Twice as Dead copyright © 2025 by Harry Turtledove. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise without written permission except short excerpts in a review, critical analysis, or academic work.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Cover art by Dany V.

  ISBN EBOOK: 978-1-64710-124-4

  First Edition. March 2025.

  An imprint of Arc Manor Inc.

  www.CaezikSF.com

  ​I

  It had got dark outside without my noticing. Well, the venetian blinds were closed anyway. I didn’t want whatever was out there looking in at me. I didn’t want to do much looking out either.

  The Santa Anas were blowing, hot and dry. They rattled the palm fronds on the overgrown feather duster stuck in a hole in the sidewalk outside my building. I hate that noise. It reminds me too much of skeletons.

  I sat at my desk and tried to ignore it. The cat was asleep on the beat-up sofa next to the filing cabinet. The sofa is a faded lavender. Old Man Mose is red, and fuzzy. Except where he’d shed on it, they didn’t go at all.

  I shuffled the bills I hadn’t paid. I looked at the bills I’d sent out to people who hadn’t paid me. Even if a miracle happened and they all coughed up what they owed, I’d still be in the red. I haven’t seen a hell of a lot of miracles lately. How about you?

  “Shit,” I said, which was just what I meant. I reached into the bottom left desk drawer and pulled out the fifth of Wild Turkey that lived there with the blackjack and the crucifix and the brass knucks. The then-current fifth, I should say. I took a knock and looked at the bills again. The bourbon didn’t help. I took another knock. The bills still looked lousy. I felt better, though. The fifth was two knocks closer to moving out. Before it did, I’d have to buy a new tenant for the drawer.

  But for the walking bones outside, the night was quiet. Then it wasn’t. Shouts rose and fell back like waves on the beach at high tide. Two blocks up and one block over, the Coast League season was winding down at Wrigley Field. The Padres were in town to play the Angels. An awful lot of holiness going to waste in this sinners’ town, you want to know what I think.

  One more time. I still couldn’t see how I was supposed to pay what I owed. If I didn’t figure it out pretty damn quick, they’d throw me out of this office. They’d throw Old Man Mose out, too. Then I’d have to find honest work. I hadn’t done that since I got out of the service. I wasn’t what you’d call eager to start.

  Somebody knocked on the door. Mose’s greeny-yellow eyes went from shut to wide open and wide pupiled in nothing flat. He flowed under the sofa. He’s a hero, Old Man Mose is.

  “Who’s there?” I said. It wasn’t like anybody had an appointment for ten after nine or anything. Wouldn’t be surprised if I was kind of wide pupiled myself.

  “Someone who needs something from you.” A woman’s voice. She didn’t say Someone who wants something from you, but that was what she meant. That’s what they all mean.

  “Come on in, then, and we’ll talk about it,” I told her. I could hope I wouldn’t need the little persuaders in the drawer with the Wild Turkey. I could hope I wouldn’t need the snub-nosed .38 under my left shoulder, either, or the bag of goofer dust in my inside jacket pocket. I could hope, yeah, but I couldn’t be sure. Dames aren’t trouble as often as men. When they are, though, they’re worse trouble than guys ever dream of being.

  Then I remembered, or thought I remembered, I’d locked the door. The corner of Forty-Third and San Pedro is a part of town where it’s easy to get company you don’t want. Any kind of company: white, black, brown, yellow, alive, dead, undead, none of the above. They’re all in the neighborhood, and they’re not all friendly. So I got up to let the lady—if she was a lady—in.

  But I must’ve remembered, or thought I remembered, wrong. The door opened just fine without any help from me, thank you very much. And into the office walked a beautiful dame. I know, I know. That’s how the stories always start, ’specially when the fella telling ’em’s got a few under his belt.

  She was, though, honest to Pete. Maybe the fourth most beautiful dame I’ve ever seen with my own two eyes. A blonde, which for me is usually a strike against, but not this time. Heart-shaped face. Big green eyes. Cute little nose. Kissable red lips. White, pointed teeth. Perfect skin, the kind velvet wishes it were.

