The Death Panel: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness Read online

  He’d been smart. He’d planned ahead for contingencies. He’d already taken out a PO box. He ran into the post office and hid the satchel of jewelry and then swallowed the key in case he got picked up. But he had no wheels. There was nowhere to run. He couldn’t be caught on the street.

  I had to give it to him, he stayed cool. He knew how to adapt and improvise. He took off his jacket and tore a hole in his t-shirt and kicked off his shoes on the way to the homeless shelter across the street. He stepped in the front door just as the cops came around the corner. It all seemed to have been perfectly rehearsed. I kept watch.

  I found out the Kid played the crazy card and threw himself on the ground and pretended to be nuts. They shipped him off. I voluntarily committed myself the same day.

  And I watched the Comatose Kid.

  And I waited.

  He rolled over on the floor, grunting in pain. “Aooww.”

  “You hear me, Kid?”

  “Ooowww.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Look at me.”

  He opened his eyes and touched his face and moaned again. “My nose—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I was your wheelman.”

  “What?”

  “Your driver. I was your driver. Remember now?”

  “You broke my nose.”

  I sighed. “Focus, Kid. You were a last minute replacement. But we only met in the car. You sat behind me. You killed Cole and Hershaw. You killed the girl.”

  He cleared his throat. He tried to sit up and couldn’t quite do it. “I didn’t need partners.”

  “If you’d followed the plan, you wouldn’t have been stuck pretending to be in a coma for three months.”

  “I didn’t mind it.”

  “And you call me a lunatic. You popped your partners. You cut the girl. You cut her and then you killed her because you like feeling a knife chewing through cartilage.”

  “I did what I had to do.”

  “The girl was our inside player. She was the one who got us the alarm codes. She was my granddaughter.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered. You would’ve done her anyway. And me, if she hadn’t sent me the video feed.”

  “That’s why you drove off.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you committed yourself? And waited? In the hospital?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But. But you could’ve taken me at any time. Why? Why did you wait?”

  “I had to make sure you had the key on you,” I said. “I wanted the score. I’m a thief.”

  I kicked him in the face, then slung him over my shoulder and walked out the back door. He didn’t have much struggle left in him but he squirmed around and mewled a bit. I marched down the path through the dunes out to the beach. I tossed him down. Emily’s chaise lounge was still where it was the last time she’d laid on it, but it was almost completely covered by sand now. I dug it out and there was a pretty sizeable hole left over. I buried the Kid in it and smoothed the sand out and placed the lounge over the spot. I sat down for a while watching the waves roll in.

  What Makes An Angel Cry

  Kelly M. Hudson

  * * *

  They say when you sleep with a succubus it takes seven years off the back end of your life. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that they’re nothing but trouble, and they have a bad habit of turning up when you least expect it.

  So when Delilah slunk into my bar and slid over to the counter, smiling pretty and sly, I wasn’t so much surprised as I was pissed.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “Vodka, on the rocks,” she said. Succubi loved vodka. I don’t know why. She was eyeing me the entire time; I could feel that hellfire gaze slithering over every inch of my body. She put the mojo on me and I knew it because each spot her eye stared at tingled with excitement. She lingered around my crotch and the buzz was burning me up, but I stayed focused and let my anger lead me through it.

  “Now,” I said. I made her drink and slid it over to her. “What do you really want?”

  “Oh, come on, Billy,” she said. She took a sip of vodka, her crimson, pillow lips kissing the glass and leaving perfect lipstick prints. She was gorgeous; there was no doubt about it. Delilah was an old school kind of woman, all hips and curves and cushions up top and behind that promised such comfort that you’d give your soul for a taste. Or seven years of your life. She had black hair when I was with her before and she’d changed it to platinum blonde, but I knew her the second I saw her. There was no fooling me. I knew my old lovers like the back of my own hand.

