“Masters of our own destiny.”
“Yeah. Even if it’s shit.”
Chapter 12
THE WEED OF CRIME …
“The morning I’ve had,” said Harrelson after the waitress left. He picked up the black coffee and stared into it, seeking answers to the problems of his life. It offered none, so he drank a mouthful of it instead. He looked at Carter. “Hot,” he said.
Carter sat opposite him in the booth. Under his coat, Harrelson could see a rent-a-cop uniform, one he recognized as Miskatonic U security because he spent way too much time walking the campus there, dealing with this death or that. Harrelson decided not to ask; MU was enough of a pain in the ass for him without asking for another helping.
“I got a kind of a problem,” said Carter. He looked uncomfortable as he said it, and it struck Harrelson that he’d never seen Carter look uncomfortable before, not even the time they were dealing with the problem of Waite’s Bill in the least legal way possible.
He didn’t want to ask, but he guessed he should. “What kind of a problem?” Carter looked even more uncomfortable, then nodded at something under the table against the wall. Harrelson frowned, looked, and discovered a plastic bag. He picked it up and looked inside. He continued to look for several seconds, his expression unchanging. Then he put the bag down again and looked at Carter.
“You’re cooler about this than I was expecting,” said Carter.
“Nah,” said Harrelson, “I’m in shock. Probably going to freak out in a minute. Let me get there.” He took another mouthful from his coffee, swallowed it while looking thoughtfully at Carter, then said, “What the fuck are you on? A diner? You bring a … this into a diner?”
“It’s deactivated and I’ve got—” Carter lowered his voice. “I’ve got the detonator in my pocket.” He nodded at the tabletop to indicate the bag packed with explosives beneath it. “It’s safe. It’s commercial dynamite. I checked it—it’s stable. Quarrying stuff. I think they use it as an ANFO initiator.”
Harrelson looked at him as if he’d started speaking in tongues. “You think they use it as … Man, I turned off after dynamite. Where did you get it?”
Carter hesitated. “I’ll tell you, but I don’t want you making this official. There’s no case here.”
It’s a bomb, Harrelson mouthed at him, disbelief on his face.
“It would…” Carter leaned forward. “Look, you want the State Department to get involved? This has to do with the Germans.”
“The Germans did this?”
“No, the Germans were supposed to be the targets. High-energy-physics joint project team at the university. That was inside a machine the Germans use.”
Harrelson’s morning was not improving. “Always the fucking U,” he muttered under his breath. He looked at Carter, plainly not wanting to hear how this particular hairball had happened. “Okay. Tell me how this particular hairball happened.”
Carter told him all the main points, just skipping the stuff about the ghost, because Harrelson really wouldn’t have responded well to that kind of shit. He did, however, tell him about Dr. Giehl, her unexpected appearance in the wee small hours, and the fact that she was carrying.
“That don’t seem very normal to me,” said Harrelson.
“She said she couldn’t sleep and wanted some results she’d left there. She’s got an apartment in a block the university owns about half a mile away.”
“She went armed?”
Carter adopted a mild German accent. “‘Your country has a crime problem,’” he quoted. “She says she was carrying for personal protection.”
“You believe her?”
“Kind of, but it’s not the only reason. She just came over as way too at home with a weapon. She had no problems pointing it at me, or … She said something that bothered me. She told me to get down and put my hands behind my head—”
“Kinky.”
“She also told me to interlace my fingers. Now maybe she just picked that up from a book or movie or something, but the way she said it, it came really easily to her.”
“You think she’s some sort of cop?”
“I think she’s some kind of agent. My dude’s Gestapo, so she ain’t that, or at least they didn’t tell him about her. Thing is, Gestapo is a security outfit. I think she might be Abwehr.”
Carter wasn’t aware of putting any emphasis on one word more than another, but Harrelson seemed to pick up on something anyway.
“She might be? Abwehr’s like OSS, right? Intelligence? If she ain’t with them, who else is there?”