  I’m working my way down. Green linen blouse, tailored to flatter what she had up top. That was plenty without being too much. Black wool skirt that clung to her hips and stopped a little below the knee. It let me see her legs were as fine as the rest of her. Can’t say anything nicer about ’em than that.

  Oh. Silk stockings, not nylons. Don’t know why I noticed, but I did. She looked twenty-eight, maybe thirty: all the way ripe, but with some of the bloom still.

  No ring. I didn’t miss that spot on the inspection tour. Only maybe half a second slower than I should have, I waved her to the chair on the other side of my desk and said, “Won’t you sit down, Miss—?” ​I didn’t go What the hell are you doing here? no matter how much I wanted to. I was proud of myself because I didn’t, too. Oh, you bet I was.

  “​My name is Dora Urban, Mister Mitchell. Thank you so much.” She had an accent, not a heavy one but she did. Something from the middle of Europe. The chair didn’t creak when she parked herself in it. It mostly does, even with gals smaller than she was. But it didn’t.

  My swivel chair made up for it. One of these days, it’ll fall apart and leave me on my ass on the floor. Hasn’t yet, though. ​“Call me Jack,” I said as I settled myself. “It’s my name.”

  “Jack,” she echoed. But she didn’t go, Then you can call me Dora, the way I figured she would.

  I took a pack of Old Golds out of the center desk drawer and showed ’em to her. “You mind?” I asked. She shook her head, so I lit up. She shook it again when I held out the pack. I shrugged and put it back. After I blew a stream of smoke up at the spinning ceiling fan, I tried again: “So what can I do for you tonight?” If she didn’t want me calling her Dora, I wouldn’t call her anything.

  I didn’t say So what can I do to you tonight? I was thinking it. A dame like that walks into your office, you have to be deader than I am or queerer than I am not to be thinking it. Did she know? Of course she knew. I wouldn’t be the first with that in mind. I’d be at the end of a long, long line. Did she let on? Not even slightly. “You are a person who can find out about things that may not want to be discovered,” she said.

  The way she phrased stuff was as interesting as anything else about her, which is saying something. I sucked in more smoke and nodded. “I’m a detective, yeah,” I said. “When people pay me, I am, anyway.”

  I wondered if she’d get up and walk out. When they’re pretty like that, sometimes they think even the hope of some will wrap you round their little finger. A lot of the time, in fact. And sometimes they’re right. Not with me, not that night. I was too broke and too blue.

  If she was miffed, she didn’t show it. “But of course,” she said.

  She opened her beaded handbag and pulled out a coin purse. She didn’t rummage. Somehow, I got the feeling she never had to rummage. Whatever she needed would always be right there, at her fingertips.

  Like me? The question didn’t cross my mind—then.

  Dora Urban took out a coin, leaned forward, and set it on the desk next to a coffee ring. It wasn’t as big as a silver dollar. For a split second, I thought it was a half. Then I realized it wasn’t silver at all. It was gold.

  A twenty-dollar goldpiece. A double eagle. An ounce of gold. I hadn’t seen one since I was a kid. ​They aren’t legal tender. They haven’t been for years. I couldn’t take it to the saloon down the street and yell Drinks are on me! But still. An ounce. Of gold. Not legal tender. Not worthless, either, though. Oh, no.

  She put another double eagle on top of the first one, and another, and another, till she had a stack twelve coins high. I goggled. You would, too, buddy. You ever see a pound of gold, all in one place? Neither had I. Twelve troy ounces. A troy pound. That’s how you weigh gold.

  “This will be enough for your services? And for your discretion?” she asked.

  “Hang on a second.” I opened the drawer where I keep my smokes. This time, though, I wanted a paper clip. I unbent it so one end stuck out, then touched it to the coins. I made sure I got them all.

  ​Nothing happened. They didn’t turn to sand or fairy dust or lead slugs. They would have, too, if they were fakes. Iron—Cold Iron—is master of them all. That’s what the poem says, and it knows what it’s talking about.

  “You are satisfied now?” Dora Urban sounded faintly amused that anyone could dare to doubt her.

