Yin studied the sword. “It is not as powerful as it was in the hands of the man who sold it to me. I’m sure you know what happens to magic each time it changes hands.” He pointed it at me. “I wonder how many of the spells on your body I could cut before it shattered?”
Now was the time. “I don’t have files,” I said, not bothering to hide my hatred of him or my fear of that damn blade. “I don’t have any authority to guarantee your safety or the safety of your children. I only have one thing to offer: I can give you a spell of your own.”
Yin’s eyes narrowed on me and the sword lowered. “A spell?”
Bingo. “It’s the only one I know. Give me a big sheet of paper and a pen and I’ll draw out both parts for you. Then you let me go and leave us alone. We pretend this meeting never happened. I can’t offer more than that.”
He smiled at me. He was terribly smug. “I agree. Understand, though, Mr. Lilly. If you betray me, I will make sure others hear about our deal. I know how your superiors respond to trading spells.”
Two of his guys pulled me upright and unlocked my cuffs.
“Remember,” Yin said, “do not—”
“Just give me the paper and pen so we can be done with it.”
Well-Spoken brought them to me. I laid the paper on the bottom of the tub and wrote “for the mind” in the upper left and “for the hand” in the upper right. I’d only cast a couple of spells in my life, including the ghost knife, and while I couldn’t have re-created them from memory, this was how they had been drawn in the spell book.
On the left side of the page, I drew a couple of squiggles that might have been a hole in the ground and maybe an eyeball. On the right, I drew a couple of short lines that suggested a campfire. I have never been much of an artist, but considering what real sigils look like, that worked in my favor.
I handed them the paper. They cuffed me again.
Yin laid his hand over the drawing on the left. He knew enough to recognize the danger in looking at that part of a spell before he’d learned the right-hand drawing.
“What does it do?” Well-Spoken hurried toward him and peered at it over his shoulder.
I glared at Yin. “Wait for it,” I said.
It took less than a minute, but eventually the fire alarm clanged. His gunmen looked nervous, but Yin was greedily delighted. “An arson spell?”
“I don’t recognize it, sir.” Well-Spoken had to shout over the alarm. “I don’t even recognize the style.”
“Is it …” He searched my expression. When he strained his voice, his pitch went quite high. “I have heard that the Book of Grooves is in this part of the world. Is this from the lost Book of Grooves?”
I looked him straight in the eye. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said truthfully.
He looked flustered for a moment, then his smug expression returned. “Of course. I forgot to bargain for its provenance. Have no fear, Mr. Lilly. My people are very good at their jobs. I’ll have my answers soon enough.” He waved his men out of the room and backed away.
“Of course, you forgot to bargain for the keys to those handcuffs!” It was his parting shot, and I let him have it. I kicked the door shut.
Bound was still kneeling on the floor. Yin had abandoned him, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. I bent low, passing the cuffs under my feet so my hands were in front of me, then peeked into the living room. No one put a bullet in my head. They were gone. Through the front window I could see black smoke pouring from one of the units across the way.
I was suddenly very tired. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was dinnertime. I needed sleep, and while I wasn’t desperate enough to lie down here, it would have to be soon.
Bound was still crouching there. The fire across the lot was growing strong. I dragged him to his feet. Together, we hustled out the door.
We hurried toward the arched exit, keeping as far from the fire as possible. Glass shattered somewhere behind me. I shielded my face and dragged Bound past the office.
The fire engine screeched to a stop at the entrance to the motel, while the clerk waved at them with a windmilling arm. I pulled Bound through the arch and off to the side, but we’d been spotted. A firefighter jumped from the back of the engine and ran toward us.
“You two!” he shouted. “Get to a safe distance, but don’t leave the area. We’re going to have some questions …”
He noticed the handcuffs and stopped talking. Then he looked again at Bound’s torn clothes and hunched, face-to-the-ground body language. He didn’t know what to say.
“What?” I said. “We’re consenting adults.”
He frowned, then pointed to a place well away from the fire. “Go there. Stay.” Then he turned and ran through the arch.
“How did you get here so fast?” I called, but he was already gone.
I laid my hand against the stone arch and called my ghost knife. I held it close and said, “Come on.” Bound followed me.
We went farther than the fireman wanted, hurrying by the people filing out of the bar to watch the flames.
With the ghost knife, I cut the cuffs off—carefully. I didn’t know what effect the spell would have on me, and now was not the time to experiment.
