The max porter box set, p.24
The Max Porter Box Set, page 24
Max waited to make sure she had finished. “I know we need the money to keep flowing. I’m not an idiot.” He glared at Drummond, daring the ghost to make a comment. “Everything you said about us being the best and the rush of the work and helping people, all of it — it’s true. And that was wonderful when it was just us. But now there’s my mom and the Sandwich Boys. You said it yourself, they depend on us. You wonder what’ll happen to them if we stop making money. What’s going to happen to all of you if I end up dead? Or worse?”
Mrs. Porter’s face reddened as she slammed her hand against the wall to get everyone’s attention. “You almost died?”
Max flailed his arms at Sandra. “Ask her,” he said and stormed through the kitchen to his study. He slammed the door shut and slumped in his desk chair. Drummond flew through the wall, and Max flung a pencil at him. “I would’ve thought a smart detective like you understood that slamming the door meant I didn’t want to talk anymore.”
“Listen, pal, you’re screwing this whole thing up, and when it all comes down, you’ll still end up apologizing to your sweet wife.”
“Gee, thanks, you’re being a real swell guy.”
“I’m your friend. Sometimes that means telling you when you’re acting like an ass.”
“Why am I an ass for wanting to keep us all safe?”
“You’ve got it all twisted up in your head.” Drummond slid into a chair next to the desk. He took off his hat and tapped the brim against his knee. When he finally looked at Max, his dead eyes sparked with intensity, but his voice remained cold and clear. “I understand. I do. The last six months, you haven’t had a case, nobody threatening your life, and you’ve started thinking how that feels. Let’s face it — it feels pretty good. But it won’t last.”
“I’m not saying we’ll never do another magic case.”
“It’s what you want to say. But if you listen to me, I’m telling you —”
“What? What is it that you’re so eager to tell me?”
“You need to hear about my case with the Dega Witch. The worst case I ever had.”
Chapter 4
BEFORE DRUMMOND COULD BEGIN, there came a knock at the door. “Max?” his mother’s muffled voice called.
A moment later, he heard Sandra shoo his mother away. “Let him be. He needs to cool off.”
No matter what else Drummond would say that night, he had been right about one thing — Max would have to apologize to his wife. She never deserved his anger.
Sounding more aggressive than he felt, he said, “Are you going to get on with it?”
But Drummond didn’t speak. He stared at his hat and ran a finger over the lining. He appeared to be summoning the courage to tell his story, and that scared Max into a darker silence of his own.
At length, Drummond set his hat back on his head and stuck his hands inside his coat pockets. And he spoke. “I had been in the PI racket for a few years when this case came my way. Before that I was a beat cop — you remember that story?”
“Yeah. Dead woman’s ghost kept crying out to you until you started believing.”
He nodded. “Anyway, my old buddy from those days moved up the ranks quick. He became a detective — Detective Cooper — and whenever he stumbled into the weird cases of my world, I’d get a call. I never did find out how he got the department to pay for my services. Probably chalked it up to some kind of catch-all like consultant or advisor. We had fallen into a steady routine and all was good. Well, mostly good. I had just come off a hard case. Almost died — three times, actually — because of a ghost that didn’t want to admit it was a ghost. So, like you, I was thinking no more.
“One night, I’m getting ready to close up the office, probably drink some whiskey and see if the pretty redhead waitressing at Mick’s Bar wanted to spend a few hours together, when Detective Cooper stumbles through my door. He’s drunk. I mean really soused. I helped him over to my couch, undid his shoes, and set a bucket nearby in case he had to throw up. Thought that was it. I’d lock up behind me and he could sleep it off. Figured he would tell me in the morning what heartbreak caused him to get blitzed. That was the typical reason Cooper drank heavy — a girl.”
Max wanted to urge Drummond to get to the point, but he saw how each word popped out of the man like old stitches being cut. Each one hurt.
