Bowles Motel and Lodge
South Bend, Indiana
Monday 15 November 2005
"That's the problem with the job, Helena, sometimes you hit a dead end."
Helena Harper silently agreed with her younger sister, Deborah as they did their final check of the motel room before hauling their stuff out of the car. Their mother had drilled into them from a young age always to scour a room before checking out, as it wouldn't do to leave personal stuff lying around.
Especially when some of that stuff included exotic weaponry and ancient grimoires. Generally, they were good about cleaning out the room. There was that one time in Key West when Helena had left the tin of salt next to the bed, and she'd insisted on turning the car around on Route 1 and heading back to retrieve it. Deborah had asked why they couldn't just go to a supermarket and get another one—it was a pretty common household item, after all—but Helena had insisted that it was a principle of the thing.
Which had been fine right up until the clerk asked why the two sisters had a big tin of salt in their hotel room, and Helena had just raised any eyebrow. With Deborah watching and not even bothering to hide her grin, Helena just said with a deep husky 'don't fuck with me' tone it was none of his fucking business.
"Sis," Deborah had said as they went back out to the car, a retrieved salt in hand, "Wasn't that a little harsh, he basically almost shat himself! You saw that right?''
"Yes, now let it go," Helena had replied with a scowl on her face.
Today, they were checking out and hitting the road, their latest job not having been a job at all.
Deborah was still talking as they headed out to the car. "But at least we got to see beautiful downtown South Bend."
"Yeah, real hot spot," Helena muttered as Deborah opened the trunk.
"Hey, we go where the jobs take us."
"Or don't. It really was a suicide, Debora. A normal, run-of-the-mill suicide."
Deborah shrugged. "It happens.'' She tossed her bag into the rear of the trunk, rolling it over the boxes of weapons and supplies. Helena did likewise, using her left hand, as her right was still in a arm brace from when that zombie boy broke it back in Lawrence.
Helena has a strong attachment to the black 1967 Chevrolet Impala, the family car their father passed down to their mother and to Helena when she turn sixteen. But Deborah didn't have that attachment since she was just a baby when their dad died. (Then again, Deborah sometimes thought she didn't have the same attached to her abusive ex-boyfriend then Helena had to the Impala.)
However, even Deborah had to admit that the massive trunk was a great benefit, given that they lived their entire life out of this car. The rear of the voluminous trunk was taken up with three bags: Deborah's bag, Helena's bag, and the laundry bag. The last one was starting to bulge.
"We're gonna need to do a laundry run soon, Deb." Helena said.
"Not here," Deborah said quickly. "I don't think that cop was too thrilled with ace reporters Melody and Melissa, We'd better split before she decides to run my face through her computer."
Helena nodded in agreement. Deborah was still wanted for series of murders committed by a shapeshifter taking her form in St. Louis earlier that year, and there was just no way "a mutated freak who looked just like me did it" was going to fly with the U.S. Attorney's office.
Helena closed the trunk and they headed to they main office. Like most of the places the Harpers stayed, the Bowles Motel and Lodge was dirt-cheap with minimal amenities. All they needed was a roof, a bed, and a working shower—though the latter was a hit and miss with some of the places they stayed—and they weren't exactly rolling in dough.
Fighting demons and monsters and thing that go bump-in-the-night was important, but it didn't pay. They lived off credit card fraud and Helena's pool and poker winnings. That meant the Hyatt was not an option.
They entered the shabby office, which had cracked wood paneling, a badly stained beige carpet, and a pockmarked front desk. An older woman sat behind that desk, puffing away on a cigarette while sitting under a red no smoking sign and reading a Dan Brown book. Her face was caked with enough makeup to allow her to attend a Halloween party as the Joker, and her hair was sprayed within an inch of its life into something that probably wanted to be a beehive. Deborah was fairly sure she could have hit that hairdo with any weapon in the Impala's trunk and not done a lick of damage to it. She wore a name badge that said Monica.
"Hey," Deborah said, "We're checking out."
Monica took a final puff on the cigarette, then stubbed it out in the ashtray. "You're Cherrywood, right?" She asked with a scratchy voice.
