by Neil Mcmahon
Several seconds later, she handed them back into his chest with, it seemed to him, more force than was strictly necessary.
He turned the van around and drove back the way they had come.
Martine was leaning against the far door, arms tightly folded, looking straight ahead.
“Audrey’s always looking for a new kick. I guess she’s already done all the hotels in town,” she said. “That slut.”
Monks stayed on Third Street, driving north back into the city, skirting the dockside tracks and terminals. Martine Rostanov’s gaze turned to him.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded.
“To your car. So you can go to the party.”
“I don’t want to go to my car or to the party. I want to go with you.”
“I can’t do that,” Monks said.
“Oh?” Her eyebrows rose, giving her the exotic expression he had noted before, and her voice took on a dangerously sweet tone. “Why not?”
Monks tried to phrase carefully what he did not want to say.
“Your connection with Aesir, Martine,” he said.
“What about it?”
“I’m wondering if it’s closer than I’d thought.”
“I’ll tell you how close it is,” she said heatedly. “They’d kick me out the door this second if I didn’t know Lex. I’m not pliable enough. I won’t do things like write drug scrips for executives who whine about how stressed and overworked they are.”
“What about Kenneth Bouldin?” Monks said.
“What about him?”
“I saw him put his hand on your arm that first night. Like he owned you.”
She did not answer right away. They passed China Basin, back into a part of the city where it seemed that people actually lived. Monks could see the top of the Metreon now, lighting up once-seedy Mission Avenue like an electric-blue torch.
“Ken’s the kind of man who won’t leave a woman alone until he’s had her, if that’s what you mean,” Martine said. “It’s not even about sex. It’s power.”
“I probably shouldn’t ask if you know that from experience.”
“You probably shouldn’t.” She folded her arms tightly again. “So, is that what you want?”
“What do you mean, ‘that’?” Monks said.
“What do you think I mean? Like Audrey just now.”
Monks was startled into candor.
“Well—sometimes,” he said.
“All right. Here.”
She twisted with a swift, lissome movement, leaning forward, hands rising and falling over her body, as if she were caressing herself in some way he could not quite see. Then she pried open his fingers and stuffed something into his hand.
Monks realized that he was holding a small, filmy bit of nylon, pearl in color—warm, tantalizingly scented.
They drove on in silence, both gazing straight ahead, for another minute or so.
Then Monks said carefully, “No one’s ever done that for me before.”
“We’re not kids. Does my brace turn you off?”
“No.”
“On?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Some men, it does. It’s like they get to undress me another layer. Jesus!”
Monks slammed on the brakes, sending them both lurching forward in their seats, barely stopping short of a car that came hurtling across their path from the left. Its horn blared tardily as its taillights dwindled.
“I had the right of way,” Monks pointed out.
“That’s a big comfort.”
They were back in the area where Larrabee had borrowed the car. It was busy all around and above, but quiet within. Monks turned off Third Street and pulled over along a darkened stretch of freeway underpass. Martine glanced around nervously, tongue quickly wetting her lips, but she made no move to retreat.
“I didn’t trip over a cat,” Monks said. “I got shot at, driving. Last night, after I talked to you.”
She stared, her mouth opening in shock.
“Oh, god, I had no idea,” she murmured. She reached out and touched his face again. Her eyes were intense with concern. “Who?”
“I don’t know,” Monks said. “But I saw Tygard’s car at the scene afterward. And a police captain I’d seen at the Aesir offices.”
“Why would anyone—?”
“I’m more interested in how they knew I was involved. Have you told any of this to anyone else?”
She pulled back from him, her eyes widening in outrage.
“You think it happened because of me?”
“Answer my question.”
She slapped him, stingingly hard, then dropped her face into her hands and began to weep. He let her.
“I told you,” she finally whispered. “I’m not brave and I’ve crossed lines I shouldn’t have. But I haven’t breathed a word of this to anyone. Believe me. Please.”
She looked up, cheeks damp, eyes dark with pain and fear, waiting for him to pronounce sentence.
Monks put his hand lightly on her shoulder, conscious that his touch was an effort to overpower Kenneth Bouldin’s, to eradicate whatever claim he or any other man might have.
“I believe you,” he said.
She gripped his face in her hands and kissed him, bruisingly hard. It was the most wonderfully ferocious experience in his memory.
“I don’t know what you saw, that first night,” she said. “But what I saw was you.”
A little dazed, Monks aimed the van down the street again. He considered that it would be gentlemanly to offer her her underwear back, but they were stuffed inside his shirt, comfortably warm against his skin, and she did not ask.
21
Who is this woman?” Martine said, perhaps a trifle jealously.
“Her name’s Gloria Sharpe,” Monks said, piloting the van through the streets of SoMa. “She was Walker Ostrand’s assistant. We think she might know about the research, but she wouldn’t talk to us.” The chances were slim that Gloria had returned to her shop, but it was close by. He had decided to check.
His attention focused sharply when he saw the gleam of red metal under the lights in the alley behind the shop. He drove slowly past the alley entrance. The gleam was coming from Gloria’s red SUV, its color standing out against the dark grays and browns of the buildings. He was sure it had not been there earlier in the day.
