Johnny Lycan & the Anubis Disk (The Werewolf PI Book 1) Read online

  He took his sweet time responding. Finally, he coughed and said, “Soon as I see my baby safe and sound you can come pick it up.”

  There was obvious pain and relief in his voice. Even if I wanted to be a hard case about it, negotiation skills weren’t my core competency. “Fine. Ten a.m.”

  “You know where.” He let out a sigh. “And… thanks.” Neil O’Rourke must have reached halfway up his ass to find that expression of gratitude. I’d known the man over ten years, and for two years out of high school he used me as hired muscle. Over the years, I’d picked up thousands of dollars for his operation and never got more than a grunt. This was practically a soliloquy. A father’s love and all that.

  “Yeah,” I said to the air. He’d already rung off. I snapped the cover off the phone, pulled out the SIM card, and thought about where to go next. My body ached, and my stomach growled. The unpleasant copper-and-beet taste of Russian wallpapered my mouth. But I had one more stop to make before home and bed. I’d have to redo the bandages afterward, but it would be worth it to work Shaggy out of my system.

  Chicago is an alright place to be a werewolf, if you have to do it. The weather isn’t too hot most of the year—a major consideration when you run around in a fur coat—and thanks to some careful city planning, corrupt Illinois politics, and rich people who’d rather leave their money to posterity than to their ungrateful children, there were lots of parks and green spaces. Out in the suburbs, there were over a dozen Forest Preserves and parks.

  It took about fifteen minutes to get to my favorite Country Forest Preserve. Pulling into the lot, I prayed there’d be no sign of a white Ford Explorer. Those patrols were a pain in my hairy ass. The coast looked clear. Finally, a break.

  With a wince, I got out of the low seat and conducted one more search for prying eyes. The October wind bit deep and cold but felt good. The air smelled of rotting leaves, distant smoke and… rabbits. Out of the trunk I got a clean set of clothes and set them on the passenger seat, then stripped off.

  Since it was a full moon, and the second time tonight, it didn’t take long to make the change and Shaggy took over. As usual, I felt better, stronger, more… me, which is precisely the problem with taking this form. Addicts say they’re never more alive than when they’re high. It’s kind of like that, only the drug is in your bloodstream every minute of every day. Scoring isn’t the problem. It’s not drawing on that stash constantly.

  After clawing a hole in the forest floor and burying my blood-soaked clothes, I squatted and sniffed the air. The scents filled my nose, stronger and more plentiful now. My brain exploded with smells. Going from plain old Johnny to this condition felt like that scene in the Wizard of Oz when it goes from black and white Kansas to Technicolor. I freaking loved it.

  There were more than just rabbits out there. The forest vibrated with every nocturnal creature you could imagine. Bats fluttered overhead, an obscenely fat possum waddled across an oak branch, and from just over the hill near the pond wafted the unmistakable aroma of venison on the hoof. I needed meat and to burn off some of this energy. That buck would be the perfect solution.

  Twenty minutes later I sat licking deer spleen off my hands and groaning at how full my belly felt. At my feet lay the gutted carcass of a young, very surprised buck. The County would be grateful for one less rat with horns, and nobody would ever have a clue I’d been there. Some poor coyote would get the blame, but they’ve been taking shit ever since the roadrunner cartoons. Screw them.

  Back at the car, I slipped a disk into the CD player—one of the few advantages of driving an old piece of crap was equally old technology. My luck held, and it started on the first crank this time. Life didn’t suck.

  Turning Zeppelin up to not-quite-ear-bleeding, I pulled out onto Dixie Highway. Twenty-five grand would buy me a much sweeter ride, hopefully something with vinyl seats or something easier to clean. I let out a happy howl and pointed the Charger North and East.

  The full moon limped across the sky and dawn broke just as I got home.

  CHAPTER 3

  The sun was coming up over the lake as I pulled into the concrete slab driveway. It looked beautiful, the sky a perfect Fall Blue, but the dawn damn near fried the eyeballs out of my head. My high-cycle heightened every sense. Bright lights just added to the sensory overload and attendant misery, so I had to wear sunglasses, even at dawn, if I didn’t want the mother of all migraines.

