by B. E. Scully
The Hound banged his fist on the table again and then slammed his other hand on top of the fist, flattening it. “I am taking my medication. Believe me, I’d be a lot worse than this if I wasn’t. I know all about the voices and paranoia. I know a lot more about it than you guys ever will. I only came here because I don’t want to hurt anybody! And he’s going to make me do it, he knows how to do it, he has powers!”
“That’s just it, see,” Martinez said. “We need to know why the Bone Man wants you to kill Lieutenant Mickelson—”
“I already told you why—for revenge!”
“I know you already told me why, but my partner wasn’t here then, and you also didn’t tell me why the Bone Man wants revenge, or why he wants you to carry it out. And those are pretty important facts we need to know in order to figure this thing out, Hound.”
“I…I can’t remember…I can’t remember everything! It was cold and wet…a blue dumpster. She was there…Manlike Woman.” The Hound searched the overhead lights for help and found none. “So much rain this winter…been raining for seventeen days straight. Got to be some kind of record,” the Hound said, smiling and shaking his head at the wonder of weather. Then he got serious again. “My brain does not work the way most people’s brains work. Sometimes I hear and see things that aren’t real. I know that, I really do. But I am taking my medications.”
“Regularly?” Shirdon asked.
“Yes. Mostly.” The Hound hung his head again and swiped his hand across his remaining eye. “I don’t know.”
Martinez and Shirdon exchanged another glance. Mickelson was probably right that this guy needed mental health services more than a night in lock-up.
Shirdon closed Sean Packard’s file. “What happened to your eye, Hound?”
“The Bone Man did it. Or made me do it. Kind of the same thing. It’s kind of the same thing, isn’t it?” he asked, making eye contact with Shirdon for the second time.
“It could be,” she said, and then suddenly the Hound stood up and looked at her even more intently.
“Haunted.” he said. “Every city, every town, every neighborhood, all across the world. Haunted by all those people who never got to finish their stories. You’ve seen them, too, haven’t you?” The Hound started laughing softly. “I know you have, I can see it!”
“What, you mean ghosts?” Martinez asked, not liking this sudden turn.
“The ones that get killed, they’re the most insistent about finishing their stories,” the Hound went on as if Martinez hadn’t even spoken. He leaned closer to Shirdon. “You’ve killed someone, haven’t you?”
Shirdon stared at the Hound staring at her. They stayed locked together like that for so long Martinez was about ready to break in, but a knock on the door did it for him.
Lieutenant Mickelson was in the hallway talking with a woman in the dead-giveaway uniform of social services—suit and shoes sensible enough to climb stairs all day, and armed with a file thick enough to knock a grown man cold, literally or otherwise.
“This is Randi Bowers, from mental health—”
“It’s actually called behavioral services now.”
“Mental health?” Martinez cut in. “We’re not even finished with the interview yet.”
Mickelson frowned. He was wearing the expression he usually reserved for press conferences involving bad news or bad publicity. “Have you gotten anything new from him since Detective Shirdon arrived?”
“Not yet, but—”
“Then we’ve heard enough. He hasn’t committed a crime or provided any evidence that he’s linked with an old one. Everybody in this city knows about Morris Falten. The story was all over the papers for months, and people still speculate about what happened to him. My job isn’t exactly low profile, either. So this guy’s been fixated on the Falten case for years, comes into the station to get out of the rain, sees my picture in the lobby and goes from there. It’s a mental health issue.”
“Behavioral services,” Randi Bowers corrected.
“Which means he’ll be held overnight in an already over-crowded psych ward, given a paper bag full of pill bottles, and be back on the streets by noon tomorrow,” Shirdon said.
“We do the best we can,” Bowers said.
“I know you do,” Shirdon said without a trace of sarcasm. “So do we. That’s part of the problem.”
Mickelson’s frown deepened. “Let’s stay focused on the job at hand. Which at this point is no longer our job.” He nodded at Randi Bowers, ignored Shirdon and Martinez, and disappeared down the hall without another word.