Helena managed not to roll her eyes. Just once, Helena wished Deborah would pick an inconspicuous alias.
"That's right," Deborah said with a smile. "We're ready to check out."
"Yeah, there's a problem. Your credit card was declined. I'm gonna need another one."
There was Deborah's wide-eyed look again, but this time Helena didn't smile. "Declined. Really."
Deborah looked at Helena helplessly, then turned back to Monica. "Could you try it again, please?'
She gave Deborah a withering look. "I tried it three times. That's all they'll allow."
"Did they say why?"
"No, no reason. You wanna call the credit card company? You can use this phone." She picked up the desk phone—which, Helena was appalled to see, was a rotary dial—and held it up for Deborah to take.
"Uh, no, that, uh—that won't really help."
Helena realized why Deborah was stalling. She had other credit cards, but none of the said Deborah Cherrywood on them.
Quickly Helena stepped forward, reaching into her back pocket, and said, "I'll get it." She removed one of her own fake credit cards from her wallet and handed it to Monica.
She took it and started at it, which Helena had been hoping she wouldn't do, since this one didn't say Cherrywood either. "Thought you two were sisters?"
Without missing a beat, Helena said, "We are, but I was adopted. By the time I tracked down my birth parents, they had both died, so I changed my name to Matthews in tribute to them."
Monica's face split into a rictus that Helena supposed could've been called a smile. "That's so sweet of you. What a nice girl you are." She ran the card through the machine, then entered the total for the three nights they stayed.
The wait for the machine to check was interminable. Deborah, to her credit, had recovered, and she had her best poker face on.
Finally, after several eternities, the machine beeped and the word approved on the small screen.
"All right," Monica said, still smiling, as the whirr of a printer could be heard under the desk. "Here's your card back, Ms. Matthews."
"Thank you," Helena said, retrieving it and putting it back in her wallet.
"Such good manners. Mr. and Mrs. Cherrywood obviously raised you both right."
Deborah smiled. "Yes, ma'am, they did a bang-up job."
Monica then handed the printout, as well as the credit card machine receipt, Helena. "Just sign here, and you can be on your way."
Once that was all done, they went back outside. "Nice save there, Lena," Deborah said with a grin. "Y'know, I'm finally starting to get it."
Helena frowned. This sounded suspiciously like the beginning of a lengthy diatribe, the end of which would be a joke at Helena's expense. "Get what?"
"Well, Sis, We grew up together, and that whole time, nothing about you ever screamed 'CIA' at me. So when you CIA Academy, it kinda threw me. But I've been watching you last year, and I think I figured it out."
Here it comes. Helena tried not to groan.
"You can shovel manure as good as anyone I've ever met. That line you pulled on Monica there with them adoption? Beautiful. And with a straight face."
In fact, Helena's skills at lying—both in terms of pretending to be someone else and also misleading people as to the true nature of her life and of the world itself—had been on of the things that attracted her to the law. Her life as the child of a hunter of supernatural creatures, and of being trained to be a hunter herself, had given her these skills anyhow, it only seemed natural to put them to good use.
That wasn't what she told her sister, though. "Yeah, I can pull the wool over people's eyes. And I do most of the research and know most of the lore. And I'm good with weapons and the hand-to-hand combat." They arrived at the Impala, and Helena gave her sister a grin as she stepped up to the drivers door. "So, uh, what do I need you for, exactly?"
Before Deborah could construct a reply, her phone started playing PINK's "So What."
"For that matter," Helena added, "I'm the one who showed you how to download ringtones."
Pulling the cell phone out of her pocket, Deborah scowled. "I would've figured it out eventually." She flipped it open and glanced at the number, which caused her eyes to go even wider than they had in the office. Putting the phone to her ear, she said, "Annette?"
That surprised Helena. Annette Birkin ran a road house that catered to hunters. She and Deborah had recently learned that Annette's late husband died when he was on a hunt with their mother, and it put a bit if a strain in their relationship—especially since they only found out because Annette's daughter Sherry snuck out and went on a hunt with her and Deborah against Annette's very strenuous objections.
