The blue uniform trousers smelled faintly of soap and starch. Standing in front of Daniel's nose, they brought a refreshing change to the alley stink of old garbage and damp abandoned rotting buildings and cat piss. For almost a week now, Daniel had dreamed of soap — soap and a long, long soak in a hot bath filled to just below his chin. He wondered how much longer the cop's shoes would hold their mirror shine, wandering around through broken pavement and weeds and drifts of garbage.
"Arthur Shoudy? What kind of Indian name is that?"
Daniel Morgan tightened his grip on the brown bag and its hidden bottle. He didn't even bother to look up at the cop standing over him in an alley off of Union Street. He kept his body-language bored, left hand out to take the driver's license and Tribal ID back when the cop was through with them, an ID check like a thousand others before. He answered the blue cloth in front of his nose.
"What kind of African name is Colin Powell? If my parents decided to name me Arthur, that makes it an Indian name. You got a problem with it, paleface, you take it up with the Ojibwa Nation. They accepted it and wrote it in the tribal rolls." Just the right level of bite to the words — enough to show Daniel was slightly drunk, had nothing to hide, nothing to fear, but not enough to get the cop pissed off and ready to break this boring foot patrol with a short lesson in proper minority deference.
Ojibwa, because if he'd claimed Naskeag or another local Nation, he'd face the chance of meeting a "relative." And some of them might actually recognize him. Even though they thought he was dead. Good sides, bad sides to choosing a Native ID and face for this. Even Stonefort Naskeags would be less likely to see a dead Morgan under brown skin.
Even if they did, whether they'd talk or not was a separate question. Morgans and Naskeags went way back, a mutual respect that predated cops by a few centuries.
Naskeag Falls had a couple or three Naskeags on the force, one of them a sergeant. Might be tokenism, quota hiring, but it did make the cops here a little less likely to roust an obvious Native just for the hell of it, or run him in for being "suspicious." And the facial structure Daniel got from his mixed ancestry backed up the skin and hair colors he got from a bottle to make a convincing disguise.
That, and the brown bag. Put an Indian in an alley with a bottle, a lot of cops pulled out their credit cards and bought the whole stereotype package. One of the great truths of Western philosophy — people see what they expect to see.
Daniel itched, spots that moved from crotch to back to armpits to scalp and back again. Probably just the lack of a bath in two weeks, clothes that hadn't seen a washer in longer than that. Probably not fleas or lice, even after sleeping in the alleys and under bushes down by the Naskeag River. But people didn't expect an alley drunk to smell of fresh deodorant and shampoo. The smell and itch were part of method acting, really getting into this role. And protecting Gary was worth considerably more than a fleabite or two.
Protecting Gary. Think of it as a background check, like the CIA would run on a new hire. Ben found out just enough about "Jane White" to raise some serious questions about that girl. She's dangerous. That's not a problem per se. The question is, what kind of dangerous.
The cop studied the driver's license in his hand, examining the edges and holding it up to the sun for watermarks. Good job, that license, official Michigan seals and special lamination plastic and all. Enough wear and tear on it to foster the sense of "real."
And "Arthur Shoudy" was real, or had been before he drowned in Florida. Real address, real Social Security number, real birth certificate. Real mother who still received real money orders in the mail every now and then from Poughkeepsie or Pocatello or Portland, sent by her wandering "son." Good documents cost good money, both purchase and upkeep, but Morgans had always known that was money well spent.
The cop handed both documents back to Daniel. "Where the hell is Pequaming, anyway?"
Not a casual question, even though he'd made it sound like one. Checking the background. The force could use some training on ethnic sensitivity issues, though.
"U.P., Upper Peninsula, south shore of Lake Superior. On the edge of the L'Anse Rez. Three-outhouse village on Keweenaw Bay. More backwoods places you've never heard of." Daniel tucked the two cards into a pocket in his hunting jacket, a jacket about two decades past its prime and blaze orange only in memory, the color faded to used-diaper yellow and so blotched by chainsaw oil and pitch it looked like woodland camouflage.
The cop nodded. "You got that right. What brings you all the way Down East?"
Yeah. "What you come heah foah, boy?" Some things never change. "Little vacation. A couple months cutting pulp, then raking blueberries, picking apples. Missed my ride south at the end of the season. Looking for another."
Migrant worker. The cop checked off another box on his mental list. With the side note that the dumb Indian had probably missed his ride because of an extended drunk.
