The Bone Polisher

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Damn,” I said aloud. Max was being secretive.

  I was trying another directory when someone said behind me, in a pleasant voice, “I couldn’t find anything, either,” and then the computer went dark and took the room with it.

  9 ~ Carpet Cutter

  The chair I’d thrown clattered harmlessly against the opposite wall, and the noise reverberated in the room as I stood stock-still and waited, willing my breath to slow. The moon was on the far side of the house now, leaving the bedroom harmfully dark. A small part of my mind, the only part not clinging to the immediate issue of survival, asked a question: How long had he been standing there?

  A quick scuffling sound, and the chair struck me in the chest and knocked me back against the desk. The keyboard of the computer pitched forward, striking the back of my legs, and I jumped forward and picked up the chair, holding it with the legs pointed away from me, lion-tamer style. “Gotcha,” the voice said, and chuckled.

  “You made quite a mess,” I said, willing him to reply.

  I heard the door to the hall close, heard the lock snap shut.

  “I got a little irritated,” he said, and I held the chair at arm’s length and launched myself toward the voice, hearing him bump up against the wall as he shifted left, and I compensated and felt the chair strike something yielding, flesh, and he grunted, and something either very cold or very hot punched against the bare skin of my left forearm, backing me away. My hand was immediately wet and warm.

  “Carpet cutter,” he said. “Very sharp.” He wasn’t even winded.

  I hoisted the chair and advanced, swinging it down hard in front of me, and one leg caught him, on the shoulder, maybe, and I heard him go down. A vision of the carpet cutter slicing from below, its hook pointed up to tear, pushed me away like a cold current, and I backed up again, lowering the chair as I went so its legs pointed at where I thought he might be.

  I still couldn’t see much of anything; the afterimage of the computer screen floated in front of my eyes, pale and blue and opaque. I took another step away from him, rifling my memory of the room for something that might serve as a weapon, and the chair came to life in my hands, bucking once, and he pulled it free by the legs, bringing its back up under my chin.

  The phantom computer screen shivered into a million tiny lights: an exploding Christmas tree. I felt myself fall backward, onto something soft, and let myself go the rest of the way down, twisting and rolling away, toward the far side of the bed. The mattress heaved and jumped, and something tore through layers of cloth in a long, rending arc. I went for the arm above the carpet cutter with both hands, missed, and landed on my stomach on the bed again with a hard lump beneath me.

  The tearing sound had traveled toward the foot of the bed. I scrambled toward its head, grabbing at the lump as I went, and came up on my knees, holding the light bulb I’d taken from the ceiling fixture. It was slippery in my gloved hand, and I realized the front of my shirt was soaked. I’d been bleeding the whole while.

  “Come to Papa,” he said from the foot of the bed.

  I went to Papa, grabbing at the blankets with my free hand and throwing them in front of me like a gladiator’s net. He made a surprised sound as they swept over him, and I tightened my hand on the base of the light bulb and brought it around, side-arm, with all the strength I had. It exploded in my hand as it struck him, and I dragged the ragged edges down along his arm until they snagged on cloth and the bulb pulled free from my grasp, and now he was the one backing away.

  “You cut me,” he said, sounding amazed.

  With the bedroom door locked, there was only the one leading to the bathroom, and he was between me and it. I sidestepped around the bed, feeling light-headed and almost exhilarated. He couldn’t have been more than eight feet from me; I could cover it in a leap, get the hand with the carpet cutter in it, and…

  Get killed. I was losing blood more quickly than I’d thought, getting giddy. I reached behind me, felt the computer desk, and knocked over a can of pencils.

  He was on me faster than I would have believed, the full weight of him, all hard surfaces: chin and shoulders and elbows and knees, and the edge of the cutter against my shoulder as his arm came up, trying to pull the point across my throat. I twisted right, away from the blade, a sharp, hot sting at the top of my arm, and I dropped to my knees and brought both fists up, together, between his legs. He jumped back with a strangled sound, far enough to allow me to stand, and I picked up the computer display, yanked it free of the system unit, and threw it through the window. Glass splintered into the front yard, and he positively screamed in rage, the scream following me as I hurled myself after the computer display, feeling the broken edges of the windowpanes rake my legs, brush tearing at my face and hands. The ground came up under me hard and fast, and I was lying on my stomach in Max’s front yard, gasping for breath and looking at Flores Street.

  I covered the distance to the sidewalk on hands and knees and sat on the pavement, looking at the broken window. White curtains stirred peacefully in the breeze.

  Some soprano was singing in my ears, thin and high as a far-off violin. The porch light came on in front of the house to the left of Max’s, and at the sight a wave of delayed panic rose in me, a swarm of gnats in the muscles and veins, and I got up and ran, bleeding back and front, toward the lights of Santa Monica Boulevard. I was on the Pacific Coast Highway before the fear subsided. I pulled the car over to the dirt shoulder and rested my forehead against the steering wheel. My shirt was stiff and scratchy with dried blood, and my shoulder and forearm burned as though coals had been slipped beneath the skin. The air seemed almost solid. I drew it in and let it go in great shuddering gulps until one caught in my throat and I opened the door and leaned out and vomited coffee and hot bile onto the road. My stomach kept heaving long after the coffee was gone.

