Hungry Ghosts (Eric Carter #3)(11)

The rest of the drive to Zacatecas is uneventful. No speeding headlights come my way, no chatter of AK fire. I pull into the city around four in the morning. Traffic’s increased on the highway. Semi-trucks, mostly. Some commuters. The hustle and bustle of a city just waking up, getting ready to start its day.

Not everything down here is violence and drug money. It’s like anywhere else in the world. Most of the people are just trying to get by. Live their lives, find love, have families. When all I see is ghosts and death it’s sometimes a little hard to remember that.

I pull into Zacatecas proper and start looking for a place to crash. Not long before I find a hotel off the highway. Big, yellow box of a building in between two vacant lots filled with scrub brush, the only decoration a bizarre, rococo-style double-staircase leading to the lobby that looks as out of place as a wig on a pig.

I get out of the car as a hot wind picks up. It’s a short burst of blast-furnace air. Like the Santa Ana winds up in L.A., but harder, dryer. Like sandpaper against my skin. Just as suddenly it’s gone, replaced with a cooler breeze that makes more sense for the early hour.

I tell myself that it’s just wind. But I have to wonder about that. Nothing is “just” anything these days. Maybe I’m paranoid. Enemies in the shadows I can’t see. Those can sometimes be just as dangerous as the ones I can.

The wind has me on edge a lot these days. Any wind. The wind can be playful or it can be cruel. I went to a wind spirit in the desert outside Los Angeles for help finding someone not too long ago. It sees everything. It goes everywhere. It isn’t just wind. It’s Wind.

The Wind down here isn’t the same as the one up there, but the edges blur. What one knows they all know. Their needs and desires blend together until they’re indistinguishable from each other. Anger one in Alaska, expect to feel the brunt of it in the Kalahari.

The price for the information was fire. Most winds enjoy a good blaze. In the parched, dry parts of the American Southwest fire season’s like fucking Christmas. It pushes the flames along, fans them higher, spreads them across hills, down mountains, into valleys. And if people are in the way, well, what does the Wind care? It was around long before humans showed up.

But it wasn’t just any fire it wanted. It was the burning down of my home. Joke’s on it. I don’t have one. The only place I’ve considered home burned down over fifteen years ago with my parents inside of it. I own a place in upstate New York, but I haven’t been there in five years. I bounce around, keep moving. Home is as alien a concept for me as dry land is for a fish.

So of course I said yes. I figured I’d gotten off easy. At most some flea bag motel would catch fire. And then it pointed out to me that I was the new Aztec King of the Dead. It wanted me to burn down Mictlan.

Why, I couldn’t say, but I have some guesses. Mictlan’s a pretty specific thing to want to burn. That’s like asking somebody to burn down Cleveland. The Wind wouldn’t want it to burn unless it had a reason, and there are only a few that I can think of.

I have no idea how I’m going to accomplish this. May as well have tasked me with burning down Valhalla or Hell.

But if I don’t do it, it’s going to come back on me and I’m not looking forward to that fallout.

I grab my messenger bag out of the trunk and head up the ridiculous staircase into the hotel. Inside it’s clean but shabby. A front desk, some leather club chairs that look like they were salvaged off the side of the road, an air-conditioner that rattles and grinds. The smell of cigarettes and Febreze is heavy in the air. A woman in a brown, bad-fitting polyester suit coat sits slumped on a stool with her head on the counter, snoring.

I ring the bell next to her head and she startles awake almost falling out of her chair.

“Whoa, hang on,” I say. “All good. I’m not gonna eat ya, or anything. I just need to get a room.”

“A room? Oh. Yes. A room.”

There aren’t many cars in the lot, so I doubt there are a lot of people here. She probably hasn’t seen anyone in hours and probably never does this time of the morning. I pass her a handful of peso notes. “Preferably near the elevator. On a floor without a lot of people on it. Better yet, no people on it.”

She rubs sleep out of her eyes and counts the notes. “This is too much.”

“Think of it as a tip.”

Money talks no matter what country you’re in. She pokes at a computer terminal behind the counter. “There’s nobody on the third floor.”

“That would be perfect.” She codes a plastic keycard and hands it to me.

I can feel her staring at me as I cross the lobby to the elevator. I give her a big smile as the doors close.





Like the lobby, the third floor is clean, but shabby. Cheap carpet, cheap light fixtures. This place is so new there are no ghosts. Nobody’s died here, yet. I can feel a few Wanderers outside, and the ones that have been following me since Tijuana haven’t caught up with me, yet.

I retrieve a can of red Krylon from my bag, give it a shake and spray a large, circular rune on the floor of the elevator. I press my hand to the floor and send some power into it. I do the same on the outside door, the stairwell door, a couple of spots down the hall and finish up with a few inside the stairwell itself. I paint the same one on the landing that I put on the elevator floor.

If anybody steps onto this floor through the elevator or the stairwell, I’ll know about it. And if I don’t like their look I have a nasty surprise waiting for them.