Chapter 1
Roland Longville was a happy man. He was virtually glowing with happiness as entered his office, because today had been a great day. People all over Birmingham were singing his praises for a job well done. He had just completed a case--a relatively simple one--and no one had gone to the hospital, or the morgue. One rather strange perpetrator was currently in jail, but even he might get off without too harsh a sentence. Roland had caught a kidnapper; but not just any kidnapper. The kidnapper in question had kidnapped only prize show dogs. In addition, he was an Elvis impersonator.
The Elvis-obsessed young man's intention was to finance his envisioned one-of-a-kind tribute tour to the King with the ill-gotten doggy ransom money from Birmingham's richer residents. Roland had foiled this nefarious plan, and therefore, Roland was a happy man. Not just for that reason; there was, added to his mere sense of success, the fact that today had also been a particularly profitable day. Roland felt better, and more solvent, than he had in a very long while.
He'd gotten a break and located managed to locate the underground kennel run by the faux Elvis, who specialized in dog napping, before any of the prize animals came to any harm. The ersatz King of Rock 'n' Roll had been very busy; a string of such crimes had victimized dog owners throughout the wealthier neighborhoods of Birmingham for two months. These were no normal dog owners, of course, but the owners of thoroughbred animals that were pampered and groomed to enter dog shows. The doo-wop desperado had been stealing purebred dogs from upscale families for about eight months. Roland had been offered individual rewards from each owner, who had also called him en masse. Roland had taken each case as a single account, gambling that the dogs were all safe, and being in a kennel somewhere by the same thieves, and he'd been right.
After returning each happy doggy to its grateful owner, Roland had then collected fees from no less than thirty well-to-do and elated owners, fees that were now cozily deposited into his bank account. All the owners had their dogs back, the bad guys were in jail, and no one had even gotten hurt. And, he wasn't broke; in fact he was pretty far from it, and he was home safe and sound, and all of this since the first time he could remember. Things very seldom worked out much better than that, Roland decided.
Home for Roland Longville was Birmingham, and she was big enough to keep him pretty busy. He'd been a police officer there for a good long while, a sworn officer of the law, fighting the good fight, until a fight he had lost, a fight with the bottle had taken his badge. He'd finally won his personal war with alcohol, as much as anyone ever could, and when he finally had enough strength to put his life back together, he took the work that was left to him.
Roland had been a police detective once upon a time, and a damned good one, too; his talents and experience behind the badge had served him well as a private investigator. The first year or so as a freelancer had been rough, but Roland had slowly made a name for himself in the business as hard-working and honest. In the end, the work he had done, and his own determination to do it well, had won out. He'd been a private detective for several years now. Sometimes it was dogged, unforgiving work; but today, he had really shone. Roland was, all in all, one happy man.
Although he didn't know it, that was about to come to an end. In about thirty minutes, a dark rewind was going to take him back to a place of nightmares and mad laughter, of lost little girls and freaks with mad eyes. A door was about to open for him, and beyond it there were roads to a strange and evil place, stranger and more evil than any he had ever seen before. For now, though, he was happy as anyone could be, and blissfully unaware of all that lay in store.
Roland Longville lived the life of most private investigators, with its practical necessities that other in his trade would easily recognize. While his practice took him out of town on occasion, it seldom took him out of the Southeastern United States. Most of his cases were of the find-them-and-bring-them-home variety. Those were the cases that paid the bills; it was, with some exceptions, work of a decidedly regional variety.
People who had a relative who had run away to say, Poughkeepsie, would not hire a private eye from Birmingham to go find him, for the most part; it was much more logical and cost effective hire someone in Poughkeepsie to bring the errant lad or lass back home. The same was true of Birmingham, and everywhere else, for the most part. People hired home-town detectives when they had no idea where the loved one had flown, or when there was dirty business to be done right there in their home town.
Roland entered the lobby of the Brooks Building, a decrepit brownstone in the old Birmingham downtown. Downtown had modernized and moved to the northwest in the 1970s. He was the sole remaining tenant in the building. Roland climbed the aging flagstone stairs--the elevator had given up the ghost ages ago--and unlocked his third floor office. He walked in, past the long vacant secretary's desk, and into his inner office. Roland kept his office on the third floor because the rent was cheaper. At least, that's what he told people. In truth, he liked the view.
From here, he could almost make out who was eating at Sally's Diner--the only other business in Brooks Plaza that could still be described as 'open for business,' besides his own--and you could see the street, and the Birmingham skyline. The jets coming and going from Birmingham International Airport were clearly visible. Roland could make out the airline insignias, when the smog wasn't too bad.
Roland now saw that the message light on his answering machine was flashing, so he pressed the "play message" button, and went over the table at the side of his desk to make coffee while he listened. The voice of an elderly lady came first.
"Oh, Mr. Longville. May God bless you. This is Mrs. Schumacher. I just wanted to tell you again how grateful we are for your fine work in bringing Tallulah back to us. She's very happy to be home. Please use us as a reference if ever you need one. You are a fine man and a great detective. Have a wonderful evening, and God bless you."
Roland felt his head swelling for the hundredth time that day. Mrs. Schumacher was a kindly, and rather wealthy, widow, who lived in Mountainbrook. Tallulah, her show poodle, was her sole companion. There was another message, very similar in tone and assurances, this from Mrs. Petty, a lady who lived a rather similar life to Mrs. Schumacher, in that she was a wealthy widow who focused her life on her dog, and dog shows. Further equally glowing praise issued forth from the answering machine.