Monks drove on around the corner. The storefronts along the block, including Gloria’s, were dark. He got out of the van and tried her shop door cautiously. It was locked, the inside silent. He knocked loudly, bracing himself in case the Dobermans erupted. Nothing.
He got into the van again and said to Martine, “Let’s take a look around the back.”
The alley was narrow and poorly lit, lined with Dumpsters and bits of unclaimed debris and iron fire escapes zigzagging up the backs of the old buildings. But it was deserted, with none of the shelters and fire barrels of the homeless. Gentrification had gone that far.
The SUV was parked behind a loading dock, beside a steel garage-sized overhead door in a raised bay. There was a plain industrial man-door next to it, with two deadbolts. Monks got out and tried the knob.
It turned. The door opened inward at his push.
Monks leaned his head carefully into the shop. It was entirely dark. The air was warm and smelled stale. If there was an alarm, it was silent; the only sounds were the hums and whirs of an old heating system.
He walked back to the van. “Stay in here and lock the doors, just in case anybody comes along,” he said, getting a flashlight.
“You’re going inside?” Martine said.
“Just for a look. It will only take a minute.”
She glanced around nervously, then shoved the van’s door open and stepped out too.
“I’ll wait in the doorway,” she said. “If somebody does come along to rape me, I want you to hear me scream.”
Monks stepped through the door that should not, no way, have been unlocked, sh
ining the flashlight around. He was in a rear area, a utility room partitioned off from the main shop. A laundry-sized sink was mounted on one wall. Beside it, a partly open door revealed a toilet. The fixtures were old and hard-water-stained. The kitchen appliances were newer: refrigerator, microwave, and coffeemaker. Building materials for the remodel were stored inside the garage bay, a litter of electrician’s boxes, wood trim, and fasteners. A dozen four-by-eight-foot sheets of gypsum drywall leaned against a wall.
Monks stepped through into the large, open main shop. The flashlight’s beam scanned the inverted vee of a stepladder, wires hanging in loops from the ceiling, dropcloths and buckets in clusters. The unfinished hardwood floor was white with drywall dust and drips of eggshell paint.
Except for one patch of red, a touch of color as the beam of light swept by.
Monks turned the flashlight back to it.
The red was a sticky splash of blood, running out in streaks that looked like the long clutching fingers of a hand, collecting to pool in a low spot in the floor. It was just beginning to coagulate.
Monks flicked off the light and waited without moving for a full minute, barely breathing, listening. He could pick out the creaks of the old building readjusting its shape as the temperature dropped with the night, the whisking tires of a car passing on the damp pavement out front, the low hum of the mechanical system. But he was pretty sure there was nothing else living in that room.
He turned the flashlight back on and followed the blood trail until it picked out the lean dark body of a Doberman, lying on its side with one foreleg extended in an oddly puppyish way. Its rib cage had been torn open by an exit wound half the size of Monks’s hand. A few feet away, the other dog lay sprawled less gracefully, with what looked like bloody dents in its muzzle and the left side of its head. The wall behind them was sprayed with blood.
Monks managed to swallow dryly. He kept walking, faster now, the beam sweeping the room. It paused at a black plastic dropcloth loosely rolled into a bundle that was several feet long and about eighteen inches thick.
He knelt and touched it. Through the layers of plastic, he felt the unmistakable yielding of flesh. He parted the folds at one end and shined the light in. It showed dark curls of human hair with the reddish tinge of henna. The plastic on the inside was slick with blood.
Monks backed away, still on his knees, trying to distance himself from the real or imagined smell.
A sharp whisper cut through the room:
“Carroll?”
He leaped up, fingers clawing for his pistol, grunting with the hot pain of twisting his knee in the sudden movement, before he realized that the whisper was Martine’s.
He swung the flashlight beam to find her. She was in the doorway to the back room, holding the jamb, leaning forward tensely.
“Somebody’s coming,” she said. This time he heard the fear in her voice. “A truck. It stopped and turned off its lights.”
Monks trotted past her to the rear door. He eased it open half an inch and put his eye to the crack. There was movement in the alley: the figure of a man in dark clothes, approaching in a stealthy crouch along the brick walls.
The man crept up behind the van and rose slowly to peer in the rear window. He was wearing a ski mask. His right hand held a pistol, barrel pointed up—a large, high-powered automatic. He stayed crouched there for several seconds, scanning the van’s interior. Then he stepped out into the alley, and waved toward the entrance.
Now Monks could see the square front end of a delivery truck parked in the alley’s entrance. Headlights out, it started moving forward.
Monks eased the door shut, breathing hard with mounting panic. In a second, he scanned and discarded possible places to hide or escape—main room too open, toilet too obvious, front door too far, and locked. There were at least two men coming, armed.
He looked again at the leaning stack of drywall.
He pulled Martine with him, shoved her to her knees, then headfirst ahead of him into the narrow space between the leaning stack’s bottom and the wall. He crawled in on top of her and lay with his face pressed to her hair, suddenly and bizarrely aware of her perfume. He could feel her breathing, labored but controlled, through his own ribs. He became aware of a rumbling outside, the truck engine. It ceased abruptly.
