The Curse Merchant (The Dark Choir Book 1) Read online

The young lion pounded the whiskey like a shot, and nodded with a shrug.

  “Nice.” I wasn’t convinced he fully appreciated the whiskey, but he seemed satisfied with it. “Julian Bright,” he chirped, holding out a hand.

  I shook it briskly and replied, “Dorian Lake.”

  Bright gathered the fresh martinis from Ben. “Pleasure, Mister Lake,” he added as he stepped away. “Great scotch!”

  I watched Bright as he navigated back to his clutch of compatriots. One of Mama Clo’s girls stepped away from his party, motioning to a wood paneled side room. I knew what this meant. I’d been noticed, and I was about to have yet more company.

  On any other night, I would have welcomed it. But Ben was really all I could handle at that moment. I turned to huddle over my scotch, praying whoever Clo sent after me would have the intelligence to read closed body language.

  Ben leaned over the bar and gathered Bright’s glass.

  “You saw what he did to my scotch, right?”

  “Don’t sweat it, Dorian. He doesn’t know shit for gin, either.”

  “New guy?”

  “More or less. Don’t recognize him?”

  “Not really.”

  “Julian Bright?”

  “Yeah?”

  “As in Deputy Mayor Bright.”

  Oh, joy.

  “Kind of young, isn’t he?”

  “I suppose, but he’s good business. He’s here about every Saturday. Brings his little band of scamps with him, keeps the girls busy.”

  “You call this busy?” I asked, gesturing behind me.

  “Well, I don’t have a smartass know-it-all hanging around pissing off the regulars anymore. I suppose they found somewhere else to get their abuse.”

  That stung, but I had it coming.

  “Sorry, Ben. I’ve just… I’ve been in a weird place lately.”

  “You doing okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Just working a lot.”

  The second I said it, I knew it was bullshit. I hadn’t been working a lot. In fact, as the exquisite fumes of the Glenrothes swirled through my sinuses, I tried to make a mental calculation of how much work I had landed in the last couple months. My headache shoved a fresh ice pick into my brain, and I rubbed my eyes.

  “Well, you look like shit, Dorian. Excuse me for saying.”

  “Love you too, Ben.”

  He smiled at me and slapped my shoulder before his eyes drifted up behind me. The smile melted, and he cleared his throat.

  “Shit,” he grumbled. With a jab of his thumb toward nowhere in particular, he whispered, “I’m going to be over here for a while.”

  It wasn’t a great evening for me, all things considered. I was sporting an earth-shattering headache, some jerkoff public servant wasted two good ounces of my Glenrothes, and I almost got shot in the face. My mind was sluggish with the recent wash of survival thinking, but I knew I had to be forgetting something particularly important. When that whiff of perfume curled around my shoulder, that important little something finally came to me.

  The reason I’d stopped coming to Druid Hill.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” that familiar, ice-cold voice spat.

  I sighed, gripped my lowball, and swiveled on my stool.

  “Hi, Carmen.”

  armen Gomez stood in front of me, hands on hips caressed by an emerald evening gown. Long, raven black hair spilled over her shoulders, feathered bangs framing long, elegant eyes alive with seething hostility. The corner of her mouth was twitching. I had learned long ago that was a sign she was trying to keep her head from exploding.

  “Well?”

  “Well what? Had a rough day.”

  “So?”

  “So, in cases of acute ‘Almost Got Your Head Blown Off,’ four out of five doctors recommend Shitface.” I lifted my glass to her and added, “So, cheers.”

  She squinted hard at me.

  “We discussed this, Dorian. You’re not supposed to be here.”

  That damned stabbing headache kept me from coming up with a clever response, so I just rolled my eyes.

  Carmen reached out and snatched the glass from my hand, slapping it down onto the bar with enough force to make me check my arm for shrapnel.

  “I was drinking that.”

  “You’re done. Goodbye, Dorian.”

  “Christ, Carmen. I didn’t come here to spite you. Seriously.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose to ease the pressure and swiveled back to the bar. “Ben?”

