McGoo took a long sip of his cinnamon latte. “You really want me to stand here and make a list?”
“Instead, how about making a few calls, bring in some backup, and bust down a door?” My face wasn’t good at expressions anymore, but I made sure I looked absolutely confident. “One condition, though—I get to come along. I have to make sure my clients’ interests are served.”
“And who exactly is your client?”
“About a hundred oppressed golems. We’re going to have a civil rights suit for unsafe and inhuman working conditions, employee abuse, health hazards. You know how Robin is when she gets feisty.”
“Sure do.” McGoo nodded with a wistful smile. “All right, let me get back to the precinct house, file some paperwork, twist some arms. If I get this rubber-stamped, we should be ready to roll by twilight.”
Before they busted down the door to the underground sweatshop, McGoo told me to stand behind the five cops with us. “Just in case there’s any gunfire,” he said.
“Gunfire? I can handle being shot better than you can. I’ve already been through the experience a few times.” (All but once after I was already dead, fortunately.) Even now, my jacket sported several bullet holes that had been repaired by a not-too-skilled zombie seamstress named Wendy. I could have bought a new jacket, but I rather liked the reminder. Sheyenne thought it lent me character.
“Don’t give me more heartburn, Shamble. I ate my last meal at the Ghoul’s Diner.” Too often, last meal was an apt phrase at the Ghoul’s Diner.
I hung back. “It’s your show, buddy.” I hoped we had the correct address. I’d never live it down if I accidentally called a raid on an old witch’s bridge club.
When we crept along the shadow-choked alley past a rusty Dumpster, the brownish fumes wafting up made the cops cough and rub their stinging eyes. I saw four rats lying dead on the ground next to the Dumpster, their mouths open, their little paws clutching their throats in agony. I knew this had to be the place where Bill had dumped the toxic hot sauce.
A metal door set into the brick alley wall was marked with hexes and protective spells—standard stuff. Since the Big Uneasy, all search warrants came with counterspells that nullified home-security hexes and protective runes.
McGoo wielded the battering ram with obvious relish. He smashed the lock, pushed open the bent wreckage, and yelled down the stairs. “Police! We have a search warrant!”
The raid team charged down the cement steps into the subterranean levels, trying to outdo one another with their enthusiasm. “Freeze!” “Stop where you are!” “Hands up!” I hurried after them, keeping my .38 in its holster, but I could draw it if necessary.
I heard deep-voiced groans from the underground lair and a high-pitched yelp of panic. “Don’t shoot! I surrender!”
The golem workshop was a cesspit—and I don’t mean that as a good thing. The place reeked of rot and wet clay, the sour stink of mudflats on a humid summer day. A crowd of clumsily formed, mass-produced golems stood shoulder to shoulder at cramped work stations, applying labels, filling bottles, operating silkscreen presses or thermal package sealers, printing and folding T-shirts, wrapping salt and pepper shakers, boxing up snacks labeled “Certified Unnatural.” Crates and crates of finished souvenirs were stacked against a wall, ready for shipment.
Even during the raid, the golems continued to work, trying to meet their quotas. The sound they made was not quite a song, but a low miserable chant that caused the brick support pillars to thrum.
At the far end of the underground chamber, a gold-painted supervisor’s chair sat like a throne. The tall necromancer, presumably Maximus Max, sat on the throne and flailed his long-fingered hands. He wore a purple robe embroidered with crudely stitched symbols; I wondered if he had done the embroidery himself. Though I’d never heard of necromancers taking up cross-stitch, I’d seen plenty of strange things in the Quarter.
Max had a long horsey face, as if someone had taken his chin and stretched his head beyond tolerance levels. He was balding, his sparse brown hair in a comb-over that he must have been able to see in a mirror. The center of his forehead sported a third eye drawn in eyeliner. He had been working on a digest-sized book of sudoku puzzles.
“Maximilian Grubb, I have a warrant for your arrest,” McGoo said.
He had run the records: Maximilian Grubb, aka Maximus Max, was a two-bit necromancer with a rap sheet of petty crimes. Nothing major, nothing violent—just a lifetime of questionable choices.
Max kept his hands up in surrender, terrified. “On what charge? I’ve done nothing wrong. I run a good clean business here!”
“One of your workers—a golem named Bill—filed a complaint. And on first glance, I see about a dozen permit violations.”
The necromancer missed the point entirely. “You found Bill? I thought he’d gotten lost.”
I said, “Bill has engaged the services of Chambeaux and Deyer on behalf of himself and his fellow golems.” I looked around the subterranean chamber. “The inhuman work conditions are pretty obvious.”
“Inhuman? But they’re golems!” As the cops put Maximus Max in handcuffs, he remained distraught, babbling excuses. “I’m a reformed necromancer! At least I don’t play with dead things anymore. I’m just trying to make a living.”
McGoo and his companions ladled out water to the listless golems, who gratefully moisturized their clay skin.
I wandered to the sealed crates of souvenirs ready for shipment, and when no one was looking, I pulled the delivery label off one box. If there was more to this black-market souvenir racket, I wanted to know the details. The cases don’t solve themselves. I slipped the tag into the pocket of my sport jacket.
McGoo came up to me, shaking his head. He pulled out a T-shirt that showed a cartoon figure of a hairy werewolf who had yanked down his pants to flash his bare buttocks. Full Moon in the Unnatural Quarter.
“Scout’s honor, I’ve never seen so much stupid junk in my life,” he said. “We’re going to impound tons of it for the case—and I mean tons. We’ll have to build a separate evidence locker.”
“Or maybe you could hold an officers’ benefit yard sale,” I suggested.
McGoo picked up a black whoopee cushion billed as Sounds just like a real outgassing corpse! “When I was a kid, my parents took me on camping trips—it was rainy and miserable and full of mosquitoes, but at least it was a family vacation. Who in their right mind would want to visit the Quarter as a tourist?”
“I guess there isn’t any place on Earth too seedy to be commercialized.”
As the necromancer was ushered off, his hands cuffed behind his back, McGoo impounded his book of sudoku puzzles as evidence. “Can’t be too careful. Might contain potential spells.”
The hundred golems were freed, and Bill would be pleased at how this had turned out. Even I was surprised at how swiftly we had shut down the sweatshop. Case closed, justice served.