I dropped the cuffs into a planter. People were coming out of the stores, and I didn’t want any more attention than necessary. Then I saw Yin step into the Maybach. His driver closed the door for him and got behind the wheel.
Movement off to my right caught my attention. It was Tattoo sitting on a Megamoto. I felt the sudden flush of fear that comes from finding myself too close to a guy who wants to kill me, but he was watching Yin. He hadn’t even noticed me.
As the trio of BMWs rolled out of the parking lot, Tattoo stuck a piece of toast in his mouth and pulled his helmet on. He didn’t have a cast over his thumb or ankle, and I was sure I’d broken both. Damn. All that work and nothing to show for it. He started his bike and followed Yin’s people.
Without thinking about it, I bolted away from Bound and ran toward Tattoo, ghost knife in hand. Yin was a bastard, but Tattoo was worse.
It was no use. The cars were out of the lot and Tattoo was only fifty feet behind them, too far away for me to use my ghost knife.
Bound was standing where I’d left him. I pushed him against the wall and patted him down. His gun was gone. He let me take his passport and billfold. He had credit cards, foreign cash, even a notepad and pen. None of it interested me, and none of it was worth taking.
“Hey,” I said. He wouldn’t look me in the face. “Hey. Where’s Catherine? Your boss said you had her, but she got away. Where did she escape? What did you do to her, you asshole?”
He said something I didn’t understand. He repeated it again, and I realized he was saying: “Help me.” Apparently, that was the only English he knew.
“Sure thing, buddy. Sure thing.” I smiled and laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. Yin’s ghost knife didn’t leave him enough vigor to smile in response, but he did look relieved.
I took the notepad and pen out of his billfold and wrote: I don’t speak English but I do like to start fires. Please arrest me. Then I tucked the billfold back into his pocket, gently put the note in his hand, and gestured toward the men by the bar. He started walking meekly toward them, note held in front of him.
I didn’t stick around to see how that would turn out.
As I approached the Neon, I passed a pair of old hippies watching the fire. It was still going strong. One of them turned toward me. “What happened, dude?” I couldn’t see his mouth moving underneath his wiry gray beard.
I shrugged. “I just got here. Is there another motel in town?”
“Naw, just the Sunset, but that’s a really nice place.”
I smiled while he gave me directions, then thanked him and climbed into the car. I couldn’t go back to the Sunset. Yin knew about it.
I pulled out of the lot and headed away from town. I would have to sneak around the roadblock and find a room at the next exit, whatever it was, and come back for my car when I’d gotten some sleep and food.
A green pickup drove toward me. Hadn’t the roadblock been put up yet? Had the mayor decided not to call it in because of the festival?
The car in front of me was a Volvo station wagon packed to the windows with loose laundry. It was about a hundred feet ahead when its brake lights came on. I slowed down, too. My iron gate twinged, but that seemed unimportant.
The Volvo stopped. I slowed to parking-lot speed, the twinge in my shoulder growing stronger. After a couple of seconds, the Volvo did a three-point turn and drove back toward me.
I braked and took out my ghost knife. The driver was a bird-faced old woman who didn’t glance at me once. She simply drove past me toward town with a pained expression on her face.
Weird. I took my foot off the brake and started toward the highway again. The first flare of a headache started, and I slowed again. I couldn’t remember why I was driving out of town. It didn’t make sense. Washaway was where I needed to be.
I stopped in the road. There was a reason I needed to leave, but I couldn’t remember what it was. A beer truck came up the road toward me, but it stopped about a hundred and fifty feet away and turned around. I watched it drive away.
I touched my iron gate. It was throbbing, but there was no one else around, not even other cars.
I saw a blue tarp on the side of the road. I got out of the car, leaving the engine running, and walked into the weeds. There were actually several tarps. The closest was the smallest, and I knelt beside it, my headache growing stronger. The edges were tucked underneath the object it was covering. I took out my ghost knife to slit open the top, then thought better of it and just pulled it back.
It was a little girl. I won’t describe her in detail, but she’d been beaten and strangled to death many hours before. She did not have a white mark on her face. I tucked the tarp under her again.
When I pulled back the tarp on the next one, I found Clara’s red-gold curls. I didn’t need to see more.
I stood and backed away, my head pounding. The other tarps were probably Isabelle and the rest of the Breakley family. I could have pulled them all back to see if Biker was there, or if the gunmen had been brought down from the Wilbur estate, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to look at more dead faces.