  It was cooler here, the air chilly on my wet face. Even so, it couldn’t dispel the hot flush of shame that suddenly seized me, grabbing me by the throat and shaking me like a wet rag. He’d been in the house, cornered, and I’d run. I’d let him go.

  A pair of headlights in my rearview mirror reminded me that I was back in the sheriffs territory, and the fear clutched me again and did macrame with my stomach muscles, and I peeled off the blood-slick gloves, put Alice into gear, and drove home.

  The cut to my forearm was deep but only a couple of inches long. The one to my shoulder, I saw in the bathroom mirror, was longer, but shallow. Both were clean and straight, testimony to the sharpness of the carpet cutter. There were scratches on my legs from Max’s window. I washed the cuts with soap and warm water and patted them dry. Then, catching my own acrid smell, I got into the shower and tried to scrub the fear away. I scrubbed for a long time.

  Naked and wet, I climbed onto the roof of the downstairs room and stood in the moonlight, letting the air dry me. My entire body hurt, cut in places, battered in others. Topanga Canyon smelled sharp and dusty. The moon was only a few degrees above the mountain that blocks my view of the sea, going down and taking the night with it, pulling the day in its wake. I focused on a solitary light in a house at the bottom of the canyon and willed myself into that room, a room with people sitting safely in it.

  Being frightened is part of my job. Giving in to it isn’t.

  This was something new, I thought, as I opened the refrigerator and took out a beer. This was something new and unwelcome. I drank the beer in three long, continuous swallows and opened another, taking it to the couch. The bright marriage brochures winked at me from the table.

  This had been Eleanor’s living room once. She had found the little jerry-built cabin, one board thick in most places, when we first decided to live together. Until then we’d maintained separate apartments near UCLA, where we’d met. She’d been specializing in Oriental studies and I’d been postponing my entrance into the real world, accumulating one worthless degree after another until my name, with all the initials following it, began to look like a bad Scrabble hand
. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the degrees—English literature, drama, and comparative religion—but at least I understood how college worked. It was a place where you did something and you got something—a grade, a degree—in return. All anybody in the real world seemed to get was money, and I didn’t really care about money.

  I was surprised to find that my bottle of beer was empty. I didn’t recall having finished it. My muscles felt a little looser as I stood to get another. Since I had to go all the way to the refrigerator, I grabbed two.

  Several months after Eleanor and I met, someone threw one of Eleanor’s friends, a diminutive Taiwanese pianist named Jennie Chu, off the roof of one of the dormitories. Eleanor kept saying that no one could have wanted to kill Jennie, and as it turned out, she was right: Jennie had been tossed by a cocaine dealer who couldn’t tell Asians apart even when he wasn’t fried. By way of helping Eleanor through her grieving process, I found him and gave him to the police, but not until I had broken both his elbows, snapping his arms over my knees like sticks of kindling. They’d broken surprisingly easily. Cocaine, they say, weakens the bones.

  My reaction to breaking his arms had been complicated.

  It had taught me something about myself I hadn’t known before, something I’d been keeping an eye on ever since. My reaction to solving Jennie’s murder, though, was simplicity itself: I’d found something I wanted to do. And I’d done it, with some success, after Eleanor and I moved into the cabin in Topanga, and I’d kept doing it after she packed her bags and left.

  Now I wondered whether I could still do it.

  He’d sounded so friendly.

  Knives have always terrified me. They’re so much more personal than guns. A bullet punches a hole into you when it enters and punches another when it exits, and it messes up anything it can get to in between. Knives are generally less lethal, but I’ll take the dull, brutal blow of a bullet over the sharp edge slipping through the skin any time. Still, I’d faced knives before without…

  He’d surprised me. The room had been dark and small, the carpet cutter had been curved. I’d seen what he’d done to Max. I’d had the sheriffs to worry about. There were a million reasons.

  Eleanor’s curtains, the curtains she’d made, still hung on the windows. She’d chosen the couch and paid for it, dipping into one of those mysterious bank accounts Chinese always seem to have. The couch was a collection of odd-shaped lumps now, and there were bullet holes in it, courtesy of a Chinese gangster who’d tried to kill me in this very room. I’d been frightened then, but not terror-stricken, not paralyzed with fear as I’d been in Max’s bedroom. Something had kicked in, as it always had before, adrenaline or fury or a sense of outraged dignity, and it had held me together until that particular dance was done. I hadn’t fallen apart until afterward.