  The building I shared with Bill and his grandmother was a typical red brick Chicago three-flat. They had the main floor. With his disability, the fewer stairs the better. Plus, Gramma owned the building and got first pick of the units. The top floor belonged to a Loyola grad student of indeterminate gender identity named Robin, who we seldom saw. I lived in the “garden apartment.” That’s the Chicago word for a basement studio with one long, skinny-ass window right at ground level, usually blocked by mud and a hydrangea bush. That was fine. It was dark when I needed it to be, like this morning, and light bulbs were cheap when I needed to see.

  The place was nothing fancy, but the rent was stupid-low, and I was a flight of stairs from my only real friend. Plus, since I had a car and none of the others did, I got the building’s only parking spot. In return, I’d occasionally drive Bill or Gramma around when they needed it. Parking in Chicago being what it is, and since Bill seldom left the house anyway, it was a sweet deal.

  There was nothing more my body craved than to curl into a fetal position and get three hours of blessed sleep before I had to go meet O’Rourke out in the burbs. No such luck.

  The annoying buhdeboop of an incoming text message went off just as my hand hit the knob.

  Come up and tell me.

  Bill was either solar-powered or half rooster. The man was up earlier than anyone I ever knew, even as a kid. Taking a step back to look up at the living room window, I saw him. There he was, already dressed and leaning on his forearm crutch. He beckoned me up. I groaned but waved back and tackled the stairs, willing the gauze and bandages to stay in place.

  We all had keys to each other’s apartments, so I slipped in, kicked off my sneakers without unlacing them, and followed the scent of dark roast coffee into the kitchen. My best friend sat at the little table cradling a mug in his hand and trying to look like he hadn’t been waiting at the window like a neurotic shih-tzu waiting for its owner to return from work.

  “Well? How’d it go?”

  I tried to act like rescuing someone, killing a guy, and turning into a feral night creature was no big deal. “Pretty good. She’s safe.” It was a mistake to try talking and sitting at the same time. He caught my grimace.

  “And… uh, what about you?”

  “Shaggy got the worst of it. I’ll live. It’s just a scratch. Really.”

  “Uh-huh.” Bill took another swig of coffee rather than continue a pointless argument.

  It hurt too much to get up again. “You going to get me some of that?” If Bill was determined to keep me up, he could damned well keep me caffeinated.

  My buddy struggled to his feet and clomped across the cheap yellow and gray floor tiles, grabbed an oversized mug with his employer’s logo on it, filled it to overflowing, and set it in front of me without slopping too much. While he did that, I took two or three deep breaths and got my game face on.

  “Who did the work tonight, you or… the other guy?” Bill was the only person on earth who knew about Shaggy—or at least that Shaggy and I were the same thing. Person. Whatever. That didn’t mean he was comfortable talking about it. He’d watched me change the night I saved him from that beating. It wasn’t soon enough to save his leg from permanent damage, but he could walk with a little aluminum support. The thing was he saw it, told no one, and pretended it didn’t bother him. It’s what friends do. I’d been keeping his secrets a lot longer.

  I closed my eyes and let the strong, black java work its magic instead of answering him. We sat, slurping and looking at the ceiling, then out the window, pretty much everywhere but at each other. He knew if he stayed quiet long enough, I’d crack. Which I did.

  “It was bad, but she’s okay. And I’m okay. Really.”

  Bill nodded thoughtfully. “And the money?”

  “I’ll pick it up later.”

  “You mean you haven’t been paid yet? Jesus, Johnny…”

  “Come on. It was four in the morning and he hadn’t even seen his daughter yet. He’s good for it.” If you couldn’t trust a bookie to have the cash he says he’ll have, what was the world coming to? “Relax, I’m picking it up at ten.”

  “And then?”

