Spliced

Volume 3, Chapter 27: Dig Your Own Grave



Baz had almost finished clearing the last of the dishes when he heard footsteps coming through the front door to his house. At first he thought it was Cat come back, but when he made his way out to the main room, it was not Cat he found darkening his doorway. It was Coal.

Coal glanced left and then right, carefully checking his surroundings.

“There’s no one else here,” Baz told him.

Coal nodded. “Good.” He took a swift step forward, his eyes tilting up slightly to look Baz directly in the face.

Baz was a big man physically. He was also magically capable of causing all of a person’s nerve endings to feel like they’d been simultaneously ripped out and wrapped around an iron hot poker, with barely the flick of a finger. Causing instant and unimaginable pain was one of his specialties, his least favorite one, but it paid the bills. He far preferred cleaning up the messes rather than making them though. He’d told Coal as much once, and Coal had, for the most part, respected that. Coal was a gentleman after all, and he was always open to negotiation. As long as you played by his rules, he would play fair. Whether or not his rules were fair in the first place was another question entirely.

But gods help you if you crossed him. Baz had once seen Coal summon a man’s beating heart right from his chest. Despite Baz’s larger size and his own painmaking powers, he knew better than to underestimate Coal. Besides, there were far worse aristocrats out there than this monster, just waiting to move in and claim his domain for their own. Baz had met them and he knew, better than anyone, the sorts of messes they left behind.

Unfortunately, the current expression on Coal’s face was not one of pleasure, nor was it normal for him to make a call to Baz’s home. Baz’s instructions were usually received via phone call, or, very rarely, if a job was more complicated, he might be called to a separate location where a handler would go over details with him. Never had Coal just shown up at Baz’s house himself. It was not a pleasant feeling to find that he had now done just that.

Often it was Natasha Crimson who relayed job details to Baz. She’d always walked a fine line between his world and Coal’s, their liaison. Now she was dead. Baz had buried her himself, following precise instructions. But then he’d told Cat about it, shared information he’d been instructed to keep to himself. Was that why Coal was here?

“Tell me,” Coal started in a cool, casual tone.

Baz’s eyes were drawn to Coal’s right hand. It was in a position ready and waiting, looking empty without sword in it. The sword was Coal’s favorite way to kill. It was that way for a lot of aristocrats, poison, the knife, or raw magic. They all had a thing for dramatic flair.

Baz remembered a case where one aristocrat’s young son had been shot by a sniper. There had been a whole lot of uproar, not so much about the death, but about the method. Guns were barbaric, a tool all far too human. Multiple feuds had been put on hold while the entire aristocracy had banded together and hunted down the poor fool who had dared make such a mockery of them. It seemed, for the aristocrats, there was such a thing as a bad death.

“...What exactly do you think the word discreetly means?”

Baz heard the words and he was unsurprised by them. Aristocrats were always very careful with their words. Baz didn’t miss the unsaid. Coal hadn’t accused him of anything specific. Sure, it was probably about his sharing information with Cat, but it was best he not admit to anything too soon. Baz wasn’t sure what the best way to answer this question was. He just knew he had to be careful. To buy himself time, he asked a question in reply.

“In what context?”

Coal’s jaw twitched. Was he amused by the question? Or was he annoyed?

“The body of Cornelius O'Hara was just pulled from the lake up at Quartz Ridge. I’m going to guess that whomever buried that body, didn’t do a very discreet job.” Coal’s words were loaded with accusations.

Baz frowned. This time the words hadn’t been at all what he had expected.

“Are you sure?” Baz asked after a moment’s silence, still confused, enunciating each word slowly to give his brain time to catch up.

But Coal had noticed his response and already backed off. “Where did you bury him?” he asked more casually.

“Not up there.” Baz’s mind was still trying to catch up. He’d buried Cornelius in the forest, in an unmarked grave, away form any other bodies, out of sight from any path, and covered with foliage.

“Who did you tell?” Coal asked, already onto the next question.

“Nobody.” He hadn’t. Not a soul. Not even Cat. The only body he’d told her about was Natasha’s.

“Show me where you buried him.”

“Are you sure that’s wise?”

Coal didn’t answer but the look in his eyes said he’d made up his mind.

Baz nodded. Then he led Coal outside and glanced around to make sure no one was nearby. He didn’t expect there to be but if you were about to revisit the unmarked grave of a Mercy politician you damn well double checked.

Coal didn’t usually give him names to go with bodies, but Baz had spent enough time doing jobs in Mercy for “friends” of Coal, that he had recognised that particular face. ‘The Money Man,’ was what some of the Mercy upper class called Cornelius in hushed whispers at secret meetings.

Baz glanced back at Coal and then frowned as he noticed the fancy dress shoes the aristocrat was wearing. Not to mention the open neck suit. It was probably worth a small fortune

“It’s a bit of a walk,” Baz told him.

“That’s fine,” Coal replied.

Seemingly not getting the message, Baz elaborated. “You might want some different shoes.”

