The Dead Pools Read online

  The Dead Pools

  American Witch Volume II

  Michael Hesse

  Copyright © 2019 Michael Hesse

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-078-33870-7

  (paperback)

  Dedication

  For my wife, Teryl, who makes every day possible. And to my children: Michael, Rain, Isabella, & Coral. Nothing easy is worth a damn.

  Acknowledgements

  Although writing is a solitary effort, no one writes a book alone. My first thanks go, as always, to my wife. Without her unflagging support, none of the words would flow. Secondly, to my lifelong friend and chief critic, Christopher Steele. You brought me through some hard times and I’m eternally grateful. Lastly, but not least; I need to thank Mark Smith, chief morale officer and editor. Your insights and input keep me on the right track. Thank you one and all, I wouldn’t be able to keep scribbling in the wee hours of the morning, if it weren’t for each of you.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Atlanta, Saturday 21:00

  Leo’s Carnival

  Ramirez is the trouble maker, not me. I’m the magnet. Join us for a drink some time and you’ll see what I mean. Within an hour Ramirez will slap some pretty girl’s ass. Five will get you ten she’s some braggart’s arm candy. He can’t help himself; it’s just how he rolls. Ramirez digs the tussle and strife. He loves cutting those guys down to size and he’s got the skills to do it.

  Me? I’m the quiet guy sipping his drink in the darkest corner of the bar. I’m not calling attention to myself. I just want to be left alone, but trouble finds me no matter where I am. Lately it’s because I’m with Ramirez, but that ain’t always been so. Trouble got a hard on for me long before I joined Shadow Company. It came onto me back in the witch camps in Colorado and dogged me straight to a jail cell in New York City. It’s been making my life miserable ever since.

  Ramirez and I were minding our own business at Leo’s. Well, I was minding my business. Ramirez was pounding tequila, pounding the table, and shoving ones into a junkie’s g-string.

  Leo’s Carnival isn’t a big and flashy gentleman’s club where the high money flows, it’s shabbier than that. It’s the sort of club where the bouncer’s face is as likely to be on a most wanted poster as not. The girls are all hustling, even the waitresses, and the bartender sells more than beer. He just keeps it out of sight, like the .45 strapped to the underside of the bar. Seedy doesn’t do it justice.

  If you’re headed for Leo’s, you’re headed for trouble, but Ramirez doesn’t care. He loves the place and he was driving. Besides, the bastard outranks me.

  After two weeks of survival training, Ramirez insisted we needed a night off base and away from the machine. He needed to blow off some steam out from under the disapproving eye of our Sergeant. Mac wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like Leo’s, which was why we headed straight there. Mac’s too moral a guy for five-dollar strippers and dollar beers. You wouldn’t know it out in the field, but he’s about as straight an arrow as they come.

  When you’re humping a pack fourteen hours a day through a snake infested swamp, he’s the devil himself. Mac couldn’t give a shit if you twisted your ankle or passed out from the heat. And if you’re on the long ticket like me, he can invent new levels of pain to drive his lessons home. But come Sunday morning he’s clutching a hymn book in his beefy hand, drowning out the choir.

  Don’t think about pointing out the hypocrisy of that to Mac. That’s trouble you don’t need. Even Ramirez leaves that shit alone and there’s just about no beehive he won’t stick his dick inside. Ramirez may be a trouble maker, but he’s too smart for that.

  So, when word came down that the Fulton County Jail was holding a Duster, Ramirez jumped at the chance to get off base. Graveyard Dust wasn’t your normal kink. We didn’t know much about it, but Command said that the samples they’d seen were soaked in blood-magick. That piqued everyone’s attention. Who the fuck would blend sorcery into a drug and why?

  Shadow Company wasn’t police. We weren’t regular Army either, not officially. Officially we’re special forces, the counter-punch to the Thule sorcerers behind the European Reich. Call it what you will; mutually assured destruction, paranormal defense, whatever. Personally, I don’t give a damn what euphemism the suits in Washington use to label us. The truth is when the dark starts creeping around our shores, we’re the bastards sent in to root it out.

  The problem was the paperwork. According to our Charter, we’re not supposed to operate domestically, as if dark magick is just a foreign problem. It’s all wink and a nod bullshit most of the time. I mean, who else are you going to send in to do the dirty work, the OSS? The Office of State Security isn’t allowed to hire sorcerers as agents. They go through six reams of paper just to hire one on as a security consultant.

  No, normally we go in and take out the target. Then we clear out and OSS takes the credit. It’s a beautiful fucking system and everyone’s happy as long as the mundanes don’t know the difference.

  Fulton County’s newest inmate had been caught with a full key, so he wasn’t a run of the mill addict or street-level dealer. That much weight places you higher up the food chain; a supplier, a distributer, maybe even a source. At the very least, he was someone that we needed to talk to, ASAP.