Sue and Big Bill had obviously brought the bodies out here and laid them by the side of the road. That seemed perfectly logical to me. The tarps would protect them from animals, and while it didn’t make sense to take them out of Washaway, they had to be put somewhere.
I headed back to the car, instinctively understanding that I would feel better if I went back to town. I did a three-point turn and drove back toward the fire and the trucks. My headache eased and my iron gate stopped aching.
But I still didn’t have anywhere to go. It wasn’t safe to stay at the B and B, and the motel was gone. There were empty houses I could break into, but they were all crime scenes. Besides, I didn’t really want to sleep in the Breakleys’ bedroom tonight, knowing what had happened there.
If I couldn’t sleep, I needed to find the predator quickly. I needed a plan.
I drove through town and pulled up in front of Penny’s house. The pickup was still against the tree, but her front door was closed. Both had been surrounded with yellow tape. At first I thought the mysterious sheriff had finally arrived, but when I got closer I saw it was caution tape, not police tape.
I went inside. The house was dark, but the entry to the kitchen was lit by a nightlight. The police scanner was still there. I turned it on to make sure it worked, then pulled the plug and tucked it under my arm.
Something rustled behind me. I took out my ghost knife and crept into the living room, hoping I was about to catch the sapphire dog by surprise and not Penny’s cats.
It was neither. Little Mark lay on the couch, sleeping peacefully. His head was covered in a big white bandage.
It looked like the same bandage the paramedics had put on him. Obviously, they hadn’t taken him to the hospital. I could have taken him myself, but that didn’t make sense; I couldn’t leave Washaway. I needed to stay, and Mark probably did, too.
I left by the front door without waking him.
I needed to find a place where I could work on the scanner and connect it to the Neon’s electrical system. Something private and well lit.
As I drove through town, Steve’s Crown Vic came toward me in the opposite lane. He pulled left, blocking the road but giving me enough room to brake. A second car, a rusted Forester, stopped beside his.
He climbed out and came toward me. I could see he was angry. “I thought I asked you to stay at the Sunset.”
God, I hated that whining voice. “I didn’t have a choice. Can we leave it at that?”
The Forester’s driver door opened and a short, plump woman climbed out. At first I thought it was Pippa, but as she stepped into my headlights, I saw that she was a black woman with Coke-bottle-thick glasses and a long, quilted yellow jacket. I guessed she was yet another member of the neighborhood watch. A man climbed out of the Forester behind her. He was a fat little cowboy with a Wilford Brimley mustache.
“No,” Steve said. “Things have been happening pretty fast around here. Look at this.” He took a sheet of paper from his pocket and held it up. It was already too dark to read it. “I’m the new chief of police in Washaway—temporary emergency position only. Pippa saw to it.”
“The sheriff hasn’t come yet?”
“No,” Steve said, “and I’ve called him eight times today. But I was a patrol officer in Wenatchee for a few years, so Pippa figured I’m the best candidate for the job. Now, tell me where you’ve been, or I’m going to arrest you.”
“At Penny’s. Did you know that Mark is there right now? Sleeping?”
“With a head wound? Is anyone with him?”
“Nope.”
He turned to the others. “We can’t leave that boy alone with a head injury. Sherisse, Ford, would you go and collect him, please?”
They hustled back to their car. Steve turned to me. “You haven’t been at Penny’s this whole time, though, right?”
“No.”
Steve sighed in irritation. “What about the other strangers in town? They’re looking for this thing too, right?”
“Yes, and we can’t talk about this here.”
“Well, we could have talked at the Sunset, if you’d done like I asked, but no—”
“Oh, for … They found me there, okay? They know I want to kill it, and I’m not safe there anymore. I need a new place to crash.” I rubbed my eyes. “I’m pretty much running on fumes.”
“Okay.” Steve rubbed the faint stubble on his chin. “Let’s go.”
I followed him through town, turning off Littlemont Road onto a winding asphalt street barely wide enough for two cars. He stopped in front of a clapboard, two-story house with a long garage, walked up the front lawn, and opened the garage door. I pulled inside.
“This is my house, if you haven’t guessed.” The walls were covered with tools on pegboards. There was a thick layer of dust on them. If Steve had been handy at one point in his life, it was long ago.
