Hellbender Read online

  Introduction

  “Hellbender” originally appeared in a short story collection called Down These Strange Streets. Editors Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin asked a number of writers to do stories of urban fantasy / crime: SciFi noir, hardboiled paranormal, fantasy PI stories—anything in which the investigator (cop, PI, amateur) works a case with supernatural elements. The book’s original title was to be Fantastic Dicks, which rather set the tone for the stories, and although they later backed down from the name, by then it was too late: “Hellbender” had already begun to take shape in one writer’s fevered brain.

  I suspect Gardner and George were expecting a Laurie King story in which Sherlock Holmes met, say, Count Dracula’s granddaughter. Instead, they got a tale in which the investigator himself brings in the supernatural elements.

  Some day, maybe, a Mike Heller collection?

  –Laurie R. King

  For publications, book excerpts, and information, go to www.LaurieRKing.com

  Copyright Laurie R. King. Originally published in Down These Strange Streets (eds. Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin), October, 2011, ISBN 978-0-441-02074-4

  Hellbender

  by Laurie R. King

  I looked across my desk at my new client, wondering what she’d say if I fished out the bottle and offered her a drink.

  Might be a little early in the morning, I decided. Might be a little straitlaced.

  “Miss Savoy, I—”

  “Ms.” The pretty sniff she gave didn’t really go along with the sharpness of the correction, but I let it pass, and turned my eyes onto the sheet of paper. On it were eight names. Next to each was a date, stretching back eight months. The first seven lines were typed, a printout. The last one and its date, two weeks past, were handwritten.

  “Ms. Savoy, I have to say, I’m not really sure what you’re asking me to do. Which of these people do you want me to find?”

  “All of them!”

  At that, I raised my eyes to hers. They were big and blue and welling with just enough tears to get the message across, but not enough to threaten her makeup. The color had to be some kind of an implant, I thought—although you’d swear her hair was a natural blond.

  Interesting fact: People of her kind just weren’t born blond.

  “I don’t do class-action suits, Ms. Savoy, and this many names will keep me busy for weeks. How about we start with one of them, and see how far we get?” I could see from her clothes that she didn’t have the sort of money we were talking about here—her shoes and coat had once cost her something, but that was a whole lot of cleanings ago.

  “Well, that would be Harry. He’s the last one to go—the last one I know of—but I’ve known him the longest.”

  And, she might have said, he was the one that mattered most.

  “Okay, start with him.”

  “Well, he disappeared two weeks ago. I was supposed—”

  “Tell me a little about Harry, to begin with. How long have you known him?”

  “Pretty much my whole life,” she said, sounding surprised. “Harry’s my brother. Harry Savoy.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, a noise that I tried to make noncommittal, but that came out a little disbelieving.

  “No, really. We were both adopted, a year apart.”

  I made the noise again, although this time it may have had a little more understanding in it. I knew the kind of people who adopt more than one of this woman’s kind: You probably do, too. And call them well-meaning or saints or just delusional, they’re usually very religious. Which is funny, considering that those who’d rather stamp her kind out altogether call themselves religious, too.

  Anyway.

  “I was two and a half when I was adopted, but Harry was almost five. I never knew exactly what his early life was like, except that it was hard. For one thing, he was more . . . that is to say, you can tell that I’m . . . ?”

  “Yeah.” Although it was true, a lot of people might not’ve known with her, and certainly not right off. Still, I could tell the second she walked in. Makeup and surgery might hide the surface, but there’s a kind of all-over flexibility that just shouts out when you know what you’re looking at. And when you don’t know—well, let’s just say that a lot of this girl’s type make a good living out of how they move.

  “Harry was more obvious than me. He even had little lines where his gills almost came up. And because he lived in a rough neighborhood, he came in for a lot of grief.”

  I nodded, keeping my face straight.

  “A social worker took him away from his family after his second broken arm. Mom and Dad heard about him, and first fostered him, then adopted him. So Harry was my big brother from the time I was three.

