WHITE FLAME ON A SUNDAY
A JOE LEDGER AND DEACON CHALK YARN BY JAMES R. TUCK
Yeah, I know Joe Ledger.
Intense motherfucker he is, and if I’m saying that you know it’s the gospel truth.
Let me reel that in a bit, I don’t know Joe Ledger. We aren’t going out and doing bourbon shots to celebrate special occasions or taking long walks on the beach, but we worked together once and he more than had my back. In my line of work, that’s fucking gold.
What happened?
Pull up a chair, pour a drink, and I’ll tell it.
It all started in a shitty abandoned warehouse on the Southside of town outside the airport. Atlanta’s a lovely city, my hometown and all, but down by the airport it goes to hell. Local politics here have left us with miles and miles of lost real estate. Empty warehouses, abandoned mills, houses falling in on themselves. We ain’t Detroit, or even Memphis, but we have our bad side of town, as most cities do.
I’d picked up a tip that the White Flame had been active in Atlanta and they were targeting a shady deal happening on the Southside.
And when an ancient Sumerian blood cult that just won’t die sets up in my town you best believe I’m looking into it. The White Flame are like rats, they multiply faster than you can kill them. They’ve been around for thousands of years doing evil shit. I don’t know a lot about them. That’s not my gig, I have people for that. They deal in dark magick and human sacrifice, and that’s all I need to know to put a foot up the ass of whatever plans they have.
I followed that tip to a shithole place that used to make paint and now just stood on a kudzu-covered lot. Kudzu really will eat abandoned buildings. Kids here learn if you find a huge section of the shit, be careful because there’s something rotting underneath. Go climbing in it and you wind up falling forty feet into a dilapidated building you couldn’t even see.
So there I was, crouched in the dark behind some big mixing vat in the corner of the warehouse. It smelled like old latex and made my eyes burn, but I had a good view of the meet so I wasn’t moving.
No, I am not telling you how I know what old latex smells like.
The middle of the warehouse opened to an old loading dock, a big open space in front of what once was a rolling steel door. The door had fallen, or been torn down, and hung on to one side of the steel frame like a rusted curtain. Two pickup trucks had been pulled inside, real redneck-mobiles, jacked tires, rebel-flag bumper stickers, the whole nine yards. Four shitkickers stood by them. Two of the fellas were big hunks of meat, heads gleaming in the late afternoon sun that streamed in the open bay doors. Beefy arms full of jailhouse ink hung out of their T-shirts. Red suspenders and white laces in their boots put them as white pride assholes and not ashamed of it. I hate skinheads.
Nazi fucktards.
The other two with them were older, could have been their dads, maybe uncles. Both of them wore BDUs and had full heads of hair. The one on the left’s shirt had letters big enough for me to read from my vantage point.
It said WHITE MAKES RIGHT.
Goddamn idiots.
Across from them stood everything they hated.
Big Jolly and his crew.
A real piece of work, Big Jolly, selling some shit he had no business selling to some dumbasses who had no business buying it. Big Jolly wasn’t jolly at all, he was a ruthless bastard with a real cruel streak, but he came by the “Big” part of his name honestly. Big Jolly was a hefty sonuvabitch. Pushing 450 pounds at well under six feet, he was nearly as wide as he was tall. Lumber as a verb, not a noun. His suit lay over him like a tarp on a pile of garbage, tucking into folds and creases his mass made against itself. His crew was international and interracial. Three hard cases from three different continents probably here on exile for crimes against humanity.
Everybody packed heat.
The rednecks had a pair of pump shotguns and three handguns amongst them. Big Jolly’s crew were strapped, the Jamaican, in particular, holding a Mini-14 capable of slinging lead across the whole place if cut loose.
I was also strapped, you know I’m always strapped, but all their guns made me wish I’d put on the ballistic vest Tiff kept trying to get me to wear. But it was too hot to wear in the Georgia humidity, and most of the things I go against don’t use bullets.
It was a weird thought, even for a moment, considering the possibility of dying without wanting to and going on to be with my family. It made my stomach turn sour, so I pushed it aside.
I’m good at that. Been doing it for years.
But if I caught a bullet from one of these yahoos, Tiff would be pissed.
Back to work.
I couldn’t hear what was being said, I was too far for that, but I could see one of the older rednecks gesture and Big Jolly lift up the backpack he held.
It was a plain, dark gray backpack, like millions of people use every day. No markings on it, nothing to make it stand out. Generic. Damn near invisible if left in a busy area.
The best thing that could possibly be in that pack was drugs.
I had a shit feeling it wasn’t drugs.
I wasn’t there for that. My target was the White Flame and whatever they were going to do. I’m not law enforcement, I’m an occult bounty hunter. Fancy way of saying I hunt monsters for a living. Regular criminals I leave to the people who signed up for that.
But I’m not an asshole, I was going to take that pack out of play no matter what.
One of the skinheads pulled a duffel bag from the bed of one of the trucks and carried it over toward Big Jolly when the first creep of magick slid across the back of my neck.
One of my guns was out and in my right hand.
The magick rolled around me like a sticky fog in a shitty nightclub, that machine-generated bullshit that just coats your skin with a layer of chemicals that feel like movie popcorn butter. I couldn’t get a pinpoint on it, my ability is a bastard like that, all impression and slippery sensory clues, nothing specific, all of it wildly inconsistent, like spidey-sense that’s drunk. Sometimes it pisses me off, but it’s saved my ass more than once.
The White Flame was in the house, doing some magick shit, but I didn’t know what yet.
The skinhead with the duffel bag unzipped it and held it open. It was full of crumpled money.
Big Jolly nodded and began swaying forward, holding out the backpack.
That’s when the cultist tried to cut my head off.
I felt it more than saw it, the long wavy blade swinging out of the dark. I jerked away and dropped, my head hitting the vat in front of me, flashing a sharp jolt of pain across the backs of my eyes, but the flame knife missed me. I rolled, eyes watering, to find a cultist wrapped in black cloth swinging the blade back toward me.
My finger twitched three times and the .45 kicked three times, spitting lead into the center of him. He kept swinging, the flame knife dropping as he did, but it was just momentum. He was gone before he fell.
My ears buzzed inside as I turned back around, the reactionary earplugs I had in shut down from the boom of my pistol.
The meeting area had become a bloodbath.
Two dozen black-clad cultists had dropped from the shadows and began cutting people down. Already one of the skinheads lay on the floor, sliced open from throat to hip. His killer knelt beside his twitching body, shoving his hands in the open wound, drawing them out covered in blood and gore, and then using that blood to write out weird symbols on the cement floor.
Two of Big Jolly’s men had fallen as well, cultists beside them, painting with their blood.
Every line they scrawled, the magick in the air began to close around me, tightening like a noose.