I followed him through a mudroom into a little kitchen, then a living room. Everything was perfectly clean and neatly arranged, but it was a depressing little house. It seemed to absorb light, but every scuff of our feet echoed as if we were in a drum. He led me to a threadbare couch and offered me tea and sandwiches. I said yes, thank you, and he went into the kitchen.
A four-foot tree stood in the corner. It was undecorated.
Steve returned and set a foldout table in front of me. There were two little plates on it, each with a white-bread sandwich and a handful of corn chips. Beside them were thick white mugs with steaming tea.
I thanked him again and took a bite of the sandwich. It was yellow cheese with mayo and iceberg lettuce. I was hungry enough to enjoy it.
Steve took a bite of his sandwich, more out of politeness than hunger, I could see. When he swallowed, he set it down and settled back in his armchair. It looked too big for him. “I think it’s past time you give me the full rundown.”
“Okay,” I said. I set down my own sandwich and sipped some tea, just to buy time. “Regina Wilbur had this sapphire dog in the little cottage behind her house for decades. It was trapped in there, and she kept it all for herself.”
He nodded. We both remembered how the sapphire dog had made us feel. “You said it was a gift?”
“That’s what she told me. She was grateful for it, but I don’t think the gift giver was doing her any favors.”
Steve opened his mouth to respond, then paused. He knew the history of this town and the Wilbur family. “When she was younger, Regina Wilbur was a terror in this part of the county. She had very definite ideas about what had to be done and who should be allowed to do it. Then she simply stopped coming to planning meetings and became a hermit. Lots of folks were relieved.”
“But something changed recently, right?”
“Well, her niece had her declared incompetent. There was a videotape of Regina pitching a fit in her drawing room, claiming that they were keeping her dog from her. A dog that died twenty-five years ago.”
“Named Armand, right?” Steve nodded. “I thought so. She gave that name to the sapphire dog, too. You can imagine how she’d behave if they kept her from visiting it.”
“The niece … Does she know?”
“She held an auction last night. She sold the sapphire dog to a Chinese guy for nearly a hundred thirty million dollars.” It was hard to believe that all this trouble had taken place in less than twenty-four hours.
“Lord help us. I know about the men, of course. Washaway has been full of rumors that he was looking to invest nearby and had come to see the festival. But they were here for this auction?”
“Yeah, but the creature escaped. Now the Chinese guy—and the others who lost the auction—are looking for it. They all have guns, and they aren’t squeamish about using them.”
Steve winced. I described the groups who had been at the estate in a general way, leaving out the summoning of the floating storm and the spells on Tattoo’s body.
“What about you? Did you come for the auction, too?”
“No,” I answered. “With me, it’s …” What the hell could I say? I couldn’t tell him about the society. “… just bad luck.”
He didn’t look impressed with that answer. “And what does this have to do with what happened to you in Seattle?”
“Near as I can tell, nothing. It was similar to this, though—weird creature, people going nuts.”
“You did solve that problem, though?”
I kept my face carefully neutral. “I did.”
“How?”
I thought back to the last moments of that ordeal, when my best and oldest friend had pleaded for me to spare his life. The smells of spoiled blood and field turf came back to me, and so did his voice. The old injury on my left hand throbbed.
I opened my mouth to answer, but the words wouldn’t come. I’d only talked about it to one other person, a peer in the society I had never seen before or since. At the time, I was still in shock and I’d expected him to kill me. Since then, I hadn’t said a word about it.
And I wasn’t going to start with a cop, even a temp cop, no matter how politely he asked.
“Never mind,” Steve said with a wave of his hand. “I understand.”
We didn’t say anything for a while, and my eyelids began to droop. He noticed. “Let me set you up for some shut-eye. Any fool can see you need it, even this one.”
The pillows and blankets he brought were pink and flowery. I stretched out on the couch, feeling awkward and vulnerable, but when I closed my eyes, I dropped into a deep, dreamless sleep.
“Get up.”
I came awake suddenly, thinking that Yin’s men had found me again, but it was Catherine.
“I mean it,” she said again. Her tone was sharp. “Nap time is over.”
I sat up and rubbed the bleariness out of my eyes. The VCR clock said it was almost ten, but was that the evening of the same day, or had I slept all the way into the morning? “It’s nice to see you, too. Is it early or late?”
“It’s still the same day, if that’s what you mean. And I’m hungry again. Those bastards took my emergency food with the jump bag. Come on! Up!”