  “Don’t be so mean,” she said, her cute, pert nose dipping as she spoke. “Can’t a girl catch up with a former flame?” She tried to lock eyes with me, get me to stare into those deep brown chasms where a man could drown and thank God for the pleasure while he was dying.

  I looked around the bar to break off the stare. It wasn’t full, but we were doing some brisk business. I owned a local bar, what folks referred to as a “neighborhood bar,” and I wasn’t getting rich, but I had a steady clientele and income. I liked it and I didn’t want anything to mess it up for me.

  Every person was ogling Delilah like starved men staring through a restaurant window. The few women that dotted the place glared, too, drawn in by her beauty. Succubi were like that; it didn’t matter if you were man, woman, child, or a goddamn dog. One of them walks into a room and everyone pays attention. It was like that then and I wasn’t happy about it.

  “You know, they got bars for your types,” I said.

  “Don’t be a jerk,” she said. She took another drink and threw her head back and laughed. “I saw your sign at the door. ‘No Demons Allowed.’ That’s kind of racist of you, isn’t it?”

  “My bar, my rules.”

  “Then why does Tommy get to hang out here?” she said, her brown eyes, decorated with the longest, darkest lashes you’ve ever seen, flicking to the corner where Tommy sat, nursing a gin and tonic. Tommy was a demon, sure, but he was also my friend. And a good guy, too. As much as demons can be good.

  “You’re not here on some social cause,” I said. “You want something, so spit it out.”

  Delilah met my eyes and I have to confess, when she gazed at me I nearly fell to my knees and wept. She still had that kind of hold on me and despite the five years that had passed since we’d last seen each other—five long, miserable years where I promised myself every day that I was over her, that I was through and had moved on—I knew I was still in love with the bitch. Goddamn her.

  “Maybe we could go somewhere a little more private,” she said, her finger circling the rim of the glass.

  “You’d like that, huh?” I went from wanting to bend her over to wanting to jam an ice pick between those pretty eyes of hers. It was like that between us; the classic love/hate thing. And I guessed it always would be that way.

  “Not as much as you would,” she said. A wicked smile split her face and I went right back to thinking of bending her over again.

  “Where’s Butcher?” I said. Butcher was her personal assistant, driver, and bodyguard. He was a demon, too, and one of the meanest I’d ever met in my life. His love for his mistress was untouchable, and when Delilah left me long ago and I went after her, Butcher stood in my way. He beat me something pretty good.

  Now, you need to understand something here. I haven’t owned and run a bar my entire life. I was a boxer once, up to a year before I met Delilah. I wasn’t great but I wasn’t bad either; won a few, lost some, and I was tough in the ring; like a pit bull when it got its jaws locked on something, I wouldn’t quit until I won or was beaten to a pulp. But I didn’t really have a future in it; I wasn’t going to be a champ and I certainly wasn’t going to rise above the amateur circuit I was on. So one day, after having my ass handed to me by a guy nearly half my age, I got out of the business.

  I’d saved some money through the whole slog, and after a loan from a neigh
borhood shark, I got this bar up and running here in Brooklyn. It was a quiet life, and I liked it just fine, being on the fading end of my thirties, gathering gray hair like a migrant worker picks strawberries, and generally having nowhere to go and no place to be.

  All that ended when the Big Event happened and my life, like the life of all New Yorkers, changed forever. How to explain the Big Event? It’s kinda like teaching a sighted person Braille; you can learn it but you never really get it, not like a blind guy.

  One day, the sky above New York City split open and these things fell through the gap. They were thousands of little balls of light, and they floated down from the rift like giant tufts of cotton, swaying gently and coming to rest all over the boroughs. When they landed, the balls of light transformed, taking the outward appearance of entities from a lot of the world religions, becoming demons, angels, gods, and goddesses, with a lot of their attending abilities. And they ghettoized themselves; the demons and Satan took to Brooklyn, the angels took Queens, Allah and his gang got the Bronx, Kabala and whatever the Jews followed started up their operations on Long Island, the Hindus got Staten Island (yeah, I never understood that, either), and Manhattan, well it was sort of a neutral ground, a melting pot, where all the different groups could mix, along with local gods and spirits, indigenous to their neighborhood. Then the rift closed and that was it.