Now there were quiet footsteps inside, and the glow of a flashlight. The steps moved into the main room as his own had done, squeaking a little: rubber-soled running shoes on a hardwood floor.
The footsteps returned, faster. A man’s voice at the door spoke quietly, words that Monks could not make out. There came more footsteps, at least one other man. They went into the main room again.
This time, when they came back, they were dragging heavy objects.
The sounds moved outside, the thumps and shuffle of the bodies being loaded into the truck. Monks stretched forward enough to peer out the end of the drywall tunnel. After a moment, the flashlight glow returned. He saw a dark figure move by, carrying something: a square metal can.
There came the sound of sloshing liquid.
The figure came back into view, backing up, throwing liquid right and left. Monks could smell it now, not gasoline but some other kind of petrochemical. He cringed as a splash hit their protective gypsum wall, spilling out onto the cardboard boxes. The dousing moved to the wooden table beside the refrigerator.
The figure bent over it, gloved hands busy—
Doing something to the coffeemaker.
The hands piled paper napkins around the base and flipped the switch. The red “on” light glowed.
The figure stepped back toward the door and waited: ten, twenty, thirty seconds. Something else was starting to glow—a loop, like a strand of wire, around the coffeemaker’s base. It was touching the paper napkins. Monks put his palm over Martine’s mouth and pressed the side of her face against his chest.
A spurt of flame burst up and caught the napkins, then flickered, with the speed of a gunpowder fuse, down to the floor, separating into long tendrils to the main room.
Monks saw a flare, then another, as plastic drop cloths caught. The table was quickly becoming a bonfire, flames climbing the legs with a sound like a flapping sheet. Something popped close to his head, and another heap of flame leaped up among the cardboard boxes.
Monks pulled himself forward until he could see, dragging his body over hers, clenching his teeth against the heat beginning to sear his face. The man was gone, the outside door closed, the room a field of flame. He straddled her back with his knees and heaved upward, pushing out from the wall until the heavy stack of drywall sheets tipped and crashed to the floor.
He got hold of her arm and pulled her to her feet. They stood pressed back against the wall. The fallen sheets had smothered the flames directly around them, but they were cut off from any exit. Smoke was swirling thickly now, burning their eyes and lungs.
Coughing, Monks gripped the edge of the top sheet, raised it, and flipped it forward. It crashed down, stamping out another few feet of flames. He threw another, and another, building a bridge to the door. Then he grabbed Martine’s hand, hooked her fingers in the back of his belt, and waded forward.
The knob was almost too hot to touch, but he got it turned. He pulled the door open, and they lunged through it into the night, thrown forward by a blast of mushrooming flames. They stumbled to the van, hacking out smoke and sucking in shrieking breaths of fresh air. He boosted Martine into the driver’s side and crowded himself in after her. His hand shook as his burn-tender fingers forced the key into the ignition. The engine caught. He stomped on the gas pedal. Behind them, the open doorway to the shop diminished, a rectangle of leaping flames in a black and smoking backdrop, like a gateway into hell.
Blocks away, Monks pulled over. He rested his arms on the steering wheel and his head on his arms. Martine was huddled against the other door. Her dress was singed and her face smudged. The vehicle was permeated with the unsettling reek of burnt hair.
“I
want to go live on the northwest coast of Ireland,” Monks said. “Where my grandfather was born. Get a little place. Putter around a few hours in the morning, take a long walk on the beach, then stop into the pub. Couple pints with your mates. Fall asleep listening to the rain.”
She shook her head slowly. “I’m trying to believe I’m really here.” She was starting to shake, reminding Monks of one of his cats, as a kitten, trying to hide after almost being killed by a dog. He put his arm around her shoulders, trying to steady her.
“Who did that? Why?” she said.
Monks shook his head. He was pretty sure that Gloria Sharpe had tried to get money out of somebody before she left town, in return for her silence—probably the same somebody who had funded Walker Ostrand’s research. But she had misjudged the stakes.
Monks saw no reason to tell Martine that the bundles dragged by the men had contained the bodies of Gloria and her two dogs, and the fire was probably intended to obscure evidence.
Set by a man wearing a ski mask, and started by a coffeemaker.
22
When Monks drove the van into the parking lot where the RV waited, he could see Stephanie sitting in the driver’s seat, watching like a sentry. She jumped up when she saw the van coming and hurried out to meet it.
Her eyes went wide at the sight of Monks’s singed hair and clothes, and wider when Martine stepped out of the van too.
Monks held out his hand palm first at Stephanie. “I’ll explain later,” he said.
Lex was lying on his bunk at the RV’s rear, with cowboy boots crossed and the snakeskin hat tipped low over his eyes. He pushed it back and sat up at the sound of people arriving. He was not a pleasant sight. His face was taut and grayish with a sheen of greasy sweat, his beard sprouting in patches through the scab-encrusted skin, giving it a fungoid look. His eyes were feverish with anxiety and discomfort. They fixed Monks with a burning question: Did you score?
Monks nodded. Lex exhaled in relief and started to get up.
But he stopped when Martine pushed past Monks and gave Lex a razor-edged stare.