“Anyway, I’m getting ready to leave for the second time when Cooper sits bolt upright and looks straight at me. He said — and I’ll never forget this — he said, ‘You never told me this was real.’ The way he said it, the horrified shiver in his voice, it reminded me of that first ghost I ever saw. How I stood there trying to comprehend what I was seeing, experiencing, and yet I was unable to get it through my head. That’s how Cooper sounded. But the terror in his eyes told me that what he saw had to have been something far worse than a ghost floating around.
“It took him most of an hour to get it all out. Not a long story, but he had to stop many times in order to get hold of himself. What it came down to is that he got called in on a homicide case, and when he showed up at the residence, he saw a slaughterhouse. Two people murdered, a young couple — he said that their blood had been sprayed across every wall as if the murderer hacked off their limbs and twirled with the bloody parts high in the air. Worst of all, there was an empty bassinet. The murderer had taken the baby.”
When Drummond paused longer than expected, Max asked, “What made him think it was a case for you?”
“While he processed the scene — made sure the proper photos were taken and all the evidence collected — he saw something that looked out of place. Just a piece of paper, really, but it was yellow and crinkled. He said it looked like parchment. On it, drawn in blood that he presumed to belong to the victims, he found a set of occult-like symbols. That’s what he called them. Occult-like symbols. He even said that he felt a vibration in the air as he reached for the paper. At the time, he assumed it was a breeze from outside, but later he noticed that all the windows were closed.
“And then he picked up the paper.
“Two things happened to him at that moment — two things that made all that I did suddenly become real for him. First, a depressive sadness overwhelmed him. An unnatural weight of emotion took over and he dropped to his knees. Second thing, and by far the more convincing, he had a vision.”
“A vision? For real?”
“Why would I make something like that up?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. It just took me by surprise. I thought you had to have a gift like Sandra or at least be open to the supernatural for visions to work. But this wouldn’t be the first thing about magic I got wrong. So, what did Cooper see?”
Drummond’s head lowered and he took a shaking breath. “He saw children. Dead children. A dozen of them. All lined up shoulder-to-shoulder like fallen soldiers after a battle. I’ll spare you the details, but Cooper shared with me every last one — down to the speck of blood on one child’s frozen eye. And standing over all these bodies, he saw a woman. He knew right away she was a witch. Said that she had all the classic features — humpback, covered in a cloak, with a bulbous nose, and disgusting teeth. She even laughed like a witch.”
After another silence, Max said, “That’s a horrible story, but I don’t see how that changes my mind. In fact, it’s all the more reason to keep PB and J out of this kind of thing. I don’t want them ending up like those kids.”
“Let me finish,” Drummond said, a harsh tone creeping into his voice. “I told you before that I had just come off a hard case, one in which I came close to dying more than once. I hadn’t told anybody this, didn’t even really admit it to myself, but when I thought no more, I had decided to hang it up. Not just no more magic cases, but no more entirely. Get out of this crazy business. Cooper’s story only strengthened my resolve. I settled him back on the couch and went home, determined to never deal with the magic world again.
“But the next morning, Cooper called me from the station. That guy had amazing resilience, especially when dealing with a hangover. So, he calls me that morning to tell me that the witch had struck again. This time, she tore apart Mr. Robert Wellman — headmaster of the Greensboro Friends Home. It was a Quaker orphanage.
“Cooper was in a panic. He did a little digging and found that the couple with the baby were Quakers who served on the board at the orphanage. And now the headmaster was killed. Cooper knew his vision meant the orphans were in danger.
“And that was it. I wasn’t about to let a dozen kids get ripped apart by some witch. Because if I did nothing, then nothing would be done. Cooper would have tried, but he didn’t know the first thing about fighting witches and ghosts and such. Like it or not, I was the only one equipped to handle the case. That’s true now about you and Sandra and me. We’re the ones here to fight now. It’s our job, and if we turn our back on it, innocent people die. Sometimes worse.”