  “Just about.” Now I touched the top double eagle with my fingers. I rang it on the desk. It sounded sweet. I bit it. The soft gold gave a little under my choppers. I did the same thing with a coin from the middle of the stack. Then I put them both back. I didn’t want her to see how bad I needed them. “Okey-doke,” I said. “I’m hired. What am I hired for? Talk to me.”

  Before she could, another swell of noise rolled in from the ballpark. Somebody’d done something over there. It seemed to distract her. It distracted me, too. I noticed Old Man Mose hadn’t come out from under the sofa. He usually does when he decides I haven’t let a cat killer into the office this time. Not t
hat night, though.

  As the cheering died down, Dora Urban steepled her fingers. Her hands were as perfect as the rest of her, as perfect as ​Bianca’s. Her nails were long and painted red as blood. But then, every broad had nails as red as blood that summer. Cold iron may be master of them all, but fashion’s the mistress.

  ​“My … half brother is missing,” she said into the returned quiet. “If he is still with us, I want you to find him and do what you can for him. If he is not, find out what happened to him and who made it happen.”

  Who made it happen? That didn’t sound so real good. I grabbed a pencil. “What’s his name? How long has he been missing? When was the last time you saw him or talked to him or whatever it was?”

  ​“He is called Rudolf Sebestyen.” She spelled the last name so I wouldn’t write it the usual way. “I saw him last this past Sunday night. He said he was going to Deacon’s.”

  “Oh, he did, did he?” I didn’t say Christ, no wonder he’s missing!, but it sure as hell went through my mind. You get to Deacon’s off of Central. If they decide to let you in, you do. If they don’t, you’ve got other things to worry about. “Is he, um, the same color you are?”

  “Rudolf? He has black hair. Otherwise, yes,” she said.

  That’s the colored part of town. Where I’m at is right on the edge of it. Somebody as fair as Dora Urban would stand out on his way to Deacon’s—or maybe not, considering it’s off of Central. And not so much once he got there, if he got there. Deacon’s is the kind of place that draws ’em from a long way off. Not everybody in our pure and decent city thinks that’s a good thing. Of course, some of the ones who scream about it the loudest show up there themselves.

  “Was he a regular there?” I asked, which was another way of trying to find out how much trouble I was likely to land in.

  She shrugged. “It would not have been the first time he went. He did not go every night, or even every week.”

  “All right.” I didn’t think it was, but never mind. “Did he have any … particular friends there?” I was trying to stay as discreet as I could. The next questions didn’t need discretion: “Did he have any enemies there you know of? Who are his enemies, there or anywhere else? What line of business is he in?”

  “We do importing and exporting together,” Dora Urban answered. “We know a lot of people in different parts of the city. We have had some permit trouble lately with the people in City Hall.”

  “Have you?” I wanted to reach for the Wild Turkey again. I lit another cigarette instead. Not as good, but better than nothing. They don’t say You can’t fight City Hall here. They say You better not. Because City Hall fights back. And it’s bigger than you are. Odds are it’s meaner, too.

  Our fair city. Which would be funny, if only it were funny.

  I let out a sigh of my own. “I’ll do what I can for you. How do I get hold of you if I find anything or if I start running low on cash?”

  She pulled a little spiral-wire notebook out of her handbag with the same deft touch she’d shown extracting the coin purse. A fountain pen followed, just as smoothly. She wrote, tore out a page, and put it on the desk facing me. Dora Urban, MUtual 8273, evenings. She had an elegant hand. Why was I not surprised? She crossed the seven like a European.

  “What if I need to talk to you during the day?” I asked.

  “I am not there in the daytime,” she answered. “Someone may take a message for me, but there is no certainty.”

  She wasn’t gonna tell me. I sighed again. “However you want. You’re paying the freight.”

  “Yes,” she said, as if I’d lost points for mentioning the obvious. She stood up. Her chair still didn’t creak. So did I. Mine did. She turned away and walked out through the door she’d used to come in.