Preliminaries complete, the officer pulled a sheet of paper out of a sheaf in his left hand and hung it in front of Daniel's nose. Photocopy, police sketches showing a young woman's face with several different hair styles and colors. "You ever see this girl?"
Daniel shook his head. Which was a non-verbal little white lie, because it was the dead kid Kate and Alice had found. Daniel had seen Alice's photos, not the same as seeing the girl.
He looked up, finally meeting the cop's eyes. After all, the question had moved them beyond the standard steps of the cop/vagrant dance. "Don't think so. Only been in town a week or so. Runaway?"
"Not anymore. She's dead. We're trying to trace her back and get an ID." The cop wrinkled his nose, shrugged his shoulders, and turned away. He'd gotten the answers he expected.
Daniel watched the officer out of sight, around rusty scorch-stained Dumpsters and a ziz-zag in the alley between crumbling brick walls, watched his smell of clean leave the reek of cat-piss and garbage, and then heaved himself to his feet. He dusted off his pants, an exercise in futility considering their general state, staggered slightly, and took a swallow from the bottle. Cheap muscatel rasped and warmed his throat. Nobody here but us drunks.
He glanced up the alley at a man squatting beside a brick chimney, muttering to himself, tucked into an old bricked-up basement window arch converted to a furnace-room vent — maintaining his claim to high-quality real estate for the coming winter, central heating and shelter from the wind. Add a packing crate to keep out the rain and snow and call it home.
Daniel took a couple of steps in that direction and paused. "Dead kid, eh? Damned shame."
The man looked up, bleary, gray-stubbled, balding, wrapped in a filthy ragged army overcoat that probably dated back to 'Nam. The boots sticking out from under it had holes large enough that Daniel saw black toenails sticking through them. "Tina? Fuckin' thief, kill you soon as look at you. No loss."
Daniel blinked at that. "Thought you told the cop you didn't know her."
"Cops."
The single word spoke volumes. Morgans might have been pirates and thieves for generations out of mind, but they lived in society. Profited from society. Society, rich society, was where you sold the loot. Morgans always were polite to cops — cops were friends, cops helped protect your plunder once you'd stolen it. Morgans hadn't lived on the streets since streets first came to Maine.
This man, to look at him you wouldn't think he'd have anything worth stealing. He had "victim" written all over him, not a threat to anyone. Yet to him, cops were enemies. You don't give information to the enemy. And cops wouldn't be around if someone like Tina came looking for the source of ill-chosen words.
"Thief, eh? Killer? Looked like a kid, maybe high school."
"Older'n that, her and her sisters. On and off the streets since I been here. Cops know who she is. Just trying to find who saw her last." He glanced around as if he expected to see a big blonde girl with a switchblade striding down the alley, grinning death at him.
"All of 'em mean as mad dogs. I saw Tina cut a man for a bottle once. Cut him bad, then laughed. Only had a couple of swallows left in it. She'd a cut me, too, if she knew I'd seen her."
Daniel staggered further along the alley and squatted down, far enough away he wasn't threatening, close enough for talking. Close enough to smell the rancid territory of a drunk too far gone to walk to the end of the alley when he needed to piss. This was the third or fourth time he'd heard mention of girls paired up to prey on men made stupid by sex or booze or drugs.
"Sisters?"
The man stirred in his little window niche, pulling himself together and slipping one hand into a pocket of that overcoat. Antisocial, maybe paranoid schizo like a lot of the street people. Daniel wondered what the pocket hid, if anything. He swirled the bottle in his right hand, listening to the gurgle of it, and then looked from the bottle to the man and back again. Bait.
The man knew. His whole body focused on that brown paper bag. Daniel leaned forward, reached out as far as he could, and placed the bag on the broken asphalt between them.
Then he squatted back on his heels. "I'm new around here. Just wonder what to watch out for. What you said, sounds like something a man ought to know."
"Yeah." The man eyed that bag for about a minute, thinking, and then leaned over until he could reach it. Lifted it, weighed it in his hand. That answer should satisfy him, Daniel had only drunk two swallows from it. One to scent his breath for the cop, the second to catch the eye of his audience.
The bum peeled the bag down past the bottle's neck, uncapped it, and wiped the glass with his sleeve. Daniel shuddered. Well, maybe the muscatel had enough alcohol in it to disinfect the cloth . . . . Anyway, the old man took a long swallow, two Adam's-apple bobs worth of judging the quality of the bribe, and sighed. It wasn't whiskey, but it wasn't Pepsi, either.
