by Harvey Click
Mary didn’t answer him. She sat at the table and stared at the stone pendulum while he poured a can of soup in a pan and sliced some ham.
“Who’s Ryver?” he asked. “What’s his whole name?”
“Joe Ryver,” she said.
She started talking about a safe-house where four people were murdered and the Horn was stolen again. The story didn’t make much sense the way she told it, but he hated the name Joe Ryver more each minute.
He put a bowl of soup and two ham sandwiches in front of her and watched her eat. She was a stranger with a bruised face, but she looked good. Her lips were turned down like a solemn little girl’s, and her hands moved the same quick way as a pair of hands he once thought he knew.
“Who organized all this?” he asked.
“Grimes.”
“Why?”
“We were trying to trap Ryver.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long story,” she said. “Let me eat my sandwich.”
But she kept talking between mouthfuls about finding Naomi dead with a fingernail clutched in her hand. When she finished eating she went to the window and stared out at the rainy darkness.
“I know you hate me,” she said. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow.”
“If you’re planning to steal anything this time, there’s not much left,” Dexter said.
“Hey, I’ll leave right now if you don’t want to put me up for one lousy night,” she said. “I got money for a motel.”
“Good, because you’re not getting anything more from me,” he said. “All those feelings you pretended to have, I guess they were just part of Grimes’ game. He told you to play me for a sucker, and you did a nice job.”
He was so angry that he wanted to say more, but she looked beat up enough already. She stared out the window like a small, frightened stranger.
“Just tell me the truth for once,” he said. “Why did you come back here?”
“What difference does it make what I say?” she asked. “It’s too late now, you won’t believe anything I tell you.”
“Tell me anyway,” he said.
She turned to him, two streams of tears watering her scratches. “I came back because I love you,” she said. “Do you believe me?”
“No. But I like to hear you say it.”
The stranger she had brought with her dissolved in the taste of her lips. He held her too tightly and felt her flinch.
“Your ribs are hurt,” he said.
“Just a little banged up. “
“You need a doctor?”
“No, what I need is a shower,” she said. “Keep your eye on this stone and start yelling if it starts moving.”
Dexter got her a towel. He watched the windows and the stone, but nothing moved except the rain.
“I don’t have any clean clothes,” she called when the shower shut off. “You got a shirt or something?”
He brought one to the bathroom and saw dozens of new reasons to hate this man named Joe Ryver, bandages and bruises and a swollen knee. Mary held a towel against her breasts.
“Show me,” he said.
A bandage had come loose from her left breast, and the nipple was dark and puffy and tied together with stitches. She covered it again.
“Bride of Frankenstein,” she said. “The doctor gave me some ointment. Maybe you could rub it on.”
She lay on his bed and talked about a duel in rocks and thorns while he smeared salve on her wounds and applied new bandages. He didn’t trust her, but her skin smelled good. When he was done, he sat on the bed beside her in the cool quiet of the room. Someone named Joe Ryver was going to die for this.
“You just gonna let me lay here?” she asked.
“You’re pretty torn up,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You better,” she said. “I didn’t drive all this way just to eat a ham sandwich.”
Chapter Eighteen
It was nearly noon when Bitter awoke. The rain had stopped, and fresh bright air billowed the bedroom curtains. Her blue jeans and shirts lay clean and folded on Dexter’s dresser; he must have washed them while she slept. She found him in the kitchen reading a pile of computer-printed newspaper articles with the tracking stone on the table in front of him.
“Want breakfast?” he asked.
“Just coffee.” She poured herself a cup. “Still want me here?” she asked.
“Yeah. Still plan to stay?”
“Where else can I get coffee this good?”