  He was towel-drying a martini glass with his back turned to me. Coward.

  Carmen huffed. “You’re the last thing I need to deal with right now, Dorian. Please just honor your word for once, and go. You owe me that.”

  I put tremendous effort into remembering what word I had given. Then it came to me. My shoulders wilted as my ego deflated.

  “I suppose I do.” I reached over for my glass, and drained the last of my scotch.

  She stepped around my stool and waved at the glass. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m leaving. Jesus.”

  “You just tossed back an entire fistful of that hooch!”

  “Hooch? Are you kidding me? This is Vintage Seventy-Eight―”

  She shook her head with a smirk. “God, you’re such a snob about your liquor.”

  “Any idea how much that ‘hooch’ costs?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. I was here when you got conned into buying it.”

  “It’s my money.”

  “Right.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s your father’s money, is what I mean.”

  “Well, thank you for bringing that up because my day didn’t suck enough.”

  “What, I’m supposed to feel sorry for you? Know how much my papa left me when he died? Nada. I had to work, Dorian. I worked, and I made something of myself. I didn’t pay dues to clubs I couldn’t afford. I didn’t buy expensive booze or German cars. So you had a bad day? Congratulations.”

  I peered through the headache into her livid brown eyes.

  “Your dad didn’t eat a bullet, Carmen.”

  More memories flooded into my addled brain, and I willed them away, spinning off of the stool.

  “Where are you going?” she snapped.

  “Again, with the leaving.”

  “Well, you can’t leave now. You just pounded scotch.” She sighed and shook her head. “You’ll have to wait, now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not letting you drive, that’s why.”

  As I slumped back down onto the stool, I caught Ben snickering in the corner of the bar.

  “Can I get some water, Ben? Apparently I can’t hold my scotch anymore.”

  Carmen muttered something in Spanish under her breath as she put fingers to her temples.

  “We had a problem in May with one of the members. He got in a wreck on Charles and we had issues with the Beverage Control board. Scared away a lot of the regulars.”

  “Yeah, kind of noticed that.”

  “I don’t need more problems. So just sit right there and don’t move. You can go when Ben says.”

  One of the girls approached Carmen from behind. Carmen stepped aside to speak with her. I checked Bright and his pride of professionals. They all were eyeballing me thanks to Carmen’s usual lack of volume control.

  Carmen gestured to them with authority, and the girl stepped away with verve. Carmen’s eyes followed her across the room as she joined Bright’s party. The only party, actually.

  Then it occurred to me.

  Why was Carmen giving the girls marching orders?

  “Carmen? Where’s Mama Clo?”

  She closed her eyes for one long blink, then looked down at her shoes.

  “She’s sick.”

  “Sick? Is it bad?”

  “Yes, Dorian, it’s bad.” She inched backward and leaned against the bar. “She’s in a hospice at Johns Hopkins.”

  “What is it?”


  “Pancreatic cancer.”

  I sucked in a long breath. “Damn.”

  “She asked me to take over for a few weeks, she said, last August. By Christmas, we all figured she wasn’t coming back. When I went to visit, she asked me to take care of the girls for her.”

  I took a sip of the water Ben had provided, watching the room. More memories of the glory days came spilling into my frontal lobes. There was a lot of laughter then. This whole place was lighter. Not dead and dreary.

  I caught Carmen looking at me.

  “What?”

  “What’s this about getting your head blown off?”

  “Oh. Crazy chick. Gun. My life sucks, basically. But hey, at least I’m drinking water.”

  “You really had a scare, didn’t you?”

  I held my tongue for a second. She wasn’t scowling at me. Her eyes had softened. They were amazing. Dark brown spheres of magic and mystery. Long eyelashes. Those sexy wrinkles in the corners.

  “Nah, I’m okay.”

  She squinted and pushed away from the bar.

  “Fine. When you finish the water, you can leave.”

  “Yes, Mistress.”