  New York had an influx of some hundred thousand or so new resident aliens, and these folks were aliens for real. Or maybe they weren’t. Maybe they really were the gods and goddesses that the world knew and loved and maybe even hated. Nobody knew for sure. Lots of theories got tossed around like abused wives. My favorite was that the lights were from another dimension and that when they arrived, they reached into the minds of the residents and took on the forms that could most readily explain their powers and abilities. And also something we’d all be comfortable with.

  Anyway, the government had to have their say, like they always do. They drove tanks right down the middle of Manhattan, determined to uproot the illegal immigrants. The only thing was, the beings fought back, and four square blocks of Upper West Side Manhattan got leveled. Now, maybe if the fight had happened in Harlem and it got burned up, nobody would have given a shit. But this was the Upper Crust we were talking about here, and everyone knows that when it comes to the Upper West Side, a homeless guy can’t wipe a booger on the sidewalk without SWAT getting called in on the case. So the rich spoke and the government backed off and the aliens settled in, Gods and Goddesses amongst the world of men.

  New Yorkers responded like they always did. They bitched and moaned and then shrugged their shoulders and got on with their lives. The entities that came through that hole and made a new life here in New York stayed in New York. For some reason, they never spread out to anywhere else in the world. Some say it was because they were afraid, but I think that they’re all stuck here, waiting, hoping that one day that rift will open again and they’ll go back to where they came from. Hell, for all I know, they’re all a bunch of criminals and they were sentenced to do hard time here on earth. They wouldn’t be the first to show up in America with that kind of rep.

  In Brooklyn, Boss Satan and his boys set up a whole new mafia-like organization and pretty soon, they were running everything. As to the other boroughs, I can’t really say. I got problems enough of my own to pay any attention to those other folks.

  Problems like an ex-lover that was a demon turning up on my doorstep.

  Delilah sighed and told me that Butcher was outside, watching the limo. “I can call him in if you want,” she said.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  Just then, a scream cut through the tension between us like a car antenna whipping down a highway. I jumped in place, dropping the glass I was holding and Delilah spun, spitting out her drink and calling out for Butcher.

  The front doors slammed open and in staggered Butcher, all six foot eight of him. He’d been wearing his typical driver’s uniform, a black suit with white button-down shirt and cap. He loved that stupid cap. Butcher was meticulous about his appearance. He polished his shoes every day and dry cleaned his clothes. But when he lurched into my bar that day, there wasn’t an inch of him that was clean of anything.

  Butcher had been cut open, his chest raw and bleeding. Flaps of his breast skin hung to the side, flopping around as he stumbled forward, held on by the tiniest, strained pieces of flesh. His jacket was gone and the white shirt he’d been wearing was red now, like it had been stitched that way, and his pants were shredded into tatters that matched the slashes on his legs. Blood poured out of seemingly everywhere. He was holding his guts in his hands and they were steaming in the air like a hot plate of spaghetti at a homeless shelter. Did I mention he was screaming? God, it was awful. I felt like at any moment my ears were going to burst and my eyes were going to pop from my head.

  Then he fell to his knees, his baby blue eyes locking on Delilah’s, a single tear running down his cheek. His mouth opened and shut, a bloody bubble forming between his lips as he tried to speak but couldn’t find the voice. Finally, he pitched forward and died, his intestines spilling across my floor, a fart of foam and blood.

  Delilah fell to his side, very careful not to get wet or stained with his blood, and touched the back of Butcher’s head. He’d been cut open there, too, a chunk of his skull pried away to reveal his glistening, gray brain. She looked up at me, tears in her eyes.

  “This is why I’m here,” she said.