Martinez looked at Shirdon and shrugged. “I’ll get someone started on his release papers and then he’s all yours,” he told Randi Bowers. “You can go in and talk to him if you want. He’s not violent, at least not now, and he’s pretty calm. Just don’t mention anything about white aliens.”
When he and Shirdon were alone, Martinez exhaled a big breath. “It’s true what I told the lieutenant—you didn’t miss much coming in late. The Hound’s pretty much been repeating some version of what you heard from the start. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Shirdon said. “It’s possible this guy knows something about Falten’s disappearance, which I think is a pretty huge deal. Mickelson apparently doesn’t, and he’s probably right. It’s not like there’s much to go on when the story begins with white aliens inbreeding with the native population. It’s also not like Mickelson doesn’t have enough problems right now with this vigilante stuff still going on and what seems like the whole city at each other’s throats lately.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. How about that ‘ghost’ stuff? You seemed a little, I don’t know—spooked by it. Bad pun intended.”
Years ago, before Shirdon had made detective, she’d fatally shot a suspect during an armed robbery call. Despite the media’s fondness for shoot ‘em up stories, most cops go their entire careers without using deadly force. When cops do kill, they second-guess and question their consciences just like anybody who wants to keep being a decent human being would do. But if they want to keep being a decent cop, they have to come to terms with it, too. Martinez had never seen Shirdon hesitate to draw a firearm on a suspect, and he’d never doubted her even once over eight years on the job.
But Shirdon chose to ignore the “ghost stuff” altogether. “If someone turned up claiming my missing partner was back in town ordering people to kill me, I’d sure as hell want to know all about it, lucid or otherwise.”
“You know Mickelson,” Martinez said. “Not much makes old Iceberg sweat.”
“Speaking of which, anything new on the Stratton hearing?”
“Nope.”
When he didn’t elaborate, Shirdon let it drop. Other than offering her partner some sympathy, there wasn’t much else she could do. And as the saying around the department went, sympathy is just a word between syphilis and shit.
Another word in that particular section of the dictionary was “secret,” and Shirdon suspected the Hound had a big one. Somewhere buried among the aliens and ghosts was a secret as dark and deep as any pirate’s loot. Like a lot of people who live on the streets, the Hound had probably seen and heard things he shouldn’t have. The trick was finding the gold among the rubbish. Lieutenant Mickelson might not be up for the search, but for a pair of homicide detectives with the eleven-year-old disappearance of one of their own still technically unsolved, the hunt was on.
4
“Got to commit a crime, got to commit a crime, got to commit a crime.”
The Hound stood in the rain, trying to think. It was easy enough to get picked up for trespassing or smashing a window. Drugs were easy, too, but the Hound couldn’t afford drugs. Plus, he knew the wrong kind of drugs messed up the right kind, the ones that helped him think. And right now, the Hound needed to think.
He didn’t want to hurt anyone—that was all he’d ever wanted, to not hurt anyone! But unless you hurt someone, they didn’t keep you in jail very long. And the mental
health places cut you loose even sooner. No room. No money. No resources. Always the same story.
“Wonder who will stick around and tell that story?” the Hound asked the rain. But he already knew the answer. “The Great White Aliens will never let anyone tell that story. Not unless things change around here, amen and how.”
Manlike Woman would know what to do, but the Hound hadn’t seen her in a long time. She’d had to leave Oregon just like him, after—
The Hound pressed his hand hard against his eye patch, then harder, enough to cause a hot stab of pain to drive the bad thoughts out. He turned his face up toward the rain, and that’s when he saw the flat black cloud moving fast across the early morning sky. Even on an overcast day, this cloud was noticeably darker and more sinister-looking than the rest. It was low and long like a spacecraft. The Hound marveled, not for the first time, at how successfully the Great White Aliens used the weather to travel all over the planet without anyone being the wiser.