  Of course, we couldn’t just walk in and flash a couple of badges. That would be easy and totally sane, but it wasn’t the way things work. Ever. Normally we’d wait for the OSS to pick him up and turn him over to us, but for some reason the OSS wasn’t cooperating. There was a jurisdictional issue. Paperwork had been filed and that usually meant that we’d pissed off a suit somewhere.

  For once, the brass wasn’t waiting for the situation to fester. We had forty-eight hours to scout out the Fulton County Jail. We had to get in and out unnoticed and peel away whatever information the Duster might have. Easy.

  I should have bugged off as soon as Ramirez volunteered. Instead he volunteered me. He’d go along to keep an eye on me, of course. Forty-eight hours, that’s all we’d need. No problem, he said. Piece of cake.

  Of course, we didn’t head towards the jail. As soon as we were off base and away from prying eyes, we turned towards Leo’s. It’s not that I’ve got anything against half-naked ladies and beer. I really don’t. I just don’t like the attention. And a couple of freshly laundered black camos were going to get some attention.

  It was quiet for a Saturday night. The music was pumping loud enough that you had to yell to be heard across the table, but there hadn’t been a serious fight yet. Just a couple of punks who couldn’t handle their first beers. Most of the men were keeping their hands to themselves so far, even the regulars. It was still early.

  No one had decided to tes
t the boys in uniform, but it was going to happen. I could feel it. After a couple of plates of Diablo Wings and a second pitcher of beers, I’d given up on trying to convince Ramirez to leave. He was too busy whooping it up with the girls grinding away on the stage.

  Besides, he’d made it his mission to get me laid.

  “You know, that’s your problem,” he yelled across the table while flagging down the waitress for another round. “You’ve got to stop overthinking it. Just bust a nut now and then. It’s no big deal.”

  “Why do we always have to discuss my sex life?”

  “What sex life? Damn, Thorn, when I was twenty-two, I was laying ‘em down in rows. They took numbers. If I only had one daddy coming after me with a shotgun, I wasn’t doing things right. Get it? I’m trying to help you here, you know.”

  “Whatever—

  “Loosen up and have some fun, amigo. Life’s short, especially since you put on that uniform. If you waved it around a bit you wouldn’t always be so uptight. Unless you’ve got something to be ashamed about. Maybe all you witchy-boys are hung like cats. Is that it?”

  Waitresses always arrive at your table at the wrong time. It’s an immutable law of the universe. Cops pull up behind you the day your tags expire and you don’t have to fart until the elevator doors close. Same thing.

  I fumbled for my cash figuring that she’d picked up on the cat thing, but it was the other part of his comment that caught her attention.

  “Is that true, what your friend said about being a witch?”

  Even if we weren’t in Georgia, this was a loaded question. The Witchcraft and Sorcery Acts might be sixty years old, but they’d never been taken off the books. Every Wiccan I knew was either in hiding or locked in a camp exactly like the one I’d escaped in Colorado. And it didn’t look like things were going to change anytime soon.

  All the Gifted keep their abilities secret from mundanes, but sorcerers like Ramirez weren’t outright criminals. The Ceremonials had cut a deal with the Church and State right after the Awakening. As long as they attended proper government schools and got the right licenses, they could walk about unmolested. Mostly.

  But we Wiccans were an entirely different matter. The Gift’s genetic. It’s a mutation I’m told, only one in a couple hundred thousand carry the gene, if that. Although it’s rumored that there are families that have selectively bred themselves in an effort to strengthen the gene, for the most part it’s entirely random. Wiccans are the exception.

  Most Wiccans are related in one way or another. All of us are descended from the original thirteen tribes of the Moon. We’re a race, like the Romani or the Jews. It doesn’t help that one of our two main deities, Cernunnos, looks suspiciously like the Christian devil, with his long curling ram’s horns. Or that the Thule Society, the true power behind the European Reich are Hell’s disciples. Once the war started the public figured all of us “devil-worshipers” were the same and the government rounded us up into temporary internment camps. Sixty years ago.

  “My friend’s an idiot. Don’t mind him.” I held out a twenty, trying to laugh off her question. “Keep the change, darling.”

  My innocent face never worked with my mother. She saw through it every time. It didn’t work here either. Maybe it never did.

  Krystal with a K slapped my hand aside. “Don’t you all darlin me. Whatcha trying to do, spell me? My daddy’s a preacher and he taught me all about you witches. We don’t want your dirty money in here.”

  I tried to stay calm, although I was boiling inside. I was also uncomfortably aware that her voice was beginning to carry. “Look Krystal, we don’t want any trouble, okay?”

  I dropped my money onto her tray and reached out for the glasses.

  Krystal with a K hopped backward, stumbling into the chairs behind her. No one hops about on six inch heels and keeps their balance. She dropped her tray, spilling the drinks all over the cheap suits behind her. And that’s when trouble found me again.

  You’d think trouble would chase Ramirez around and to be fair he gets his share. But trouble’s been jonesin’ for me ever since I slipped the wire and fled the camps. Which is exactly the reason I try to avoid places like Leo’s.

