone.

  Annie brought out a Boy-Scout kit and bottle of Listerine, and the Aimsley children, most of them clutching chickens, gathered around. I scored a hit by letting her treat the puncture without complaint. I could have healed it with half a drop of hellfire, but that seemed wasteful. Besides, Ned’s arm around my shoulder, his strong, warm body next to mine, almost made getting stabbed worthwhile.

  I’d missed him, I realized. Missed Ned’s conversation, so much more serious than Bernie’s, and now our easy friendship had slipped away.

  “Thank you.” I gazed into his soft, dark eyes, doubting that musketeers ever doctored their wounds like this. If I hadn’t been a warlock, I’d have kissed him there on the steps. And I was pretty sure he’d kiss me too.

  But I was a warlock. Already damned, in Ned’s eyes, whether a demon ultimately got my soul or not. And there was no taking it back.

  “Well….” My throat felt thick. “I guess I’d better go.” I slid out from under Ned’s arm. “You can snap the windows in the Nash and stow the chickens there.” Gladys would not be thrilled to see her beloved car used as a henhouse. “I’m really sorry Bernie ran over your chicken coop,” I added. “Charge his account for repairs.”

  “Okay.” Ned nodded stiffly. “See you around.”

  “If you….” I hesitated, not wanting to let him go. “We could use an extra bartender tonight. During the contest. If you’d like to work?”

  Ned seldom set foot inside the Fellowship, although it may have been the coven his Presbyterian family objected to more than the booze. But he’d always loved music, and his dad, Ed Aimsley, was one of our judges, so it should be all right.

  “I don’t know anything about mixing drinks,” Ned admitted.

  “That puts you exactly five minutes behind my education.”

  He winced and I kicked myself for bringing up school. I made up for it with my most persuasive, man-melting look of appeal. “Please? I’m tearing my hair out. Honestly. It would be a huge help.”

  Ned softened.

  Then I softened.

  In two more minutes there’d have been a pool of melted butter on the ground.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there with Dad at six.”

  “Thanks.”

  Ned led his siblings off to the Nash to put away chickens. I headed downhill. The alley was strewn with feathers, I noted glumly. Ruth’s rampage was going to cut into my profits.

  Grover Aimsley joined me as I trudged up the Fellowship’s back steps. “That cousin of yours,” he said, “is all wet.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “He poisoned five of my sib-lings,” the child pronounced the word carefully, “and they’re not dead.”

  The back door to the Fellowship had blown shut. I pushed it open and wedged a rubber stopper under the wood. The smell of Gladys’ cooking and Priscilla’s booze washed through the little mudroom on a current of jazz.

  I turned to Grover. “Bernie poisoned somebody?”

  “My little brothers and sisters. They didn’t even throw up. I could have eaten that danish myself.”

  “Were you out here?” I asked. “Did you see wha
t happened?”

  “That’s pilgrimaged information.” He tapped the pencil against his nose. “You have to wait until the press gets tucked in bed.”

  “I’ll give you a kiss.”

  Grover grimaced.

  I checked my dress pocket and found three sticks of Wrigley’s. “How about half a stick of gum?”

  “Two sticks.” His eyes gleamed. “Say, I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Grover dashed up the alley. I waited, listening to a foxtrot arrangement of “Some of these Days” while Ruth sauntered out of the building. A half hour in the alley with poultry had left me hot and dirty, whereas the genie, draped in a black and tan tea dress with gold embroidered sunbursts, looked like she’d stepped out of a D. W. Griffith film. We stood together, watching Ned Aimsley snap in the plastic windows that came with the Nash and then toss in chickens. I didn’t like the genie’s hungry expression.

  “You,” I accused, “are not much help.”

  “I can be.” Ruth shrugged. “You have to be real specific.”

  Grover skidded back down the gravel, carrying my cousin’s cap.

  “He lost this,” the boy said. “When that Chicago monster busted his chops.”

  “The mobster?” I asked. “Stoneface hit Bernie?”

  “Him and Miss Luella. They stuffed him in their van with the bottles they took out of your basement.”

  “Stoneface Gibraltar and Luella? I see.” The stolen-liquor caper was beginning to make sense. Stoneface was bootlegging for the Hollywood Grand. Luella’s father was Mr. Hearst’s business partner in the new hotel. And Luella knew she could get away with taking liquor from me, the same way I’d known I could get away with stashing a body in the Umbridge’s icehouse. All for one and one for all. Between Luella and me, it had been a supernatural vow.

  “Are they going to dress your cousin in cement overshoes?”

  “Don’t be silly. There aren’t any lakes nearby.” And anyway, Athos would never hurt Porthos. Play a joke on him, yes, stuff him in a van, probably, and definitely lure me into an inconvenient game of hide and seek over the booze.

  Luella didn’t know about my bet with Hans, didn’t know I needed Bernie to teach Ruth to dance.