The Green Lama: Scions (The Green Lama Legacy Book 1) (2 page)

Reynolds waved a placating hand at Wilfred as a chunk of grey matter dripped down the oar, but it was no use. “Calm down, boy, calm down. No need to get yourself worked up. They notice when you ain’t calm.”

“You hear that?” Wilfred asked, suddenly standing up. His eyes were wide and quivering, looking more like those of a child trapped in a dark room than a gangland thug’s. “Reynolds, please tell me you heard that.”

“It’s just seagulls, boy, coming fer dinner.” Reynolds kept his gaze trained on the deck and shook his head, hearing nothing but the waves. He felt his stomach twist again and tried to push the image of the woman’s shattered skull out of his mind. “Just seagulls.”

“Ain’t no seagulls that sound like that. This is something big, something nasty. Sounds like—”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Reynolds shouted. “Whatever you’re hearing is just in your head, boy. You keep on like this, the whole damn world will—” Then he heard it, off in the distance and moving closer, warbling and shifting like the tides. His teeth started to chatter. It definitely wasn’t seagulls. “Mary, Mother of God, what is that?”

“I told ya!” Wilfred exclaimed. “Told ya it weren’t no seagulls!”

“It’s screaming,” Reynolds said under his breath, remembering good ol’ Drew’s final moments. “It’s people screaming.”

Beneath the violent shrieks and wails, Reynolds could hear the rush of water, growing louder and louder, almost drowning out the screams. It was a ship; there was no doubt about that—a big one—moving fast the way it was cutting through the drink. With the brume this thick, they needed to get to shore as fast as they could.

“Jesus, what’s happening to them?” Wilfred asked, peering into the fog.

“Nothing we wanna find out,” Reynolds replied, stealing a glance at the body knocking up against their boat. He slapped Wilfred on the shoulder and climbed over to the oars. “Come on, boy-o, we need to get moving quick.”

But Wilfred kept watching the night. “I can hear them,” he whispered. His eyes rolled back and his voice grew monotone. “I can hear all of them. Every single one them, dying for the sunken city. Their blood feeds them.” He cocked his head unnaturally to the side.

Reynolds’s stomach twisted into knots. “Willy…?”

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh…
” Wilfred sang, as the screams grew louder. He twisted around, a Cheshire grin distorting his face, foam collecting at the corners of his mouth. “They have come here at last, for the stars are about to align.”

The screams suddenly went silent and the fog split open as the ship bore down on them. The boat splintered beneath them and Wilfred disappeared into the mayhem. The metal hull crashed against Reynolds’s chest, crushing his ribcage, before hitting his head milliseconds later, shattering his teeth, flattening his nose and bursting open his skull. Brain matter floated into the water as the tide pulled him down. If Reynolds could have felt it, he would have noticed the water was warmer than he expected. A pleasant relief for a man who had no chance to swim as his arms and legs were broken. Had he been alive as he sank to bottom alongside good ol’ Drew, his last thought would have been that this was all the Green Lama’s fault.

• • •

“Unhand me!” Tzu-hao Ming-yu clamored, struggling against his bindings. Raw sewage dripped off his robes and down his legs, trailing along the floor as he was dragged toward the holding cells. He was the sort of man who looked old even when he was young, and at twenty-four had a receding hairline speckled with grey, crow’s feet dashing his eyes. “Do you know who I am, barbarian?! I am royalty! You do not touch royalty.”

Lieutenant John Caraway rolled his eyes, lifted Ming-yu off his feet, and carried him down the hall like a sack of potatoes. Ming-yu had been in control of the opium trade in and out of Chinatown for the last few years and was linked to more than two-dozen murders throughout the city. They lost track of him during a raid of one of his brothels and Caraway had spent the better part of a month hunting him up and down the city, finally finding the crime lord hiding beneath an abandoned building downtown. After a gunfight and two men down, the bastard led them on a chase through the subway, down a manhole, and Caraway suddenly became much more familiar with the city’s sewage system than he had ever wanted to be.