As a rule, I don’t like being snapped at, but I was too damn tired to care. Maybe I was just glad to see that she was okay. “Don’t talk to me that way,” I said out of habit. “How did you find me?”
“Goddammit, Ray.” She sat down on the edge of the couch and folded her arms across her breasts. “I saw you go into the motel to meet Yin. What kind of game are you playing?”
“I’m not playing any kind of game. Do you think he turned me? Do you think he bought me off?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said with more anger than I’d expected. “He sent me your cellphone and told me he’d kidnapped you. I went there to free you.”
She sighed and set her hands on her knees. “And I watched you go in, thinking you were collecting a payoff.”
“He nearly killed me, but the fire made him back off.”
“That was lucky.”
“Not really.”
She smiled and I smiled back. We had a moment. Then she looked away and her smile vanished. She held up her hands. They trembled slightly.
“I’m forty-five years old, you know. I’ll be forty-six in August, if I live that long. This job isn’t as exciting as it was when I was twenty-five. I’m better at it now, but …” She rubbed her hands together and leaned back. “They did get me, you know. They stopped my car and dragged me out onto the asphalt. It seemed like a dozen of them, all smiling shit-eating smiles and holding their guns against my body. All over my body.”
She was silent for a moment. I waited for her, and eventually she said: “They couldn’t keep me, though. They underestimated me, and when I saw my chance I took it.”
“I’m glad.” It was a stupid thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything better.
Catherine just nodded. “How did you get into this? How did you get sucked into this life?”
Maybe she didn’t know my history. Or maybe she was testing me to see if I shared information. I didn’t care. “My best friend … my best friend had a predator in him. Annalise was there to kill him, but I tried to save him. I took his side against her, but he was past saving.”
She nodded. “With me it was my nephew. He was a little wild and very funny, but one summer day he could suddenly do things. When the society came hunting for him, the whole family hid him away. They protected him. Except me. I knew he was killing people, and I decided to turn him in. I had to do the right damn thing, no matter what it cost. My family … isn’t my family anymore. I’m married now, with two girls, but they’ve never met my mother or sisters. I don’t want them to hear the things my family says to me—what they call me now. I got this damn job out of it, though.”
I couldn’t imagine how hard it was to do society work as a parent, and I said so.
She pulled away from me and let her body language become neutral. “I have ways of dealing. There are ways of doing this job that help keep a little distance. I don’t do any of the violence, and I’m never around when it happens. There’s no need for me to see that and carry it around with me, bring it home to my family. Not after what happened to my nephew. I take care of my own people and let these people take care of themselves.”
That last bit was a little cold. I don’t rescue people. I kill predators. But I did my best not to react. People have to cope the best they can.
She continued. “But … maybe it’s just that I know more now. Maybe I just know more about the danger and the … the suddenness. It can be so quick. One minute everything is just fine, and the next you’ve lost all power and control. They only had me for about twenty minutes, okay? That’s how long it took me to get away, but … When they have you, they can do anything to you. Kill you, rape you, torture you …” She paused while she ran through the possibilities in her mind.
I couldn’t ask what Yin had done. I didn’t have any real need to know except self-indulgent curiosity. What I needed to do was make her feel better. “Want to go kill them?” I asked.
“Yes!” she answered, but she didn’t jump up and rush for the door. “But I’m not the type. And it wouldn’t get me anything. I’m going to have nightmares about this, I think. I’m going to have nightmares for a long time about this. Christ, I’m collecting them like scars.” After a moment, she added: “Do you really think we should kill Mr. Yin?”
I spread my hands. “Catherine, I bought him off with a fake spell. Someone is going to have to kill him.”
We had a little discussion about that, where I explained what I did and how I did it. Catherine didn’t like the idea on general principle but couldn’t think of a specific reason to object. She even admitted that the society publishes fake spell books to discourage wannabes. Then she explained that Steve Cardinal had told her where to find me. It seemed that most of the town was looking for us, with instructions to call him if we were spotted.
“He seems to know more than he should,” she said. She watched my response carefully, as if trying to decide whether I was sharing information I should have kept to myself.
“He saw the sapphire dog,” I said. “In fact, it nearly fed on him. So yeah, he knows more than he should.” I told her about the predator, how it looked and what it could do. She was motionless while I spoke, staring at me intently.
