Free Harmony Black by Craig Schaefer

serial offender. He’s stolen other children, and they’ve never been found. With every hour that passes, the trail gets that much colder.”
    He looked down at his beer. “Those boys are gonna kill me.”
    “Right now,” I said, “there’s a mother staring at the door, staring at the phone, wondering if she’ll ever see her baby alive again. Minutes, hours, days . . . can you imagine how much that hurts? You can help her. Right now, you’re the only person who can. Please. Help us find these men.”
    Douglas slouched back, the brim of his cap slipping down over his eyes.
    “All right,” he grumbled. “Goddamn it, all right. Fine. You’re looking for the Gresham brothers. They hole up in a trailer park in Berrien County, just off Route 12. I can give you the address.”
    “What are they into?” Jessie asked, leaning closer.
    “Meth, mostly, but they’ll rip off anything that ain’t nailed down. You know the saying ‘Don’t get high on your own supply’? Well, they don’t think much of that rule.”
    “They work only for themselves?”
    Douglas grunted. “If you call that work. Yeah, mostly, but every once in a while somebody from the Flowers throws a dirty job their way.”
    “Flowers?” I said.
    He looked at me like I’d grown a second head.
    “Yeah. Court of Night-Blooming Flowers?”
    I looked at Jessie. She shrugged.
    “You gotta be kidding me,” Douglas said. “Special feds, huh? You don’t know shit . You ladies get comfortable while I grab another bottle of Bud. I’m about to ruin your lives.”

NINE
    “Been in this game a long time,” Douglas said, back at the booth with a fresh bottle of beer. “I was a cop, out east. We were working a gang beat in Little Vietnam, trying to roust some scumbags who were preying on the immigrant traffic. Then one night, my partner gets sick. Coughing up blood, buckets of the stuff. Ran him to the ER. Turns out, he had ninety-eight fishhooks in his stomach, like he’d swallowed them one by one.”
    Douglas took a long pull on his bottle, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment.
    “After the funeral, I had a lot of questions. Didn’t care about why—I knew why: we’d stepped on the wrong toes. I wanted to know how . Because my partner didn’t swallow any goddamn ninety-eight fishhooks, but there they were.”
    “Find what you were looking for?” Jessie asked.
    “And then some. And then I couldn’t stop. That’s the thing, this world, it just . . . sucks you in. You start looking for the answer to a question, it leads you to a hundred more questions. You start looking to answer those, and there you go. Straight down the rabbit hole, and that’s a one-way trip.”
    “What was that you were saying earlier,” I asked, “about flowers?”
    “The Court,” he said, making grand gestures and rolling his eyes, “of Night-Blooming Flowers. Lemme bottom-line this for you. A few centuries ago, Lucifer took a vacation and never came back. Hell fell into a civil war. What was left, when the dust settled, were the courts. Each one with a prince, each one laying claim to some patch of dirt here on Earth. They call it the Cold Peace. Some really old-school factions, like the Bargainers and the Chainmen, they get an exemption and can go wherever they want. For most of hell’s rank and file, though, they keep to their own courts. Plotting and scheming against one another gives the bastards something to do, I guess.”
    “Slow down,” Jessie said. “Are you telling us hell is organized ? They have a functional government, and they’re claiming actual territory in the United States?”
    “I don’t know how functional I’d call it, but yeah. And they’ve got operatives. Hounds, they’re called. Not hijackers who have to possess a human body, but incarnate demons. You know what incarnates are?”
    I nodded. “I met one, in Las Vegas. He called himself Sullivan. I was told he was the only one in the country.”
    Douglas snorted. “Then you were