Bitter drank it standing up, enjoying the breeze through the window and the way Dexter’s face looked from this angle. His long black hair, combed straight back as always, was thick enough for two heads. She liked his high forehead and those rocky cheekbones that reminded her of her father’s. She liked his husky arms and broad shoulders and the easy way he sat, long legs stretched out beneath the table. She wondered how she could have ignored her heart when her heart had been talking about this man. It would be nice to believe that Grimes had hypnotized her, but she knew she had hypnotized herself.
“Is Grimes a very good friend of yours?” Dexter asked.
“No, but he raised me for a couple years after my father died. Tell you the truth, I hope I never see him again.”
“You mean that?”
She saw something in his eyes and wondered what the honest answer was. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he’s kind of like Naomi was to you. I mean, we go back a long time.” Whatever was in Dexter’s eyes stayed there, and she said, “What’s wrong?”
He handed her a newspaper article and said, “His house blew up last night.”
“Jesus.”
Bitter sat down and stared at the page. House totally destroyed . . . apparently caused by a leaking gas pipe . . . police found charred bones matching the description of Michael Grimes, a retired investor . . .
Dexter laid his hand on hers, and she remembered that the last person who had consoled her over someone’s death was Grimes. Sour coffee seeped up her throat.
“Is this connected with Ryver?” Dexter asked.
“I don’t know.”
Sour lump scalding her throat, and she wondered why she felt like crying over Grimes. So much death . . .
“I should be used to it by now, all this fucking death,” she said. “I was born in death.”
“What does that mean?” Dexter asked.
“Nothing.”
“No more mysteries,” he said. “I want to know who you really are and what the hell is going on. I want some facts.”
Mary got up and refilled her cup. Life was a mystery born in death, but Dexter just wanted the facts. She wondered if her father would approve of him. No, not unless Dexter could turn her into a better killer.
“My father was a medicine man,” she said. “He had something called the Spirit Horn that was handed down from his father and his grandfather back to the old people of legend. It was a buffalo horn lined with lead or something, and there was a purple light when you opened the large end. If someone was sick, Poppa moved the tip of the horn across their body and listened, and a spirit told him what was wrong and how to treat it.”
“I’ve interviewed three medicine men who talked about a healing horn,” Dexter said. “But it was all talk, they never showed me one.”
“If they showed the wrong person they’d be dead,” she said. “My father knew that, but he wasn’t always careful enough. So my mom was nine months pregnant, and here comes some cousin saying his wife is sick. Father didn’t want to go, but there was a midwife there to watch my mother, so he got his medicine and left.
“This was in Idaho. My parents had a cabin up in the hills above Hell’s Canyon, wasn’t very far from the reservation when the roads weren’t washed out, but Father’s truck was old and it took some time getting there. The Spirit Horn said something was wrong with the woman’s heart, and it said she needed dried foxglove leaves. My father gave her some and told her she better go see a real doctor because a heart’s nothing to fool arou
nd with.”
Bitter had heard the story countless times at her father’s knee, old story planted early growing into a map that shaped the whole world.
“Father always said the hour driving back was the longest hour of his life because he knew something was wrong and he knew the old truck wasn’t going to get him there soon enough to fix it. He saw the smoke miles before he got home, and when he got there it was so thick he could hardly see. He found my mother trying to crawl away from it with broken legs. She was burned so bad there wasn’t much left on her face except bone.”
Bitter started choking on the words like smoke, ugly old story planted early that shaped the whole world.
“You don’t have to tell me the rest,” Dexter said.
“Yes I do. My mother kept coughing and saying it was a skinny man dressed in black who did this, someone trying to steal the Spirit Horn. Father pushed smoke out of her lungs and told her to save her breath, but she kept talking. She told him to cut out her baby with his knife because she was dying.
“When she coughed her last breath, he cut her belly open. He held me up to the fire and said, ‘Child, what you see here you will always remember. Daughter of death, I call you Bitter Ember.’ ”
***
Wrapped tight in his iron-web cocoon, Johnny Burne dangled from the high ceiling by a thin thread in the big room above the gallery.
