What Waits for You

by Joseph Schneider

  “Bastard,” said Jarsdel.

  “Huh? Who?”

  “Sponholz blurted it out when he saw this picture. At the time we all assumed he was talking about the Creeper.”

  Morales didn’t speak, and Jarsdel knew it was because his partner understood how his mind worked—when he needed silence and when he needed to talk. They made a good team.

  The house is bleeding.

  That again. Why was that important? Yes, the Creeper was a monster, and he’d beaten Joanne Lauterbach so badly that her blood had leaked into the floor and the wall and out the fracture in the stucco. The fracture that wouldn’t have been there if not for that earthquake, the one that had released valley fever.

  Al-Amuli’s voice, of all people, from that night at the Tiki-Ti. Jarsdel had been drunk, but Al-Amuli’s soliloquy had come after the reprimand from Sponholz, so it had stuck with him.

  Ever since that earthquake. Remember? That earthquake, way back in January. All from there.

  Sponholz had even picked up the thread after Al-Amuli had left. He’d talked about the spores, and about how the Creeper seemed to come out of the ground right along with them. The spores that had killed two trees in his yard. He’d called the earthquake the source of all his troubles, even predicted it would cost him his ticket to Phantom, which it did.

  Jarsdel was aware of Morales standing there, was aware of the pictures in front of him, was aware of the gradually waking station. But his mind was with the past.

  My mind’s always with the past, Jarsdel thought. That’s my strength. It’s where all the answers are.

  What did the Galkas and the Lauterbachs have in common? The plastic—red and yellow, similar size and shape. That, and they’d both been killed after an earthquake. Jarsdel remembered that well. Would always remember those terrible days last summer. The second big earthquake, followed by the death of that poor patrol officer when he’d gone to arrest Degraffenreid. The end-of-watch call. A moment of citywide silence on the police band. Then Jarsdel had woken the next morning to news of the Galkas.

  Bastard, Sponholz had said, seeing the sliver of red plastic. Then he’d wanted to see the Lauterbach book, and in that one he’d seen a sliver of yellow plastic. And then he’d caught the Creeper. How had he known to check the Lauterbach book? What did the earthquakes have to do with the plastic?

  “Oscar.”

  “Right here.”

  Jarsdel gave the cardboard box a shove with his foot. “Check out Santiago, Verheugen, and Rustad. See if you can find any more pictures of plastic looking like these ones here.”

  “On it.” Morales picked up the box and went back to his desk. While Jarsdel waited, he continued to stare at the two pictures.

  It’s official. LA run of Phantom’s canceled. Sponholz’s words.

  Canceled because of the quake. Damage to the theater, to his beloved Pantages.

  “No plastic in Verheugen,” said Morales. “I mean, I’m going quick, but I don’t think it’s there.”

  Jarsdel registered the comment, then put it aside. He was back with Sponholz. Sponholz lamenting that he didn’t know when he’d get his refund back. Something else, too.

  Right. All those poor actors out of work.

  Actors. What had Sponholz said about them? That these days they were spoiled rotten. They didn’t have to learn all the crafts of their predecessors. Insurance wouldn’t let them. Not like Sponholz, swinging around like Quasimodo, hanging lights from the grid.

  Right, thought Jarsdel. Back then they did it all. Set-building, costumes, everything.

  Sponholz’s words came back, louder—

  Swinging around like Quasimodo, hanging lights from the grid.

  Something about Quasimodo? No. Something about lights?

  “No plastic in Santiago,” said Morales.

  Varma now. Her office the first time they’d met. How she talked about her work with lighting designers.

  Jarsdel closed his eyes.

  Bastard Red.

  The gel in Varma’s book of samples. The red plastic on the Galka carpet. Sponholz had known exactly what it was, had nearly blurted out its name.

  The plastic slivers were bits of lighting gel.

  “You won’t find any plastic in Rustad,” he said to Morales.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the Creeper was out of work.”

  Morales raised his eyes from the Rustad book and stared at Jarsdel.

