Supernatural Noir

“That’s it,” Mickey says, throwing open the safe. He sets his drill rig on Louis’s desk and returns to the open closet door.

Sylvia races across the room to see the extent of the fortune Louis has locked away from the world and to begin its collection. She presses up against Rossini’s back and peers around him, only to find herself confused by the vault’s contents. She had expected to find stacks of hundred-dollar bills, stock certificates, a jewelry store’s inventory of gems, and though there is some cash—three small stacks on the third shelf of the safe—the bulk of the space is empty. The money sits on one shelf and another is devoted to a bizarre assortment of baubles.

The collection is comprised of six metallic statues. Each is no larger than Sylvia’s pinkie finger, and they are ugly like randomly shaped wads of iron with points and blobs.

“I don’t understand,” Sylvia whispers.

“Amazing,” Rossini replies.

“What is this shit?” Sylvia asks. She reaches around Rossini to retrieve one of the unattractive statues.

His hand shoots out and grabs her wrist painfully. “Don’t touch those,” he says. “You get the cash and the jewelry. That was the deal.”

“The cash? There’s only about ten grand there, and there isn’t any jewelry.”

Rossini squeezes her wrist until she feels the bones grinding. “That was the deal,” he repeats. “The icons are mine.”

A hot mask of rage falls over Sylvia’s face. The thief has played her, though she has yet to understand the extent or the intent of his game.

“Get away from there,” a rasping voice calls from the doorway.

Sylvia turns to the sound, her heart in her throat. A squat shadow stands at the threshold. The face is very pale, visible but ill defined. Mickey turns and knocks Sylvia aside. His flashlight falls squarely on the intruder, and he says, “Son of a bitch.” Sylvia only gets a glimpse of the man in the doorway, and, to her shock, he resembles Louis Towne. She recognizes chipmunk cheeks and small ears, but the view is momentary, and she is stumbling, so she doesn’t trust what she has seen.

Rossini lowers the flashlight so that the beam falls on the intruder’s feet. He then pulls a gun from his coat pocket and levels his left arm to aim the weapon.

Sylvia remembers the boulevard and the man who killed Louis, remembers his size and his posture and the way he held the gun, and she realizes it was Rossini. All along, she has underestimated the thief. His eagerness for the job, his satisfaction with the contents of the safe—this had been his plan all along. He’d only allowed Sylvia to believe it was hers.

Two muzzle flares light up the room. The reports are deafening. A body falls in the hallway and Rossini hisses, “Shit. Enough of this blackout crap.” He stomps to the door and turns on the light.

Awash in confusion, Sylvia looks around absently as if waking in a strange place with no understanding of how she’s gotten there. Rossini is in the doorway, kneeling beside a body on the floor. Sylvia approaches him and when she sees the face of the intruder, she gasps. It is Louis Towne.

His face is longer and misshapen. Tufts of hair stick out around his ears, but he is otherwise bald. Two ragged wounds show above his ear. He still wears the coffee-grounds stubble, but much of it has been torn away on the right side of his face, revealing a patch of darker skin beneath. His nose is longer, and his mouth is circled with odd ridges. His eyes are the worst. They stare at Sylvia, but they are the wrong color. Louis’s eyes were blue and these eyes are chocolate brown, and, even more unsettling, each eye is framed by two sets of eyelashes.

“What happened to him?” she asks.

“Mumbo jumbo,” Rossini says in a dry, earnest tone.

“His face . . .”

“Yeah,” the thief says.

Louis’s legs begin to kick and thrash on the carpet. Sylvia screams and leaps back, covering her mouth with a palm.

“Settle down,” Rossini says, rising to his feet. “It’s just a death dance. Muscle contractions.”

“How can you be so calm?” Sylvia wants to know.

“I got word that Louis’s body went missing from the funeral home. Considering the weird shit he was into, I kept my mind open. Now I think we need to get what we came for and get the hell out of here.”

“Is he really dead this time?”

“Don’t know and don’t care. I’ve got a full clip. That’ll keep him down long enough.”

“Are those little statues doing this?” Sylvia asks.

“Probably.” Rossini casts another glance at the corpse thrashing on the carpet in the hall. “Asshole there got drunk one night and started bragging about these things. He called them the Pellis Icons, and he’d spent about twenty years hunting them down. He said they helped him master the flesh, whatever the hell that means. I know he used them to tear apart Tocci, because I was sitting with him in this room when he did it. They do something, and I figure I’ve got plenty of time to figure out exactly what that is.”

“How much are they worth?”

Rossini laughs and shakes his head. “By your definition, not a damn thing. There isn’t a fence on the continent who would know what to do with them.”

He turns away from Sylvia to take another look at the thrashing man. Sylvia pulls her gun and shoots the thief in the shoulder, sending him sprawling against the wall. He drops his gun and slides to his knees and looks at Sylvia, an expression of pained surprise on his face.

“What the fuck, Syl?” he says. He grasps the wound on his shoulder. Blood spills between his fingers in thick rivulets.

She doesn’t reply. Instead she keeps the gun aimed on Rossini’s face as she crosses to him and retrieves his weapon from the floor. She slips it into her pocket and walks to the safe. On the floor is Rossini’s canvas bag. Sylvia retrieves it and waves the sack in the air until it’s opened. Without looking at the thief, she pulls the meager amount of cash into the bag and then scoops the Pellis Icons on top of the bills. The disappointing void of the safe still feels wrong to her, and she convinces herself that Louis must have kept more. She reaches in and presses against the back wall, expecting a panel to pop free. She does this on every shelf, but the back of the safe is solid and hides no additional treasures. She gives the empty shelves a final look and then turns to leave.

In the hall, the dead man’s convulsions have stopped, and she is grateful for this, but Rossini has crawled away. He no longer sits by the door. Sylvia approaches the hall cautiously, gun raised, fingers tensed and ready to fire. The weapon trembles in her hand. When she reaches the threshold, she is shocked to see the condition of the body in the hall.

It isn’t Louis at all. Sylvia recognizes the corpse’s face, and it belongs to a low-level bookie who went by the name of Tap. His cheeks are red as if deeply sunburned. The collar of his dress shirt is laid wide, and his tie has been torn away and lies across the expensive carpet like a crimson tongue. Blood continues to seep from the two well-placed holes Rossini shot in the man’s chest. Sylvia absorbs this oddity and wonders how she could have mistaken this insignificant creep for Louis Towne.

A crash in the hallway sends her back into the den. Glass shatters, and a great weight hits the floor. Sylvia puts the canvas sack and her purse down and holds the gun in both hands, trying unsuccessfully to steady the weapon, which suddenly feels as heavy as a block of lead. A quieter thump comes from the hallway, and Sylvia swallows a moan.

Movement in the doorway causes Sylvia to fire two shots in rapid succession, but the flashing motion is too brief, like a flag whipping in a sudden breeze. Her bullets punch through the wall.

Then a man steps into view. Sylvia ca