Then I told her about my visit with Pratt. She seemed to recognize the name.
“Did he give you his number?” she asked.
“He wasn’t that into me. Actually, he was a complete asshole. He told me to go home, and he wouldn’t help deal with Yin.”
Wouldn’t help rescue you was what I should have said. Catherine seemed to understand anyway.
She rubbed her face. “Well, we can’t leave,” she said. “It wouldn’t make sense to leave Washaway now.”
My head felt foggy and sore for a moment, probably from the effects of sleep. “Right, that doesn’t make sense.”
After that, she set up the police scanner. Steve was out, so I went into his kitchen. I couldn’t find any coffee. We had to settle for black tea and sugar. His fridge contained nothing but condiments, Wonder bread, white cheese, and hamburger buns, and his freezer was packed with microwavable meat patties. I felt a little awkward raiding the man’s kitchen, and the dismal selection made it easy to leave it all untouched. Maybe we should order out.
We listened to the scanner for the better part of an hour. It was extremely dull, but Catherine had an amazing capacity to focus on something that might become useful at any moment. I got up and moved around the room, swinging my arms and trying to keep loose. My face felt stiff, and when I checked a mirror I saw that my eye was not swollen anymore but was an ugly dark color. The spot where Bushy Bill had hit me was slightly red but not too bad. No wonder the women in Washaway weren’t tearing their clothes off when I walked into the room.
There was squawking on the scanner when I came back. It barely sounded like human speech. “Do you understand any of that?”
“Fire at the motel is out,” she said. “The whole thing is a loss. The neighborhood watch is supposed to find locals who can put the firefighters up for the night.”
I wasn’t sure why they weren’t going home, but that didn’t seem important. What was important was Steve’s house; I didn’t want to be there when he got home. I didn’t like that clean, quiet, depressing little place.
“I want to get out of here,” I said. “Do you want to stay and man the scanner?”
“No,” she said quickly. “I’ll come along.”
That surprised me. “Are you sure?” I didn’t say This is a safe place or We might run into bad guys. I didn’t have to.
“They know about me, so there really isn’t a safe place anymore. And I’m not the stay-at-home type.”
She took the keys to the Neon and carried the scanner into the garage. While she fiddled with the wires under the dash, I went into the kitchen, boiled water, and poured it into a thermos. Then I added a tea bag and the last of Steve’s sugar.
Back in the garage, I found Catherine sitting behind the wheel, the engine running and the scanner hissing. I opened the garage door and she pulled out. I closed the door and climbed inside.
The scanner sat on the floor mat beside my feet. I didn’t dare move for fear of pulling out a wire. “I’m the one who rented this car, you know.”
“Maybe, but I’m a better driver.”
Fair enough. We drove back and forth through town, waiting for something to happen. At one point, a black Yukon passed us going the other way. The bidders had the same idea. After almost an hour, a thin fog billowed in, but nothing else came up. Finally, Catherine said what I’d been afraid to say. “Could it already be gone? Things wouldn’t be this quiet if it was still in town, right?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Except that the Breakleys were only discovered because we burned down their barn. Maybe it’s holed up somewhere, feeding and biding its time.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “The cage was surrounded by lights, remember? What if it only wanted a ride because it needed to avoid daylight? What if it set out cross-country once night fell?”
“Fuck.” That hadn’t occurred to me. The predator hadn’t walked like a creature that could cover a lot of ground, but I wouldn’t have guessed it could move through walls, either.
“Driving around is a waste of time,” I said.
“I agree completely.” Catherine did a U-turn in the middle of the street and headed back toward the shopping center on Littlemont.
The Grable was sealed off with more yellow caution tape. The arch was blackened on one side, and the building was a shell. I didn’t like looking at it.
Catherine parked in front of the bar. “I’m going to socialize,” she said. “You’re designated driver, so you can have Pepsi. After I get inside, count to five hundred and come in. This works better if people think I’m alone.”
She went inside. I sat and counted slowly. There was a Fleetwood parked a couple of dozen yards away. It took a moment for me to remember where I’d seen it before. I got out of the Neon.
I approached from an angle that would keep me out of the side and rearview mirrors, but I didn’t need to bother. The driver was alone and asleep. It was Regina Wilbur.
She was wrapped in an expensive cashmere coat, and she’d managed to clean herself up. Her hair had been washed, at least. She had a duck hunter’s shotgun in her lap.
