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All this fuss over a bottle of wine. Michigan-grown Chardonnay, to be exact. And not even a particularly old vintage: 1963. Duke had procured older. Hell, he’d drunk older.
(After that one time, he’d also decided that he’d drunk much, much better wine in his life, and really there was no reason a sane man should ingest food or drink older than himself.)
(Except maybe whiskey.)
But who was he to judge. He was here to be paid, for something that - by his standards - was almost legal. He still had his principles, though, a reputation to upkeep. So while morally a little less shady than some of his previous jobs, technically, if you were to ask a judge... definitely not innocent.
That’s why he had no problem with carefully stepping down the stairs of a wine cellar, the rotten wood creaking ominously, his flashlight barely illuminating the steep descent, while the property owners slept on soundly in their beds, just as they had in the past forty years since they last had set foot into the old hole that had been dug into a hill on the outskirts of their tiny village.
He wasn’t stupid; he knew that old cellars could be dangerous. He’d brought his diving gear. The mask was placed firmly over his head; the oxygen tank strapped to his back would last him for a couple of hours in case he had to search through vast tunnels to find the stupid bottle.
*
In the end, it took him twenty minutes. There was only one large room, and although its bottle racks were full, they had apparently been stacked by a neat freak, in chronological order. And 1963 had been this winery’s last vintage.
From then on, it had been merely a battle against the limited visual range through the diving mask, the squick factor of mould and spiders, and the toll forty years in humid air had taken on the labels. But he was absolutely positive that he’d found the right wine.
Back on the dirt road outside the cellar, Duke pulled off the scuba equipment before he noticed a second car parked behind his truck, an old American classic black as the forest night, and a guy leaning against it with his arms folded around a handgun that shone silvery in Duke’s flashlight beam.
“I believe you’re trespassing,” the guy said, now that he’d been discovered, “breaking and entering, stealing even...”
Local law enforcement? A deputy sheriff maybe, who lived close-by? The sheriff’s office was three towns over; it would’ve been a hell of a coincidence to run into one of them here at the edge of the forest, at night. And the man certainly wasn’t dressed in a uniform, unless blue jeans and leather jackets were standard issue around these parts.
Duke opened his mouth to reply, to say something that might extricate him from this mess, but the guy waved his gun dismissively before he could actually think of anything.
“What d’you got there?”
Duke’s fingers automatically tightened around the neck of the bottle. He was still pointing his flashlight in the direction of the guy, but down, not trying to blind him. Right now it was his only advantage, and he’d need to time it right so as to jump into his truck and drive off before bullets started flying.
“Do you have an ID?” he asked instead, tentatively. A LEO on official business should identify himself, but in these rural parts not every elected lawman had gotten the memo yet.
The man laughed, brief and harsh and lacking humor, but it was enough for Duke to suddenly realize that he was a lot younger than he’d initially guessed - about Duke’s age instead of older, maybe in his mid-twenties. “Oh I’ve got one, but you don’t need to worry about that now. What bottle is that?”
So, not a deputy. He hadn’t anticipated there being another party interested in the bottle, had dismissed his client as a quirky old man with weird tastes and too much money. But it was a two-thousand dollar deal (half up front, half on delivery, Duke was old-fashioned) and that was still a lot of money to some people (like Duke).
“A Chardonnay,” he hedged. Damn it all to hell, this was the third time in as many months that he’d been interrupted by a rival procurer/smuggler, the second that he’d been caught with his pants down (once literally) and no weapon in reach. This was not a habit he wanted to get into.
When Duke refused to step closer as the gesture had implied he should, the other guy straightened and moved, keeping the gun trained at the ground which didn’t set Duke at ease in the slightest.
“It’s not by any chance a 1963 Chardonnay with a label that’s stained red all over?”
Duke shook his head, “More like, black and flakey.” And he turned the label into his flashlight to prove it. The golden print of the vinyard’s logo was hardly distinguishable from the faded ink proclaiming year and varietal and any other part of the paper.
The man, who had stopped just outside of arm’s reach, smirked. “Yeah, blood will do that.”
Okay, that... yuck. Still. The early bird, and all that. “Look, if you’re not a cop, leave me alone. No offense, but I was here first, and I’m taking this bottle with me.”
“No, you’re not,” the guy shot back, voice even and steely in a way that communicated nicely just how far he’d be willing to go to ensure Duke didn’t. And damn it all, but the cocky attitude, the utter self-confidence, the tall, lean frame, blond hair, and the damn leather jacket with its collar turned up really shouldn’t be hot.
Oh dear lord, he had a type.