“I understand what you’re trying to say —”
“Then understand this — once you started this, quitting never became a real option. People depend on you now, and I don’t just mean Sandra, your mom, and the boys. I mean people who don’t even know you yet. People who are going to find themselves faced with the world as it really is and they won’t have anybody to turn to that they can trust.”
“Except us.”
“Exactly.”
Max spun his chair toward the window looking at the backyard. Not much could be seen under the quarter-moon, but Max’s eyes were not focused on the landscape anyway. His sight focused inward.
A lot of Drummond’s words made sense, some even filled Max with a sense of pride — after all, the Hull family would still be out there ruining people as they saw fit if not for Max and his team. However, spells and curses existed long before he had been born. They would exist long after he died. Somebody always filled the role Max now had. If he stopped, somebody else would come along and protect people from the evil of the world.
But he couldn’t guarantee that. Plus, it wasn’t a matter of being replaced. It was a matter of numbers. Back when Drummond lived, he had met others who also fought witches and ghosts. Surely, there were others now. If Max closed The Porter Agency, those others would continue to fight, but they would be one agency down. One resourceful team less.
Max glanced at the door. And what makes me think Sandra would let me close the agency?
She would fight him, but deep down, he knew she would rather let it go than lose him over it. If he dug in and refused to budge, she’d let the agency die. So the real question came down to who was more important — those he loved or those who needed the agency’s help?
He stood and tucked his shirt into his pants. Might as well get the argument over with — Sandra and Drummond were not going to take this well.
As he came around the desk, he glimpsed a shadow moving in the yard. Not wanting to spook whoever hid outside, Max continued to move toward the door. To Drummond, he said, “There’s somebody outside.”
“I’ll check it out.”
As Drummond passed through the window, Max entered the kitchen. He hurried by his concerned mother, slid into the garage, out the side door, and sprinted around back. Tearing around the corner, he saw the pale glow of Drummond by a line of trees bordering the backyard of their neighbors.
“He’s here,” Drummond said, waving a hand. “Gray suit and blue tie.”
Max zeroed in on the man’s position, but before he got too close, the man bolted across the yard. Max pursued while Drummond flew through the back corner of the house to get ahead of the man.
“You want me to freeze him?” Drummond asked. He could touch the corporeal world, but it caused him tremendous pain. His cold grip would certainly hurt the man, too, but as Max rushed down the side, he shook his head.
“Let him go,” he said, halting at the edge of his property. The man vaulted over a small fence and weaved his way from one backyard to the next.
The bright beam of a flashlight played against Max’s back, casting his shadow long upon the grass. He turned around to find Sandra and his mother standing in the doorway.
“Why’d we let him get away?” Drummond asked.
Staring back at the empty space where the man had been, Max set his jaw and fought back the urge to scream. Though strained, he managed to say in a calm voice, “There’s no getting away, is there?” He looked to Drummond. “Even if I stop working the cases, even if I tell the whole world that I’m done with it all, they’ll keep finding their way toward me. They’ll keep threatening us, no matter what we do. Because they know that we know. And that means that we can jump back in at any point. Right? Once you know about magic, once you start getting involved, you can’t get out.”
“Sorry, pal. That’s what I was trying to tell you. It’s all part of the gig.”
Sandra stepped closer. “What’s going on?”
Putting his arm around his wife, Max swallowed hard and conjured his bravest face. “We’re taking the case.”
“I could’ve told you that.” Sandra laughed. “In fact, I did.”
Chapter 5
THE NEXT MORNING, Max waited in his downtown office for the others to arrive. He set out early, before sunrise, and stopped by the little bagel shop on the corner. A dozen bagels and several cups of coffee awaited his wife, his mother, and the boys. Not much of a peace offering, but enough to get them going on the right foot.
Kicking back in his chair, he looked upon the bookshelves that served as a home base for Drummond. Like the rest of the room, it had its function but lacked much of the charm of their original office. Of course, that office had come complete with an old curse, the Hull thumb pressing down on them, and a witch living down the hall.
