For a big guy, Spranwell sure backpedaled fast. Not that it did him any good. With Bonesy splayed across his chest like some knock-kneed spider, he was too panicked to keep track of where he was going, and he tripped over the couch, clocked his head on the windowsill, and went down like a ton of bricks.
A whole lot of things were happening at once, but the loudest by far was Coggins screaming like a girl, and the strangest was the reverend, who I figured would have been running for dear life, zipping in through the middle of the brawl and making a grab for the big paper sack. He got it just as Bonesy popped up from behind the couch, blood on her teeth. The way her eyes were darting every which way at once, she looked like a demented chameleon, or at least the skeletal outline of a demented chameleon. Worse, she was chipped, nicked, and cut up, as if little bits of her had been torn away—which of course they had. Freeing herself from Renner’s staple job had ripped more than a few of her bones to shreds.
Coggins screamed again, and behind me, so did Iris, who dropped her grocery bags, sending oranges rolling down the hall, together with a jar of sweet and sour sauce. Spranwell didn’t make a sound. No shock there; he’d never struck me as a serious contender.
Bonesy, though, was another matter. Maybe she didn’t like Coggins’s yelling, or maybe he was just in her way, but she was on him in a flash, and when he dropped into a fetal position, she used him as a springboard and vaulted all the way to the ceiling light. She clung there like a gibbon, one handed, with her head on a swivel.
“Run!” Renner yelled, and he set off for the door, lugging the Crate & Barrel sack in one hand.
I couldn’t see any reason not to follow—it’s not like Spranwell and Coggins were close friends of mine—so I bolted, too, right on the reverend’s heels. I didn’t exactly intend to chuck my crutches in the process, but somehow running and using them things didn’t seem real logical, so away they went, clattering into the kitchen someplace. That was maybe just as well, ’cos while it hurt my foot something awful to put my full weight on it, there was Iris, or the woman I presumed to be Iris, right in our way, and it was up to me and Renner to sort of scoop her up and shunt her out the door. Next thing I knew, we’d slammed it home and were leaning backs-to-wood against it, breathing hard and feeling, again, lucky to be alive.
The last of the grocery sacks slipped off Iris’s shoulder and thumped to the hallway carpet. She gave herself a little distance, then took a good look at me and the reverend pressed against the door. She said, “Renner. What did I just see in there?”
He managed an embarrassed giggle. “Nothing worth staying for, I hope.”
From the other side of the door came a shriek, then a crash, then another shriek. Coggins, most likely.
I shot a look at the reverend. “I hate to ask, but do we need to go get them?”
The reverend’s eyes were big like moons and I could tell his pulse was heading for heart attack country, but he gulped and nodded and said, “Maybe.” I didn’t have to ask to know he was thinking about Ed and Lizzie and the dead bear from last fall, and how we’d kind of more or less set them up for what happened to them, and now here we were, running out on two strangers who didn’t even have a horse in this race, or not a real one (beyond, maybe, a paycheck), but they were the ones trapped inside with a killer midget skeleton, and we were the ones mostly safe outside in the hall. Not that I was convinced that Bonesy couldn’t squeeze under the door pretty much any time she wanted, but—
“Here,” said Renner, and he tossed the Crate & Barrel sack at Iris’s feet. Iris, who didn’t look much like I’d figured. Older, for one thing, all that fierce snowy hair. Stronger, too. Not the average damsel in distress.
On receiving the bag, she said, “I don’t understand.”
From behind the door came more crashing, and this time it continued, a stream of thumping, sliding noises that I recognized from the Woodmere Library as a rain of falling books. That nut-job rubbing was at it again.
To Iris, Renner said, “There’s a book in that bag. Is it yours?”
With both hands holding the sack open, Iris looked inside, past the mounds of nasty monster hair. “Yes,” she said. “That’s mine.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t had it long.”
Another crash sounded from inside. I said, “Renner, can this wait? ’Cos if we don’t hurry up, there may not be much inside left to rescue, you get me?”
Renner pointed a skinny finger at Iris. “Don’t you move,” he said, “and don’t let that book out of your sight. We’ll be right back.”
“Hang on,” I said. “Lady, we need your house key.”
She threw her keys to Renner, and he sorted them out, then stuck the correct point in the lock. “Wait,” he said, to me. “Where are your crutches?”
“Oh, you know. They panicked and ran.”
“Okay, then. All the more reason to go back in. Ready?”
I wasn’t, but no way in hell was I about to let him see that, so I said, “Last one to Bonesy’s a rotten egg.” The lock clicked and I flung the door wide. We both charged in.
The living room wasn’t a museum anymore. In the few minutes we’d given her, Bonesy had thrown down half the room’s books and scattered most of Iris’s mementos in the process. Coggins was some place in the kitchen, whimpering, and Spranwell was just coming ’round, rising up near the window and groaning, one hand to the back of his head.
As for Bonesy, she was doin’ her Bonesy thing, bouncing all over the shelves and pulling down books like there was no tomorrow. If she’d been moving any quicker, I’d have figured she was a cartoon, or a DVD on fast forward.
I wasn’t real sure what Renner had in mind, but my sights were set on search and rescue, evacuation. Spranwell was closer, so I dodged a few dozen hardbacks plus a beat-to-hell kachina doll and got ’round behind him, hooking my arms under his.
“Lean back,” I ordered, “and if you can use your legs, stand up.”
With his help, I got him moving—Jesus, he was a big boy—and then I started dragging him toward the door. He helped, sort of, but not as much as I would’ve liked, and with the extra weight, I was pretty sure I’d popped the stitches in my foot. It sure felt warm and wet inside my walking cast.