  I don’t mean she opened the door and walked through the doorway. I mean she walked through the door. It never opened, but one instant she was on this side of it, the next on the other. Hell, no wonder I thought her teeth were pointed!

  Old Man Mose chose that moment to emerge from under the sofa and hop up onto it. He looked at me and shook his head. “You dope,” he said. “You didn’t even know what you were dealing with.”

  The hell of it was, he was right. All kinds of things all of a sudden made, well, more sense than they had. The way she talked. That she’d given me gold and not silver or even silver certificates. That she’d needed an invitation before she crossed my threshold. And that she wasn’t there in the daytime. Oh, boy, she sure wasn’t!

  “How was I supposed to know she lives, exists, whatever the right word is, in Vampire Village?” I said. VV starts a few blocks south of the office. Yeah, I know, it’s not the angelic part of Los Angeles. But I don’t know what the angelic part of LA is, either. I haven’t found it yet—I know that.

  And I know I’d go out of business if I hung up my shingle in a nice part of town. Of course, I was too damn close to going out of business anyhow, so what does that prove?

  As for Mose, the way he looked at me said I was stupid even for a human being. “If you didn’t poison your nose and your tongue with those stinking cigarettes, you would have smelled what she was before she even came in.”

  “Do I bitch about your catnip?”

  “You’d better not.” He curled up in a doughnut with his tail over his mouth and his nose. Even if I did complain, he wouldn’t listen. So I didn’t.

  The world looked better the next morning. A pound of gold will do that to you. I hadn’t turned it into money I could spend, but I had it. I knew I had it. I knew the kind of finagling I’d have to use and the people I needed to talk to.

  So I splurged on breakfast. Two eggs over medium, a ham steak, hash browns, enough coffee to float a man-of-war. Came to forty cents. I left a quarter tip. The waitress looked at me funny. “You rob a bank, Jack?” she asked.

  “Two of ’em,” I said. She could do whatever she wanted with that.

  But my good mood wore off when I went to the corner to wait for the Red Line car. The sun was shining through the smog. That meant I couldn’t go to Deacon’s. It kept vampire hours, pretty much. So I had to head downtown instead. Talk to the cops, talk to the clerks …. I would have had more fun at Deacon’s, if I came out again afterwards. I couldn’t very well have had less.

  A dented old Black and White cab chugged by, belching smoke from the tailpipe. The colored driver looked a question my way and slowed down. I shook my head. He sped up again. He wouldn’t have wanted to take me where I needed to go. Black and Whites cover the Negro part of town, and they’re supposed to stay there. Yeah, and Sunshine cabs are supposed to stick to Hollywood. Somehow, it’s not the same.

  Ten minutes later, the Red Car clattered up. The motorman rang his bell. I climbed aboard and handed him a quarter. He thumbed the coin dispenser on his belt without even looking at it. “Out of zone?” he asked. When I nodded, a dime and a nickel went into the fare box. The other dime came back to me.

  I sat down. The motorman clanged the bell again and got going. The trolley wasn’t crowded. No surprise. He’d just come up through Vampire Village. VV hopped at night, but not much went on there during the daytime.

  The seat was too hard and too straight up-and-down. They didn’t want you getting comfy. They wanted you to get off quick. As I shifted, the coins in my pocket jingled. It made me wonder how vampires ever rode the Red Car. Silver isn’t good for them.

  No sooner wondered than answered. Up above the windows, with the advertising placards for hair restorers and crystal-ball readers and Jim Clinton men’s clothes, was a sign from the Pacific Electric Railway telling people—and anyone else who happened to get on—they could buy a passbook: forty in-zone rides for three bucks. So vampires could use the trolley, all right. They could even do it at a discount.

  North up San Pedro we went, stopping every half a block or every block or every other block, depending on who wanted to get on or get off where. It’s a scuffling part of town. Shoe-repair places, hex joints, storefront churches, saloons, paper and magazine stands, little groceries, fried-chicken places and burger shops, secondhand stores that were secondhand stores, secondhand stores that fronted for the numbers runners, a Technocracy meeting house that couldn’t have looked more out of place if it tried, and more crystal-ball readers.