Chapter Two
Eager to shut down the illegal golem sweatshop, I went to find Officer Toby McGoohan. McGoo was my BHF, my best human friend, and our lives were closely related but not in lockstep. Back in college, we’d both wanted to be cops, but my life didn’t turn out as I had planned. After a lackluster career on the outside, I set up my private detective business in the Quarter, and I did all right for myself (my own murder notwithstanding).
McGoo had stuck with his law enforcement and criminal justice training, became a police officer. And his life hadn’t turned out as planned, either. He had never been a rising star. His sense of humor and lack of political correctness had gotten him transferred from a dead-end career on the outside to an even deader-end career here in the Quarter.
McGoo didn’t like the assignment, but he made do. As a cop, he believed his job was to enforce the law and keep the peace. “If I was in a quiet, affluent district with a low crime rate, what would I do with myself all day long? Hang out at the donut shop and get fat?” Victims were victims, and scumbags were scumbags; it didn’t matter that they had fangs or claws. McGoo knew he wasn’t going to be promoted to a better job, regardless of how many gold stars he got on his record. He was always going to be a beat cop. So be it.
He made sure I understood the irony. “Who would have guessed it, Shamble? You were the one who dropped out of the curriculum, and you’re the one who made detective!” It was a joke, but not a very funny one. Most of McGoo’s jokes weren’t funny.
Where do you find a zombie that’s lost its arms and legs?
Exactly where you left it.
His monster jokes were a safe bet. These days, a guy could get in trouble for picking on ethnic minorities, but it was perfectly all right to disparage unnaturals (though it wasn’t smart to insult a werewolf in full-moon heat).
McGoo and I often helped each other. He could use department channels off the books to get me details I needed on cases; for my own part, since I didn’t wear a badge, I could use unorthodox means to dig up information that he needed. It was a good partnership. We were also drinking buddies.
Our friendship had changed fundamentally once I became a zombie. No surprise there: A lot of things changed after I came back from the dead. It was only natural … or unnatural.
Around McGoo, I would try to pretend that nothing had happened, for old times’ sake. I drank the same brand of beer, sat on the same barstool, and McGoo did his best to ignore the differences. But when we sat together in the Goblin Tavern, sometimes he couldn’t look me in the eyes; instead, he focused on the neat round bullet hole in the center of my forehead (makeup notwithstanding).
Right now, I found McGoo leaving the Transfusion coffee shop, where I knew he’d be this time of day. As a service to the customers, Transfusion had opaque windows so that insomniac vampires could hang out during daylight hours, have a cup of coffee, read a book or work on their laptops. McGoo just liked their coffee. From his gruff exterior, McGoo seemed like the type of person to order coffee strong and black, but he preferred cinnamon lattes (and was ready to deliver a punch in the nose to anyone who called him a sissy for it).
Carrying his latte as if it were a live hand grenade, McGoo saw me coming toward him down the street. “Hey, Shamble!”
“I need a favor, McGoo.”
His grin turned into a frown. “Never a good way to start a conversation.”
“Consider it job security, some excitement in your life. A good deed for the day.”
“I just try to get through the day, Shamble. Wanna hear a joke?”
I cut him off. “I’d rather tell you about an illegal sweatshop, enslaved and abused golems, a black-market souvenir racket. I need you to call in a raid. You’ll be glad you did.”
For all his curmudgeonly exterior, McGoo took his job seriously. “You aren’t kidding, are you?”
“When have I ever lied to you?”
McGoo took a long sip of his cinnamon latte. “You really want me to stand here and make a list?”
“Instead, how about making a few calls, bring in some backup, and bust down a door?” My face wasn’t good at expressions anymore, but I made sure I looked absolutely confident. “One condition, though—I get to come along. I have to make sure my clients’ interests are served.”
“And who exactly is your client?”
“About a hundred oppressed golems. We’re going to have a civil-rights suit for unsafe and inhuman working conditions, employee abuse, health hazards. You know how Robin is when she gets feisty.”
“Sure do.” McGoo nodded with a wistful smile. “All right, let me get back to the precinct house, file some paperwork, twist some arms. If I get this rubber-stamped, we should be ready to roll by twilight.”
Before they busted down the door to the underground sweatshop, McGoo told me to stand behind the five cops with us. “Just in case there’s any gunfire,” he said.
“Gunfire? I can handle being shot better than you can. I’ve already been through the experience a few times.” (All but once after I was already dead, fortunately.) Even now, my jacket sported several bullet holes that had been repaired by a not-too-skilled zombie seamstress named Wendy. I could have bought a new jacket, but I rather liked the reminder. Sheyenne thought it lent me character.
“Don’t give me more heartburn, Shamble. I ate my last meal at the Ghoul’s Diner.” Too often, “last meal” was an apt phrase at the Ghoul’s Diner.
I hung back. “It’s your show, buddy.” I hoped we had the correct address. I’d never live it down if I accidentally called a raid on an old witch’s bridge club.