  God, he could be a pain in my furry butt, but I dutifully recited the plan. “Bring it back here, break it up into smaller bundles, and take it to the bank a bit at a time.” Before Bill became my financial advisor, I hadn’t even had a bank account. I was strictly cash only, pretty much living off the grid like some Mexican dishwasher.

  Bill’s eyes lit up. “Oh, let me show you.” He popped up and crutch-stepped as fast as he could into his room, returning with half a dozen printed sheets of paper. “Here are the invoices. All official-looking as hell, if I do say so myself.”

  Now that I was working for real money, I needed to do things like pay taxes and have a debit card. Bill had drawn up some fake invoices I could use to deposit the money without awkward questions from the bank. They looked good, but the name at the top bummed me out.

  “J Lupul and Associates?” I thought we were calling it Vandelay
Industries?” My friend gave me one of his snarky “ach” noises.

  “That’s a lame-ass Seinfeld reference. You may as well put a big neon sign on your door that says, ‘audit me.’ Honest to Christ, man, you’re thirty-one years old. Time to live like an adult.”

  He was right, naturally. A complete pain in the neck, but correct. And he had the patience of Job with my ADD-assisted ignorance. That time he suggested I get paid in Bitcoin, and both our heads nearly exploding during the conversation, was a case in point.

  I focused and studied the papers. We billed parts of my fee to a fictional, innocuous-sounding company. They were for various amounts under ten thousand dollars so they wouldn’t ring any bells with Homeland Security or the DEA. I had to admit they looked legit and grown-up. Without my buddy’s assistance, I’d still be taking crumbs and shoving them under my mattress, pulling out a fistful whenever the bills were due. It’s what I did for years, working construction. With everything done online now, there was no way for anyone to function on a strictly cash basis anymore. Until the Zombie Apocalypse, that is. Bill Mostoy never took my concerns about that seriously.

  “So, I’ve got all your DBA paperwork done, you just need to sign it. And the website’s ready to go tomorrow morning, too. I did it all in dollar bill greens and golds. WordPress isn’t very sophisticated, but it’s got some great widgets, and we only need enough of a presence to pass the sniff test. People who want to hire you won’t be impressed by…” He babbled on excitedly, and I did a fair job of pretending to listen. Website, presence, blah, blah blah. He was going to a lot of trouble for me, but what I needed most at that moment was a nap.

  “Hey, when this is all done, you think I could get a new ride? The Charger’s just about had the biscuit.”

  His face lit up. “Really? You’re ready to ditch that old rust bucket? Hell yeah. If you’re going to be an adult, you should travel like one. It’ll look more professional when you meet clients. What were you thinking, like an Acura?”

  “Um, I was thinking another Charger, just like a 2016 or something. Something with all the fenders the same color. I can pay cash…”

  Bill drove an imaginary Samurai dagger into his belly. “I’m trying to make a real company out of you and all you want to do is swap it for a slightly less humiliating version of what you have? It’s hard to write a muscle car off as a corporate expense.”

  The sound of slippers on slick, old linoleum alerted us to Gramma’s presence. Bill’s puni daj was just over seventy but looked ninety. She was an old Romani woman—I’d get the wooden spoon across my butt if I ever called her a Gypsy, although that’s exactly what she was—bent and sun-wrinkled and worn to a nub by a hard life of which we knew only the tiniest details.

  Gramma Mostoy did what she always did before entering any room I was in. When she didn’t think I could see, she pulled her bottom eyelid down to ward off the Evil Eye, then spit on the ground. What she thought I was, she never let on directly. Maybe it was out of gratitude for saving Bill’s life, but she never once said anything. Protected from whatever evil I represented, she forced a smile and shuffled into the kitchen.

  “You boys are up too early. It’s not natural. You should be out late drinking and getting laid, not talking business ‘fore the sun’s even up.”