I kept one eye on where we were going, which wasn’t easy, since I was walking backward, and one on Bonesy the whirlwind. She was lower down now, so the books weren’t flyin’ quite so far. The top shelves were empty, bare like they’d been hit by an indoor twister.
“Okay, okay,” Spranwell groused, “I can walk.”
I took him at his word and let him go. Down he went, rubber-legged timber. I might as well have used an axe.
He swore a few times as I dragged him up again, hauled open the door, and shoved him into the hall.
“Here,” I said, to Iris. “Next time, don’t hire amateurs.”
Then I dashed back inside, slamming the door behind me. Where in hell was Renner?
Bonesy greeted me from the top of the couch with a clatter of teeth and a freak-show dance. Her staple-ripped mouth was movin’ like she wanted to speak, but I couldn’t make hide nor hair of her whispery nonsense—and hell, where was she gonna talk from? She didn’t have a larynx, a trachea, or even a throat.
On the plus side, it didn’t look like she was fixin’ to launch herself my way, which was a relief, since about the only weapons I had handy were a few hundred splayed hardcovers. Just to be sure, I said, “I’ve gotta help Renner, so how ’bout you calm down?”
That, she most definitely did not do. Instead, she took off like a shot straight into the bedroom, where she started hauling the sheets off the bed, which left them pretty damn well shredded.
I heard a whimper from the kitchen, and whirled toward it. A spatter of blood led the way over my fallen crutches and across the ceramic tile, and at the far end, I found Coggins’s stupid bowler abandoned on the floor. Beyond that, there was Renner crouching over Coggins and doing his best to get him on his feet. The problem was, Renner was goin’ about it all wrong; the reverend was trying to entreat and cajole, and Coggins was way too scared to pay attention.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Coggins! You want to live to see tomorrow? Get on your feet!”
To get a grip on Coggins’s sport coat, I had to damn near shoulder Renner out of the way, but once I got hold, I hauled him up like I was a drill sergeant and he was the blubbering remains of a brand new mama’s-boy recruit. A bloody one, too. Bonesy had bitten him hard on the shoulder, and my right hand came away slippery and red.
“I think he’s in shock,” said Renner.
“’Course he’s in shock, we’re all in shock. Do we need anything in here besides getting this moron out of this place?”
“I wish you wouldn’t call people morons.”
My eyes did a triple Lutz roll. Priorities, timing, and Renner—them three things just do not get along. “Come on,” I said, “let’s blow this popsicle stand. And don’t you even think of telling me that’s an insult to popsicles.”
I slung my elbows under Coggins’s armpits—man, did he squawk when I leaned into his shoulder—and Renner got his legs. Out we went, me leading the way, but backward. Again. Bonesy, apparently, was still searching high and low in the bedroom.
Or she was, anyway, until just about the moment that we got to the door, which was a hurdle, since I couldn’t open it without halfway letting go of Coggins. When I finally got that managed, I started squeezing myself through the gap—I could just see Spranwell down by the elevators, slumped on the floor with his long legs sticking halfway across the hall—and that’s when the reverend said, “Dale. Look.”
I peeked past him into what I could see of the living room. Bonesy was back, but this time she wasn’t all hyper and dancing, she was down on all fours, scuttling around with her face to the carpet and sniffing, sniffing just like a dog.
“What’s she doing?”
In a real unhappy voice, Renner said, “I have a bad feeling that Bonesy has an excellent sense of smell.”
“Yeah, ’specially for a gal without a nose.”
“She’s hunting for that book.”
This made sense, but only partly; I hadn’t actually laid my hands on it, but at least by sight, it hadn’t set off my nerves any more than a cupcake at the mall. What the hell did Bonesy want with a book that wasn’t spooked, charmed, or touched?
“Can we just go?” I asked. “If she’s a bloodhound, we need to get on the far side of this door.”
I hauled, Renner lifted, and we slipped into the hall. We were all but out, when sure enough, Bonesy raised her head, focused on us, and gathered herself for a leap.
“Look out!” I yelled, and Renner spun around, dropping Coggins in the process. He got the handle just in time and pulled the door home. We heard the slap of Bonesy hitting the door’s back side, followed by a scratching, dragging noise, which had to be her sliding to the floor with her fingers adding welts to the wood every inch of the way.
“What do you think the odds are that she can figure out how to turn the handle?”
Renner’s question was hardly out of his mouth before, sure enough, the handle began to rotate. I vaulted Coggins, who was still on the floor, snuffling and clutching at his shoulder, caught hold of the handle, and forced it back the other way. It should have been easy, no great trick; after all, Bonesy weighed next to nothing. But then, that’s the problem with the supernatural: logic loses every time, and damn me for a Cornhusker if that crazy book-throwing, floor-sniffing pile of bones wasn’t givin’ me a run for my money.
“We need to seal this door,” I grunted, doing my best to keep the handle still. “Find something!”
Renner galloped off, but he’d gone all of five yards when the elevator doors opened, and out walked some sweaty Japanese guy (what Renner would call Asian American) dressed in gym clothes. He was maybe twenty-five, thirty, and he stopped, took in the two guys on the floor, the blood pooling slowly around Coggins, and then me hanging on to the door for dear life. I thought he’d say, “What the hell?” or “Holy fuck,” or something any normal person would say, but all he came up with was, “Please don’t hurt me.”
The reverend, for once, was quick on the draw, and before the guy could faint or die from fright, Renner said, “We need to jam that door. Have you got a hammer, maybe a pry bar?”
