Monster Hunter Memoir: Saints

  “Never trust a politician or a wizard.”

  “There’s two kinds of trust, Earl,” I said, looking him in the eye. “One is honesty. The other is competence. There are very few people I trust on both. I can count on the thumbs of one hand the number I trust on both. And I’m including myself in that number.”

  * * *

  “You don’t trust me?” Milo said.

  We were driving back from clearing some shamblers out of a cemetery. In deference to MCB’s new policies we’d kept it discreet. Agent Robinson was easily excitable, and I was tired of getting arrested.

  “If it came down to me or the Shacklefords, who would you choose?” I asked. “You don’t have to answer but it’s one of the bases. I love you like a brother, Milo—a real brother, not my shithead brother. But totally trust you? I don’t actually totally trust me. Are you honest? Sure. As honest as anyone can be. But try to honestly answer the original question. Are you always competent? In ways that amaze even me. But I wouldn’t want you to represent me in court. And there are emotional connections you have that are stronger than your connection to me. Would you do something for me, something very important, if you thought it violated your faith or your soul? I would hope not. If Earl was dead set against it? I think you’d tend to take Earl’s side. I don’t mind that. I don’t like you less for it. But you can see where I don’t trust you entirely thereby.”

  “I guess there’s some logic,” Milo said, frowning. “But it isn’t about loyalty as much as it is about right and wrong. Mostly it sounds like you trying to justify being a butthead.”

  “Uncool, man. Now, I’m going to go do some stuff that will make you uncomfortable,” I said, pulling up to the team shack. “So I’m going to go do it alone. Because I don’t trust you not to say something that will cause an issue.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go see a voodoo lady. And get my future read in tea leaves and tarot cards and there might be a chicken sacrificed.”

  “Those people are…” Milo grimaced and started to get out. “Whatever.”

  “Milo.” I held up my hand. “You really are the closest person I have to a brother. So please be aware, the reverse is not true. I’d literally give up my soul for yours.”

  “I…Don’t,” Milo said, then shrugged. “That isn’t how souls work anyway.”

  “I doubt it will ever be an issue, but I got to go get my voodoo on. See yuh, brother.”

  * * *

  I went to see my real estate agent.

  Madam Courtney was a revered hoodoo lady but her hoodoo had always been of the “White.” When I’d first met her, I had not realized just how respected she was in the hoodoo world. She made charms and healing potions, cast blessings and such. She’d never been known to lift a finger in harm against anyone. It should be noted that despite being houdoun, Madam Courtney attended Catholic mass every Sunday, without fail, as well as on major saints’ days and at various other times. She had, in addition, attended Sunday School every week her entire life. Not “with few exceptions.” She’d once attended Sunday School and church while suffering from raging pneumonia.

  So I couldn’t imagine a better hoodoo woman to see to determine what MCB had found out and possibly more. When I’d said there were twenty wizards in New Orleans better than MCB’s, I was serious and was friends with one of the top three, and her office was conveniently located in Bayou St. John.

  The place was covered in charms and hoodoo decorations. After her attractive young secretary led me back through the bead curtain, Madam Courtney came around her desk to give me a hug. As usual she was dressed in bright colors and wearing a bunch of jewelry and amulets. “Oliver Chadwick Gardenier, my favorite client. Sit. Sit! Now, what is the bother for you?”

  “I need you to talk to your loas.”

  The first few times I had met her, Madam Courtney had constantly admonished me to trust in the loas. “It is serious then?” she asked as returned to her chair. Without asking if I wanted one or not, she poured two glasses from a bottle of dark rum.

  “I have come under suspicion by the authorities of being involved in a very foul crime. They won’t give me details but I’ve determined they were looking for those who are involved and did some sort of casting. I was found to be connected as was my brother. The problem being, I am not involved in any way that I am aware. I swear this to you, Madam Courtney.”

  “No need. I know you too well to believe such things.”

