Heart and Soul by Jackie May (reading list .TXT) 📗

Hillerman seems to like that answer. She nods. “What was her name?”

“She didn’t say, and even if she did, I can’t name names, and you know it. I do that, and my kind will do much worse to me than exorcism. So just go ahead and cast me out!”

“Relax.”

Ruby chomps nervously on the hookah tube, like a baby with a pacifier. Hillerman has completely broken him. She’s right—Arael Moaz was a much tougher cookie, and he was already half dead from cancer.

“How do I know you’re not lying to me?” she asks.

“Lying?”

“To get me off your back. Telling me what I want to hear.”

“But, I said it’s a woman. Is that right? The summoner you’re looking for?”

“50/50 guess it’s a woman. Not good enough.”

“She didn’t give me a name, I swear!”

“Fine. As it turns out, there’s something about her that’s just as good as a name. Something you could only know if you saw her face.”

Brenner goes on alert. Knee bouncing. “Her face?”

“I saw her face,” Ruby says, “but she was wearing sunglasses and a hoodie!”

“Wouldn’t matter, trust me,” Hillerman says.

Brenner interrupts, blurting, “Her chin.”

Hillerman’s face whips around. Her mouth is caught half open. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen her to genuine shock.

Encouraged, Brenner says, “A black stripe, starting at the bottom lip, running down the chin and all the way down the neck. Is that right?”

Hillerman’s only answer is to close her mouth. That would be a yes.

“We need to talk,” Brenner says.

Just like that, the encounter is over. Hillerman pounds twice on the roof of the car. Behind me, a tinted window rolls down to reveal an FBI agent in the front seat. Out the windshield, glittering in the alley, is a silver luxury car that I could only describe as a giant diamond on wheels. Ruby’s eyes bulge, and he spits out the hookah pipe with a sputter of shock.

“Bugatti Veyron Super Sport,” Hillerman explains. “Estimated value, 1.5 million. Confiscated during the rollup of an organized crime family in Miami. Free and clear, no strings attached.”

“No strings?” Ruby repeats. His face shines with the glow of love at first sight. Can’t pull his eyes away from the car.

“It’s all yours.”

A high-pitched squeak whistles through Ruby’s lips.

“With the understanding that the debt is now paid. You no longer have any claim on Shayne Davies or Detective Brenner. All is even between the two of you, and if I ever hear otherwise, it’s bye-bye, Bugatti. Square?”

Ruby, still unable to peel his eyes away from his new lover, makes a shooing motion with his fingers.

Satisfied, Hillerman nods at Brenner and throws the door open. “Now, we talk.”

Two empty beer bottles sit on the coffee table in front of Special Agent Hillerman. The first, she drank entirely in one breath as soon as we stepped into her usual hotel room at the Marriott downtown. The second, she guzzled as Brenner recounted his memory of the revenant with the black chin.

“They have to be related,” he says. “This revenant and the demon summoner you’re looking for.”

Now that it’s her turn to share, Hillerman pops the top on a third beer. Her black shades still cover her eyes, despite the gray darkness of the room, with only a single lamp on by the bed. For a long moment, she stares at her feet propped on the coffee table. The beer in her hand seems forgotten. She lets a long breath hiss from deep in her lungs. When she talks, her voice is thick with the beginnings of a buzz. I can tell she would be a sad drunk.

“When I was seventeen, I was abducted by a demon named Boca. He’d taken other girls. Tortured them, broken them. They hadn’t ever fought back.” She considers the beer in her hands, but doesn’t drink. “I did. Back at his place, I grabbed a knife. He had…” She gestures to her chin. “He had a messy chin. Years before, he’d been burned with acid down his chin and neck.”

Brenner trades looks with me. This is it. We’re about to get answers.

“I rammed that knife up through the bottom of his chin. The news called it poetic justice. I sure didn’t mean it that way. I had nightmares for weeks of that chin, that throat opening up, gushing blood and spilling out his tongue. Until…” She turns the bottle in her fingers. “Until they weren’t nightmares anymore. He was there, and he was real. His spirit clung to me from the Deep world, because I was the one who killed him.”

“He haunted you?” I ask, fighting to control a shiver up my spine.

“Wherever I went. We were connected. Killing is an act of creation, same as giving birth. It creates bonds. Boca was never going to leave me alone until I joined him in the Deep. Back then, I didn’t have anyone. My parents were divorced. I couldn’t go back to school. I had to hide from news reporters. There was only one person I could…” Her voice catches, which scares me more than any gruesome detail of her story. “He was the only person I knew I could trust. I knew he’d believe me.” She wipes at her eyes beneath the shades. “Of course he did.”

After a long pause, it’s evident that she won’t—or can’t—say his name, so I do it for her. “Matthew Hillerman.” I remember his photo from the news articles I found. Tall, ripped guy, tattooed with all the same morbid designs Hillerman now sports along both arms and shoulders. Spiders and skulls and angels of death. He’s the reason why she listens to heavy metal bands.

She thumbs the wedding band on her ring finger. “Matt helped me. We found out Boca had a daughter. She was trying to bring him back, but she needed a body for him to inhabit.”

I take a wild guess. “Matt’s body?”

Hillerman nods. “They took him. By the time I tracked them down, it was too late. Matt wasn’t mine anymore.”