“Jam the door?” the guy asked, like those were real complex words.
“Exactly. You can help. Do you live up here?”
The door handle twisted in my grasp, and I jerked it back the other direction. “Can we hurry this up?”
“I live here, yeah,” the man said, still sounding lost. “I’m in six.”
“Six. Good. But let’s make this a rush job,” said the reverend, in that you-can-trust-me voice that’s maybe almost as good as mine, at least when I’m not locked in mortal combat with a doorknob. Anyhow, it worked; the guy vamoosed. He had his door open in no time, and Renner was through it, and suddenly it was just me and Iris and Coggins in the hallway, ’cos Spranwell, in all the confusion, had rolled himself into the elevator and disappeared, presumably headed to the ground floor and out.
Well, the reverend got back after what must have been the longest two minutes in history, a hammer in one hand and a box of three-inch drywall screws in the other. Was I impressed? Yeah, I kind of was. The only question now was whether Renner could hammer straight, which all our Neil House building sessions had already taught me he couldn’t.
“Hey!” I yelled, trying to get the Japanese guy’s attention. It was his hammer, after all; maybe he knew what to do with it. “We could use some help here!”
“No, I got it,” said Renner, dumping the whole box of screws on the floor, which made my job even harder, since now I had to watch my footing. He grabbed a rolling screw, planted the sharp end about an inch in from where the latch mechanism met the frame, and reared back with the hammer. I wanted to yell at him not to do it, but all I had time to do was shut my eyes. I sure hoped he had the sense to do the same, since drywall screws aren’t meant to take that kind of punishment, and I figured that screw had about a fifty-fifty chance of shearing into shrapnel.
I shouldn’t have worried, ’cos Renner missed. On the plus side, he missed his thumb, too, so all in all that first strike was a win (except for the bottom of the door, which took the blow dead on).
“I’m serious!” I called. “We could use some help!”
The guy hollered back, “I’m calling 9-1-1!”
“So am I,” said Iris, removing her phone.
I turned my attention to Renner. “Here, you do the handle, I’ll do the nails.”
“You sure I’m strong enough?”
I grinned, but not because anything was funny. “I guess we’ll find out.”
In a lapse in Bonesy’s tugging, we switched places. I got the hammer and started swinging, wincing at every blow, and holding both hammer and screw as far away as humanly possible. The first two did fine, but the third shattered and a flying shard nicked the tip of my nose. I said something rude to the screw, and grabbed another. The key was to get the screws on an angle that sent them through the door and diagonally into the frame, ’cos of course the door opened inward, so we were gonna have to pin it in place.
Amazingly, the next six held, and now I had eight in place, each one angled and driven halfway in. Shy of busting the hinges off the frame, I figured that door was now gonna be damn near impossible to open.
“Two more,” I said, rising, “higher up.”
The next screw blew into a couple dozen pieces on the very first hit, and I heard Iris yelp.
“You hit?” I asked Renner.
“I don’t think so.”
“Iris?”
“No, just—I’m jumpy.”
“Okay, then. Hang in there.”
The next one broke, too, but at least it didn’t bite back, and after that, with police sirens wailing in the distance and closing fast, I got the last two in place. The door sure looked funny, like it had the home improvement version of a skin disease, but what the hell. Sometimes you gotta do what works.
After running over to Coggins and giving him a shake, I said, “Buddy, I don’t know about you, but we’re gettin’ in that elevator. You comin’, or what?”
To my surprise, he was halfway responsive. “Jesus, mate,” he said, as he tried to rise, “what is that thing?”
Some people. They flap their lips when they should be putting their feet into overdrive.
“Come on,” I said, and I grabbed one arm. “Upsy-daisy.”
I was about to say the same to the Japanese guy, but he’d slammed the door to Number Six, and I could hear him locking it—maybe triple locking it—from the other side. Oh, well. He was on his own.
In another minute, all four of us—me, Renner, Iris, and Coggins—were down at street level and making tracks for our rental Camry, which right about then I sure was wishing was a Buick or a Lincoln, or better yet, an ambulance. Coggins was a mess, and my walking cast was damn near sopping with blood. But, there was nothin’ else for it. We piled in, and since I was stowing Coggins, Renner wound up behind the wheel, which I didn’t like one bit. Hell, he was in so much of a hurry, he was in gear before I’d smushed myself back into the front seat, and as he tried to clear the parking spot, he crashed first into the car ahead and then the car behind, all before I’d clicked on my seat belt.
“Blimey, mate,” said Coggins, sounding drugged, “where in fuck did you learn to drive?”
“Language,” said Iris, in the kind of no-nonsense voice that Renner wishes he had.
“Excuse me?” said Coggins. “Are you seriously lecturing me about my use of Anglo-Saxon English?”
Iris was staring past Coggins, out the window. “I hired you, so I’ll thank you not to swear while you’re on my dime.”
“For criminy’s sake—”
“You heard the lady,” I said, as Renner squealed the tires while making a turn onto some much larger road. “And since you heard her, do like she asked and shut the fuck up.”
After a couple blocks of me bleeding, Coggins bleeding, Iris stone-silent, and the reverend driving like a blue-haired ninny, I piped up with what I felt was an increasingly valid thought. “Renner,” I said, “where are we going?”
“Well, I don’t really know. But we need time, I think, and distance. We need to look over this book without fear of Bonesy showing up halfway through.”
Coggins, from the backseat, said, “I need a doctor,” but not with a whole lot of oomph. ’Course, I needed a doctor, too, or at least the next best thing—and that prompted a thought that hit me like a haymaker.