Coal glanced down. “Oh.” A moment later he had in his hands, a summoned pair of hiking boots that looked like they’d never been worn.

They climbed over logs and ferns as Baz led him through the forest to the spot where he’d buried Cornelius.

“There.” He pointed to an area of soil that looked no more disturbed than the way he’d left it.

“Start digging,” Coal told him.

“I don’t have a-” Baz turned to find Coal holding out a shovel . He took it with a sigh and got to work.

Several minutes later, he knew something was wrong. He was exactly where he had buried the body and deep enough now that he should have unearthed it already. But there was nothing to find in this soil except worms.

Baz climbed out of the hole. “It’s not here.”

Baz froze as he stood up to find a sword pointed at his neck. He suddenly realised how much easier he’d made things for Coal. If Coal wanted to kill him for his silence or whatever had gone wrong here, it would be easy out here. There would be no crime scene. His blood would get washed away with the rain. Hell, had he dug his own grave?

“Who else knew he was here?”

“No one, I swear.”

“Someone must have known.”

“Well, if they did, it wasn’t through me.”

Baz waited stubbornly for the strike to come, refusing to drop his eyes or beg. He’d done his job and he knew it. Whatever had gone wrong here had been out of his control.

The strike never came. Instead Coal withdrew his sword, stashed it away in a recently summoned scabbard on his belt. Then, very casually he walked around the hole.

Baz watched Coal’s boots leave imprints in the freshly turned soil as he circled the empty grave. The sizing of the footprints was off. Baz noticed things like that. When your night job was cleaning up crime scenes, paying attention to details was important. He wondered whose boots they were? And the purpose of them. Did they even belong to anyone? Or were they just a red herring. Coal hadn’t thought to swap shoes at first, but Baz was certain that once the topic of shoes had been brought to his attention that Coal would not skimp on details.

Coal had his hands in his pockets and was studying the grave with a slight frown. Finally he withdrew his hand from his pocket and held it out over the grave. He shut his eyes as if he was listening to something. A spell maybe? Baz had little interest in such things. Spells were the domain of sorcerers and aristocrats. Devil’s magic.

With a second wave of his hand, Coal refilled the grave. It was somewhat to Baz’s annoyance, since he wondered why he couldn’t have done that to empty the grave in the first place and saved him some effort on digging. Perhaps he had needed to see the soil first?

A moment later a small pine tree sat in the place where the grave had been. Coal stepped back and what had been a beautiful day only a moment before now crackled with thunder up above.

The next thing Baz knew, they were standing back by his little cabin near the lake, and he found himself fighting a sudden strong bout of teleportation induced nausea. He gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to vomit in front of an aristocrat. Why couldn’t he have been given some warning first?

Coal immediately spun and walked over to retrieve his shoes.

Once the nausea subsided, Baz glanced toward the forest where dark clouds had gathered overhead. It would be raining soon. He thought about how Cat hated the rain. She’d always press closer to him if it was raining outside. He wondered if he’d get to feel that again. He supposed he probably would. If Coal hadn’t killed him in the forest then he probably wasn’t going to now, right?

He turned to find Coal placing the hiking boots on the small deck in front of the cabin.

“Dispose of these would you?” Coal told him.

Baz nodded. He’d burn them this afternoon when he lit the fire. There was a chill in the air now and the smell of the incoming winter.

“You had something else for me as well?” Coal inquired. “I might as well collect that while I’m here.”

Baz nodded again. He led Coal back inside his house, into the kitchen where the plate of macaroons still sat on the bench.

Baz burned the boots after Coal left. They were good boots, not expensive, and too small for Baz, but they were solid and sturdy, the type plenty of people in town would have been overjoyed to have been gifted. If this hadn’t been Little Rock but some big city, Baz might have considered that option, but as it was, the less to point back to him the better.

He sent an inoculate message to a sleuth he knew suggesting he get his car checked out at Cat’s garage later today. He mentioned that the service was exceptional and the owner was hot. Definitely worth the man’s while. Baz left his front door open. It was cold out but the cabin would overheat if he didn’t.

As the fire raged inside and the rain started to fall outside, Baz opened a drawer. Resting on a large pile of used sheets of paper, Baz retrieved a blank drawing pad. As he lifted it out, a mix of comic heros and beautiful woman smiled up at him, nestled among detailed depictions of varying landscapes, and a few rogue sketches of different species of fish.

Baz took a seat near the fireplace and carefully extracted a piece of charcoal from just beyond the reach of the flames. He cast his mind back to earlier, before Coal’s visit, to the curve of Cat’s muscular arse as she paused on the way out his door, the jut of her lower lip, and the look in her eyes as she glanced back over her shoulder to give him one last look. He remembered the way her hair reached her middle back, as wild and free as she, and as dark as the charcoal that now smudged his hands.

He thought back to earlier, to every inch of her, and then, in front of a roaring fire, he put charcoal to paper and he drew all that he remembered.


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