Carter shook his head. “Fuck if I know. I could have understood another Gestapo stooge, but she is way too at home with a weapon for that. Abwehr might want to turn some of our scientists, I guess, but…” He rattled the back of his fingernails against the side of his coffee cup while he thought. “She’s a scientist first. If they had some big scheme, they’d plant an agent as an assistant or some kind of hanger-on, somebody who has time. She spends all hers worrying over that machine like a mother hen.”
“Maybe you’re reading too much into how she handles a gun. Maybe she belonged to her college’s practical shooting team or something, I dunno. She reads a lot of procedurals. It could be anything.” Harrelson checked his watch. “I gotta go soon. What do you want me to do with the … bag?”
Carter picked it up and put it on the bench by him. “Nothing. I’ll take care of it.”
“You really do want this on the down low, don’t you?”
“I wish it had never happened. I wish I’d just got the damn pictures and some joker hadn’t put a bundle of dynamite right where I needed to be.”
“Yeah. The perp. I was wondering when we were going to get to them. Thoughts?”
“Really amateur hour. The trigger’s primitive and had no backup or antitamper on it. I think it stretched whoever built it. Probably never handled explosives before.”
“Does dynamite have like, I dunno, serial numbers on it?”
“This stuff didn’t, I looked. Still worth checking for reported thefts, though.” He looked hopefully at Harrelson who rolled his eyes. “Anyway. I don’t know why the explosive was planted or who by, but it doesn’t look like it’s ‘Spy vs. Spy,’ which is kind of a relief. I’ll keep my eyes open. Maybe they’ll make another attempt.”
“If they do, and you miss it, and people die, it’s on your head, Dan. I think you’re crazy not to report it.”
“I can’t do that. I’m already wading in Shit Creek. Reporting it would drown me.”
“Okay, your funeral. We never had this conversation and as far as I’m concerned you got an oven-ready chicken in that bag there.” Harrelson started to leave, hesitated as he thought about what he’d just said, and pointed at Carter. “Do not put it in the oven.”
Carter smiled wanly. Tiredness and hunger were catching up with him. “Thanks for the advice, Detective.”
* * *
The man in the hat and coat returned to Poppy’s coffee shop, again ordered a tea, and sat by the window. He entered exactly ten minutes before Carter & Lovecraft Books was due to close, although the waitress didn’t notice this or even care very much, intent as she was on earning another large tip. He had turned up at this time the day before, after all, and done just that.
The hour arrived, and he watched the sign in the bookstore’s door flip over to read Closed. Presently Emily Lovecraft came out with a hook on a pole to push up the canopy over the storefront and then pull down the shutter over the window. She locked it, and went back inside. The man sipped his tea, and continued his surveillance. Soon, the door opened again, and Lovecraft exited wearing her street jacket, a tasseled shoulder bag across her chest and, the man was particularly interested to note, a large artist’s portfolio in her hand. She paused as she was about to close the door to glance at the portfolio, and the man could see her frown. She seemed on the cusp of going back inside, but instead seemed to steel herself, drew the door closed, and locked it. Holding the portfolio a li
ttle away from her side as if carrying a case containing a venomous reptile, she walked down the sidewalk and out of view.
The man pushed his cup away and rose, pulling on his coat and picking up his hat. The waitress was at his side in a second. “Was everything good for you, sir?” she said. The teacup was barely touched, and she feared a negative.
“Callooh,” he said. “Callay.”
“I’m sorry?”
The man smiled. “A little project of mine seems to be coming along very well. A frabjous day indeed. For you.” He passed her a fifty-dollar bill without fanfare or pause for thanks and walked toward the door, the smile stamped upon his face as if it were a permanent fixture.
The man turned in the opposite direction from where Lovecraft had gone, and kept his head tilted slightly so his face would be hidden should anyone happen to look out of the apartment window over the bookstore.
A little way along the block was an alley, and the man took it sharply, as if eager to be out of sight of the store. Immediately after turning the corner, the tilt of his head righted itself, and he walked along, his smile as placid and radiant as when he had spoken to the waitress.
The blow was meant to put him off balance, but he was heavier than he looked and what was intended as a hard push to the back of the head turned into a punch of sorts. The man staggered all the same, his hat falling off onto the oil-streaked asphalt. He was silent, but threw his hands up to cover his head.