He thought about Dungeons and Dragons, his favorite game. He thought about the dirty back streets of Detroit where he used to play. He thought about the squalid apartments where he’d lived as a child, trying to picture each ratty little room. He thought about his mother, who had given him everything she could afford, and that wasn’t much. He thought about his father, who had given him every kind of shit he could dream up, and that was plenty. Sometimes he reviewed the lessons Grimes had taught him and realized the bastard had taught him a lot after all. He spent some hours practicing telepathy and trance-noesis and telekinesis, exercises he’d been too lazy to hone while living with the old man. Mostly he just listened to everything going on in the big room above the gallery, hoping to hear word of a reprieve and knowing there would be none.
Every few hours the flicker-specter arrived, drifting up the stairs like glistening tendrils of smoke or appearing out of nowhere with the hot smell of summer lightning. His name was Rebus, and Rebus was the boss. He would slip up into a dark ceiling corner near Burne and hang there like a will-o’-the-wisp with a thousand shifting faces. The questions always started at once, one coming after another so quickly that Burne couldn’t think about his answers. Most of them had to do with Grimes, and he wondered why Rebus and Katerina were so interested in a dead man. Maybe they were afraid the master would reassemble his blown-up atoms and kill all these Lost Ones and rescue him. Burne imagined them chugging away in the Mercedes to a nice safe place.
“What were his last words?” Rebus asked.
“I need a doctor,” Burne rasped through a dry sore throat. “I think my guts are sliding out.”
Katerina reached up with a broom and gave him a hard whack where his balls used to be. She was called Kat by the Lost Assholes in the big room. She was boss when Rebus wasn’t around, and she didn’t let anyone forget it.
Endless questions repeated over and over.
“His sources of income?”
“I don’t know. Buying and selling, I guess.”
“Where did he keep his money?”
“I think he had some gold in the basement, but I could never find it.”
“What did his bank statements say?”
“First National.”
“His favorite food?”
“Liver and stinking rat cheese.”
Pretty soon Kat would put on her goggles and get out the green egg. The egg was even worse than her scalpel. She placed the metal box on a step ladder so the horrible green light could enter his eyes and suck his brain. One time Rebus scolded her for using it too long. He said if they destroyed Burne’s brain they wouldn’t learn anything, and Kat said they wouldn’t learn anything until his brain was a cinder. Burne wept while they argued.
After the egg, long hours of dizzy sickness. He would recall his childhood and watch the room spin. He had a good view up there in his web-cocoon, high enough to see over the lead partitions placed around the step ladder so the green egg wouldn’t make everyone else sick. The big room looked like an old warehouse with some of its old wares still rusting in the corners and some new wares piled on top, crates full of weapons and drugs.
Burne had always wanted to join a society. He had pictured solemn adepts trading strange secrets in hushed places like the stained-glass shadows of the churches he’d always wished to enter as a child. This anthill of Lost Assholes was nothing like what he’d pictured. There were goths with trench coats and bull-dykes with tattoos and skinheads with swastikas and junkies with sick eyes and punks with pale skin like they’d just gotten out of the joint. They wore camouflage or black except for a fat girl who wore nothing. When Kat wasn’t around they snorted coke and blew reefer and had sex on the army cots, but when she came upstairs they answered phones and watched computer screens and weighed dope and cleaned packing grease off a case of military rifles.
They all looked young except for the cowboy named Ryver. He looked old and tired and pissed off and strung out on something. He kept to himself on a cot in a far corner of the room, sat back there shivering and spitting and stewing in his own brown juices like he wanted to kill every living thing in this room but hadn’t yet settled on the meanest and slowest way to do it.
Someone came up the stairs with Chinese carry-out, and the stale warehouse air smelled like cabbage rolls and bean paste. The spices made Burne’s mouth water, but he wasn’t hungry because the tubes in his arms took care of his nutritional needs. He had another tube stuck in his colon and another one in what was left of his penis. The bag hanging above him giveth, and the bag hanging below taketh away.