  Boss Satan’s men came along and cleaned up the mess. They were the real law out here, so there was no need to call the cops. This was a demon matter, anyway, and it was best they dealt with it.

  Delilah hid up in my apartment above the bar and her involvement was never mentioned. One of the demons, a burly fellow that would have passed as a pro wrestler if he wanted that kind of job, asked me pointedly about Delilah. Everyone knew that Butcher was her driver.

  “Butcher told me he was coming by to talk to me,” I lied. “He told me Delilah wanted to see me and I told him to go get fucked,”

  Pro Wrestler gave me a funny look.

  “Hey, I fooled around with her once, and that was enough for me,” I said, holding my hands up to show my innocence. “You’re a demon. Maybe you can handle those succubi better than a human can, but I tell you the truth: those broads are ten times worse than a regular woman.”

  Pro Wrestler laughed. It was our own private joke between man and demon. Here’s something else for you to know: demons, hell, all the creatures that came through the rift that day, they all looked human. If you weren’t paying any attention, you couldn’t tell them apart from anybody else. But they all had a funny smell to them—a slight undercurrent of cinnamon—and you could see, just by looking at them for more than a few seconds, that there was something different about them.

  “What’s with the ‘No Demons’ sign outside,” the other demon said. He was smaller than the Wrestler, but he was still bigger than me. He had the body of a dock worker and the brow of an ape man. “You prejudiced?”

  “Hey,” I said. “I got that cleared by Boss Satan. You got a problem, take it to him.”

  Dock Worker didn’t like it and he grumbled under his breath about it to let me know. But there wasn’t anything he could do. Boss Satan ran things. And he understood, better than his underlings, that humans and demons needed their own places to mingle without the others getting involved. Besides, he had a regular string of succubi whorehouses and sinful gambling spots that kept everyone mixed and happy. A bar here or there that catered to one clientele over another was no big deal and was, in the end, just good business.

  “Don’t leave town,” Dock Worker said.

  “Where do I have to go?” I said, spreading my empty hands even further apart.

  It took a couple of hours, but they got the place cleaned up so good it was almost like nothing happened. I closed shop and went upstairs.

  Delilah threw herself on me as soon as I stepped throug
h the door. I’d like to tell you I pushed her away, told her to go back to hell, or some other clever line. But I didn’t. As soon as that familiar body slid into mine, it was over. We locked together, like we always used to do, like the last two puzzle pieces out of a box that finally revealed the masterpiece being assembled. We weren’t a masterpiece, though. We were raw, uninhibited sex. Her groin met mine through our clothes and a heat rose between us terrible enough to scorch old Boss Satan’s eyebrows right off. Before I knew it, she had me out of my shirt and was working my chest with her hands and mouth and then my pants were off and she was naked, too, and we were on the floor, pushing against each other, sweating and groaning and going to places I never thought were possible.

  I guess I lost another seven years off the back end of my life.

  When it was over, we lay on the floor, our bodies a sheen of sweat like we’d been wrestling in oil for a captive audience. I was trying to catch my breath but it was like grasping the wind in the palm of your hand; it was there one moment, gone the next.

  She snuggled up next to me, that vixen of fire and brimstone. I hated myself right away for what I’d done and cursed my body for betraying me. It didn’t listen. It had its own needs and was quite happy right about then. I decided to ruin the fun.

  “Why did you come to me?” I said. “And who killed Butcher?”

  She sighed and rubbed her nose against my chest. “I want to sleep,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I want some answers.”

  Delilah bolted straight up, anger on her face. She slapped my chest with an open palm, raising a welt. I yelled at her and then she laughed and pulled away. That’s how she was. Pleasure one minute, pain the next. She was a demon, after all.

  She leaned over to the pile of her clothing and fished through the rumpled garments. Finally, she found a pack of smokes and a lighter. She took one out and plopped it between those two pillows she called lips and lit it up. Delilah took a long drag, letting the smoke sit in her lungs for a minute and twirl. She blew out a plume and looked over at me.