“Royalty my ass,” Caraway growled, a dog at the end of his leash. “Royalty doesn’t run around the sewers like a goddamn rat. But don’t you worry, your majesty, you’ll be king of your own private cell real soon…”

Caraway was a tall barrel of a man; in another life he could have been a boxer or hired muscle but instead chose to spend two long years in the air fighting the Kaiser before coming home to put a badge on his chest. He was a good cop, the kind of man that would have made Eliot Ness’s shortlist, not that one could tell by looking at him. Besides his perfectly trimmed and waxed mustache, Caraway was perpetually disheveled, always looking as if he had spent the night sleeping on the couch—which was the case more often than not. Tonight, however, he would be sleeping in his own damn bed, he decided; Francesca had left him again and he might as well sleep diagonally if he could.

“Wayland!” he shouted to the spherical officer at the other end of the hall. “Tell me where we can give the King of Stink his throne.”

“Insolence,” Ming-yu swore on his breath.

“Next to Zenner,” Sergeant Evan Wayland said with a nod of his chins. Wayland had joined the force a thin man but had steadily expanded over the years and would qualify as a planet by the time he retired. “We just got the good congressman back for his trial. Well, one of them at least. Hopefully, our visiting sovereign won’t mind listening to the congressman whimper on about how the Murder Corporation was all a setup.”

“He still bitchin’ about that? That was over a year ago.”

Wayland shrugged. “You know how politicians are, the past is always debatable. Honestly, that’s—” He stopped short, his face scrunching up as Caraway approached. He covered his nose and mouth, tears forming at the corner of his eyes. “Holy Hell.”

Caraway tossed over Ming-yu before Wayland could stutter a response. “Hose him down first; I don’t want this place smelling like feces.”

“You might also want to think about doing that yourself, Boss,” Wayland said, holding Ming-yu at arm’s length.

“Thanks, Wayland, you really know how to make a girl feel pretty.”

“Well, when you look that good, Boss…”

“Shut up, Wayland.”

Wayland chuckled and pulled Ming-yu toward an empty cell. “Come on, Stinky.”

“Do you know who I am, you insolent pig?” Ming-yu shouted as Caraway walked away. “I am the son of the Devil himself. I am the son of Doctor Fu—”

“Yeah, Foo yourself, jackass,” Wayland retorted as the door closed behind him.

Caraway glanced at the clock hanging on the squad room wall, watching as the hands clicked to midnight, marking the end of another day as head of the Special Crime Squad. A wave of nostalgia briefly washed over Caraway, remembering when his days were only filled with rumrunners and pickpockets. That all changed three years ago when a brain surgeon named Frank Pelham put on a domino mask and started calling himself the Crimson Hand. For nearly two weeks, Pelham’s reign of terror spread from New York to Cleveland and would have stretched even further had it not been for the Green Lama.

Vigilante,
that’s what the Green Lama really was, no matter how much people liked to call him “hero.”

He had first read about the Green Lama in the gossip section of the
Sentinel,
an unsubstantiated rumor about a man in a green hooded robe, knocking around gangsters. At the time, Caraway was more than happy to write the Green Lama off as nothing more than a canard made to move papers, until one night that rumor showed up in his office. Back then, Caraway was just another cog in the wheel, but the Green Lama had seen him as something more. He handed Caraway a card with a green symbol on one side, a phone number—MOrningside 7-2363—on the other. The Green Lama bowed his head and promised he would be in touch before disappearing into the shadows like a wisp of smoke.

They had worked together—in a wholly unofficial capacity—ever since, the Green Lama proving to be not only an unparalleled asset in the war against crime, but something more than human, with strength and abilities that defied natural law. Apparently this was thanks to something called radioactive salts—artificial crystalline grains the Green Lama radiated with ions from a particle accelerator, rearranging their molecular structure to release the energy within. It all sounded ridiculous to Caraway, who was more willing to believe in sleight of hand than something that might have come out of a movie serial. He had never even seen the Green Lama’s true face and, while he had a number of theories on who was beneath the hood, he knew the Lama was at least a good man and, more importantly, a friend.

“Lieutenant Caraway… Boss!”