"Don't think they were sisters. Called each other that, but prob'ly not. Last couple of months, Tina'd been going around with a big blonde, even bigger'n her, bigger'n most men. Mean as hell. Short hair, nasty scar on the side of her head. Catch you in a corner, beat you up. Beat the shit out of you for the pure hell of it, not even search your pockets after."
He paused and took another swallow, longer, three bobs this time, and the sigh seemed more relaxed. "Few years back, it was a shorter kid, thin and tense as a wire, all sorts of weird hair colors. You know, green, purple, orange, that kind of thing, all done up in spikes. Kid would play hooker, Tina would bust in and shake the John down. Don't know if the kid ever did any tricks. Been a couple of other girls, they didn't last long. Tina probably killed them. Kids disappear."
Jane White again, most likely. Hell and damnation, why did Gary have to inherit Ben's habit of thinking with his dick? Every word Dan had found, that girl was poison. On the street or off.
Dan lurched to his feet, and the bum shrank back into his window niche, hugging the bottle close. The free hand was buried in its pocket again, gun or knife or rock. Daniel wouldn't learn anything more here. He stepped back, and the man relaxed.
One bit of confirmation he might get . . . "Those the girls used to hide out upstairs at the Paramount? Heard about them. Bad news."
The man studied him, eyes dark holes shaded under his brows. He sat still for a moment. Then he nodded.
Any more questions, Daniel would cross the line. Become one of "them," labeled as an undercover cop in the drunk's paranoid mind.
Daniel stared down at the bottle and the man hugged it closer, tensing, ready to fight to keep his bribe. Shaking his head, Daniel turned away and shuffled down the alley, touching the flaky bricks every third step as if he needed them to confirm "vertical" to his brain. Nobody here but us drunks. Have to keep in character, even when you're headed off the stage.
The Paramount. An old five-story hotel, it dated back to lumberjacks and river-drivers, a hell-hole even then. Cheap whiskey downstairs, cheap women upstairs, cheap graves in the cellar that opened directly onto the Naskeag River. Men came down-river with the spring floods, the long-log drivers riding the tail of ice-out, a winter's pay weighting their pockets and looking for a little fun. The Paramount and the other "hotels" existed to remove that extra burden, send the workers back hungry and hung-over.
With the occasional case of pox.
That had been Naskeag Falls in the 1800s — get the logs and the winter money, both. Sawmills and dives. And eight or ten churches, steeples high on the hills above the water, among the mansard mansions and above the stink and noise, representing the pious hopes of the families that kept the money. Morgans weren't the only pirates working the Maine coast.
The Paramount was about the only old hotel still standing — if you could count it as still standing. Half and half, maybe. Boarded up for years, a couple of minor fires, part of the roof collapsed in a snow-storm a few winters back. Condemned. The city hadn't torn it down because of a listing on the National Historic Register. The owner kept claiming he was going to make repairs.
Daniel worked his way toward the waterfront and a section of downtown that had escaped the big fire back around 1900. The alleys grew even more crooked, frost-heaved cobbles instead of asphalt underfoot, narrower, darker, designed for traffic when horsepower was literal and men moved tons of cargo by their own muscle. The alleys grew emptier, as well — that police sweep preceded itself, as word of it spread like ripples faster than a man could walk and ask questions.
The Paramount looked strange, bereft of the flanking buildings that had left blank side walls up to the third floor, wide and shallow to get the maximum number of daylight rooms to save on gas lights. Daniel ignored the "No Trespassing" signs, the even larger "DANGER" signs. Third cellar window from the left, his source had said, a roof over your head if you were desperate.
Daniel dug a pair of filthy gloves out of his pockets and pulled at one corner of the weathered plywood covering the window. It groaned like an Addams Family door, swung towards him, and damp musty air flowed out. He smelled rats and pigeons and rot, old charred wood, wet plaster. And things long dead. He hoped they were the rats and pigeons. He patted the small of his back, verifying his hideout .22 auto before he went any further.
This wasn't necessary. It wasn't a good idea, and likely wouldn't tell him anything he didn't already know. "Tina" was dead, safely toe-tagged in a morgue, Jane spreading havoc among the boys at the university just outside of town. That other big blonde nagged at Daniel's memory, though, the mental image fitting perfectly over his memories of Jackie Lewis, Kate Rowley's kid.
