Slimy Underbelly Read online

  Robin searched through several manila folders and brought out a certificate for Lurrm. “Recompose is one hundred percent legitimate. Your business license, sales tax forms, health certificate, OSHA clearances, immersion waiver forms—everything you need.”

  “I’m very grateful for your assistance, Ms. Deyer.” Delighted, the amphibious creature turned to me, jittering up and down. “We even have an employee manual! I insist that you all come and take a look tomorrow. I promise a tour and special discounts. Ayup.”

  Robin handed over all the forms, licenses, and certificates he needed, including a leather-bound corporate manual and a hand-press seal (which might be a challenge for the frog demon with his squishy fingers). “We’re very supportive of our clients. We’ll be there.”

  “Weather permitting,” I added.

  The frog demon bundled up in his frock coat and left our offices prepared to face the cold and snow, but by now the clouds had vanished and been replaced by dense fog.

  When the offices were quiet again, I realized I didn’t have anything to do. “Slow day,” I said.

  Sheyenne said with the flirtatious lilt that she used just for me, “If you’re that bored, we could spend more time together.”

  “We always spend time together. Almost all day, every day.”

  “Quality time.”

  “Every second with you is quality, Spooky.”

  “Good save.” She picked up a set of folders and drifted off to the file cabinet.

  I was eager for another exciting mystery. Solving cases is what makes me tick—in fact, I don’t do much else with my life, or afterlife. I define myself by being a detective, zombie or otherwise. But I needed something more glamorous than preparing business licenses and health department forms.

  Robin wrapped up the paperwork for the Recompose Spa and put all the folders on Sheyenne’s desk. “This may not be exciting, Dan, but cases like this are our bread and butter. Our workload is just like the weather—wait a few minutes and it’ll change.”

  And it did.

  CHAPTER 2

  When a huge, hulking ogre steps through the office doorway, you take notice. I was just glad he decided to turn the knob and enter the traditional way instead of smashing through, as ogres often do.

  He was huge (I know I already said that, but it bears repeating), with burly shoulders, pebbled gray skin, muscles the size of backpacks, shaggy hair like a dried kelp forest, and a mouth as big as a garage. He wore a brown tunic tied at the waist with a jaunty yellow sash. The bags under his eyes were so large they wouldn’t have qualified as carry-ons. He was covered with melting snow from the recent blizzard.

  I greeted him with my professional smile. “New client?” I asked.

  The ogre moved his mouth and puffed his chest. “I am Stentor.” I expected a deafening roar, but the voice that came out was a ridiculously tiny, high-pitched squeak. “The opera singer. You may have heard of me?”

  Such a clumsy voice would never have graced even a Sunday-school stage for fourth graders. “Sorry, sir, my knowledge of opera doesn’t go much further than ‘Kill da Wabbit!’ ”

  Sheyenne drifted forward, letting out an exaggerated sigh. “Beaux, I am going to get you more cultured if it kills you. Again. Stentor has been performing to sold-out audiences in the Phantom’s opera house for the past two months. He caused quite a stir in the cultural scene.”

  “The most fabulous performance by an ogre opera singer in weeks!” Stentor squeaked. “That’s according to the National Midnight Star.”

  “Know your client” is a good catchphrase, and I was sure I would have to research opera and the ogre’s career. Sheyenne wanted to make me a better man, a better zombie, and I liked being with her. She had already dragged me to performances of Shakespeare in the Dark, and since I cared about her, I would even endure an opera. If I was with my beautiful ghost girlfriend, it couldn’t be all that bad . . . could it?

  With fist clenched and arm raised, Stentor tilted his enormous head back and belted out a succession of meepy atonal noises that contained neither sturm nor drang. After the abortive performance, the ogre hung his head, sniffled with the sound of a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner, and began blubbering. He sobbed with such palpable dismay that I felt sorry for him without even knowing the problem. Tears flowed down his seamed face in rivulets, like a potential flash flood. “It’s gone. I’ve lost it.”

  “Lost what?” I was pretty sure I knew, but never having attended an ogre opera, I wanted confirmation.