  Three men of the southern-belly club shot up from their seats while a fourth weaselly-looking character mopped at the beer staining his funeral director’s tie. One of the fat men reached down and helped Krystal back onto her feet, before all four turned to glare at me.

  “Gentlemen, I’m sorry,” I tried to explain. “There’s been a bit of a misunderstanding. Let me buy you another round in apology. There are few things that happen in a bar that an offer of fresh drinks can’t smooth over. This turned out to be one of them.

  I reached back to grab my wallet when Krystal with a K shrieked. “Watch him Jeb! He’s trying to spell y’all.”

  What’s her problem? I pulled my hands back slowly and caught a flickering smile cross her face before she turned and started sobbing into the fat man’s shirt. I got it. Krystal with a K was a blood-junkie.

  You know the type, hanging on the periphery of every school yard fight, egging on the combatants. They date the boys with hair-triggers. Flirt with their husband’s friends. And they frequently work at places like Leos’s where they can perch on the edge of the mayhem. Girls like Krystal mainline trouble. They get off on it.

  I held up my hands. “Everyone, calm down. We don’t want any trouble.”

  “You should have thought about that before you tried to rape me!” This time she turned and pitched her voice to carry over the thumping music. “He tried to put his dirty witch hands all over me, Jeb. Now whatcha gonna do about it?”

  And there it was. Everyone within reach of Krystal’s voice tore their eyes off the girls on stage and over to us. I might have been able to buy off the good old boys with a couple of rounds and basket or two of wings, but now they were the center of attention. If they backed down now, they’d lose face.

  One of the fat men reached for my arm and I swatted it away. Mistake number two. I wasn’t going to catch a break, it only ratcheted things up another notch. People were definitely starting to look.

  “Ramirez, it’s time to go!”

  If there had been three or four of us in uniform things might have gone differently. But with just two of us, especially when one of us is only five seven and Mexican, well . . . it doesn’t carry too much weight in a Georgia bar.

  Ramirez turned around in time to see two of the fat men charging me, while the third roared and swung at him. That was a mistake. Nine times out of ten, it’s the little guy that’s the most dangerous. Trust me; they should have gone after Ramirez first.

  The men coming after me were street brawlers. They split up and came at me from both sides of the table. Normally a good idea, but they don’t give these uniforms away at the bottom of a Cracker Jack. It would have saved a lot of hurt if they’d noticed the Special Forces emblems pinned beneath our name patches.

  Instead of retreating, I charged the fatty facing me. He grinned until my boot snapped up and into his knee. He took a step before it buckled under his weight. I followed it up with a chop to his meaty neck and sent his face screaming into the top of the table. I let the momentum spin me around and turned to face the Bubba who thought it was smart to come at me from behind.

  He didn’t look so snappy now that his buddy was lying in a bloody mess on the floor. He should have paused a moment to reassess. I would have. Instead he exploded into a rage, arms flailing, spittle spewing from his puffy lips. Getting angry doesn’t make you a better fighter, it does the opposite. It makes you sloppy.

  Bubba threw a haymaker that would have flattened me if there was more muscle than flab on his arm. Instead he telegraphed his move which allowed me to slip inside the sweep of his arm delivering two rabbit punches that flattened his nose. They didn’t take him down, but they knocked him back a pace or two.

  I didn’t need to check on Ramirez. His opponent had a hundred pounds on him, but that j
ust meant that he’d hit the floor that much harder. The crack of a bone snapping and a howl signaled that Ramirez’s contest was already over.

  My concentration was still on my Bubba, who was wiping at the blood streaming down his face. The idiot didn’t seem to realize that our fight was over. In less than a minute two of his buddies were down, but some people don’t know when to quit. I stepped forward to deliver a knockout blow when someone cut the music.

  Chairs scrapped across the floor all around us as the other patrons decided to join in on the fray. I had no illusions of which side they’d be choosing. This was going to be a long night.

  I didn’t know how right I was.

  “Hands up! You’re under arrest.”

  I turned around slowly, making sure that I didn’t make any sudden moves. I had that itchy feeling at the back of my head that someone had a gun pointed at me. It was the funeral director, holding a long barreled .38.

  I glanced over at Ramirez, but his hands were already up. He slowly shook his head.

  “Assaulting a police officer, drunk and disorderly, and disturbing the peace. You boys are in a heap of trouble.”

  “Don’t forget that he’s a witch too,” Krystal with a K wailed from the floor where she was curled around Jeb.

  The weasel pulled the hammer back on his .38 and pointed it squarely between my eyes. “We’ll add conspiring with the devil and witchcraft to the charges.”

  Like I said, I’m a trouble magnet.

  Chapter 2

  Atlanta, Saturday 23:30

  Fulton County Jail

  I’ve been in worse jail cells. The best thing I can say about Fulton County is that Ramirez and I weren’t dumped into general population. We were temporarily placed into the isolation cells for our own protection, while the deputies scrambled to figure out the proper procedure. For our own protection. I had to laugh.