  Swinging around like Quasimodo, hanging lights from the grid. Sponholz’s words, and he’d been close. Not Quasimodo, though. It wasn’t a great analogy. Quasimodo lived in a cathedral. The Phantom of the Opera, on the other hand, lived in a theater.

  “He’s a lighting tech,” said Jarsdel. “Also explains why he doesn’t mind heights. January quake closed the Pantages. Everyone’s out of work.” He tapped the photograph in the Lauterbach book. “They trim these to cover the stage lights. He still had bits of this on his shoes, maybe his clothes. As the weeks pass, he doesn’t come into contact with it again. Kills the Rustads, Santiagos, Verheugens. Then we get that little lull. Why? Because he’s back at work. Theater’s about to reopen. Then the second earthquake comes along, closes the place for good. He kills the Galkas.” Jarsdel pointed to the piece of red plastic on the carpet. “And he leaves this.”

  Morales stood, putting on his sport coat. “Gotta find out the names of everyone who worked on that show. Cross-reference them with their driver’s licenses. Looking for someone small, so we can rule out anyone over five-four. Then we’ll just see which of those guys have disappeared.”

  “Meant to give this back to you,” Jarsdel said. He bent over and unstrapped the holstered revolver from his ankle. He offered it to Morales, who shook his head.

  “Nah. You keep it, Dragonslayer.” He began to move off, then noticed his partner hadn’t stood. “What’s the matter—you ain’t comin’?”

  “In a minute.”

  “Don’t go off in your own little world. We got shit to do.”

  “I know. I’ll meet you outside.”

  Morales left the squad room.

  Dragonslayer. He supposed it was an improvement over Dad or Prof.

  “Master of Midnight,” he murmured, closing the murder books. “I’ll know your name, your face. And you’ll be master of nothing.”

  Tully Jarsdel strapped the Bodyguard back onto his ankle. He’d reloaded it with wadcutters, just like before.

  By the time he made it out to the parking lot, a light rain had begun to fall. It had been a cold, dry winter, and the air was suddenly alive and rich with smells. Petrichor, it was called. The peculiar, pleasant bouquet of scents accompanying the first rain after a dry spell.

  Your unceasing, chattering mind.

  Yes. That was true.

  But it also slayed dragons.

  Read on for an excerpt from the first Tully Jarsdel LAPD novel One Day You’ll Burn

  1

  Hollywood was at its worst in early morning. The gray light hit in all the wrong places, deepening the cracks in the facades and making the black, fossilized stains of chewing gum dotting the sidewalk stand out like leeches. Dawn made Hollywood into an after-hours club at closing time—the party over, the revelers departed or collapsed where they stood, the magic gone.

  As the first pale hues spread across the desert sky, a coyote ventured down from Griffith Park. The wildfires that had torn through the hills that summer had scattered the rabbits and scrawny deer she depended on for food, and the coyote had been reduced to competing with raccoons over the contents of trash bins. But she wasn’t strong enough to fight them—had already lost an eye—so now she was across Los Feliz and passing Pink Elephant Liquors, suddenly alive to the scent of meat, picking up speed, down Western Avenue and then left onto the boulevard, faster, until her instincts took over fully and sent he
r streaking along the sidewalk toward her claim.

  A block east, Dustin Sparks—whom Fangoria magazine had once called the “Godfather of Gore”—stared in amazement at the human-shaped thing lying at his feet. Back in ’87, he’d worked on a movie about a gym that had been built over an old prison graveyard. When the local power plant melted down, the radiation cloud woke up the corpses, which broke through the gym’s floor and began attacking the members. An aerobics instructor had tried hiding in the sauna, but the murderous dead had jammed the door and cranked the heat up all the way, roasting her in her spandex suit. It was a stupid idea—no way a sauna could get that hot—but he’d been happy to build the dummy of the burned woman. It hadn’t been a tough job, technically speaking; he’d begun with a wire frame, wrapped it in foam, then covered the whole thing in strips of latex. Over the barbecue paint job, Sparks had finished with a coat of glossy sealant, which left it all with a wet, organic look.

