The Voodoo Killings by Kristi Charish Read Free Book Online Page A

I said, and we started down the spiral steps into the city.
    The city unfolded in a series of wide tunnels with stores and apartments recessed into the walls all the way up to the arched ceilings. Those ceilings were high, considering how far down we were. Wrought iron lampposts reached out over the tunnels, gaslight lending the vibrancy of a city that comes alive at night.
    The twenty smaller tunnels, or streets, spilled out into First Street, a “main street” that stretched out for a mile. As on the other streets, the shops and apartments here resembled their frontier Seattle roots, even though they’d been built after the great fire. The only section of the city that had escaped the flames was the market, a large alley off to our left as we stepped off the stairs onto the city boardwalk. A dead-end offshoot of First Street, it was one of the few places large enough to accommodate rows of stalls.
    “Try not to stare, Cameron,” I said, and pushed him along the boardwalk and away from the staircase, which descended for two more levels, each with an identical layout. The second level wasn’t somewhere I went often, because it catered to zombies and ghouls. As for the third level? Well, the third ended at the subterranean docks. If you found yourself needing to go down there, you had big problems.
    I kept a hand on Cameron as we moved through the crowds coming out of the market. The pedestrian traffic rivalled that of any busy street in downtown Seattle, except that nothing here ever really shut down. Nate compared it to Las Vegas for zombies, though I didn’t see it. Not enough lights and the gambling broke out into fist fights more often than not, which was one of the reasons Lee didn’t keep poker tables in her establishment anymore.
    I held my breath as we passed by the food stalls that catered to zombies and ghouls. It wasn’t the smell that bothered me, but the fact that it reminded me of chicken noodle soup. I did my best not to look, either. I can handle dead bodies, but not a lot of unidentifiable hanging…things.
    We passed by zombies who looked almost normal and others where no way they were passing topside without a gallon of paint. I almost lost Cameron once when he stopped to stare at a ghoul, a type of zombie, sitting on a bench.
    “Sorry,” I said to the ghoul in apology, and towed Cameron back along the boardwalk. “You wouldn’t have stopped to stare if you knew what the serrated teeth were for,” I said.
    Halfway down the boardwalk, I turned down one of the narrower side streets, and after five more minutes of weaving through the foot traffic, we reached our destination: a dusty, gold-coloured shop window next to a set of saloon-style red doors. Gold Chinese characters decorated the doors and the edge of the window, and hanging above the entrance, also written in gold letters, was a sign announcing Damaged Goods.
    I noticed a pair of Chinese paper lanterns hanging just inside the window, white with red characters. Hunh, those were new. EitherLee got bored with the old ones or there’d been another fight. I was betting on the fight.
    “Well, Cameron. Here we are. What do you think?”
    Cameron examined the shopfront painstakingly. Then he turned to face me, confused. “You’re taking me to a dive bar?”
    I shrugged and pushed him ahead of me through the red saloon doors. “Depends on what you consider a dive bar.”

CHAPTER 4
    DAMAGED GOODS
    We stepped straight into a set of beaded curtains suspended over the entrance—not your classic hippie beads, but strings of bamboo painted white and decorated with red Chinese characters. Hmm, those were new too, and, oh…phew.
    I covered my mouth with the sleeve of my jacket; the air was loaded with paint fumes. Well, that explained why the place was empty for a Friday night. As I stood there giving my eyes a chance to adjust to the newly dimmed lantern light, I took in the scene that lay before me. Lee really had been redecorating.
    White