The button for the door lock was up, so I yanked the door open and snatched the shotgun away from her as quickly as I could. She woke instantly. If I’d been any slower, I’d have been staring down the barrel. I was glad I hadn’t underestimated her.
“Hello, Regina,” I said. “It’s kind of a chilly night to be sleeping in your car, isn’t it?”
“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.” If she had bothered to remember my name, she wasn’t going to say it. “I know why you’re in Washaway. If I get my hands on that shotgun again, I’ll use it to part your miserable skull.”
“You don’t know as much about me as you think,” I said.
That got a rise out of her, as I’d hoped it would. “That little German bastard told me everything I need to know. He says you want to kill Armand.”
“And you believed him? You can’t trust that guy. He murdered a member of your own staff in cold blood.”
“Pfah!” She waved a liver-spotted hand at me. “Why should he lie to me? I’m just a helpless old woman!”
I almost laughed in her face. But that “little German bastard” wouldn’t have been fooled by her any more than I was. “And I’ll bet he offered to capture Armand for you.”
“Not just for me,” she said, sounding as if I’d insulted her intelligence. “He wants to bring in a team to study Armand, and he thinks the home I built for him would be the best place to do it.”
“So he wants to share the sapphire dog with you? Like the poetry professor?”
“Yes!” she drew out the hiss at the end of that word with malicious joy. “He and I will share the same way I shared with the poetry professor, as soon as he catches Armand in one of those big, black Yukons of his.”
I couldn’t resist correcting her. “The Yukons with the red-and-white cards on the dash? Those aren’t his. That’s a different bidder entirely.”
She smiled like a snake, and I realized I’d made a mistake. She started the engine and backed out of her parking slot. I had to jump out of the way of the open door. She gave me one last sneer before she pulled out, leaving me holding her shotgun.
Damn. I had underestimated her after all, but what should I do about it? I could have tried to call the new emergency chief of police, if I had his number, which I didn’t. And if I followed her, I would be separating from Catherine again.
That hadn’t worked well the last time, and I wasn’t going to do it again. I tossed Regina’s shotgun onto the roof of the teriyaki place. Maybe she had another gun, but I think she would have tried to shoot me if she had. And while she could certainly afford a new one, she’d have to wait until the stores opened. I had time. I hoped.
I decided that I’d waited at least a five-hundred count and went inside.
Catherine was sitting at the bar, chatting amiably with the bartender. She had a glass of white wine in front of her. Her body language was different from what I’d seen before—yet another personality. I wonder how she chose them, or if she went by instinct. I took note of where the bathroom was and picked a spot where I’d have to walk by her to get to it.
Two stools over from me was a guy of about twenty-five. He was slumped over a beer, reading the label as if it might make him happy.
In the corner was an older couple sipping from tall drinks with a careful, trembling elegance. They both looked shriveled and wasted on the top half of their bodies and thick with flab on the bottom half. They seemed like people who had once had much better uses for their time but would have been offended at the label “barfly.”
A pair of young guys shot pool in the corner. They didn’t talk, but I couldn’t tell if that was because they didn’t like each other or they were just intent on their game.
The last person in the bar was Pratt. There was an empty bowl and crumpled napkin in front of him—he’d come here for his dinner. I wondered if, like us, he was here to find information or if he was slacking off from his job. Which wasn’t fair, but to hell with him. I didn’t like him.
The bartender tore himself away from Catherine long enough to take my order. He was a middle-aged guy with a slouching belly and no ring on his left hand. His face had started to go pouchy, but his hair was thick and combed straight back as though he was proud of it. I asked for a root beer and a menu. He dropped them off and wandered back to Catherine.
I could overhear a little of their conversation: she was complimenting the town in ways that prompted the bartender to brag a little. He described the Christmas festival that would happen tomorrow, explained the history of it, and flirted with her shamelessly. She didn’t encourage him, but she didn’t back away, either.
Depressed Guy tapped his empty bottle on the bar and the bartender brought him a new one. He took my order, too. I went for the grilled cheese, figuring it was cheap and too easy for him to screw up.
Catherine went back to doing her thing. I couldn’t hear everything she was saying, but it sounded like small talk. Whatever information she was getting was coming at a leisurely pace, and she didn’t seem interested in speeding up the process. My grilled cheese arrived; I’d never had a better sandwich in my life.