  “Harry’s bright—really bright—but he decided early that he wasn’t going to take any more crap, from anyone. When he was a teenager he got into a lot of fights, although after he got big, the kids stopped trying to pick on him quite so much. But he refused to make any concessions, never had any treatments, wouldn’t even do The Surgery.

  “Oh,” she said, with a pretty trace of blush rising across her cheeks. “I didn’t mean, that is, I didn’t intend—I’d never criticize what others choose to do.”

  That drink was looking better. Might help with the room, which was suddenly feeling a little cold.

  “Who would?” I agreed, giving a little shrug to show how disinterested I was.

  A little frown line came into being between those pretty eyes. “But . . . I mean, surely you’re one, too?”

  “One what?” A stupid thing to say, but she’d taken me by surprise. It’d been a long time since someone made me that fast. Most people took me for a young guy with a slight skin condition. I’d even perfected a stiff walk that made my heels jar all the way up to my neck and gave me a backache, but helped me pass.

  “One of us. A . . . SalaMan.”

  I was born in the second decade of the millennium. Oh, I spent a few years in a freezer first, then a lot more years in legal limbo before the case finally wound its way through the courts to give me a birth certificate, but conception took place when that oh-so-clever shit-bastard of a grad student stirred up some DNA to see what would happen, and I figure conception is when I began.

  When Elizabeth Savoy came to my office that Tuesday morning, I’d been breathing for thirty-one years, although I only looked twenty. And sometimes felt fifty.

  Interesting fact: People don’t know just how many of us there are. Oh, you may think you do, and you can bet Uncle Sam does, but it didn’t take very many bombings and riots before even the government could see that playing things down might be a smart idea. Once the Supremes turned in their decision regarding our human status, the feds were ready, and pretty much everything about us went away: numbers, characteristics, identities. There’s even the occasional Web rumor that says we’re nothing but a myth, which is fine with me.

  As far as the government is concerned, the only time we’re the least bit different from any other citizen is when we want to be. From the start, they swore up and down that they’d set up the records so even they didn’t know who we were unless we chose to come to them. Which was hard to believe, but at least they kept their hands off us. We’ve all been counseled; we all know that it’s a good idea to take any medical problem to one of their specialists rather than wonder if our local GP knows what he’s looking at; we’re all aware of the standing offer of money, shelter, and a lifetime of protection if that’s ever what we want. And if we don’t, well, we got a handshake and a wish for good luck, which is more than most of our fellow citizens get.

  I had to wonder how my client had found me. I didn’t exactly have a shingle out saying “SalaMan Investigations.”

  About a quarter of my own genes come from a sp
ecies called Hellbender, a big guy that’s about as ugly as most of his kind (although at least the name was cool—what if our DNA came from mud puppies or—God help us—“seepage” salamanders?). That lunatic grad student Joey Handle had to’ve been a genius, because he tweaked and balanced and played God with the stuff of Cryptobranchus alleganiensis and Homo sapiens to make himself a race of Others, in a way no one else has yet.

  Or anyway, did so enough to prove to himself that he could. No one knows if he ever intended to warm up all his frozen embryos and see if we twitched, or just flush us all down the drain. I suspect the latter. But before the boy genius could decide, Reverend Tommy Bostitch’s mad followers took over the lab, not really knowing what was there other than it was something sinful. That’s where they found us, and before you know it, they’d gotten it into their well-meaning little brains that what God wanted them to do was give us life.

  Reverend Tommy’s men were bad enough, but the women who fell for his spiel? I mean really: How nutso do you have to be to volunteer your womb to grow what for all you know will turn out to be a monster? Religious nuts just get my goat. Even though I owe them my existence.