Lust induced stupor aside, this guy was an annoyance. “Well, that puts us in a bit of a stalemate. Since that means we’re kinda stuck with each other for the foreseeable future,... name’s Duke.”
Neither of them put a hand forward, too wary of a karate kick or judo seoi-nage or some other ninja trick.
“Dean.”
Duke nodded, and for a moment, they stared at each other uncomfortably.
“You realize that the wine has probably gone bad?” Dean asked, and now he seemed to be mostly amused, rather than in a grim killing mood.
“I’m not planning on drinking it.”
“Well this shit certainly can’t be worth a damn, so what the hell do you need it for if you’re not a hunter?”
A hunter? Dean wasn’t going to sell this thing? “What?”
But suddenly, out of thin air, a stocky man in his fifties stood right next to them and reached for Dean, who swung up his gun and fired and the old man vanished in a puff of black smoke, leaving Duke’s ears ringing with the shot, all before he’d managed to draw in a breath or even blink.
“What the fuck!” Duke heard himself yelling, felt himself taking a panicky step backwards and stumbling, saw his hand reaching out to steady himself against his truck’s bed out of reflex, the flashlight falling and rolling under the truck. Everything turned moonlight-dark.
Dean muttered a few expletives, something that sounded like, “so he can leave the damn house after all” and “running out of time” and pulled out a couple of items from his jacket pocket with his left, while the right hand was wrapped firmly around the gun, forefinger never leaving the trigger.
It all felt awfully fast to Duke, but maybe that was just his brain being entirely incapable of processing what had just happened, skipping over the images and looping, trying to make some sense of it, any at all. “What the fuck just happened?” he demanded again.
“That was the ghost of some dude who’s haunting a house in that village over there. I’ve been trying to exorcize him for days now, been turning the whole place upside down looking for anything else that might’ve belonged to him. And a couple of hours ago, somebody finally told me about this little fight he’d had with a friend at the vineyard, just a few days before he was killed. How supposedly, he’d bled all over one of them bottles and kept it as a reminder of backstabbing friends. And the paranoid fucker’s using it to hang onto this world and take revenge on anyone he thinks ever took advantage of him.”
Duke’s head reeled. Ghost. Haunting. Exorcize. Bottle. Breathe. Okay.
Okay, he could do this.
No freakier than a little trouble, right?
He nodded to himself, leaning bodily against his truck while his knees turned to jelly. He held out the bottle to Dean, noting absentmindedly how white his knuckles looked where he was gripping it hard. “What do you need to do?”
Dean stared at him again for a second, then opened his left hand. There was a small bottle of lighter fluid and a Zippo. “Put it down, dowse it, burn it.”
No sooner had he said it, that the ghost shimmered into existence again, slightly off to the left and behind Dean, but the way Duke’s eyes had immediately focused on it and widened in horror must have clued him in. Another well-aimed shot, and again the ghost went up in a puff of smoke.
“Where does he go when you shoot him?”
“I’m sending him back to the house he’s haunting. But he’s getting better at pulling free, so hurry. I’ll keep guard.”
Duke gratefully let his legs give out and sat down hard on the ground, almost banging his head on the side of the truck in the process. A concussion at least would have given him a good, rational explanation for later, when it surely would all seem like a delusion. Maybe he’d inhaled some toxic gases in the cellar despite the oxygen tank?
He laid down the Chardonnay at arm’s length, unscrewed the lighter fluid bottle and poured it all over the blood-stained label. He fumbled with the Zippo and almost let it drop when Dean whipped around and shot again above him. Holding it steady with both hands, the flint finally sparked and the flame came to life. Carefully touching it to the edge of the puddle of lighter fluid, it caught and Duke quickly drew back his hand.
Somewhere, at once sounding far off and right next to his ear, the man’s ghost screamed, then cut off. Duke stubbornly ignored it all. He kept his eyes on the fire, which quickly consumed the last remains of man and paper.
*
Duke didn’t know how long he’d sat there and stared into the flames, but when the heat caused the cork to pop out of the bottle, he shot up in surprise.
Dean laughed. At Duke, most probably, but relief rushed through him as he realized that it was well and truly over, leaving him giddy, and he laughed as well.
At last, Dean walked to his car and opened the driver’s side door, but stopped before actually getting in. “Buy you a drink?”
Duke considered him for a moment, the guy with the sleek car and the weird-ass job and the kind of body that pushed all of Duke’s buttons. “Sure. But I have to warn you, you just cost me two large. Expect me to run up quite a tab.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll think of a way to make it up to you.”