  She rolled her eyes and sauntered away. I watched her hips sway as she moved. The last couple years had been very kind to Carmen.

  Apparently, not so kind to Mama Clo.

  Ben finally emerged from exile, cracking his knuckles.

  “You could have warned me, you know,” I grumbled at him.

  “Dorian, I couldn’t keep up with your drama when you were here every weekend. I got used to things being quiet.”

  “I kind of hate this, Ben. What’s happened to this place? It’s nothing like it was.”

  He looked out over the empty sofas and shrugged.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Yeah. We’re all okay, aren’t we?”

  I finished the water and gave Ben a hearty handshake.

  “Ben, I wish you luck.”

  His eyes drooped and he fidgeted.

  “Are you, uh, will I be seeing you around?”

  I looked out over the club and caught Carmen peering at me through a potted palm. She spun on a heel and slipped quickly into the girls’ waiting room.

  “Yeah. You got my scotch, remember?”

  To my credit, the three fingers of Glenrothes didn’t actually impair my ability to drive. The only thing making the trip difficult was the damned migraine I was sporting.

  By the time I reached my red brick two-story just north of the Stadium, however, the headache had eased. I checked the street before parking in the narrow driveway. After sunset, the neighborhood couldn’t be described as friendly.

  I bought the house when I returned to the States after ten years living in London. It was supposed to have been an historic building. The realtor said Poe lived there once. I never did the research to see if that was a load of bull for fear that it was. The realtor had also told me the entire area was due for a community revitalization. So, I invested in a handful of row houses around the corner as rental properties and waited for the neighborhood to start cleaning up. Unfortunately for me, the block across the expressway experienced the revitalization, and I ended up putting bars on my windows.

  I spent the rest of the evening indulging in memories of Carmen and me. That weekend in Atlantic City. The time her parents came to visit from Miami. Her ugly ass hatchback I tried to fix, but managed to break my wrist in the process. She made it up to me in the back seat of that hatchback.

  Yeah.

  I was a real jackass for screwing that up.

  Before I waded through the piles of laundry on my bedroom floor to collapse on my bed, I managed to find the photograph we took together on that day cruise out of Annapolis. It was lying face down inside my sock drawer. I didn’t even remember putting it there.

  I stared at the photo from my bed, examining her face. She seemed so much younger. Rounder. Tonight, she seemed so glamorous. So commanding. She was doing well without me.

  Gunshots barked several blocks to the west, and I tried to remember if I had set the alarm when I came in. I rolled over and slapped the clock radio on sleep mode. At that moment, I really didn’t care if the door was locked.

  After a day like that, I wasn’t feeling terribly connected to my possessions, or much of anything really.

  Or anyone.

  Oh well. At least the headache was finally gone.

  jerked awake the next morning to the buzzing chime of my doorbell. My heart was still racing from an already-forgotten nightmare, and it took me several minutes to find a bathrobe and push through the clutter in my bedroom before I bounded down the stairs to the front door.

  I peeked through the eyehole to find the tall, spindly frame of Abraham Carter lingering on my concrete stoop. Abe was one of my tenants. Real estate wasn’t expensive in West Baltimore, and I bought my properties embarrassingly cheap. It took a couple years to fill them with reliable tenants like Abe, and since then, I hadn’t had to think much about them.

  Which was why his showing up on a Sunday morning worried me.

  I opened the door and greeted him. “Morning, Abe.”

  He pulled his trucker cap off of his white, wooly hair and nodded.

  “Mornin’ Mister Lake. Sorry to come by so early.”

  “Not a problem.” I held the door open and waved him into my foyer. “Come in.”

  He peered into the house, then stooped and tip-toed inside, kicking his shoes on the threshold as he did. He stood in the middle of the room, shoulders hunched, his eyes low and sneaking peeks at my interior décor.

  “What can I do for you, Abe?”

  “Well, Mister Lake, we didn’t hear from ya yet, so I thought I’d bring the notice to ya.”

  Abe fished a folded yellow paper from his jacket pocket and opened it, handing it out sheepishly.