  “But the casting has me as being, according to them, ‘the alpha and omega.’ That I created it and that I can end it. I swear I did not create it though I would like to end it.”

  “What is this foul crime?” Madam Courtney asked.

  “There is a group who are kidnapping girls to be used as virgin sacrifices, and selling them to those of the Dark and the Black who need such. They often kill whole families to get girls who are the right type. The only information I have is that they’re called the Dark Masters.”

  “Ah.”

  “You’ve heard of them.” I wasn’t surprised. Madam Courtney knew everybody.

  “Rumors only. They’re not from around here. They work up north and out west, Yankees and scoundrels. So foul with the Black that I’m surprised they can maintain the semblance of being human. They call themselves Dark Masters as think they are more powerful than the loas. They revel in sin. Many in this town work with the Dark and the Black, but I would have no clue, though, why anyone would put you in their midst.”

  “That’s the question I’ve been asking everyone. The only thing I can think is to…The term I’d use is ‘reverse engineer’ the casting. To try to do the casting that whoever the Feds hired did and see what comes of it.”

  “But you know not what casting,” Madam Courtney said, frowning. “And it could be many. It depends on what they were looking for.”

  “Could there be a way to look for the girls instead? That may have been what they were doing. Could a federal hoodoo man have tried to find who took them, and somehow my name came up by mistake?”

  “To find the girls, or them as took them, I’d need something of theirs. Not just something they touched, something that is of them. Hair, toenails. Do you have such?”

  “Not currently. I can possibly find something, but that victim would probably already have passed on.”

  “Such a thing is vile,” Madam Courtney said angrily. “Find me something of one of the girls who was took. We will trust the loas to show us the way!”

  “Thank you, Madam Courtney. I truly appreciate the help.” I got up, laid an envelope on the table, and let myself out. When it came to the hoodoo side of her business, you didn’t ask Madam Courtney how much her help cost. It cost what you paid. If you had nothing, she would help you for free. If you were rich, you were expected to pay as much as was reasonable. The envelope contained ten thousand dollars. I was pretty sure she’d give most of it away to the needy anyway.

  CHAPTER 7

  Unfortunately, this necessitated another out-of-town trip.

  Franklin was not happy to see me leaving town again, especially with being down a body again and me being the Hunter most familiar with New Orleans, but I had a job to do. I was going to get my name cleared one way or the other.

  My files on the virgin kidnappings ring went back to when I was still in good graces with the FBI. MHI had gotten a few of the files on the remaining missing, after we rescued those girls from the Seattle Lich. It was virtually guaranteed all of those girls were already sacrificed, but it was the only thing I had to go on.

  The nearest suspected victim where the family was still alive was in Arkansas. But there was an event in Pueblo that fit the MO, and while that wasn’t close to Crestone—nothing was close to Crestone—it was closer than, say, Arkansas. And Crestone was the Tibetan town I needed to visit to see about what unguents you used to wipe out an Old One’s entity. Also, I had an in in Pueblo.

  It was good to be armed again. The one
problem with visiting England was being continuously at the mercy of whatever evil thing might pop up at any time. They had arms at the Institute, but God help you if you were caught walking around Oxford with a 1911 in your waistband. English politicians were firm believers that everyone should be a victim and English constables looked at carrying a pistol as equivalent to a thermonuclear device.

  I hired a plane. Less hassle that way. Not a jet, I wasn’t going to spend that much. A twin-engine Beech. Faster than driving, and I could load up as many guns as I wanted. I told the pilot I was going big game hunting. Which was almost the truth.

  First stop was Crestone. Going to Pueblo was going to dredge up old memories, victims’, families’, mine. Crestone was easier.

  Crestone, Colorado, is even more the definition of middle of nowhere than Yuma, my late friend Jesse’s hometown. It was damned near the center of Colorado but on the far side of the Front Range from Denver and most of the main areas of CO and in, if not Colorado’s most arid region, then pretty darn close. Put it this way: the nearest major attraction was Great Sand Dunes National Park.