Max smirked. “From the very start,” he said. Witches, curses, power struggles — all of it had been with them from the first day they stepped foot in Winston-Salem. And from that same day, they had always persevered by plowing on straight through their troubles.
After taking such a brutal beating on their last case, Max could now admit that he had panicked. He had attempted to retreat, and that never worked. Even his masters in Tae Kwon Do could have told him that. They repeatedly taught that one must never turn his back on a threat. Always face the enemy.
Again, Max chuckled at himself. It amazed him that no matter how often he learned certain lessons, his mind still attempted to trick him into backing away. And yet, another aspect of martial arts followed the idea of knowing one’s limitations and acting accordingly. As a newly-minted green belt, Max had some confidence, but he knew he couldn’t pull of a flying jump back kick with any authority. Limitations mattered to survival.
Sandra and Drummond would argue that they were black belts when it came to the paranormal. Max wasn’t so sure. But he did know that there was a serious threat to deal with, and for once, he had a sizable team to help him out.
The office door opened, saving him from his own spinning thoughts. The whole gang entered, and the bustle of people brought Drummond out of his bookshelf. The boys pounced on the bagels while Mrs. Porter and Sandra opted for the caffeine boost of warm coffee.
Over a mouthful of bagel, PB said, “I hear we got a new case.”
“We do,” Max said. “And I’m going to need everyone on this. I’m not sure how much we can trust the people who hired us, but they do need our help.”
J sat on the floor next to PB and downed the last of one bagel as he reached for another. “Momma Porter said they paid up front. Can’t be all that bad if they’re paid up already.”
Momma Porter? Max glanced at his mother but she shrugged it off. “Maybe. But somebody doesn’t like them and is causing them trouble. We don’t have much to go on regarding this mystery man.”
“This the guy who spied on you last night?” PB asked.
“Yeah. Since we can’t follow up on him yet, we’re going to look into the Darden family. Try to find out why somebody is targeting them, and hopefully that will lead us to who.”
Sandra nodded. “Sounds like a good approach. What do you want us to do?”
Despite all his misgivings, Max had to admit it felt good to be organizing a case again. “Mom, PB, and Jammer J — I want the three of you to go to the Darden property. Don’t let them know you’re there. Don’t even go through the gate. I want you to walk the entire perimeter of their land. It’s a lot of land, so be ready for a hike. Anything you see that isn’t fields, rock, trees, or animals, anything at all, you write it down. Also, mark the exact location of what you find.”
He turned to Sandra. She smiled and said, “I know. You want me to check into the property history.”
“You are the best at it. Also, I need you to swing by the Darden’s lawyer and pick up a copy of Holly Darden’s Will. While you all do that, I’ll research the Darden family to see if I can find out who might have a reason to come after them. Any questions?”
Less than a minute later, they all left the office. All except Drummond. As Max booted up his laptop, he said, “Thanks for keeping quiet while my mother was here. She gets unsettled when I talk to you in front of her. Makes her think I’m going crazy.”
“Watching you talk to empty air will do that. But I can’t take credit for sensitivity or anything. I just didn’t have anything to say.”
“That doesn’t always stop you.”
“Hey, you try being a ghost for seven decades and see what happens. You’d rather I ended up like some of the ghosts we’ve seen — zombie-like and moaning and all lost in the head?”
Not wanting to indulge Drummond’s fondness for argument, Max shifted to the task at hand. “You know what I want you to do.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll go to the Other and search for Aunt Holly’s ghost.” Drummond drifted back to his bookshelf. “You know, just because I’m the only one of us that can actually go to the Other, doesn’t mean I can’t do other things, too.”
Max’s mouth dropped as he faced Drummond. “Are you serious? I’ve agreed to take on the case, something I didn’t want to do in the first place, and you’re going to complain about how I handle it? And since when don’t you get to do other things?”