“Hang on,” I said, my little epiphany still as fresh as a daisy. I squirmed around, trying to dig my cell from the depths of a pocket. “I know just the place.”
Renner shot me a look. “I thought you worked out of Los Angeles.”
“Sure, but in my line of work, sometimes LA and the Bay Area weren’t all that far apart, you know? And this one guy—best cut guy in the business, back in the day—I’m pretty sure he moved up here. Hang on—here we go.”
Fact is, I have pretty much everybody I’ve ever known logged into my cell so I can get at ’em in a hurry. Renner, he’s the opposite. If he could, he’d probably ditch his computer for quills and carbon paper, but me? Speed is of the essence. Not when you’re watching sports or fishing, obviously, but when you’ve got a situation like what we had right then? So just like that, I was dialing a guy I hadn’t seen for maybe seven years and crossing my fingers that he hadn’t changed his number.
“Who are you calling?” Renner demanded.
“Guy named Rufus Bugg,” I said, and at that very moment my call went through.
“Well, if it isn’t Dale Quist,” said a lethargic, phlegmy voice from the depths of my phone. “Now that’s a name I didn’t think I’d be hearing again.”
Me, I heard my name damn near every day, and I told him so. Then I told him I had a carload of folks in need of some under-the-radar stitches, the sooner the better.
“I’m retired,” said Rufus, but not like he meant it.
“We’ll make it worth your while. Just tell me where you’re at.”
He wasn’t next door, that was for sure—Berkeley to South San Francisco is not a short drive, even in the middle of the night—but we made it, and Renner kept it memorable from start to finish. Weaving, tail-gating, random shifts in speed, failing to signal, unmotivated lane changes, last-minute decisions. On that trip, there wasn’t a single arena of bad driving the reverend failed to master. To make matters worse, I wasn’t feelin’ so hot by the time we pulled up to where Rufus had said to go, a warped and dilapidated two-story house, redwood sided, working class, about a block in from the freeway. More Seitapar, that was what I needed, plus some E-Tecrased and a glass of water, but first we had to get inside.
We all piled out and headed for the door. I knocked while Renner held the screen. The wire was sagging off, and so was the door; the top hinges had long since pulled free of the wood.
“So,” said Renner, eyeing the building like maybe it was a virus, “friend of yours?”
“Better,” I said. “An associate.”
The guy who eventually opened up looked like Rufus Bugg’s great-great-grandfather. He had the same bald head, the same bags under his eyes, and the same mottled skin—when we’d first met, he told me he wasn’t black and he wasn’t white; “Guys like me, we don’t bat for either team.”—but beyond that he was stooped and slumped, and his clothes, a gaudy Hawaiian (orange sunsets and palm silhouettes) over stained black chinos, looked about three sizes too big for his body.
“Yup,” he said, raising his head just enough to get a look at me. “You’re Dale Quist, all right.” He drew a deep, exhausted breath, and sighed. “Well, come on. Get in here.”
A cloud of cigar smoke had rolled out the door as soon as Rufus opened up, but in we went regardless, me first and the reverend last, and wouldn’t you know it, he made a big deal of holding one sleeve over his mouth and nose. I don’t think it helped. Rufus had a poker game going on in his sardine can of a dining room, and the six geezers he’d got crowded ’round his beat-to-hell table were coughing so bad it was like they didn’t have two lungs between ’em. Did that stop a single one from chomping on stogies as thick as my thumb? No, sir. Not a one of them.
“Damn, Rufus,” I said, starting to cough. “You ever think to maybe open a window?”
Rufus gave me a weak smile. “Sure, but then I catch hell from the neighbors. Come in the kitchen. Not so thick there.”
He shuffled along, and I hobbled after with the other two in my wake. The grimy, cluttered kitchen had a swinging door, and the stovetop fan was on, so air-wise, life was better. The overhead was a single fluorescent ring without a cover, and it kept flickering like a short-circuiting lightning beetle. Made me feel like I was on a horror movie set instead of in a perfectly ordinary dump of a house.
Fast as I could, I did the introductions, saying as little about Rufus in the process as possible. Ringside, in Southern California, the guy was a legend, and in the right crowd, he wouldn’t have needed any introduction at all. That much I pointed out, and Rufus liked that I did, but of course I skipped the parts about how me and him first met, and all the shady deals I could long ago have turned him in for if I’d only had the mind. But I’d always liked Rufus, and he’d fed me some killer information and patched me up more than once along the way. Besides, what would have been the percentage of turning him in? He wasn’t a criminal, not really, not the kind that hurts people. He was an angle-man, the kind of guy who spots the weak links in any given system and uses them to eke out a few extra dollars. Not a role model, no, and not a hero, not unless you were a boxer caught mid-fight with a bleeding temple. Then Rufus Bugg was a god, and one you damn well wanted in your corner.
Rufus made Coggins sit on a stool, and then he helped him off with his shirt. Seeing Coggins half-naked wasn’t something I needed, so I busied myself finding a clean glass to down my meds. Behind me, Coggins winced and whined, until finally Rufus stopped prodding and poking.
“Well?” Coggins demanded. “Where’s the needle and thread?”
“Can’t help you,” said Rufus.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re the best, remember? Or at least, that’s what I’ve been telling these nice folks.”
Rufus leaned against the counter. Even the act of nodding his head seemed like it was maybe too much for him, like he was gonna need a nap immediately after. “Your friend,” he said, “has a broken bone. Maybe more than one. He needs a real doctor.”