  Mom was one of the lucky ones, sort of. First off, I lived, which most of Handle’s Children didn’t. Then, she wasn’t one of Reverend Tommy’s direct followers, so she didn’t die with the others in the raid a few years later. And to top it off, I looked enough like a human baby that people didn’t shriek and run when they saw me. But she volunteered to be implanted only the one time. And she had to’ve blamed me for the divorce. In any case, hers and mine wasn’t exactly a cuddly relationship. I’d guess it’s hard for a pure mammal to feel all maternal toward a baby that feels a little bit cool and maybe a touch slimy—as my client said, some of us were more blatant than others.

  But for some reason, the first round of implants didn’t put a complete halt to the birthing program. If it had, we’d be a lot fewer of us, and we’d all be the same age.

  About a year after the embryo theft, the first of us were born. About a month after that, the government caught on that something weird was going on. And from there . . . well, by the time I was eighteen, the courts had decided that I was a citizen.

  Once I’d had some work done, I could pass. I could even sleep with women without them freaking out, since I’d had what my client delicately called The Surgery (although I was still sterile, like all the others.) And in the eight years I’d had my PI shingle out, I’d had only one SalaMan client, and he came in my door by accident.

  So as you can guess, I wasn’t exactly happy about Ms. Savoy.

  I jerked open my desk drawer and took out the bottle and two shot glasses, filling both to the top. I tossed mine down and filled it up again. To my surprise, Ms. Savoy picked hers up and swallowed half of it without a blink.

  Maybe she wasn’t quite as prim as she looked.

  “Okay, so your brother Harry’s gone missing,” I said, bringing us back to the subject at hand. “Have you filed a missing-person report?”

  “Yes, although the police really weren’t interested.”

  “They told you that he’s a grown man, he can go away if he wants, I know.” My license meant that I had to pay attention to the rules of what a PI could and couldn’t do. I had a buddy in the department, but I didn’t like to ask Frank for too many favors. “You say your brother’s a guy who’s not at all interested in passing. You think that’s related to his disappearance?”

  “One has to wonder,” she said. I had to agree, “one” did—every year or so there’d be another set of headlines about a SalaMan who pushed a Salaphobe’s buttons and got himself beat up, or worse.

  “Yeah, activism can be a dangerous hobby. What was he into when he disappeared?”

  “He had a friend, a woman, who—”

  “A friend, or a good friend?” I interrupted.

  “I think they were serious, but I’m not certain. I only met Eileen a couple of times, but he liked her a lot. And then about six weeks ago she just up and vanished. She texted him—not even a phone call—to say she couldn’t take it and she was going home. When he went to her apartment, most of her stuff was there but she wasn’t. He was convinced something happened to her. He’s been trying to find her—that’s her name on the list, right above his. And now he’s missing, too.”

  Harry’s was the handwritten name at the bottom of the printed list.

  “Who are the others?”

  “I’m not altogether certain, but I think they’re all people like us.” I wished she’d stop putting it that way. “I found that piece of paper in Harry’s desk drawer two days ago. It was on the top, so I thought it might be something he was working on, a meeting or an article or something. And I recognized two of the names—other than Eileen’s, of course. Imogen and Barbara were girls I’d been to college with. So I tried to find them, to see if Harry had been in touch. But they were missing, too. Both of them.”

  I had to agree, the odds of coincidence here were pretty thin.

  So I took her check, and I got to work.

  Brother Harry had a third-floor apartment in a tired part of town near the water, which address alone would’ve made me wonder about him. And when I walked in, using the key his sister had given me, I’d have known for sure: The air was so moist the paint was coming off the walls, and you could smell the mildew despite the scrubbers. Which told me Harry had the kind of skin that needed to be damp. Humidity was one reason so many of his kind—okay, my kind—lived in San Francisco. (That, and the city’s hey-it’s-your-business attitude.) Which in turn was one reason I lived in Oakland where, being dryer and hotter, people didn’t automatically wonder if you were One of Them.