  I took the paper and winced when I saw the City of Baltimore letterhead.

  “What is this?”

  “Well, Mister Lake, I gave ya a call two weeks ago. About the awning? Figured ya was busy.”

  “You called me?”

  “Yessir.”

  “What about the awning?”

  Abe blinked rapidly and melted a little into his own torso.

  “From the snow last winter?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The awning fell off. My house and the Wilkins? Ice pack tore it straight off, took the gutters with it. Remember? Ya came and looked at it.”

  I took in a patient breath and scanned the notice. It was a citation for failure to maintain the structure of the façade. I seemed to remember something about the awning, but I thought I had taken care of it.

  “The carpenters never came?”

  “No sir. I put up some two-by-fours, but someone from the city came and left this notice on my door. Figured ya wanted to have that.”

  I nodded and tried to smile.

  “Abe, I apologize. I had no idea this was left hanging like this. I’m going to take care it.”

  He nodded rapidly and smiled.

  “Thank ya, Mister Lake.”

  “And bill me for the work you did to fix it, okay? I’ll take it off your rent.”

  “Oh, no sir. That’s no problem.”

  “Seriously, Abe. It’s not your responsibility to maintain the property. It’s mine. You shouldn’t have to pay for that.”

  “Well, that’s kind of ya. I figured since I took care of the fence and the sink, I oughta do somethin’ with the gutters, too.”

  That made me wince.

  “How much work have you been pouring into your property, Abe?”

  I didn’t really want to know the answer because I had a feeling it was going to make me feel like a certified asshole. Good thing Abe wasn’t feeling forthcoming. He just shuffled back and forth on his huge feet.

  “It ain’t nothin’, Mister Lake.”

  “Okay. Look, again, I’m sorry. I’m going to get right on this, and I’m not going to let shit slip like this anym
ore.”

  He gave me a toothy smile and shook my hand. He had a surprisingly limp grip for the size of his hand.

  “All right, then.” He opened the door and stepped out into the morning chill. “Good day, Mister Lake.”

  It was going to take no small reversal of fortune to salvage a good day out of this. My first order of business was to figure out why I had never received Abe’s message. I found it buried in a full voicemail inbox, amidst client requests that I had managed to blow off in the last few months. All of those opportunities, lost. I scribbled a quick list of the most recent inquiries onto the back of a Chinese delivery menu, then scoured through the old antique writing desk I kept near the first story street window.

  There was once a time when I kept meticulous records of all my personal transactions. The pile of wadded-up receipts festooning the interior of my desk now spoke to the gradual demise of my personal record keeping. Somewhere in the paper chaos was hiding the business card of the carpenter who had rebuilt the porch on unit B five years ago. Andreas Tatopoulis. He had given me a discount in exchange for one of my “Cupid” charms. My tenants were happy with the porch, and Tatopoulis met a brassy Greek woman who shared his love of the Bossanova. They sent me a wedding invitation, but I much preferred keeping professional distance with my clients.

  After a quarter hour’s rummaging, I managed to produce the dog-eared business card, and gave Tatopoulis a call. He did in fact remember me, and after a brief conversation screaming over the noise of shrieking toddlers in the background, he agreed to take a look at the damage the snow had rendered to the awning. I got the clear impression he was working for diaper money these days, so I didn’t bother bartering services.

  Once I had taken a shower and found an old favorite sweatshirt I thought I’d lost, the day was starting to feel like it was salvageable. I had taken steps to remedy the tenant situation, I had a list of five client leads to follow up, the sun was out on a crisp October morning, and the smell of coffee from the corner café two doors down was filtering through the window.

  I searched through my sock drawer for a matched pair of socks. One of these days, I was going to start actually folding my laundry. I fished around for two whites with gray toes, spotting an old garish dragonfly lapel pin that I had tossed in the drawer at some point. The thing was hideous. It must have been a gift. I managed to secure two white socks, toes notwithstanding, and closed the drawer.