“Told you,” said Renner, which weren’t any kind of help—and besides, had Renner ever said any such thing? Maybe, ’cos he’d talked a good deal on the drive to Bugg’s house, and I’m sure I would have heard more if I hadn’t been gripping the dashboard for dear life.
I forced down a couple of E-Tecrased and slapped the glass on the counter, which was swimming with crusty dishes and brown-stained coffee mugs. “Let’s forget him,” I said. “How ’bout you take a look at my foot?”
Coggins started yapping about getting him to a proper whitecoat, but nobody even bothered to shush him. As I hauled off what was left of my spongy, sodden cast, all eyes were on my sopping red sock and the long welt on my foot where the good folks at Munson Medical had once given me a nice set of stitches.
“Jiminy Christmas,” said Rufus. “What’d you do, try to slit your wrist and miss?”
“Rufus, you’re a riot. Can you fix that up or what?”
“Sure. But I gotta disinfect it first, and that’ll hurt like a sum-bitch.”
At least one part of my brain recoiled, while another part yelled for more Seitapar. The part that steers my voice said, “Well, let’s get on with it. It’d be nice to have some blood still in me come morning.”
Now pills and all, I was definitely not feeling my best, which is maybe why I don’t have real clear memories of the next few hours. I know Rufus had me lie on one of the counters, which left Iris and the reverend clearing dishes (several went straight into the trash), and I remember screaming bloody murder when he started swabbing the cut with a cloth soaked in rubbing alcohol.
As for anesthetic, Rufus shrugged. “I’m retired, remember? I sold off most of what I had years ago.” He gave me a twisted terry cloth rag to bite on and told Iris and Renner and Coggins to hold me down. I wasn’t optimistic: the reverend and Coggins barely weighed a hundred pounds between them, soaking wet, and Iris was—well, she was a woman, and let’s face it, I’m a tank. But that Rufus Bugg, he was clever. He said, “Dale, I know you’ve got the muscle to throw your pals clear through the window. The question is, are you strong enough to just plain hold still?”
Pride. Man, I hate it when people appeal to my pride, ’cos it just about always turns me into their personal doormat.
Well, I stuffed the rag between my jaws and growled at Rufus to get on with it, and Rufus, he threaded a fierce-looking needle while Renner, Coggins, and Iris moved in to grab my arms and legs. As to what happened next, I really don’t remember, or at least I don’t want to remember, except that it hurt like nine kinds of hell, and then I passed out.
In the end, I slept. I wish I hadn’t. Trooper DeKoven was everywhere that night, and for once, he wasn’t lying around on the floor, no, sir. He was up and walking, following me no matter where I tried to dodge, and asking questions to boot, questions like why I had a Michigan bumper sticker on my truck, and what was I doing in Ohio in the first place, and why did I keep sneakin’ around the Neil House? Most of all, he wanted to know what killed him.
“What was that thing?” DeKoven asked. “It’s like it was water, dirty water. A mound of dirty water.”
In my dream, I said, “I hear it called itself Coil.”
DeKoven said, musing, “I shot it, the bullets went right through.”
I said, “Will you please go away, leave me alone?”
The trooper put his hands on his hips, and he’d have looked like one tough hombre if he hadn’t been dripping wet. “Unfinished business, Mr. Quist. You owe me. You owe my family. Plus Coil’s still out there, and you haven’t done a damn thing about it, pardon my language. It’s time to pay the piper.”
That’s when I ran. There were stairs, like a fire escape. I ran down. The fire escape kept blending in with other fire escapes, and one of them led into Tower Records, the Hollywood branch before it closed, and for a while I lost him in the record bins. But I couldn’t stay there, not there of all places, the building where I first got sensitized, where I first stumbled onto something from the far side of natural, and pretty soon I was out on the streets, running down Hollywood Boulevard and into the courthouse at Vine, and there was DeKoven, dressed as a judge and pounding a gavel and pointin’ at me, yelling, “Life sentence! Life sentence for the accused! Dale Quist to serve life with no parole!”
When I came to, it was morning. That crazy kitchen light was still flickering, but now it had competition from the misty daylight sneaking through the windows. I started to sit up, then realized that if I did, I’d bang my head on the underside of a cabinet. Turns out, I was still lying full-length on the counter with my head damn near in the sink and my feet all but dangling off the edge. There wasn’t a single soul in the room besides me, which was one hell of a relief. I’d expected to find Trooper DeKoven, or worse: Coil.
After I rolled myself to the floor and took a long gander at my sewed-up foot, I made the mistake of running a hand over my chin, and what did I find? Stubble. Again, I hadn’t shaved. That meant that life had hold of me instead of the other way ’round, plus I was still in California, which meant an earthquake could cut me down at pretty much any moment. Landers. Northridge. Loma Prieta. The next one might be calling my name.
Armed with no small amount of pain and a real short fuse, I hobbled off to explore. The poker game had broken up, and the players were gone, but the cigars were still in the ashtrays, the butts trailing lazy smoke into the stained glass of the overhead light.
In a tiny back room, I found the reverend asleep on a torn leather couch, curled up with Iris’s big old ancient book like it was some sort of teddy bear. I had questions galore, so I leaned over and gave him a good shake. Wouldn’t you know it, the little pipsqueak woke like a shot, reared back, and slugged me right in the nose.
Well, not quite. He tried to slug me right in the nose, but I bobbed out of the way, bad foot and all, and caught him by the wrist. I mean, what’d he expect? Did he think I’d met a guy like Rufus Bugg without knowing a little something about boxing?
“Hey, now,” I said. “What do you think you’re playin’ at?”