  Stentor blinked his huge bloodshot eyes at me. “Are you deaf? My voice is gone!” I had to lean forward to hear him. “Someone stole it, kidnapped it—you’ve got to help me. I’ll do anything to get it back.”

  Now this was more like it, a case I could sink my teeth into (if I were the sort of creature who sinks his teeth into uncooperative flesh). I preferred to use brains, not eat them. “You’ve come to the right place, Mr. Stentor.”

  I started to direct the ogre toward my office, but realized the office wasn’t large enough unless I moved the desk to accommodate him. So we went into the much larger conference room to talk. The ogre shook himself off like a shaggy, waterlogged dog, sending sprays of snowmelt everywhere.

  Robin emerged from her office to join the intake meeting, where we could decide whether Stentor would need her legal expertise, my detective skills, or both. She held a yellow pad, ready to take notes—a special legal pad, given to her by Santa Claus himself after we helped him out on a case. The paper never, ever ran out, and a magically connected pencil took notes for her exactly as she thought them, which left Robin’s hands free to do other incomprehensible lawyerly things.

  “That isn’t your normal voice, I take it?” she asked. She set the legal pad down, and the pencil dutifully jotted down the basic information.

  “I’m a baritone,” Stentor said in a shrill peep. He continued with greater fervor, gesticulating to demonstrate an intensity that his vocal cords couldn’t convey. “My voice is my livelihood, my very soul—and now it’s gone.”

  Before he grew too emotional, I calmed him with a no-nonsense voice. “Just start at the beginning and tell us what happened, Mr. Stentor.”

  “I did my nightly performance of Don Giovanni at the opera house—and it was a great one. An artist can feel it when everything clicks.” He pounded a boulder-sized fist against his chest as if to pummel the voice out of his throat. “It was my first three-window performance.”

  I looked over at Sheyenne for an explanation. She said, “He means he shattered three windows with his singing.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “In some circles,” Stentor said. “The Phantom has an insurance rider just for that.”

  Robin’s legal pad made notes. She said, “So your voice was fine during the performance.”

  “Yes, and afterward, I went back to my dressing room, as always. Gargled with lye, as always, then went to bed. I woke up with a frog in my throat—and my voice was gone.”

  I pursed my lips. This was indeed a strange case, so I asked the obvious question. “Do you still have the frog?”

  “Yes,” the ogre answered. “Yes, I do.” He shifted his brown tunic and struggled with a small cloth sack tied to the sash, but his fingers were the size of kielbasas and too unwieldy to undo the delicate knot.

  My zombie fingers weren’t very nimble either, but they were sufficient. I retrieved the bag, loosened the string, and dumped a shivering frog onto Sheyenne’s desk. The creature looked dazed and confused; it didn’t even have the ambition to hop away.

  “He’s very cute.” Sheyenne reached her ghostly hands down to cup the frog, but they passed right through. As a ghost, she can’t touch living, or formerly living, things—including me—but she likes to go through the motions.

  As Stentor gazed at the frog, his face was a billboard-sized canvas of emotions that rippled from dismay to affection. “At first, I thought I might have gotten a case of warts on my vocal cords, conside
ring that it’s a frog and all.”

  I corrected him with my newfound knowledge. “That’s just an old wives’ tale. Warts are caused by toads. Frogs get a bad rap.”

  “I know, I did my scientific research,” the ogre said. “That’s why I suspect some dark magic instead, and that led me to you, Mr. Shamble. Only you can help me—I’ve read your novels.”

  I grimaced with embarrassment. “Those stories are highly fictionalized, written by a ghostwriter. Don’t put too much stock in them. Some of the adventures are . . . exaggerated.”

  Ever since I’d allowed Howard Phillips Publishing to use my life and cases as the inspiration for a series of “Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.” novels, I had been embarrassed by the attention—and even more so as the books continued to sell well.

  “But you’re the best in the business,” Stentor said.

  I shrugged. “Thank you. Honestly, though, I just do my best to take care of folks. If you wouldn’t mind leaving the frog with us,” I said, “I’ll see what I can find out. Let me talk with a couple of witches who act as my special advisers in cases like this. We’ll get your voice back. You’ll be singing the blues again soon enough.”