Depressed Guy muttered something to himself. I glanced over at him. He said: “Ever love someone or something so much you can’t live without them?”
I remembered the way the sapphire dog had made me feel. Depressed Guy suddenly had my full attention. “Yeah, man. I think I have.”
Encouraged, he turned toward me. His eyes looked a little bleary and he had trouble focusing, but he could talk without slurring. “It hits so hard at first. It’s like … all the love in your life is ripped away from you all of a sudden. All you have left is this, like, little tattered shred of something in your hand, because you tried to hold on too tight. Ya know whutamean? You think I tried to hold on too tight?”
Catherine did this for a living, I thought. She drew people out, listened to their stories, and found the information she needed. Not me. Everything I’d ever learned about investigations had come from being on the other side. I couldn’t play this game her way; I had to do it mine.
“I don’t know, man. Who did you lose?”
“My wife.” I immediately lost interest. Still, he kept talking. I glanced away and saw that one of the pool players had joined Catherine’s conversation. Whatever they were talking about, she seemed interested. Was she a good actress, or did she enjoy this? “She dumped me over the phone. Can you believe that? After ten and a half months of marriage.”
I glanced around the room. Pratt was looking straight at me. I looked back, and he didn’t look away. In some places, that would have been an invitation to brawl, but I haven’t had much luck with bar fights.
Depressed Guy wasn’t finished. “Almost eleven months! I thought we were in love.”
“That’s rough,” I said.
He went back to his beer. “I’m keeping the damn fish tank, you can believe that.”
I imagined a tank full of dead fish, and it suddenly occurred to me that Pratt might have completed his job already. Maybe this was his victory meal, as pathetic as that sounded.
I slid off my stool and crossed to his booth. He was dipping his spoon into a bowl of grayish chowder when I sat across from him. Before he could tell me to get lost, I said, “Well?”
“Well, what?”
I met his stare. Apparently, he wanted me to talk out loud in front of all these people. “Well, have you taken care of that dog?”
“I don’t report to you.” Which was true, but he struck me as the boasting type, so I figured the job wasn’t done.
“Fair enough. How about another supplemental report?”
“You don’t file reports,” he said. “I get those from the smoke.”
For a moment I thought he was talking about smoke signals, or visions in magic smoke or something. Then I realized—duh—he meant Catherine. “You’re a real charmer.”
He stirred his soup. “Get out of here,” he said without looking at me, “before I break both of your legs.”
So much for warning him about Yin’s ghost knife. I glanced back at Catherine. She was looking at me, and her expression was difficult to read. I stood and went to the men’s room, washed my hands in the dirty sink, and walked toward my original spot. As I passed Catherine’s stool, the bartender said, “Hey, man. Are you Clay Lilly?”
I stopped. “My name’s Ray Lilly.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Catherine said, her voice lilting. “I knew that was you. How is your mother?” She slid off her stool. “Excuse me, Rich,” she said to the bartender.
I heard the bartender curse under his breath, but it was too late. Tonight’s entertainment had walked off with another guy. I led her to the table and picked up my soda. “Did—”
She interrupted me right away. “Is your mother still working at that law firm?” We had a conversation about a woman I hadn’t seen for years. While we were talking, Pratt laid a couple of bills on the table and walked out.
Eventually, I said I had my mother’s phone number out in the car, and Catherine smiled as though I was learning the game. I paid for my food, and while we were waiting for the slip to sign, Depressed Guy looked blearily over at us.
Catherine couldn’t resist. “How are you, honey?” Her tone was maternal.
“Alone,” he said. “My wife just left me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. What happened?” If she was pretending to be interested, she was damn good at it.
“Thass the thing. I don’t even know! This afternoon everything was great between us. An hour later, she called me and said that she didn’t love me anymore. She said she’d found someone else. Someone with stars in his eyes.”
Catherine looked at me. I looked at her. I fought down the urge to grab the guy and shake him until he told me more.
“That’s terrible,” Catherine said. Her voice was shaky and she’d lost her grip on the kind, maternal, cry-on-my-shoulder character she was playing. “Where did she call from?”
It was a crazy transition, but Depressed Guy was drunk enough to take it in stride. “She rides out at the stables three nights a week.” He took a pull off his beer. “He’s prolly a cowboy or something.”
The credit card slip came. I signed it. Catherine and I walked calmly and slowly toward the door.
Once through it, we ran to the car. We had our lead.