I could feel his muscles relax as soon as I caught hold of him. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you were…well, I don’t what, exactly, but there’s a dream I keep having, and it is not pleasant, and you gave me a scare.”
Dreams. It seemed now everybody was having dreams, and they weren’t the kind that did us any favors. I let go of Renner’s arm and said, “Was this a Bonesy type dream?”
“Possibly. Probably. I don’t know. She’s not in it, but they started when I hung her on the wall.”
I made a mental note to pry a little more into the good reverend’s dreamscape, but in that moment, I had other fishcakes to fry. “So,” I said, “if you’re done trying to pop me one, where is everybody?”
He shook off the last few cobwebs and explained that after Rufus had finished with my foot, Iris had borrowed the rental and driven Coggins to the hospital. That was the only update he had, since he’d been asleep most every minute since.
I made to sit down, and he scooted over to give me space. The couch creaked like a dying buffalo, and it sagged something awful, but it was better than standing, what with my foot about twice its normal size and pink as a steamed-up lobster.
“So, what’s next?” I said. “What’s the deal with that book?”
“The deal,” said Renner, thumbing the rough pages, “is that this is really two books, and they’re both in Latin. The main book, the real book, the intended book, is a partly illuminated copy of I’m not sure exactly what, but it seems to be a Book of Hours. Or something like it. But then somebody added to it.”
He had that right. Alongside the blocky all-caps lettering of the main text (it reminded me of Roman monuments straight off the History Channel), there was all this scribbly stuff. There were a few pictures, mostly simple sketches in black ink, but a couple with gold backgrounds and real mournful-looking figures in blue or red robes. A couple of angels, not lookin’ all that glorious or cheerful. A saint or two: beards, brown robes, and haloes. But mostly writing, black ink on yellow-brown, spider-wrinkled pages. A museum piece for sure.
Renner kept right on playing tour guide. “Every margin is filled, and the hand is different. The handwriting. The original itself is very old, and given that the second writer was using mostly Latin, too—and a quill or a stick, you can see the spotting, and sections where the ink was running dry—I’m thinking it’s not much newer.”
“Well, what’s it say?”
“I don’t read Latin, remember?”
“A book that can’t be read, real useful. Wait, what about your buddy Iris?”
The reverend shook his head. “She took a quick look, before she left, but she’s basically in the same boat as me. We can see root words that trace forward to English, but mostly she knows services: the mass, fragments from Augustine. Most of this book isn’t liturgical, and none of the margins, which means we’re both stumped.”
“Okay, then. Google Translate.”
“I tried that, just before I went to sleep, but mostly Google spits back gibberish, and the discussion boards are pretty clear: for Latin, there is no really efficacious online translator.”
Efficacious. Here we were in a universe full of useful, helpful words, and the reverend had to go Dumpster diving for “efficacious”. I understood what he meant, sure; I do know my share of dollar words. But would I ever bring ’em up in conversation? Hell, no. Some kinds of horses are meant to stay in the barn.
The reverend was back to thumbing pages, working toward the front. He stopped at the inside cover. “This is the best part. Look how the writing changes here. It’s barely legible, and the ink’s a different color.”
I peered closer, which in the low light I didn’t want to do, ’cos it was a real sore reminder that I needed me some readin’ glasses. Even so, I could see well enough. Something in Latin, centered on the frontispiece, and everywhere else a scrawl, not all of it even right ways up, and every last cotton pickin’ letter brick brown.
“That’s not ink,” I said. “That there is blood.”
“No.”
“Get some forensics tech to test it. You’ll see.”
Renner shook his head. “It’s not red at all.”
“Aren’t you the one who keeps tellin’ me how old this book is? Red fades, blood especially.”
With a sigh, Renner shut the book. “This situation,” he said, “keeps getting worse and worse.”
“Well, it don’t sound too good, that’s for damn sure. Seems to me that Bonesy’s gonna come after this book all over again, and we still won’t have a clue as to why.”
The reverend shifted in his seat, causing the couch to let out another temperamental groan. He indicated my swollen foot and said, “You need a doctor.”
I snorted. “All I need right now is about three thousand milligrams of Vitamin I.”
Renner raised an eyebrow. “Vitamin I?”
“Ibuprofen. Honestly, Renner, what rock do you live under?”
He grinned. The poor guy actually likes it when I make fun of him.
At that moment the front door banged open, and in came Iris Buckhalter and her sorry-ass mistake of a hire, Coggins. I half expected to see Spranwell following behind, but no. The little Brit had his arm in a sling and there was a hump of what I figured were bandages or braces or who knew what stuffed under his shirt and above his hurt shoulder. It was a new shirt, too; the old one must’ve been too bloody to save, and the same for his natty black sport coat.
Their story was quick. The hospital had patched up Coggins, but since he didn’t have insurance, Iris was the one who wound up footing the bill. Only one of them looked pleased about that. As for why she hadn’t dropped him at his apartment or at his office, he’d insisted on coming back to Rufus Bugg’s because he had questions—the kind that only me and the reverend could answer.
“All right,” I said. “Fire away.”
He didn’t look so slick without his bowler hat, which I figured was still in Iris’s place, along with my crutches, and given the shoulder sling and the fact that he’d been up most all the night, he didn’t look too cheeky, either. All in all, a nice change.
“The fact is,” he began, swallowing hard, “thanks to you, I seen something yesterday that I can’t unsee. Something in this ’ere lady’s apartment, as it were. And I can’t quite explain it, because, if you must know, I don’t believe in spooks.”
The reverend was doing his best not to crack a smile, but I didn’t even make the effort. “So you admit,” I said, like some shark of a lawyer leading a witness by the nose, “that you and your partner are charlatans?”