When we crept along the shadow-choked alley past a rusty dumpster, the brownish fumes wafting up made the cops cough and rub their stinging eyes. I saw four rats lying dead on the ground next to a dumpster, their mouths open, their little paws clutching their throats in agony. I knew this had to be the place where Bill had dumped the toxic hot sauce.
A metal door set into the brick alley wall was marked with hexes and protective spells—standard stuff. Since the Big Uneasy, all search warrants came with counterspells that nullified home-security hexes and protective runes.
McGoo wielded the battering ram with obvious relish. He smashed the lock, pushed open the bent wreckage, and yelled down the stairs. “Police! We have a search warrant!”
The raid team charged down the cement steps into the subterranean levels, trying to outdo one another with their enthusiasm. “Freeze!” “Stop where you are!” “Hands up!” I hurried after them, keeping my .38 in its holster, but I could draw it if necessary.
I heard deep-voiced groans from the underground lair and a high-pitched yelp of panic. “Don’t shoot! I surrender!”
The golem workshop was a cesspit—and I don’t mean that as a good thing. The place reeked of rot and wet clay, the sour stink of mudflats on a humid summer day. A crowd of clumsily formed, mass-produced golems stood shoulder-to-shoulder at cramped work stations, applying labels, filling bottles, operating a silkscreen press or a thermal package sealer, printing and folding T-shirts, wrapping salt-and-pepper shakers, boxing up snacks labeled “Certified Unnatural.” Crates and crates of finished souvenirs were stacked against a wall, ready for shipment.
Even during the raid, the golems continued to work, trying to meet their quotas. The sound they made was not quite a song, but a low miserable chant that caused the brick support pillars to thrum.
At the far end of the underground chamber, a gold-painted supervisor’s chair sat like a throne. The tall necromancer, presumably Maximus Max, sat on the throne and flailed his long-fingered hands. He wore a purple robe embroidered with crudely stitched symbols; I wondered if he had done the embroidery himself. Though I’d never heard of necromancers taking up cross-stitch, I’d seen plenty of strange things in the Quarter.
Max had a long horsey face, as if someone had taken his chin and stretched his head beyond tolerance levels. He was balding, his sparse brown hair in a comb-over that he must have been able to see in a mirror. The center of his forehead sported a third eye drawn in eye liner. He had been working on a digest-sized book of Sudoku puzzles.
“Maximilian Grubb, I have a warrant for your arrest,” McGoo said.
He had run the records: Maximilian Grubb, a.k.a. Maximus Max, was a two-bit necromancer with a rap sheet of petty crimes. Nothing major, nothing violent—just a lifetime of questionable choices.
Max kept his hands up in surrender, terrified. “On what charge? I’ve done nothing wrong. I run a good clean business here!”
“One of your workers—a golem named Bill—filed a complaint. And on first glance, I see about a dozen permit violations.”
The necromancer missed the point entirely. “You found Bill? I thought he’d gotten lost.”
I said, “Bill has engaged the services of Chambeaux and Deyer, on behalf of himself and his fellow golems.” I looked around the subterranean chamber. “The inhuman work conditions are pretty obvious.”
“Inhuman? But they’re golems!” As the cops put Maximus Max in handcuffs, he remained distraught, babbling excuses. “I’m a reformed necromancer! At least I don’t play with dead things anymore. I’m just trying to make a living.”
McGoo and his companions ladled out water to the listless golems, who gratefully moisturized their clay skin.
I wandered to the sealed crates of souvenirs ready for shipment, and when no one was looking, I pulled the delivery label off of one box. If there was more to this black-market souvenir racket, I wanted to know the details. The cases don’t solve themselves. I slipped the tag into the pocket of my sport jacket.
McGoo came up to me, shaking his head. He pulled out a T-shirt that showed a cartoon figure of a hairy werewolf who had yanked down his pants to flash his bare buttocks. FULL MOON IN THE UNNATURAL QUARTER
“Scout’s honor, I’ve never seen so much stupid junk in my life,” he said. “We’re going to impound tons of it for the case—and I mean tons. We’ll have to build a separate evidence locker.”
“Or maybe you could hold an officers’ benefit yard sale,” I suggested.
McGoo picked up a black whoopee cushion billed as, Sounds just like a real outgassing corpse! “When I was a kid, my parents took me on camping trips—it was rainy and miserable and full of mosquitoes, but at least it was a family vacation. Who in their right mind would want to visit the Quarter as a tourist?”
“I guess there isn’t any place on Earth too seedy to be commercialized.”
As the necromancer was ushered off, his hands cuffed behind his back, McGoo impounded his book of Sudoku puzzles as evidence. “Can’t be too careful. Might contain potential spells.”
The hundred golems were freed, and Bill would be pleased at how this had turned out. Even I was surprised at how swiftly we had shut down the sweatshop. Case closed, justice served.