Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

I went back to more familiar haunts and pored over what I knew so far with a pot of coffee and a fried breakfast at Fat Duke’s. Halfway through the bacon, a guy came in, noticed me in the corner and helped himself to the chair opposite me. I chewed slowly, waiting. This was no chance encounter. Another nice suit. The mountain had come to Mohammed.

“Mr. Stone.” Nice voice. Nice salary too, I guessed.

“You want a coffee?”

He shook his head. “We have a mutual friend. I think you know to whom I am referring.”

“Yes, I think I know to whom you are referring. Tell me something, is this friend of ours dead or still wandering the streets of our fair city?”

“I was hoping you could tell me that, Mr. Stone.”

“So why are you interested in him?”

“It’s rather a complicated story.”

“Isn’t it always?”

He sort of smiled, but he made it look like he had the gripe. “Our friend is wanted for questioning. Not just by us. It’s an international matter. Security. And he is a very dangerous character. I can’t tell you how dangerous.”

I carried on chewing, occasionally breaking to sip my coffee. “I guess a man like that makes more than a few enemies.”

“It doesn’t pay to get mixed up with this sort of people.”

Ah, did I detect a chill note creeping into the voice? A coldness of expression? I grunted.

“So what is your interest, Mr. Stone?”

“Let’s just call it curiosity.”

“If you say so, Mr. Stone. Is the payload worth the trouble?”

“A man’s got to eat.”

“You know who I represent? It’s a powerful outfit.”

It was taking him a long time to get round to the threat. But this had to be it. “Sure.”

“How much would it take to eliminate your curiosity?”

“Like I said, a man’s got to eat.”

He named a figure that would have fed a sell-out at the Yankee Stadium. “You want me to forget about our mutual friend.”

“Completely.”

“Somebody might be disappointed if I did that. Somebody with a bad attitude. It could affect my health.”

“We can take care of that for you. If you help us.”

The idea of the FBI and my three employers going head to head was an interesting one. I just didn’t want to get mashed in the middle of it. “I’ll think about it.”

He nodded and got up, pushing the chair back slowly. “Good. We’ll talk again, Mr. Stone. I’ll be in touch. I know where you live,” he added, with a grin.

I forgot to shudder and just did my casual wave. But the fact was, I was deep in the mire. Whatever I did now, someone was going to be very upset.

* * *

Later in the day, one of my sewer rats came up with a lead. He’d been in and out of the wharf cafés, bumming smokes and a crust or two, when he’d tuned in on an intriguing conversation. Now this guy, a dropout called Shivers, is a real pro. He can blend in with the walls, or the furniture, or the garbage. You wouldn’t know he was there. He lives by the skin of his teeth and traffics in gossip. And he makes a point of knowing his market. So he knew that Nick Nightmare had an ear out for anything to do with the dockside “suicide”. Word had already got around.

In another bar, tucked away in a thick wooden booth, the air hung with smoke as thick as curtains, he spilled his news. He’d overheard two guys. One of them was a major link in an illegal immigrant chain, a man who could arrange to shift people from place to place with no questions asked. I knew the guy by reputation. Let’s call him BoBo.

According to Shivers, BoBo was talking to a weird guy—I interrupted him to show him the mug shot of Zeitsheim.

“Jeeze, Nick, that’s him, I tell ya! That’s the guy. White as a corpse.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“He was lookin’ for passage along the coast. Not by any normal channels. He kept turnin’ round as if Satan himself was blowin’ hot air down his neck, so I guess he was on the run.”

“How did he smell?”

Shivers nearly choked on his beer. “What the—? You know about that? Real bad, Nick. I mean, real bad. Fish gone off. I been in some places, but man, this guy was stinkin’ fit to make a guy retch.”

I merely nodded. Sailor Stefan it was, then.

“He spoke low and with a weird kind of voice, like he had a mother of a cold. But I heard him mention one of them old Massachusetts seaports. Innsmouth. He wanted to get to Innsmouth. BoBo took his time about answerin’. Sounded like Innsmouth was bad news to him. But he agreed. The fish guy gave him a wad of notes, must’ve been a fortune. BoBo told him it would take a few days to sort out. The guy would have to hole up until then.”

“You know where he is now?”

“Yeah.” He gave me the address of an old warehouse down by the docks. Good place to hide a needle. “Want me to take you?”

“Not yet. But keep an eye on him. I don’t want him leaving New York before I get a chance to meet him.”