  What lay in front of him now so closely resembled that long-ago prop that, at first, he thought his brain must have finally started to misfire. It was only a matter of time, he knew, considering how many years he’d spent frying it. His arm began throbbing again—invisible, hot bands of iron cinching into his flesh. He gripped the limb, trying to massage the scrambled nerves back into dormancy, and glanced up at the sound of someone approaching.

  But it wasn’t a person. A coyote—eyes wide, tongue lolling—flashed across the cement and clamped its jaws onto the leg of the Halloween dummy. Sparks stumbled back, but the animal didn’t seem to notice him.

  At least I know I’m not seeing things, he thought. Coyotes don’t eat hallucinations.

  As Sparks watched, the coyote whipped its head from side to side until it separated a fist-sized chunk from the thigh, then lifted its nose skyward and snapped it down. It lunged forward again, burying its snout into the wound it had made, and repeated the process, trembling with what Sparks could only suppose was primal ecstasy.

  The thing on the ground wasn’t a dummy. It was too real—the way it lay, the proportions, the viscera, the detail. The smell, which was of roasted meat, not of rubber and paint. Sparks understood these things, but dimly.

  Coyotes don’t eat hallucinations, he thought again, but they also don’t eat Halloween props.

  The animal licked its chops and looked around. It noticed Sparks, lowered its head, and growled. Sparks backed away, stepping off the sidewalk and turning his ankle in the gutter. The pain was bright and urgent, but there was enough adrenaline kicking into his system to keep his attention on the ragged predator. Holding his palms out in a placating gesture, he shuffled in the direction of his apartment. He realized he was staring into the coyote’s eyes and dropped his gaze. You aren’t supposed to look in their eyes, right? Or are you? Do they respect you more if you do? He couldn’t remember, just kept moving.

  The coyote waited until Sparks was halfway down the block before returning to its meal. Sparks broke into a limping run, casting anxious glances over his shoulder until he turned onto his street.

  * * *

  The arrival of lights and siren scared off the coyote, and the responding officers, both veterans, had gaped thunderstruck at the remains for a full minute before radioing detectives and blocking off the scene. Paramedics arrived, even though the body was unquestionably that—a body—along with a truck from Fire Station 82, which was just down the street. They were soon joined by more police units and parking enforcement officers, and together, they extended and reinforced the barricade, which now stretched from Western to Harvard. The resulting snarl of traffic pressed against the surge of rush hour commuters filing onto the nearby 101 on-ramp. Like a clog in an artery, the crime scene caused other vital systems to fail. Los Feliz, Sunset, and even Santa Monica Boulevard began to slow. Franklin was at a dead stop in both directions, and Hollywood was a sea of stopped cars from La Brea to Hillhurst.

  The corpse lay at the base of a pagoda in Thailand Plaza, a restaurant-market complex west of Little Armenia. The pagoda was tiled in mirrored glass and housed the statue of a deity. The serene, gilded god sat on a throne under an elaborate canopy. It was a local landmark and a sacred site for Thai immigrants, who decorated it daily with garlands of fresh flowers. A rickety table at the foot of the pagoda allowed devotees to leave offerings—mostly food and incense. And at some point in the dark, early morning hours, someone had violently upturned the table and dumped the body of the murdered man.

  By the time Tully Jarsdel arrived, he had to navigate between vans from KTLA, FOX, and ABC7. Word of the homicide had reached local anchors, and anyone enjoying the morning news with a cup of coffee would get a rare treat to start their day.

  Lieutenant Gavin met him at the perimeter, briefed him on what little they knew, and told him his partner was already on scene. “Been here a half hour already.”

  “Sorry,” said Jarsdel. “Traffic from my direction was—”

  Gavin waved him away. Jarsdel signed the perimeter log and stepped under the tape. He didn’t need to ask where the body was. Against a backdrop of dingy sidewalk and the sun-faded peach walls of Thailand Plaza, the privacy tent was a stark white anomaly of clean, ordered lines, as conspicuous as an alien craft. Jarsdel headed toward it and the body inside, his heart rate kicking up. It was always that way with him—like those dreams where you’re helplessly drawn toward a door you don’t want to open.