There is little point in exploring the life of the man’s attacker, Billy Hoskin, in much detail. He had a reasonably paid job in a body shop, but he also had a charge sheet dating back to juvie, and an impulse control problem when he saw expensively dressed men reeking of money entering dark alleys.
Hoskin thought the sight of the man clutching his head was both funny and aggravating, since he hadn’t hit him that hard. He moved in close and started going through the guy’s pockets, hunting for his wallet. “Just give me the money and we’re done here, fucker.”
The man said nothing, which wasn’t unusual in Hoskin’s experience, but he wasn’t making any sound at all, which was. He wasn’t breathing hard, or whimpering, or sobbing or making little incoherent noises under his breath or any noises that Hoskin had heard these people make when you got a little physical with them. He stood, half-crouched, half–bent over, clutching the back of his head, and something in the pose irritated Hoskin. He hadn’t been hit that hard, so what the fuck was his malfunction? It occurred to him maybe the guy had already had a head injury and the blow had reopened it.
“You’ll be fine. Money, and then I’m gone. Come on.”
The man’s pockets were remarkably empty. No forgotten receipts, tissues, there hardly seemed to be any lint. Finally, just as he was becoming desperate, Hoskin found the man’s wallet in an inside pocket of his jacket. He grabbed it, relieved he could finally get out of there. In fact, the relief was so great it surprised him, as if he’d dodged a bullet, as if he were escaping from real danger.
His hand was barely out of the man’s jacket, the calfskin wallet firmly gripped, when the man’s hand snapped down from his head to grab Hoskin’s wrist. “No,” said the man firmly. “You may take the money, but you may take nothing else.”
Hoskin tried to pull his hand away, but the guy was strong. Hoskin pulled hard and it was like his wrist was held in a clamp. The man didn’t even move an inch. How could a little guy like that weigh so much?
The man reached up and pulled the wallet easily from Hoskin’s trapped hand; he couldn’t have stopped him if he’d wanted to, not now he seemed to be losing feeling in it. He released Hoskin as if dropping a dead rat, and then ignored him as he drew a wad of maybe twenty fifty-dollar bills out. The man held the money out to Hoskin. “There. That’s what you wanted. Take it and leave.”
It took a minute to get through to Hoskin that he had completely lost control of the situation. It kind of made him angry, but the wad of green just floating there made it hard to get too mad. He snatched the money and glowered at the man. “What’s your business anyway, man? Who the fuck do you think you are?”
The man didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. It was suddenly like talking to a waxwork. There was something else wrong. Now that the man was no longer holding his head, a flap of something, hairy on the underside, was hanging from it, lankly bobbing off to the left side. Hoskin started to laugh; the guy was wearing a hairpiece and Hoskin had dislodged it when he shoved the guy. That was why he was being so weird. Nothing like injured vanity to upset people in strange ways.
Then he saw it wasn’t a hairpiece at all. It was skin, but it wasn’t, and the skull exposed beneath it was not a skull. Hoskin looked and then he made the mistake of seeing, and wheels spun inside his mind as gears of logic and simple causality disengaged. He couldn’t be seeing what he was seeing but he was seeing it so he could not be seeing it and the gears ran rapidly and with no letup or control, spitting out sparks that were Hoskin’s sanity being ground away.
He screamed, once, a high-pitched scream he was hardly aware he was making, and ran from the alleyway. The man, animated once more, lifted the strip and tamped it more or less back into place. Out in the street, the man was screaming and people were stopping. It was all a great nuisance to the man. He put away his wallet and walked rapidly the other way.
* * *
Harrelson was on the knotty last paragraph of his report, the last thing standing between him and going home, when the nutcase was dragged in. The guy was pretty big, a raging mess of a red face, dirty-blond hair, and a lot of shouting. It took three uniforms to keep him in check, with two more hovering about. One had his hand on the butt of his gun, which irked Harrelson, but not enough to get up from his cozy warm desk and venture out toward the tank. He returned his attention to his report and had got most of the way through typing “unconfirmed” when the guy screamed a bunch of stuff, the only word of which that made it to Harrelson’s ear ungarbled was “monster.” He looked up again. Now the lunatic was saying somebody wasn’t human.