  “Opera,” Stentor corrected.

  I clapped a reassuring hand on his backpack-sized bicep. “After I find your voice, you can do whatever you like with it.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The next morning began as a nice outing with Robin, Sheyenne, and me going out to do our social duties at the refurbished and reopened Recompose Spa.

  Though I promised myself I’d check out the new direct connection to the sewers soon, we left the Chambeaux & Deyer offices by the street-level entrance—and stepped into a mist so thick it felt as if we were already in the sauna. The feuding weather wizards had created some sort of inversion layer that burbled up from the manhole covers, clotted in the alleys, and curled along the streets. The fog was as thick as proverbial pea soup, and actually smelled like the digestive aftermath of pea soup.

  I heard a shriek overhead and saw a shadow, but could make out no details in the mist; probably a harpy flying above the clouds, I decided. A mummy was setting up his newsstand, straightening the day’s papyrus edition and arranging his selection of chewing gum, cough drops, and souvenir amulets. An enterprising clothier had set up bins on wheels filled with sun hats, parkas, rain shawls, umbrellas, bikinis, and discount all-weather combos. The bins could be swapped and rearranged as fast as the weather changed.

  A love-struck vampire couple strolled along hand in hand, enjoying a rare late-morning walk made possible by the opacity of the fog. Outside a Talbot & Knowles Blood Bar, a hemoglobin barista was handing out free samples to any potential blood-sucking customers who passed by, or even humans who were hemo-curious. The vampire couple frowned in disdain at the smiling young barista. “We don’t patronize chains,” said the woman with a sniff. “We buy only organic, locally sourced, guaranteed no additives hemoglobin.”

  Even after the tumultuous upheaval that changed the world more than a decade ago, life had a way of settling back into its own definition of normal. Some days I had a hard time remembering what the world was like before the Big Uneasy. I had been alive then, setting my sights on a career as a private investigator because I couldn’t make it as a cop.

  A strange and unexpected sequence of events had triggered the return of all the supernatural creatures and magic to the world. The combination of a rare planetary alignment and the blood (from a paper cut) of a virgin (a fifty-eight-year-old lonely librarian) spilling on the pages of an original copy of the Necronomicon had unleashed all the unnaturals. At first it seemed like a true holocaust, the end of days, an every-kind-of-monster apocalypse, but society settled down soon enough and people, of all sorts, got back to normal. It was everyday life, but with added monsters.

  Robin dedicated her career as an attorney to serving the downtrodden unnaturals, insisting that they deserved justice just as much as anyone else did. I’d come to town as a private investigator, hanging out my shingle and taking cases, no matter how unusual. Back in the outside world, I would have been stuck taking photos of cheating spouses for divorce cases. Even here, I still got hired to do the occasional sit-and-wait, but adding monsters to the equation made even simple cases a lot more interesting.

  Even though Sheyenne and I were both murdered here in the Quarter, this is still the place I call home, warts and all (regardless of where those warts came from).

  As the three of us strolled along, the fog cleared, then came back with a vengeance, cleared again, and came back in alternating blocks. Sheyenne flitted along as insubstantial as the mist, but a lot prettier. She said, “If this is the spa’s grand opening, Beaux, then we should bring flowers.” She placed a ghostly finger against her ghostly lips. “Lily pads would go with the theme, brighten the place up.”

  In other times, a guest might have brought a bottle of wine or champagne, but after the Big Uneasy, with so many different types of creatures drinking so many different types of beverages, flowers were a safer bet.

  “I should’ve thought of that,” Robin said. She was a thousand percent dedicated to her work, intent on her cases with a laser focus to the exclusion of etiquette.

  As for me, no one had ever accused me of being socially adept. “Flowers it is,” I said.

  So, we stopped at a boutique florist called the Medium-Sized Shop of Horrors. The proprietor was a raspy-voiced woodwitch with thistles and moss for hair and spiderwebs for clothes; her knuckles and elbows looked like knotty hunks of driftwood. Small decorative fountains trickled in alcoves in the shop, and New Age music, complete with chimes, added to the heady atmosphere.