But he should have kept his attention closer to earth, because the Bone Man used that big black cloud to turn up again, just like the Hound knew he would.
The Bone Man was less than ten steps in front of him. Just like last time, he was wearing a long raincoat and hat with no umbrella. Only he wasn’t wearing a three-piece suit, and the Bone Man always wore a three-piece suit. He also wasn’t smiling, and the Bone Man always smiled. The Hound leaned forward, trying to get a better look at his face, but his hat was pulled low over his forehead, shadowing most of his features. But the Hound knew that skeletal frame, even in the January gloom.
The Bone Man held out a small pouch, the cheap vinyl kind with a zipper. “Mr. Packard, I want you to take this. It contains a bus ticket to Phoenix, Arizona, a list of social services agencies that can help you find somewhere to stay, and a thousand dollars to hold you over until then. It’s very, very important for you to leave town as soon as possible.”
The Hound leaned in even closer, trying to get a look at his eyes. But the rain was too thick, the hat pulled too low. Even so, the Hound could smell a Great White Alien set-up a mile away. “Why? Why would I want to do that when I just was in Arizona, and now I’m here? Didn’t like the desert, no, sir. Sand worse than rain. They didn’t tell me that part.”
“Okay, then you don’t have to go to Phoenix. You can go anywhere—anywhere you want. But you can’t be in the Pacific Northwest.”
“Ever again?” The Hound had been born and raised in this land of deep forests and even deeper waters, this land of lava and volcanoes and floods.
“No, Hound, you can’t be in Oregon or anywhere in the Pacific Northwest ever again. Or at least not for a long, long time.”
“And you don’t want me to…to kill anyone? To get revenge?”
The Bone Man was shaking his head back and forth so vigorously the Hound thought the bones of his skeleton jaw might start coming loose. “No, Mr. Packard. Nobody wants you to hurt or kill anyone. Never again, for any reason.”
The Hound nodded, still thinking. He reached out, took the cheap plastic pouch, and stuffed it deep inside his frayed coat pocket along with the bus pass and meal voucher he’d gotten from the clinic. “Okay,” he told the Bone Man in what he hoped was his most convincing voice. “Okay.”
The Bone Man nodded and gave the Hound a good long look. He had to tip his head back to do it, and suddenly the Hound knew the truth—the man standing in front of him wasn’t the Bone Man at all, but the man who looked like the Bone Man. The man who used to walk around town with the Bone Man—Twin Skeleton, the man in the picture frame at the police station.
The Hound opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it. He also closed his eye and counted to eleven. Sure enough, when he opened it, Twin Skeleton had disappeared back into his cloud.
The Hound stood on the sidewalk, not knowing what to do. Twin Skeleton might not be the Bone Man, but he was the next best thing. The Bone Man and his twin had never trusted each other, not completely. And now the Hound knew better than to trust either of them.
Both of these skeletons had something funny up their sleeves, the Hound was sure of that. And if Twin Skeleton wanted the Hound out of town as soon as possible—enough to give him a whole thousand dollars to make it happen!—there had to be a reason.
The voice came out of the rain. He immediately recognized the throaty, cigarette and whiskey purr that signaled the arrival of Carrie Bradley.
“Time to make a decision, Hound-Dog.”
The Hound didn’t care for the “dog” add-on, but he’d never tell Carrie Bradley that. In fact, Carrie Bradley could call anyone just about anything she wanted. After all, it took one tough woman to run a house of prostitution in today’s world let alone on the mean streets of Portland’s tenderloin in 1881. And Carrie Bradley was nothing if not one tough woman—fistfights and shoot-outs were a regular occurrence at her ‘boarding house.’