Lunch was finished, and Rebus flickered in the dark corner again like a ghostly ball of fireflies. Endless questions made Burne’s brain water.
“Do you want the green egg or the knife this time?” Kat asked.
It was a trick question, and Burne didn’t know the answer. He tried to remember his alphabet. A: Kat liked to play with knives. B: She had already removed a few unnecessary parts of his body. C: That always hurt. D: She had told him the elixir dripping into his arm would keep him alive even with some parts missing so he could hurt for a long time. E: Blood was red and the egg was green. A plus B minus C equals six or maybe D, but if no A is B then A is non-3, and he got confused.
“I can’t remember, what was number C?” he asked.
“You’ll remember better after I carve out one of your eyes,” she said.
A tall skinhead held a metal basin beneath his face while Kat climbed the stepladder with her scalpel. Burne thought about his mother. She was a pretty woman except for the bruises Daddy gave her. “Pain, pain, pain, hurts, hurts, hurts,” she said, smearing iodine on her cuts and sipping gin while little Johnny munched his morning cornflakes. “I hope to God you never know what real pain is.”
The milk was sour and the school bus was coming and a ball of bloody meat plopped into his cornflake bowl. Burne’s scream filled the big room.
“What’s the matter?” Rebus said. “Kat got your eye?”
***
His fat tabby cat jumped up on his desk to sniff the interesting coils of wire while Professor Krickbaum took a handful of dust from his vacuum cleaner and blew it around his cluttered little study. He sat down and stroked Pusscat’s velvety ears and chuckled.
“Faces of rats or verevolf men or nasty Rottweilers, vhat kind of hobgoblin vill Pusscat see tonight?” he asked. “Now off my desk, you furry rascal!”
He shooed the cat, and it jumped onto its favorite chair and curled up. It watched sleepily while Krickbaum adjusted a diode and switched on the transformer. The copper and silver wires woven like fancy lace on th
e study walls sizzled and gave off a dusty electric smell.
He slipped his listening shells over his ears, and a flickering apparition appeared in a corner of the room. Krickbaum’s accent slurred into countless other accents quavering from the specter’s mouth.
“I am Rebus, and I am hungry, and nasty little Pusscats I eat for dinner,” warbled a shuffling blur of lips.
The cat hissed and sprang off the chair. It jumped onto a bookcase and hid behind a priceless Egyptian mummy mask, but Rebus floated up to it like a confetti of shredded faces.
“It does no good to hide,” he said. “Rebus has a thousand eyes.”
***
Bitter felt eyes on her back. She turned to the kitchen window, but there was nothing out there except a black cat staring in from a tree branch.
“Tea’s ready,” she said. “Wanna sit out back?”
“Sure,” Dexter said.
He tied shut a trash bag full of burglar debris and took it out to the garbage can while she carried the teapot, sugar, and cups to the back yard and set them on the lawn table. It was a pretty blue afternoon, air clean and crisp, but the bright leaves reminded her of flames. Puffy clouds above the flames looked like smoke clotting the sky.
“Next bastard who robs this place better clean up his own mess,” Dexter said. He sat down and poured their tea. “I don’t know what to call you anymore,” he said. “Are you Bitter Ember or Mary?”
“From now on, I’m Mary. I’m sick of being bitter.”
She stirred sugar in her tea and sipped it, but it still tasted bitter. Dexter’s long back yard sloped into the bank of the Olentangy River, and she stared at every shadow behind every tree.
“Shit, I forgot to bring out the tracking stone,” she said. “I better go get it.”
“You really need it every minute?” Dexter asked.
She sat back down, but she still wanted the stone.
“I just keep thinking, Grimes isn’t the kind of man who dies an accidental death,” she said.
“I’m sure it wasn’t accidental,” Dexter said. “He knew something was up because he was packing his toys when I left.”