  I stood in the neat little two-bedroom, listening to the low hum of the two opposing machines—one to make the air wet, the other to battle the effects of damp—and waited for the place to tell me about Harry. He was a tidy guy, I could see that. He liked bare floors and simple furniture, and color on the walls. Not too many books, but then, books didn’t like humidity, so that was hardly unusual.

  More interesting, the place had been searched. So carefully that, unless you’d done a lot of cautious searches yourself, you wouldn’t have noticed it. And even I might not’ve caught on if the sun hadn’t been out, or if Harry liked sunlight a little less.

  It gave me pause, for a minute. But in the end, I was here with the permission of the owner’s sister, and anyway, my presence was sure to be on a camera somewhere in the neighborhood. So I went ahead with my search, keeping an eye out for bugs, but either the guy who’d searched the place was sharper when it came to planting surveillance than he was at putting back the vases on dusty surfaces, or there weren’t any.

  My client’s brother liked damp, but he also liked light, which was unusual, considering the sensitivity of most SalaMan eyes. His walls were painted a bright white, the bulbs in his lamps were full-strength, and the thin curtains over the windows were designed to keep out eyes rather than glare. Moving to the kitchen, I could see he was a cook, with a bunch of Asian-style pans and spices, more knives than I’d seen outside a French bistro, and an espresso machine the size of a small car. His refrigerator’s sell-by dates didn’t narrow down his departure a whole lot, although I didn’t spot anything that was actually expired.

  And his willingness to embrace the amphibious side of his heritage stopped well short of his palate—you wouldn’t believe the things some of his—of our—kind tried putting on their plates.

  Or maybe you would.

  His closet had a suitcase in it. His bathroom had a toothbrush, electric razor, and zip-up traveling bag in a drawer. The little closet near the front door had an overcoat, a raincoat, and a leather jacket, and its only bare hangers were half-hidden by occupied ones. All of which suggested that when Harry went out, he didn’t expect to be gone long.

  I pressed a couple of buttons on the espresso machine, took the cup of black sludge that resulted over to Harry’s desk, and settled down to the
drawers.

  The first thing I saw was a box of bullets. It was sitting next to a tin of oil and a cleaning rag. The box was half empty. I got up and went to look for all the likely places to hide a handgun: bedside table, behind the toilet, in the flour canister. No gun.

  I had to wonder if he had a carry permit for it. Permits aren’t easy to get, here in California.

  My tablespoon of espresso had gone cold, so I pressed the buttons again and let the powerful syrup dribble into the cup, then returned to the desk.

  Four cups later, my nerves were singing and I knew a few more things about Harry Savoy. His sister had told me he was a kind of graphic artist specializing in architectural drawings, who worked from home. The room he used as an office was drier than the rest, probably because of the equipment—I’d gone there when I’d squeezed what I could from his desk, and found a desktop computer with a state-of-the-art drawing pad, a giant wall-mounted screen, and a printer fitted with paper three feet wide. Most of the stuff I didn’t touch, although I did turn on the desktop long enough to see that pretty much all the files were password protected. Which put it beyond my personal skill set, although I had a friend who could help me, if need be.

  His paper files told me he made good money, and invested some. His machinery suggested that most of his friends existed online, through WeWeb, although he also had a Facebook page. I shut the computer down without logging on to either, and sat for a minute looking at the half-dozen framed pictures on the wall over the desk.

  Harry was good looking. My client hadn’t mentioned that, not a thing a sister would notice maybe, but the group photos had one person in common, a guy with a dark and intense look about him I figured would win him a lot of attention, even without the litheness he was sure to have when he moved. Gun, looks, money: maybe I didn’t have to look any further than old Harry’s personal life for a motivation.

  But I would. If nothing else, I had to earn the check in my pocket. I made notes of his phone numbers from the bills on file, and made copies of the last few months’ statements on the credit cards he used. He had an address book, a tattered old thing that functioned as a backup to whatever phone he carried, but I wrote down a few of the addresses that looked more recent.