  Bill and I exchanged eye rolls. For all her salty talk and world-weariness, we were both sure she had no idea that her grandson’s ideal romantic partner was a-six-foot-tall blonde frat bro, likely named Jason. It was one such specimen and his asshole buddies who jumped Bill for making an ill-advised pass the night Shaggy and I came to his rescue. The beating had left him romantically unattached and with a permanent limp. All the old lady knew about that night, or would admit to, was that I was a good friend who’d saved her grandson’s life. For that, I got cheap rent and admission to the inner circle.

  “Acting like a bunch of gorgers, the both of you.” Calling us the Old-World word for anyone who wasn’t Roma was the highest insult she could muster. And this from a woman with a world-class colorful vocabulary.

  She padded over in those ugly furry slippers and gave her grandson a kiss on the forehead, then looked me up and down. “What’d you do now?”

  I fibbed like a five-year-old. “Nothing.”

  She motioned for me to show her.

  I looked at Bill for help, which wasn’t coming. He just grinned that superior smirk of his and stared into his coffee mug like there was something fascinating at the bottom. Avoiding eye contact with her, I lifted my shirt. A little blood had seeped through the gauze and crusted, meaning it tore the scab and started bleeding all over as I exposed my abdomen.

  She shook her head and said something I didn’t quite catch. It didn’t matter, the world for “dumbass” sounds the same in any language. She scuttled off and returned with a proper first aid kit.

  The crone administered rubbing alcohol, more clean gauze, and a healthy dose of verbal abuse. Finally, she determined I’d live and waved at me to put my shirt down. “God, you’re a furry bastard. Any woman you’re with would probably cough up hair-balls.”

  “I haven’t had any complaints.” Bantering with her was a lost cause, and God only knows why I bothered.

  “You haven’t had any anything in so long you don’t remember.”

  My supposed best friend damn near snorted coffee out his nose, which only put him in her sights. “You should talk. The two of you, honest to Christ.”

  It was time to make my getaway. I pushed away from the table. “Thanks for the coffee. I’m gonna take a catnap before I go to… my appointment.” I gave her a peck on the top of her grey head and retrieved my shoes from the entryway. There was a door leading from the kitchen downstairs to my apartment. We never locked it so I could come and go pretty much at will. Still in my socks, I headed to my room to catch an hour of zees before meeting Neil O’Rourke and the biggest payday of my life.

  CHAPTER 4

  First day past full- waning gibbous moon.

  “O’Rourke?” The kid behind the counter at the cigar lounge didn’t even look up from his phone. He just jerked his pierced head towards the small room in the back. I managed not to throw up in my mouth and said, “thanks.” On one hour’s sleep and a high-cycle hangover, the stench of all that raw tobacco was doing terrible things to my gut. Fortunately, I had a good base of county-provided venison holding everything down. Still, I felt like crap.

  Neil O’Rourke had been running his book out of The Golden Humidor since I was in high school. He had some kind of arrangement with Sammy, the Lebanese guy who owned the joint, to claim the back smoking lounge as his personal fiefdom.

  It didn’t look like much of an empire. An old card table sat ostentatiously in front of the biggest flat-screen TV. O’Rourke held court in an oversized leather chair, occasionally poking fat fingers at a laptop keyboard. The fat Irishman sat there all day, puffing on the longest, fattest, most noxious stogies and taking bets from all the respectable—and delusional—Cubs fans and Northwestern alums who made up DuPage County.

  Like most such places, the lounge was BYOB, but it still jarred me to see a bottle of Connemara whiskey and a half-empty glass sitting on the tray at that hour. Despite the peaty blood flowing through his veins, the big man was infamous for keeping a sober head. That made him even more dangerous when crossed, because he knew exactly what he was doing, or threatening to do, and had a memory like a bull elephant.

  He scared the crap out of me when I worked for him. O’Rourke had taken me on a year out of high school to intimidate the slugs who fell behind on payments, and I’m ashamed to admit that I dug the feeling of power it gave me. I didn’t know what to do with all that lunar rage back then and beating the crap out of deadbeats was an outlet. But there wasn’t a moment’s doubt that my boss was bigger, meaner and all-around more dangerous than anyone in the room.