Instead of flinching, Coggins straightened up. “’Course we are,” he said. “But look, can you blame us? There’s a niche, right? And if we didn’t fill it, somebody else would. We put on a good show; we provide a public service. Where’s the ’arm?”
“None,” said Renner, leaning closer to Coggins, “until you run into someone who actually needs help. Who needs help with something that really does go bump in the night.”
“But nothing does!” Coggins exclaimed. “At least, I didn’t think so. Not until that thing jumped out of your cooler.” He narrowed his eyes and jabbed a finger at each of us in turn. “You’re the real deal,” he said, “and you were playing me. Toying with me. I’ve got this sling because you weren’t telling the truth.”
With a delicate sigh, the reverend said, “Think of this as being like The Wizard Of Oz. Dorothy, Glinda. If we’d told you the truth up front, you wouldn’t have believed.”
“Besides,” I said, grinning, “the first rule of spook club is, don’t talk about spook club.”
Well, it’s no fun teasing a guy who’s already beat, and Coggins looked ready to bawl. He said, “But I need to know. That was…real?”
“Everything in creation is real,” said Iris, from out of nowhere. I’d forgotten she was even in the room.
“So I didn’t dream it?” Coggins jerked his chin down toward his shoulder. “It wasn’t one of you that maybe did this, when I wasn’t looking?”
“Here’s the situation,” said Renner, and I let him do the talking, ’cos frankly, this sort of heart-to-heart repair job was what he was best at. “Up until now, you were working in this field as a first-rate fraud. But now you have a problem, because the trouble with ghosts is they’re a lot like allergens, and you’ve not only run into a ghost—or something that we might call a ghost simply out of a need for simple shorthand—but you’ve been injured by whatever this creature is. It bit you or clawed you or both, I don’t know, but it was in contact, direct contact, with you. In fact, it was literally inside you, however briefly, and that kind of contact leaves a trace. Maybe more than a trace. The odds are that you have now been sensitized, just as Dale and I have been, over the years and through different encounters. So in the future, when you take on clients who believe they’re affected by haunts or charms or spells or what have you, you will probably know with some accuracy whether or not they’re calling you because they’re lonely or confused or superstitious, or if they actually have a supernatural problem on their plate. And if it’s the latter, you will feel it. In your body. And I don’t mind telling you, it’s an uncomfortable sensation. Like tension, internalized tension.”
I rolled out my shoulders and pointed to the back of my neck. “Gets me right back here. Makes me crazy and cranky, all at once.”
If Coggins’s eyes had gotten any wider, he’d have turned into a pug. “But I don’t want to be what you just said! Sensitized! This was just a job!”
“Yes,” said Renner, “and now it’s a lifestyle.”
“But how do I know what to do? If I meet up with…with something nasty, what’m I supposed to do?”
Renner and I had to exchange one of those I’m-in-the-club meaningful looks, and then—we couldn’t help it—we both broke out giggling. I mean, Coggins had just asked the million-dollar question, and we—the experts—didn’t have so much as a jelly bean of an answer.
“I honestly have no idea,” said Renner, at last.
“Best advice?” I added. “Run for the hills, every time.”
“But…but…”
The reverend spread his hands in defeat. “We’re not superheroes,” he said. “We light a candle in the dark and we fumble around, trying to find our way. And that’s what you’ll be doing, too. Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but the fact is that we’re actually quite busy this morning. Fumbling in the dark and lighting candles and so on. Is there a bus or something that can get you home?”
From the doorway, Rufus Bugg answered. “Sure,” he said. “Three blocks that way.” I hadn’t seen Bugg come in, and I wasn’t sure I really wanted to see him now, since he was dolled up in a gold satin boxer’s robe with bright green trim and a green sash. With his stoop and all that shiny fabric, he looked like the world’s oldest Mexican wrestler.
“So that’s it then?” Coggins asked. “Dismissed, just like that?”
“You’ll be paid,” said Iris, “as discussed.”
As for me, I gave him a huge, we’re-buddies-but-tough-luck shrug. “The reverend’s right, we’re busy people. But hey, if you’re ever in Northern Michigan, look us up. We can take you to meet all the local undead.”
One thing for sure, Coggins was savvy enough to know when he was being insulted. “The bus,” he said, practically spitting. “At home, that’s one thing. But ’ere? Men of my class, at my time of life, do not ride the bleedin’ bus.”
Well. Let’s just say that the door damn near did hit him on his way out.
With Coggins gone, Rufus Bugg looked us up and down. At last he said, “I don’t have much for breakfast, but if you want to take me out for a bite, I’ll be glad to let you pay. I do seem to recall you sayin’ something about making all this trouble worth my while.”
Turns out the cut man had seriously upscale tastes in breakfast. After a stop at the pharmacy for all the Vitamin I money could buy, he led us to a place called JoAnn’s, the kind of joint that puts sherbet on the fruit cups and on the pancakes. What the hell, at least the coffee was decent.
While we were waiting for the food, Rufus, who’d worn his damn boxer’s robe to the restaurant, took the opportunity to get nosey. I was surprised, since he’d been downright uninterested the night before—what Renner might have called “circumspect”. Maybe it was the coffee. At first, we put him off, but then Iris led the charge toward full disclosure, explaining that Bonesy was her pet—that’s what she called him, no joke—and she could damn well talk about her very own house pet any time she liked.
