away long enough to blow a cloud of smoke in our direction before barking, “What do you want?”
“Reave sent us,” Bronx replied while I coughed, gasping for some clean air.
“Oh. You’re him, huh?” Her eyebrows jumped toward her hairline and her mouth hung open in surprise. Apparently I wasn’t exactly what she’d been expecting.
“Yeah, I’m him,” I said.
“You gotta come inside to do your thing?”
“It helps. Reave said he wanted this place thoroughly protected. If I don’t know what I’m protecting, things could go wrong.” I leaned close, flashing a wicked grin while struggling to ignore the gagging body odor rising from her. “Horribly, painfully wrong for anyone inside.”
The woman jerked away from me, her dull brown eyes going wide. She pulled open the door and moved out of the entrance so Bronx and I could enter the house. From the exterior, it looked like a normal suburban house. You would have expected to see a tidy living room with upholstered furniture in floral patterns, neatly piled magazines on the coffee table, and maybe a stack of cartoon DVDs beside the TV in the corner. You would have been wrong.
The house was a lie. It had been chosen so it wouldn’t draw any attention. The police didn’t expect to find a lab for manufacturing lethal drugs in the middle of suburbia. They were looking for things like that in the slums on the other side of town.
The curtains were drawn over the front windows and the living room was lit by a single desk lamp resting on an old orange crate. A large man sat on a metal folding chair behind the crate, cleaning one gun while another was disassembled and resting on the crate. A small TV played in the corner, sound muted so he could hear our conversation at the front door. The guard watched us as we entered, but said nothing.
The stinky woman shut the door behind Bronx. She dropped her half-burned cigarette on the hardwood floor and crushed it under her stained pink house slipper before guiding us to the back of the house. We passed through an empty dining room and she started toward the kitchen, but I stopped her at the stairs leading to the second floor.
“What’s up there?”
She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Couple cots. Bathroom. Reave don’t keep any kind of furniture or valuables here.”
“Where are the other guards?” Bronx asked. The woman narrowed her eyes and I held my breath. I didn’t want her to whip out a cell phone and call Reave to check our story. I wanted to get in and out. “He needs to know. Otherwise your own guards could be locked out.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” she murmured, and it was hard not to laugh because Bronx was just piling on the bullshit. “The other two are picking up dinner. There’s usually only three guards here, plus me and my husband. Except on delivery and pickup days. Then Reave sends over four more guards.”
We continued to the kitchen, where we found all the counter space covered with take-out containers and greasy fast-food bags that desperately needed to be thrown out. The trash was overflowing with empty beer bottles and more rotting food. This place needed more than extra security. It needed a cleaning service, but then both the people I had seen so far also needed a few lessons in personal hygiene.
At the back of the house, the woman pulled open another door and we descended into the basement. This wasn’t one of those nice finished basements with a big-screen TV, minifridge, and pool table. This was an old-fashioned basement with cold stone walls, concrete floor, and exposed pipes overhead. All the lights were bright bare bulbs and an odor of mildew hung in the air.
A man looked up from where he was leaning over a long table, his black eyes enlarged by his thick glasses. “Where the hell have you been, woman? I’m ready for the next batch,” he shouted as we came into view. Along the wall behind him was another long table, but this one held a row of silver boxes and several glass containers with tubes coming out of them.
“Those men Reave called about arrived,” she snapped irritably, waving one hand back at Bronx and me.
The man’s eyes settled on us and his frown deepened. “Why they down here?”
“We need to see all of the premises so that the work can be done properly,” Bronx said, but the man didn’t seem to be as trusting as his wife. His frown deepened as his fists landed on his hips.
“Is that one of the new gravity convection ovens or are you still using forced air?” I asked, stepping around the woman to approach the table. The man straightened, his frown disappearing as he glanced over his shoulder at the row of ovens behind him.
“The two on the far end are forced air. I just got in the new gravity convection,” he said slowly, sounding as surprised as Bronx looked beside me. Unlike a lot of tattoo artists, I had studied various methods of preparing ingredients used in potions. Most tattoo artists bought their ingredients prepared for them, while I liked to work with the raw materials. The result was that I knew a fair amount about the machines found in professional laboratories.
“How do you like it?” I asked, scratching my head as I looked over the ovens. “I’ve worked with the forced air for years and think they’re great. I’m reluctant to change when I think something works just fine.”
“The gravity is a dream,” the man said with a chuckle, his whole demeanor relaxing as he imagined that he was talking to someone who was in the business as well. “It took me forever to talk Reave into getting me one, but it has sped up production. It’s a lot more reliable than the forced air.”
“You’ve got a great collection of desiccation jars, particularly the vacuum ones. I wasn’t expecting you to use those.”
He shrugged as he took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses on the hem of his dirty Black Sabbath T-shirt. “They come in handy if you get backed up. If we can’t get the livers directly into the ovens after harvesting, they’ll go into the traditional desiccators, but if we need to let them sit for a while after coming out of the ovens, we’ll drop them into the vacuum desiccators. With all the moisture in the air down here, we have to be careful that the product doesn’t get contaminated.”
I nodded, pretending to be interested in his tools and gadgets when my stomach was churning inside. I knew the basics of how fix was produced. Pixies were torn open, their insides ripped out and separated. Their livers were used for the drug, but most of their other organs could be sold to vendors for potions and a few delicacies. The livers were thrown into laboratory-grade ovens and dried until they could be pounded into a fine powder, which was later snorted or injected by trolls, ogres, giants, and other large races. A smaller creature’s heart would quite literally explode in its chest in a matter of seconds.
“Yeah, that’s got to be a problem,” I murmured before turning back to the man. “Do you keep the pixies on-site?”
“Have to. The product has to be fresh.”
“Can I see the room they’re kept in?”
The man’s expression closed once again as he crossed his arms over his slightly bulging stomach. “I don’t know why you need to see that.”
At the same time I could hear the heavy thump of two sets of footsteps descending the wooden stairs into the basement. The men fetching dinner had returned. Excellent—more gun-wielding assholes running around this enclosed space. Three people with guns we might have been able to handle quietly, but five was getting tricky. The scent of salty fries and greasy burgers hung heavy in the air, adding to the uncomfortable gurgling in my stomach.
I forced an indifferent shrug. “Fine. Reave said to protect the house. It was my understanding that meant the most important parts of the house. I’ll just do the upstairs. You can explain to Reave why I didn’t protect the pixie storage room. You can also tell him that I’m not making a second trip. I’ve got better things to do with my time.”
Bronx was expressionless as he started to follow me back toward the stairs. I didn’t even reach the bottom stair when the man was anxiously calling me back.