Daniel had seen her lying dead outside Tom Pratt's blazing carriage house, shot in a drug war. Alice had set that up, damn her tangled witchy fingers in every pie, a diversion to her hunt for that Peruvian brujo and also Gary and Caroline's raid on the Pratt tunnels below. And then the kid's body disappeared. He'd seen it, seen the wound even through a grainy closed-circuit TV monitor. But no body found. Cops hadn't found the slime Gary killed, either.
"Nasty scar on the side of her head."
Ugh. Not a pretty picture. And likely to be way into Alice Haskell's territory.
But he slipped through the window into damp fetid darkness. His feet squished something, and he pulled out a thin Mag-Lite and twisted it on. Mushrooms. Decades of rains and leaks and spring high water had washed a deep layer of silt across the room, and patches of mushrooms dotted the floor. Footprints also patterned the mud, human and animal, fossil reminders of earlier trespass.
He followed them, through a broken door and into deeper shadow, his flashlight beam flickering across stub ends of pipes and wires stripped out for scrap, a hulking boiler white with asbestos insulation and dust, talus heaps of collapsed brick, old mattresses and cardboard furred with mold. A stairway led upward, more than half the treads ripped away for firewood, handrails long gone. The plaster walls dripped fungus.
The next level up smelled cleaner, less rot and silt and more the sharp dusty ammonia of pigeon crap. Hummocks of salvaged brick spotted the old flooring, with ash and charred ends of wood showing the hearths of private fires. Blackened cans and cheap abandoned cookware set off kitchens from living rooms, tangled cardboard and moldy discarded clothing marked bedrooms. Light filtered around the plywood window covers and made shadows into a complex of caves.
"Upstairs," the hints had said. Daniel's flashlight beam found a saw-tooth curve, the remains of an ornate sweeping stair that had led along one wall and upward, an ominous black hollow underneath. All the treads and risers had vanished. A line on the grimy wallpaper showed where hands had found balance on the inner wall, climbing the tightrope skeleton of supporting stringers that remained. He followed.
The smell of old death grew, replacing pigeon shit. Daniel paused. This was really not a good idea. But he needed to know as much as possible about Jane, as much as possible about any threat to Gary. Tina and Jane tied together, and this place tied to both.
The second floor creaked under his feet, and he found craters of rot or vandalism squeezing him down to a single path. Plaster lay scattered in heaps and spread around as dust, and the footprints led to another stripped stair of saw-tooth stringers and no handholds.
The third floor actually looked better, most of the plaster still in place and doors hanging on their hinges. Probably few people dared to climb this high. Daniel still followed footprints in the dust, though. One path led to a pile of dried-out human turds and a tattered telephone directory for toilet paper. And a scattering of empty tampon boxes and wrappers. Girls, all right.
The first door creaked away into its room, rusty hinges straight out of a cheap horror flick, and Daniel sent the flashlight beam into the darkness ahead of him. Dust. Cobwebs. Furniture. Ancient chair and table and dresser. Ancient bed. Ancient air, musty, clammy, like a tomb just opened.
Ancient corpse lying on the bed.
Dan froze and stared, free hand creeping toward his pistol and his ears snatching every creak and whisper of the ancient crumbling hotel, bats and rats and pigeons. Deep behind his thinking brain, something kept expecting the corpse to move. It didn't. He started to take a deep breath and then decided that was a bad idea.
He checked his gloves. He'd never left fingerprints at any of his crime scenes — damned sure he wasn't going to start with someone else's.
He edged into the room and studied what evidence remained. The body lay straight and calm, as if laid out for a funeral, a man, naked, with a hole in the chest where his heart should be. Corpse looked like it had been there for a year or more, skin shrunken around bones like a dried-up mummy found in the desert, and the rats hadn't bothered it. That sent icy fingers down Daniel's spine.
And it hadn't been killed there. No black blood staining the ancient yellowed linen on the bed.
Okay. Daniel backed away, careful of his feet, careful of hands and elbows. Everything he wore had an appointment with the incinerator. Shoes had left prints, jacket and pants would have scraped a wall or splintered wood and left snagged threads, gloves would have left smears of grease and pitch and flaked dry paint. Forensic science was a bitch for finding matches — so don't leave anything to match to.
Time to have a chat with Alice.