“Good Lord, it never ends,” Caraway grumbled, massaging his eyes, feeling the exhaustion radiating from his bones as Officer David Heidelberger raced over breathlessly. “Give me some good news, Heidelberger. It’s been a long night.”

“There’s been an accident, Sir. A big one,” Heidelberger said, trying to catch his breath. He was a foot shorter than most of the men in the Squad, his arms little more than twigs. Beneath his hat was a black mop of unruly clown hair that seemed to take on a life of its own. He wasn’t what Caraway would describe as the typical cop, but he was definitely one of the bravest.

“How big we talking?”

“Boss, they’re gonna be talking about this one for years.”

• • •

The Theatrical Boarding House sat on West Forty-Fifth Street, just off Broadway; each apartment little more than a hole in the wall with a faucet, bed, and mirror. Ma Smith, the house’s matron, was a cantankerous old woman prone to screaming swears that would make the filthiest sailor blush. The place smelled of stale cigarettes and liquor, the nights filled with the sounds of mattresses and moans as the tenants mingled indiscriminately.

Ken Clayton stood outside the decrepit old building smoking the last of his cigarette. He had moved to New York as a last minute gamble to restart his acting career, which had faltered after some initial success. Ken had the looks and talent of a leading man—he loved sitting in the darkened theatre and listening to the ladies swoon when he walked on screen—and wouldn’t be satisfied with a supporting role, let alone the extra work which had become his sole source of income by the time he left Hollywood. The bet had paid off; within a short time he had landed several major roles in local film productions and starred in the play
Shadow and Substance
for part of its run at the John Golden Theatre. He eyed the Theatrical Boarding House disdainfully; a first rate star didn’t belong in a fourth rate sty like this.

That wasn’t the truth, but for now, that was the reason he was giving.

He tossed the smoldering cigarette to the ground, extinguished it with his heel and walked inside.

“Oi!” a craggy voice rang from the sitting room. “What’re you doin’ comin’ ’ome so late? ’ave you no sense of decency?”

“None that I know of,” Ken replied with a shrug. He spun around to face Ma Smith standing in the foyer, her hands on her hips. She was a head-and-a-half shorter than him so he had to tuck his chin against his throat to look her in the eye. “It’s why my dad gave me a wad of cash, a suitcase, and made sure I walked out the door.”

“It’s yer walkin’ in that concerns me, Mr. Clayton,” she said pointedly, her jowls wobbling.

Ken smiled and bowed slightly. “Well, I’m just happy you’re thinking about me. Truly, Lady Smith, I’m touched.”

“Lady Smith!” she exclaimed cynically. She jabbed a finger into his chest. “You’re just lucky your checks never bounce, Mr. Clayton!”

“And why should they?” he asked, walking backwards up the stairs. “There’s plenty bouncing around in here already!”

“I run a reputable home here, Mr. Clayton!” she protested.

“I know!” he laughed, knocking his fist against the wall. “It has the reputation as the only place in the city where walls shake on their own!”

His room—he wouldn’t dare call it an apartment— sat at the far end of the second floor, overlooking a dank alleyway and brick wall going to rot. He fished into his pocket for his keys before deciding against it. He leaned his head on the door and sighed.

Every day was a performance, a constant pantomime to give everyone what they wanted to see, and it was beginning to wear on him. Even Chaplin stopped playing the Tramp. But there were no cameras to turn off for Ken, only an ever-present audience, always waiting to see the next act. The show would never end, no matter how much he wanted it to.

Thankfully, he had one person who would let him take off his mask.

He walked down the hall to the room marked two-one-four and lightly rapped his knuckles against the door. “Red, it’s me.” He could hear voices whispering within and waited several seconds before he asked: “Can I come in? Red?” He checked the knob and found it unlocked. His stomach knotted. “Red, you there?”

Ken took a deep breath and grabbed the sidearm strapped beneath his jacket. Such a strange thing for a movie star to have, he reflected. He closed his eyes, took a long breath in, and prepared himself for what he was about to find. He slowly turned the knob, cocked back the hammer, and burst into the room.