  It was an old mining town that had just about dried up and drifted away with the sand dunes until the 1950s. Them damn ChiComs had taken over China then invaded Tibet. (Then promptly burned six thousand years of history.) There wasn’t much the US government could do about China but they could try to start an armed rebellion in Tibet. Tibet had been independent for as long as anyone could remember. And they’d stayed that way by not only being hard to access but being good fighters. So, train up some Tibetans and send them back to train others. Set up an air-lift like they’d done for the Chinese in World War II. Made perfect sense.

  Where to put these Tibetans where they’d be at home and keep their lungs ready for the heights while training?

  When they activated the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, nobody and I mean nobody could figure out why the hell they’d put it in New York when they had Colorado just sitting there. The answer, of course, was “there was this congressman.”

  The CIA black ops program put these Tibetans where it made most sense: Crestone. Tibet was mostly arid. Crestone was in an arid part of Colorado. Tibet was very high. Crestone was in a high part of Colorado. There were nearby mountains that were even higher. Best of all, Crestone was so far away from anything that nobody in 1958 was going to look there. Pretty much the same arguments as why they set up Oak Ridge in Appalachia.

  So they took two hundred Tibetan “fighters” and some of their families out of refugee camps in India and Nepal and brought them to Crestone, Colorado, to start training to retake their homeland. Victory was assured!

  Enter the Dalai Lama, who got wind of the program. The Dalai Lama was an absolute Buddhist pacifist and there’s no group more pacifist than Buddhist pacifists. He also had been basically the king of Tibet and was, like the Japanese emperor, the highest moral authority. He put his sandaled foot down and forbade any of them from engaging in combat. To do so would damn them for eternity upon the Wheel.

  So much for the armed Free Tibet program. And note to people who think my mother’s approach is right: The nonviolent approach of Gandhi and Martin Luther King requires a government that is in some way Western, moral, and beholden to the will of the people. Fascist and Communist dictatorships don’t give a shit. Anything but an armed Free Tibet program is flapping your gums to no avail. End international relations pro-tip.

  So the Tibetans were told to not talk to anyone about the original plan, each given a small severance package and residency papers and the CIA walked away.

  That left about five hundred Tibetans in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. (Not to mention a bunch of CIA case officers who had to find a new career specialty. Fortunately, the Vietnam War was just heating up…) All the mines were closed and there were about no jobs.

  Paradise! The land of opportunity! To Tibetans, Crestone looked like nirvana! There was so much water! (Remember the thing about the sand dunes.) There were electric lights! You didn’t have to go collect sticks over miles of parched terrain to cook dinner and hold off the biting cold of a Tibetan summer!

  To make a long story short, they settled in. They started businesses which covered the whole “no jobs” thing. They got irrigation credits and started farms. They walked the hills and found overlooked mineral deposits, found out who the local babu was that had to be paid off and started small mines. (Mining in Tibet had been even more tightly controlled than in the US and almost as corrupt.) They dug in and worked and not a few of them became rich.

  The United States is a nation of immigrants. We need more like the Tibetans.

  Some of them had eventually moved away. There was a large Tibetan population in Seattle for example. That was where I hooked up with them. The occasional times that I’d needed a charm in Seattle I’d used either Chinese or Tibetans. It always boggled them that a round-eye could speak their language and in many cases read the ancient tongues better than they could.

  But the CIA hadn’t only brought fighters. They’d also brought shamans because if you’re going to move a group as tied in to the supernatural as the Tibetans, that’s what you do. They won’t move without having a lama or a shaman tell them which way is the correct way to place their foot. Because, let me make this clear, Tibet really is rife with hoodoo. Go up the wrong valley in Tibet and you’re going to get your soul sucked out and your bones spit on the ground.

