what they would think if they got more than a passing glimpse at what I had saved.
Thankfully nobody else had stopped by at seven o'clock on a weekday morning. It was just me standing in front of my small roll-up door at unit C-17, the only eyes on me those of the crows resting on the rooftops, hoping I had something edible I might drop. I punched in my code - Dannie's birthday - and heard the lock release. Then I reached down and pulled up the door, slipping through the bottom and closing it from the inside in the space of a few seconds.
There was a small, battery-powered LED light strip on my left. I flicked it on. The storage space was illuminated in a soft white glow that only made it more macabre. I pulled the coat a little tighter. It was colder in here than it was outside.
I'd lost all of my corpses after Ms. Red. All except Dannie's cat. Mr. Timms was nice to keep around for nostalgia, but he wasn't going to do me much good in a fight. As a result, I'd needed to go on the hunt for a new complement of my own dolls, scanning the tri-state area obituaries, driving to cemeteries in the dead of night and digging up potentials. It was gruesome, disgusting work. It was often draining and even more often disappointing. It wasn't enough for the cadaver to be somewhat whole. Some people took too much energy to control. Others didn't respond well enough to the magic, maybe because when they had been alive they lived like they weren't. In any case, it was a ten-to-one ratio of digging up a body to keeping it.
My months in New Jersey had given me time to claim two new partners. One was a rough-cut, a seventeen-year-old prostitute who had been found strangled to death in an alley in Manhattan. Her name was Pepper, and what she lacked in experience, she made up for in potential.
The other was a bruiser named Carl 'The Punisher' Johnson. He was an amateur boxer who overdosed on a cocktail of 'roids and cocaine and found himself on the wrong side of the line. Six-foot three, three hundred pounds. He had gone three rounds against an ogre and almost won. Plus, his body was nearly pristine. He was the polished diamond.
They were both resting together in a large cardboard box in the left-rear corner, kept preserved and almost scentless by the cold air. I glanced over at the box, wishing I could bring one of them with me, and then turned to the right side.
That was where I kept my other tools of the trade. Guns. Lots of them. At one time, I had kept them in a trunk in the van, tossed in as if they didn't matter. Dannie used to handle the receipts, but after I got a better idea of how much they cost I started being a little more meticulous. Now I kept one small sidearm with me at all times. The rest were here, packaged separately in vaguely marked boxes, kept with rounds in the chamber and more wrapped in. All I had to do was grab the boxes I wanted and be on my way, and then make sure to put everything back in its proper place when I was done. It was a better system than the trunk had been, and it would be easier not to lose everything in the not-completely-impossible scenario that my van got ripped apart by shifters.
I only took one box from there. A Smith and Wesson 500. It was the most expensive gun in my arsenal, a tough weapon to manage and control. I didn't like it because it killed my shoulder to manage the recoil, and revolvers were always a pain in the ass to reload in a hurry. I felt like I might need it where I was going.
I left that box near the roll-up and slipped behind the guns, finding a duffel there. I leaned down and unzipped it, and then pulled out a few minor assistances. A set of lock picks, a small boot knife, and finally a credit-card sized piece of black plastic with an NFC chip hidden inside. An anonymous payment card. I'd already loaded the payment for the meds onto it.
I cast one more wistful look over at the box holding Carl and Pepper, picked up the box with the 500 inside and then slipped under the