Rufus might have looked like the worn-out sole of a real tired shoe, but his mind was tack-sharp, and after he’d heard us through (and after our meal had arrived, pesky sherbet and all), he said, “Let me give you folks a summation before I lose the whole story. You’ve got mixed up with a dangerous sort of skeleton that messes around with your dreams, and you think she’s a girl, and she’s chasing down a medieval book, which you’ve got. Now having this book might be helpful, but you don’t know what the book says, so you’ve got no idea why she might want it. Other facts, if I understand correctly, is this skeleton used to be a brass rubbing that you,”—and here he pointed to Iris—“made yourself in England, in a town called Swayfield.”
“Swayfield-On-Witham,” said Iris, correcting. “It’s a village. Barely.”
“This book, meanwhile, doesn’t have a history. You don’t know where it came from.”
“True.”
“Sure. And your friend the brass rubbing is fast and dangerous and doesn’t have the common decency to wear gloves when she throws a punch. Plus, she’s erratic, hard to predict—which I always say is the toughest kind of opponent, ’cos you can’t read ’em. You can’t form a good strategy. Is it gonna be a left hook or a right jab? Or neither one? My point is, for all you know, Bonesy, or whatever you want to call her, is angry enough to not give a damn about the book, not anymore. She might just want to mess you three up. Hurt you for whatever reason. Maybe just for fun. Some people are like that, so maybe some dead things are, too. Who knows?”
I was startin’ in to think that Bugg had a real talent for distilling information when the reverend, sounding indignant, said, “I don’t think that’s her nature at all.”
Rufus gestured with his coffee mug toward the reverend’s bandaged-up face. “Maybe not,” he said, “but have you asked your cheek and jaw about that?”
For once, Renner didn’t have a ready response.
“So,” Rufus went on, “it sounds to me like Little Miss Brass doesn’t take too kindly to daylight, which means that you’ve bought yourself about ten more hours of a head start. To do what, I don’t know, but you should maybe work on getting that book figured out. Is there anything I’m missing?”
I snapped my fingers. “Yeah. I keep forgetting to say, but I’ve been gettin’ messages from a haunted toaster.”
Wouldn’t you know it, but all three burst out laughing. It took me a second to realize they thought I’d cracked a joke. Did that make me just about ten types of mad? Hell, yes, and with good reason.
“Hey!” I cried, waving my arms, trying to call for order without knocking over the maple syrup. “I’m not kiddin’ around! Renner, you’ve even met these two, Tim and Tina Wolving, from Meryl’s. They’re like half albino and they’ve got this toaster, it prints letters on the bread, and when you line ’em up, it forms words, sentences. Messages.”
By this time, the other three had wised up that I wasn’t playing, but good old Renner, he couldn’t help himself. “Messages,” he said, like a real somber Rod Serling, “from beyond.”
And they all cracked up again. Jesus, I hadn’t felt more ridiculous since I’d mispronounced “abyss” in a seventh grade presentation on mountain climbing, and wound up telling all my guffawing classmates about a Himalayan “abbess” of doom.
“All right, all right,” Renner said, fluttering his hands and appealing for calm. “Let’s try to keep our focus.”
No good. Rufus wanted to know what kind of bread, or did the messages maybe show up on English muffins, and I had to explain that in fact my particular messages were oatmeal. This set them off all over again, and when Iris, who’d had less sleep than any of us thanks to her Good Samartian trip to the hospital, tried to gulp a drink, she spat orange juice out her nose. I figured I’d just have to wait ’em out, ’cos this kind of thing happens now and again, where folks are both real tired and real tense and the release comes out all at once, usually in public, and generally in the form of hysterical laughter. Where that left Rufus Bugg, I’m not sure; he wasn’t tired and tense, he was just old and bizarre.
As if to prove my point, his next comment was the most outlandish thing he’d come up with yet (excepting, possibly, that crazy gold robe). He said, “Dale, you know who you really need to track down is Carole Lombard.”
This time it was Renner’s turn to snort liquid out his nose—herbal tea or some such, which to my mind don’t smell any better for having gone through a guy’s nostrils. “Carole Lombard?” he said. “The actor?”
“Sure,” said Rufus, nodding. “She’s real gifted with languages.”
Iris tried to inject a little rationality into this increasingly nutty conversation. “Carole Lombard has been dead since World War II,” she said, and she actually patted Rufus’s hand. “She’s not really a viable option.”
“Well, now,” said Rufus, as he dabbed at Renner’s spat-out tea with a fresh napkin, “seems to me that the last time I saw Carole was just before Dale, here, skipped town, so unless I miss my guess, she’s still living off Mulholland Drive. Big place she’s got, terrific view. And I’m not kidding about the languages. I can give you directions.”
Iris tried again. “But she’s dead.”
Smiling, Rufus said, like he was talking to an especially dense child, “Sure, but so is this Bonesy creature. So I ask you, what’ve you got to lose?”
Los Angeles. Mulholland Drive. Six hours of steady driving, minimum. Assuming, of course, that we wanted to take Bugg up on his loony idea of talking to a dead thirties starlet about how to translate Latin.
“Well,” said Renner, thinking it out as he went, “it would put some distance between us and Bonesy. And she’s indisputably fast, but I don’t see how she can be that fast…”
That got an emphatic nod from Iris. “If you’re going, I come with you. I am not staying in this city with that thing by myself.”
The reverend looked at the leftovers on his plate and shook his head. “Carole Lombard,” he sighed. “This is insane.”
Rufus Bugg smiled so wide I could see the fault lines in his dentures. “Sure, but then again, messages from toasters. Oatmeal bread. Insanity for sure.”
“Fine,” I said, and I banged my fork hard on the table. “I’ll get the bill. LA, here we come.”