  Sheyenne drifted down the aisles, inspecting strange mushrooms, thorny plants, flowers that talked, blossoms with inset eyeballs—and lily pads floating in a reflecting pool. After Sheyenne found what she was looking for, Robin and I carried the lily pads to the cash register so the woodwitch could ring up our purchase. Robin selected an appropriate gift card to accompany the lily pads.

  Outside, we heard a buzzing engine, a squeal of tires up against the curb, then the clatter of little feet. The door to the Medium-Sized Shop of Horrors burst open, and a crowd of brightly painted lawn gnomes charged inside brandishing machine guns.

  Their normally cheery expressions were angry, their painted lips curled downward, their eyes glinting with evil. The machine guns they carried were old-fashioned and miniaturized—not traditional Tommy guns, but the smaller, cuter versions known as Timmy guns.

  Even in the Unnatural Quarter, with its oh-so-typical strange goings-on, a customer doesn’t expect machine-gun fire inside a flower shop.

  The gnomes chattered in the quaint voices that normally made gnomes so charming, but their leader, a standard-size gnome model who had painted his cap and vest an ominous black, shouted out in a surprisingly loud and commanding voice, “This is a stickup!”

  The lawn gnomes pointed their Timmy guns at the flower-shop walls and opened fire with a rat-a-tat-tat of tiny-caliber bullets that sounded like popcorn popping. The gnome robbers sprayed the vases and flowers on the shelves, shattered the decorative fountains with a hail of projectiles.

  Robin hurled her lily pads at the lawn gnomes, knocking one over. When they turned their Timmy guns at her, I threw myself on Robin and covered her with my body as a dozen stinging slugs pounded into my back. Even though the small-caliber slugs caused some damage, I decided it was better me than Robin. She’s still young, perky, and very much alive. As for myself, a few more bullet holes wouldn’t make much difference, especially tiny ones like this.

  I would have protected Sheyenne, too, but she didn’t need my help. She used her poltergeist powers to hurl flowerpots at the gnomes, and they ducked from side to side to dodge the projectiles.

  The terrified woodwitch had the presence of mind to work a spell that turned her gentle New Age wind chimes into rattling alarms that jangled and clanged, drawing even more attention than the shouting gnomes
and the machine-gun fire.

  Not expecting so much resistance, the gang leader yelled, “Grab the cash register and let’s get out of here.”

  It took four of the lawn gnomes to lift the heavy cash register, but they raced out the front door of the flower shop with it nevertheless.

  I picked myself off of Robin, and she insisted she was all right. My back was perforated in a dozen places, and I knew the sport jacket would need stitching again. But not now. I drew my .38 and lurched toward the robbers.

  The black-garbed leader bellowed back at us, “When the coppers come asking, you tell ’em you’ve been stuck up by Mr. Bignome!”

  Meanwhile, the woodwitch worked druidic magic to summon an instant fecundity spell that made the plants and vines grow wildly, proliferating like spam e-mails from supposed Nigerian princes. Foliage surged upward in exuberant growth, vines covering the door and forming a barricade that would have been sufficient for landscaping around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

  The leafy vines lashed across the doorway a second too late to stop the fleeing lawn gnome robbers—and just in time to prevent me from going after them. I yanked and tore at the vines, trying to get the foliage out of the way. I threw a glance over my shoulder at the woodwitch. “Timing could have been better.”

  She seemed embarrassed. “I forgot about the spell delay. Sorry.”

  As I tugged at the barricade, I watched lawn gnomes lug the cash register over to the curb and toss it in the back of a getaway jalopy the size of a go-kart. I heard police sirens in the street, squad cars rushing to the scene of the robbery.

  I finally pulled the vines free from the doorway and stumbled out onto the sidewalk, nearly tripping as a persistent (or pissed-off) vine wrapped around my ankle and snagged me. “Halt!” I yelled at the gnomes, not because I expected it to work but because it was the first thing that came to mind. I hopped on one foot, disentangling the vine from my leg.