Years of listening to loud music and using firearms had played merry hell with Deborah's hearing, so she kept her cell's volume up way too loud. That meant Helena could hear Annette's tinny voice over the phones speaker.
"Listen," She said, "I may have a job for you girls."
"Really? 'Cause—"
"It's for Albert. He wouldn't ask himself, but I figured he did you two a favor, so you might be willing to do him one back." Annette seemed to be barreling through the conversation, not letting Deborah get a word in.
Or, at least trying not to. Keeping Deborah quiet was usually a forlorn hope. "Sure, I guess." She smirked. "Always had a soft spot for Wesker. What's he need?"
Annette gave the particular of the case to Deborah, and did it in a lower voice, so Helena couldn't make it all out. Albert was a former FBI/CIA agent who nonetheless was a genius and able to track demons via computer, a trick Helena had never mastered despite many attempts. As Deborah had once said, Albert's geek-fu was strong. Unlike Deborah, Helena did entirely believe his claim to of gone to MIT—for starters, he said it was a college in Massachusetts, and anyone who'd gone there would know it was in Cambridge—but they did believe that Albert had the know-how, based on the times he'd helped them out.
"Okay. We'll check it out." With that, Deborah flipped the phone shut and looked out the driveway. "That road'll take us to 80, right?"
Helena tried to remember the map. "I think so, yeah. Why, where's the job?"
Deborah ginned. "That town so nice, they named it twice: New York, New York."
"Really?" Helena turned and went back to the trunk. "Open it up, I wanna show you something."
"Something in New York?" Deborah said, joining her at the back, since she stole the keys from her.
After Deborah hand the keys, Helena opened the trunk. Helena took a folder out of her bag. "It may not be anything, but I notice a couple of murders that took place there."
"Helena—it's New York. They get, like, fifty murders a day."
"Which is why these two probably flew under the radar." She took the clippings, Photocopied off the newspaper she'd looked in several different public libraries they'd visited recently. "First, we got a guy bricked in a building's basement." Helena handed Deborah an 81/2 by 11 sheet of paper with a filler news story in a section of the New York Daily New dedicated to a community news about a man named Mark Reyes, who was found bricked up in the basement of a house in the Bronx.
As Deborah glanced over three photocopy, Helena went on: "And this past Sunday, two college kids were beaten to death by an orangutan."
Deborah looked up at that. "Seriously?"
Helena nodded. "That's two murders that are right out of Edgar Allan Poe short stories."
"That's kind of a stretch," Deborah said as she handed back the story about the bricked-up man.
"Maybe—but they both took place in the Bronx, and Poe used to live in the Bronx. Plus, the first Maurer was on the fifth—they didn't find the body until two days later but it happened on the fifth, which was—"
"The last full moon," Deborah said with a nod. "Yeah, okay, maybe, but—"
Tossing the folder back in the trunk, Helena said, "And the orangutan was the last quarter." She didn't need to add that lots of rituals were based on the phases of the moon. "It's not that big of a deal, but since we're going to New York anyhow, I figured we could look into it while—uh, do whatever it is we're doing."
Deborah slammed the trunk shut. "Hunting. Some friend of Albert's is having ghost issues. So who's he gonna call?"
Helena chuckled. They both got into the car, Helena in the driver's seat. "That's really weird."
"What, that there's be a hunting? We see them all the time."
"No," Helena said with a shake of her head, "That Albert would have a friend."
With a chuckle of her own, Helena slid the key into the ignition. A grin spread on her face as the Impala hummed to life. "Hear that engine purr."
Squirming in the passenger seat, Deborah thought, I swear to God, if she starts petting the dashboard again, I'm walking to New York.
However, she was spared that. Helena shoved a fireflight disk into the player, twirled the volume up, and the was filled with the guitar opening to "Stand Up."
Helena turned to her. "Atomic batteries to power."
Glowering at her older sister, Deborah said, "I'm only gonna say, 'Turbines to speed' if you don't make a comment about me in short green pants."
Helena pull the gear shift down to R and said, "Let's move out." She backed out of the parking spot, then brought it down to D and sent them out to the open road.