Roland Longville, savior of the richest lapdogs in Mountainbrook, Roland thought to himself with a wry smile. If anyone met me on the street, they would never guess.
Roland was a big man, six foot three, and still muscled like the linebacker he had once been, at the University of Alabama, where he had played football on a scholarship. He had graduated from there with a double major, one in Criminal Justice, the other in English. He was a black man, or, more accurately, a brown one, born and raised in North Birmingham, in the old Westmoreland Heights projects, the poor kid of a single mom. He had seen more than his share of man's inhumanity to man in his time, but he had tried to rise above it.
A crescent-shaped scar showed on the left side of his face, running from the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth. Roland's skin was a medium brown; his scar was a thin loop of lighter-colored skin that tightened that side of his face ever so slightly, and gave a hint of the sinister to his face when he was tense. When he was angry, the scar became paler, and his face got darker. Sometimes, when he passed women on the street, especially affluent young white women, he saw them grip their purses a little tighter.
If only they knew, he always thought, and shook his head. He had gotten the scar when he was a young policeman. He had cornered a rapist that had been terrorizing women. The man had raped his victims and then slashed their faces; The Mountainbrook Slasher, the media had dubbed him. Roland had stopped that man, too, and he was much, much worse than a man who kidnapped dogs and dressed like Elvis.
Roland had spotted an open window one night at 2:00 a.m. while on a routine patrol, and had surprised the Slasher as he attempted to commit what was to be his final crime. Roland and the man had fought; Roland had gotten cut several times, the worst cut being the cut on his face that left him with the scar. As for the Mountainbrook Slasher himself, he had been a mentally disturbed man from a wealthy family, and had fallen on his own knife in the struggle. He had later died of peritonitis in the hospital. The man's death had put an end to the attacks, had gotten Roland decorations and a promotion to detective, and left him with the scar.
Roland had other scars, too, but they were the kind of scars that you couldn't see. After a shooting incident in North Birmingham, a young officer had died on a crime scene, and many had blamed Roland for her death. No one blamed Roland as much as he blamed himself. He had taken to the bottle after that, and for over two years he had surrendered himself to its blinding embrace. He had finally fought his way back to sobriety, only to find himself alone, his career down the tubes, and his prospects few. With the help of his old partner and constant friend, Lester Broom, he had set himself up as a private detective, and started over.
But such grim times were far from Roland's mind at the moment. He poured himself a cup of strong black coffee and sat down with a bemused smile to listen to the rest of his messages. When Mrs. Petty hung up, there was a beep, and silence; Roland reached forward to clear the machine when another voice came on the line. His hand froze. The voice was very vague, as though it was coming from the bottom of a well, or someone was speaking through a wet towel. It wasn't the voice of a happy dowager; there was something desperate in that voice; it was the sound of someone earnestly trying to get a message across. He listened hard to make out the words.
"...in your mail..." was all that he could make out. The voice wasn't familiar, that much was for sure. It had a faint, musical quality to it, but that was all. Like a young girl, perhaps, though he couldn't be sure. The words on either side of the phrase were lost in static, or noise. He had the strange sensation that the speaker was surrounded by people who didn't want the message to be heard, but for some reason limited their objections to rude noise.
Roland rolled his chair over to his computer, which sat on a side desk, and opened his email folder. Nothing there; so maybe the person had been referring to his mail slot downstairs? Probably, he thought; he usually let the mail pile up down there until a bill, or some other important correspondence appeared. Other than that, at his office he got junk mail, anyway. But that must be what the caller was talking about, snail mail.
With an increasingly weird feeling, he went down the stairs to his mailbox, careful to pocket his .45 before doing so. The world is full of kooks, Roland reminded himself, as he strolled down the stairs. He had made the news; that might attract any number of psychos, for no further reason that they wanted to make the news, too. Or maybe their dog told them to come to the Brooks building and shoot the doggy detective. A similar excuse had been used by a maniac before, after all, Roland reasoned.
He looked out the front windows into the slanting red light of Birmingham in the death of afternoon. There were no kids across the plaza, no car with the engine running, no lookout peering surreptitiously around a corner to watch some prank unfold. There was no bag of flaming dog poop on the stairs. It didn't feel like a practical joke, either. Something about the voice had been, oddly ... commanding.
Roland opened his mailbox. There was the power bill; that, at least, wouldn't be a problem for a while. The mailbox contained nothing else. Maybe it was a prank, and nothing more.
But you know it wasn't, a little inner voice told him. The little voice warned and chided him at times. Over the years, he'd learned to take that little voice very, very seriously. Roland shrugged.
Just a prank, after all. He walked back in and grabbed his coat.
Time to take it to the house, Roland decided. For the first time in more than a month, he was going to spend a quiet evening at home, he decided, and actually watch a ball game, or a movie on television. Hey, maybe even an oldie, a good old detective film noir, and maybe, just maybe, he'd even get to watch it all the way through.
)
The exciting sequel to Timothy C. Phillip's Magician. When an unknown caller leaves Roland Longville a tantalizing clue that child killer Samson Fain has resurfaced in storm-ravaged New Orleans, Roland teams up once again with Detective Amos "Cold-Case" Tiller to hunt down Fain and rescue a teenaged girl who's disappeared. Along the way, they meet a strange man who seems to know more about their case than he's telling; a stripper who dances wearing nothing but her twin pythons--and an insane old woman who runs a decrepit not-so-funhouse in the swamps. Roland and Tiller fight to stay alive in a nightmarish twilight world, where nothing is as it seems.