  Some of those shamans were still around. Older now, creakier, more powerful, and a few of them very knowledgeable. When the shamans in Seattle had a question they couldn’t answer, they’d take a pilgrimage to Crestone. And when it was really tough, they’d talk to Father Pema. Pema meant Lotus but it wasn’t considered by the Tibetans to be a girly name. The lotus has a special meaning in Buddhism. And Father Lotus was the most powerful and knowledgeable Tibetan shaman in the New World.

  Crestone still looked like an Old West mining town. Many of the downtown buildings were from the original boom period in the late 1800s. Single-story, clapboard siding, covered porches elevated to get away from the mud when it, rarely, rained. There were some newer houses, a few brick, mostly cheap vinyl siding and single-story. Cars were up on blocks in many yards and there were a few vegetable gardens here and there. Only the main drags, Colorado 71 and Country Road 5/10, were paved.

  Father Pema’s house was on Alder Street near North Crestone Creek. The house was old, clapboard, but was well cared for. Freshly painted with a straggling front lawn and a garden on the side that I suspected ran mostly to medicinal and magical herbs. Hopefully all of them were legal but some of Tibetan medicine used hemp extracts. I suspected those plants were somewhere up in the mountains, probably tended to by apprentices. And some Tibetan medicinal plants were more powerful than peyote if not on the controlled substances list.

  Father Pema was tricky. Sometimes he’d talk to a round-eye and sometimes not. Hell, sometimes he’d blow off other shamans. And he didn’t have a phone: if you wanted to talk to him you had to come see him. Calling ahead wasn’t preferred. You presented yourself at his house and he’d get to you at his convenience.

  But if he had a weakness, it was the same as Madam Courtney’s. And I had two bottles of a locally made, New Orleans, dark spiced rum with me.

  It was late spring by then but there were still patches of snow in sheltered areas and coming from New Orleans it was cold as shit. I’d rented a car at the nearest airport. The heater didn’t work. I was freezing my ass off. It felt wonderful.

  I walked up on Father Pema’s porch and knocked on the door. It was answered by a young male Tibetan who looked like one of the “round-eyes all need to be buried” types.

  “I’m looking for Father Pema,” I said in Tibetan. I held out the bottles still in a brown paper bag. “I bring gifts.”

  “Father Pema does not talk to barbarians,” the kid said haughtily.

  “He has spoken to me before. It regards certain writings of a lama from the first century.”
>
  I put this in correct Tibetan phraseology which was more or less: The words of a grand master of the eternal Wheel from the time of the King of the Eighteenth Lotus Petal Lying on the Waters of the Buddha.

  Which clearly confused the hell out of Pema’s new apprentice.

  “The what?” he said in English.

  “I’ve got some Tibetan writing from the first century A.D. I need his interpretation.” I switched to English and tapped the satchel on my hip. “I also need him to figure out what material I need to destroy a major mava. And by major I mean the largest ever found in North America. I’m known to Father Lotus. Tell him it’s Tiewan.”

  “I’ll see if he’s in.” The kid took the bottles. He still looked puzzled.

  I took a seat on one of the rockers on the porch and settled down to wait. It might be a few seconds, it might be days. That was the way Father Pema worked.

  As it was, it was about two hours when the door opened and Father Pema walked out.

  He was ancient. Exact ages, like real names, are something the Tibetans don’t talk about. The birth date of a child has magic significance so they’re cagey about their birthdays. But he had to be around ninety.

  He was short—I’ve never seen a tall Tibetan—wiry, very muscular legs and a grip like an industrial press. “Iron Hand. What problems do you bring an old man this time?”

  “We suspect there is a mava in New Orleans,” I said in Tibetan, pulling out my notes from Oxford. “A great beast of the deep with many parts that extend long distances. The notes I have called it a ‘mother of worms.’”

  “There is a mother of worms in this land?” Pema exclaimed.

  Tibetans don’t show fear or surprise. He was afraid and surprised.