  He stopped, distracted by the sound of shouting. An argument had broken out in front of the barricade where Serrano met Hollywood Boulevard. A man with a camera had tried to duck under the tape, and a patrol officer was threatening him with arrest. Jarsdel recognized the cop as Will Haarmann. He’d recently transferred from Valley Bureau, where he’d been picked as the face of a Los Angeles magazine article titled “Yes, We Have the Hottest Cops in America.” Jarsdel wouldn’t have known about the piece or about Haarmann, except for some anonymous station comedian who’d cut it out and left it on his desk. It’d been accompanied by a Post-it reading Tough break—maybe next time!

  Jarsdel watched, fascinated, as the man became more combative. He shouted something to Haarmann about rights of the press, then stepped forward, lifting his camera to take a picture of the officer. Haarmann put his hand out to stop him, and the civilian swatted it aside. The cop went on autopilot then, quickly spinning the man around and bracing him against the squad car. The camera, which looked expensive, sailed a few feet and smashed into the curb with the sound of a champagne glass breaking. Within seconds, the citizen was shoved into the back seat of the car, his loud protests snuffed by the door closing behind him.

  Jarsdel thought Haarmann had made a mistake. He hadn’t used excessive force, but anyone with a phone could’ve caught the whole thing, and petty shit like that could antagonize potential witnesses. He made a mental note to avoid working with Haarmann on any sensitive assignments, then reluctantly crossed the last dozen yards to the tent.

  The first thing he noticed was the smell. It wasn’t the sour-sweet uppercut of putrefaction, nor was it the sickening copper of congealing blood. The smell emanating from the tent was so unusual under the circumstances that Jarsdel thought for a moment his mind was playing tricks on him.

  He hadn’t yet had breakfast, and the unmistakable odor of cooked meat gave his stomach a twinge. He pushed open the tent flaps and stepped inside.

  * * *

  It didn’t look like any body he’d seen before, and in his five years on the force, Jarsdel had lost count of how many times he’d looked upon death.

  The corpse was naked. Even its hair was gone, with only a few patches of ash to mark where it had once been. Heat had contorted the body so that it was more or less in a fetal position, what pathologists called the “pugilistic attitude”—elbows flexed, knees bent toward the chest, genitals tucked between the thighs. Patrol had radioed that they’d chased off a coyote, but to Jarsdel, it looked more like a shark had been a
t work. The right leg was ravaged.

  Though the body lay on its side, the head was twisted upward, giving the investigators a clear view of the face, something Jarsdel found at once horrifying yet irresistible to look upon.

  The lips had been cooked to nearly nothing, stretching back to expose a set of yellowed teeth, and gave the impression that the man was grinning up at them. The eyes were gone, either having popped in the heat or dried up like raisins and disappeared into the ocular cavities.

  Jarsdel wanted to bend down so he could touch it and saw that Ipgreve, the medical examiner, had been smart enough to bring a gardener’s pad to cushion his knees.

  “Can I borrow that a sec?”

  “Sure,” said the ME, straightening up.

  Jarsdel knelt and ran a gloved hand lightly along the cadaver’s thigh. “Still warm. Like a cooked turkey.”

  “Yup.”

  “Evenly, though. No charring. Like it was baked slow in an oven.”

  Jarsdel wiped a sleeve across his forehead. It was getting hot inside the privacy tent, due in no small part to the hundred-fifty-pound slab of cooked human they were sharing the cramped space with. He shook his head as if to clear it. “What are we even looking at here?”

  “It gets weirder,” Ipgreve said. “Check out his fingers.”

  Jarsdel did. The hands were curled into fists, but the fingernails he could see were badly damaged—split or melted, others missing entirely. He could tell by their odd cant that a few of the fingers were broken. The victim had tried desperately to claw and beat his way out of whatever had held him prisoner.

  The ME squatted beside Jarsdel. “And c’mere. Take a closer look at his face. See?”

  Jarsdel had been trying his best not to—thought he might be seeing those gaping black eye sockets and that lipless, grinning mouth in his dreams. Steeling himself, he forced his attention to where Ipgreve was pointing. The burns had turned most of the cadaver’s flesh a deep chestnut brown, but the skin on the forehead was splotchy with bruising.