People got dragged in all the time ranting about orbital mind-control lasers, and how the Bilderberg Group was hiding in the attic, and stuff that was almost boringly similar to paranoid rants on the other side of the Fold. Harrelson had been hoping for a better class of conspiracy theory in a world where there really was some dark shit going down, but he’d been disappointed in this. Carter had told him to keep his ears open for anything that was a little different as an SOP for the Unfolded, but so far nothing had given him much pause. This, though … not many of the nut jobs actually mentioned monsters. V had never been a thing here, so the folded weirdos’ obsession with reptile people infiltrating society was never a thing either. That was one of the cool things about the Unfolded: no lizard people bullshit.
Well against his better judgment, Harrelson typed the last few letters of “unconfirmed,” got to his feet, and went over to where the nut job was screaming about monsters.
“You called for psych yet?” he asked one of the officers.
“Yeah, but they can’t be here for an hour.” The cop was maybe thirty, but clearly never going to rise to any higher rank. He looked pleadingly at Harrelson. “What do we do with this freak?”
Harrelson looked at the square, flushed face of the screamer and turned down his mouth. “I know this guy. Hey, Billy! Billy! Focus, man, and stop screaming! You’re upsetting people.”
The man looked vaguely at him, not really seeing him, but at least he stopped screaming. “Put him in the interview room. If you put him in the tank, he’ll set off every idiot in there. I’ll sit with him until the doc turns up.”
The uniforms were grateful, but wouldn’t say it, nor did he expect them to. They took Billy Hoskin into the interview room, made sure his restraints were in place, and left Harrelson with him. Harrelson sat down and regarded Hoskin with disdain mixed with curiosity. Yeah, he vaguely knew Hoskin: bad Irish kid from a bad Irish family, ended up working a chop shop, broadened his sk
ill set into stealing the cars in the first place, then carjacking because he wasn’t the most patient guy. Last he’d heard, Billy was out on parole, but nobody was expecting that to last long.
“Hey, Billy.”
Hoskin’s eyes held a vacancy within and behind them. Harrelson tried again.
“I’d get you a coffee, but I ain’t spooning it into your mouth, so I guess you’ll have to do without.” Still no response. “Not that you look like somebody who needs caffeine right now. You using, Billy?” It seemed out of character from what Harrelson could recall, but people change. “Have you taken anything?”
Hoskin looked slowly around the room. There was a weary depression in his face, as if he were on the edge of tears. Harrelson decided to stop fucking about and just ask.
“So, Billy, what’s this monster you’re all upset about, huh?”
He knew it was a risk. Maybe Hoskin would clam up, or maybe he would freak out and they’d have to Tase him or something. But just maybe he might actually say something useful, and do it before the psych arrived.
Hoskin’s gaze settled upon him and Harrelson saw he was looking at the top of his head.
“What is it? I got something in my hair?” He reached up and touched it, but found nothing. He realized the interview room’s one-way mirror was behind him and looked over his shoulder. “You think somebody’s watching? Believe me, Billy, you ain’t that newsworthy.”
When he turned back, he realized it really was his hair that Hoskin was finding so fascinating. “Okay, can you stop staring at my hair, please? Maybe I should use some conditioner, I know, but who’s got time?”
“His hair wasn’t hair.”
Harrelson leaned forward. “Who’s this we’re talking about? The monster guy?”
Hoskin’s gaze slid down until it was looking Harrelson in the eye. The expression of hopeless dread started to return. Harrelson had never been in an interview quite like this one before, but he knew how to read a suspect well enough.
“Hold it right there, Billy. If you think I’m some kind of monster, too, ask yourself a few questions first. One, if I was in cahoots with your monster man, why would I be bothering to ask you any questions when they could just tell me what I wanted to know? Two, if I’m in on the big monster conspiracy, why didn’t I just uncuff you and shoot you first thing? I coulda claimed I thought you’d calmed down and stupidly showed a little compassion in letting your hands go. Then—gasp—you attacked me. Bang. You see what I mean?”
After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft) Page 12