After one unhappy customer complained to the police that he’d been fleeced by one of Bradley’s girls, she decided to teach him a lesson by plying him with alcohol and luring him back to her place, where she promptly laced his drinks with morphine, took a small white towel saturated with chloroform, and tied it around the poor sucker’s nose and mouth. She then left him alone in a closed room to think over his situation. The next morning, one of Bradley’s girls found the man dead, his face a crimson-purple shade. When Carrie Bradley came into the room, she proceeded to vent her anger on the corpse by beating it with brass knuckles her lover had made specially to fit her hand.
They dumped the body in the waterfront, where it was found a few weeks later sticking out of the water like a macabre buoy. Bradley was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to twelve years in prison. She was released after five and immediately opened up a new house in California, which she ran until her latest lover was sent to prison for enticing young women into prostitution and sentenced to five years at San Quentin. Carrie Bradley shot herself shortly afterward, and has been roaming the coastline from San Francisco to Seattle ever since.
The Hound knew that Carrie Bradley was bad news. But like a lot of people who are bad news, she’d mastered the kinds of life lessons that most people never even think to learn—or never have to.
“Don’t know what to do, Ms. Bradley,” the Hound whispered through the rain. “Don’t know what to do about the Bone Man.”
I swear on my son’s life that I will see them both dead.
The Hound had heard the Bone Man say those words with his own two perfectly working ears. Now the Bone Man’s twin wanted him to leave town and never come back. The Hound could feel something bad brewing, and he was afraid.
“I know a thing or two about men,” Bradley said. “Especially men like your Bone fellow, so I’ll tell you what you probably already know.” She paused for dramatic effect. “These two twin skeletons of yours have to face off. They have to get it out of their system one way or the other. Only then will the Bone Man go away and never return.”
“Never?” the Hound asked, hopeful for the first time since the rains came.
Bradley shook her head. “Never. Once the story is finished, they move on. Has to be that way. Too many new stories come along that need finishing.”
The Hound strained to see through the rain. He knew Carrie was a killer, but he’d always been fond of her. “When will your story be finished, Ms. Bradley?”
She gave a low, husky laugh that ended in a purr, like a cat. “Not until the last working girl is out of work. Look there!” she said suddenly, pointing across the street to where a bus was air-braking to the curb.
When the Hound turned back, Carrie Bradley was gone.
He ran to the bus and shoved his pass at the driver without even checking where it was going.
Settling into a seat in the back, the Hound thought about what the Bone Man had said when he’d appeared out of the rain at the lumber yard. “Eleven years is what he said. Eleven, a very powerful number.”
Eleven years ago, the Hound
and the Bone Man had started something very bad. For eleven years, the Hound had been trying to forget, to run far enough away to forget.
But even a hound has to stop running someday.
Number magic must have been on his side, because as the bus turned left, the Hound suddenly knew where the route would take him—out to the edge of town, to his plywood lean-to at the old lumberyard. And to the gun that was buried there, waiting for his return. The Hound had been wrong to try and run away from the Bone Man—to run away from what he now knew he had to do.
* * *
“Jesus, Cass, this rain is really something, even for our part of the world,” Martinez said, watching the cascade of water on the windshield. They’d been sitting outside the behavioral services clinic for ten minutes, reluctant to leave the warm, dry comfort of the car.
“Careful, partner. You’re giving yourself away as the California transplant that you are.”
“Yeah, and I know how the natives just love the steady stream of refugees coming north these days,” Martinez snorted. “Hell, even I cringe when I see another California license plate. Okay, might as well go in. You know damn well the rain’s here to stay.”
After dashing into the clinic and shaking off the wet, the two detectives found an intake nurse. “Excuse me, we’re looking for a patient that was admitted last night—a forty-eight year old male by the name of Sean Packard, diagnosed schizophrenic. Was admitted after making threats against a police detective—”
But a trim man with a thick shock of gray hair and the no-nonsense air of being in charge cut in. “No need to pull up the file, Ellen. My name is Doctor Woon, and I signed Sean Packard’s release this morning.”
“That was fast,” Martinez said. “Can you give us any information about where he might have gone—an address where he might be staying?”