  The bottle in my hand was empty. I threw it across the room, opening the cut in my shoulder. The bottle hit the wall, harmlessly, just as the chair had. I could throw things at walls, it seemed, all night long without doing any harm. I picked up the other bottle and drank, bleeding onto the leather of the couch.

  I’d run away from Eleanor, as my mother had pointed out during several of our rare personal talks. After we’d been living together long enough to begin talking about marriage, I’d had an affair, and then another, meaningless and passionless. Mechanical. Stupid. She’d found out, as I supposed I meant her to, and forgiven me. Then I did it again, and she stopped forgiving me and started suggesting I get some counseling. Instead, I had another affair. That was when she packed. Now she lived in a small cottage in Venice, working on her third book and writing occasionally about the New Age for the Los Angeles Times, and I lived alone on my hilltop, venturing out from time to time to make a little money. To poke around in other people’s untidy lives. To get into knife fights in dark rooms with people who scared me senseless.

  The bottle was half-full this time, and it made a nice splash when it hit the wall, beer spewing forth in a foamy arc to soak the carpet. See, I could do some damage. I climbed to my feet again and went to the refrigerator and drank the three remaining bottles straight down, standing there and staring at the wall. Then I grabbed a paper towel and pressed it over the cut on my shoulder until the bleeding stopped, and then I hauled my aching body to bed.

  10 ~ Special Delivery

  I surfaced out of a bad dream and into the knowledge that someone was in the house.

  The house has only three rooms on the upper level: the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom. The bathroom door opens directly into the bedroom, and the little room downstairs, the one whose roof serves as the sun deck, can be entered only from outside. That’s the whole house. The noise that had punched a hole in my nightmare had come from the kitchen.

  Sunlight burned through the window: late morning. I inched my hand to the edge of the mattress and then beneath it until my fingers touched the handle of the nine-millimeter automatic I keep there. I pulled it out and hid my hand under the covers and let my eyes close most of the way, looking at the door through the rainbows the sunlight made against my eyelashes.

  The living-room floor creaked and something clinked, like a couple of bottles being knocked together. Then a sharper sound, from the kitchen again, metallic this time. Under the covers, I snapped the automatic open and then shut again, forcing a bullet into the chamber. It was deafening.

  The bedroom doorway darkened and Eleanor Chan stood there, a coffee mug in each hand. I kept my lids down and enjoyed the sense of looking at her when she didn’t know she was being observed, feeling the now-familiar knot in my abdominal muscles dissolve. She wore a pair of red UCLA gym shorts, an oversized gray T-shirt with dalmatians on it, and a pair of white knee-socks folded to midcalf. No shoes: Eleanor doesn’t believe shoes belong in the house. Her black hair was pulled back against the heat, held on top of her head with an elastic band strung through two little red plastic balls that matched her gym shorts. On anyone else it would have been too cute. Dark wisps of hair fell around her high cheekbones, and she lowered her head impatiently and blew them away.

  “You’re a mess,” she said.

  I opened my eyes. “You’ve known that for years.”

  “You look like you walked into a windmill. The shoulder probably needs stitches, and the arm looks like it’s infected.”

  “You saw my arm?” My arm was under the covers.

  She regarded me from head to foot. “I saw everything. You were in a coma.”

  “So much for vigilance,” I said. I reached over and put the gun back under the mattress. “Is one of those for me?”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and I admired a smooth length of thigh. There’s something unwholesomely interesting about knee socks. Her lips pursed in disapproval. “If you think you can manage it after all that beer.”

  “I only drank part of it. I poured the rest on the living-room floor.”

  “So I saw,” she said, holding out one of the cups. “It’s a novel way to cut down.”

  “Can you hang on to that for a minute? Sitting up is going to demand most of my attention.” I put my hands flat on the mattress beside me and heaved myself upward, feeling the muscles in my legs and stomach form a union and wave little neural signs in protest. “Jesus,” I said, staring at my cut arm. It was bright red.

  “It’s Mercurochrome, you dolt,” Eleanor said. “I put some on your shoulder, too.”

  “And I slept through it?”

  “That’s not all you slept through,” she said.

  This did not sound good. “What else?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  I took the coffee. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what happened.”

  “I don’t suppose I am.”

  “Why should today be different?”

  She raised her eyebrows and sipped her coffee.

  Normally I love Eleanor’s coffee, but the smell of it made my stomach heave rebelliously, and I turned it into a cough and blew on the cup.<
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  “Told you so,” she said with some satisfaction. “You’re not as young as you used to be.”

  I closed my eyes. “People keep saying that.”

  She traced the cut on my shoulder with a light finger. “Maybe you should listen. There was a time, and I remember it more vividly than I’d like to, when you could go out and get minced and then come home and drink a case of beer, and you’d still wake up as fresh as a daisy.”

  “ ‘Fresh as a daisy,’ ” I said admiringly. “I like that. Is that a New Age expression?”

  “I have a New Age expression for you,” she said, “but I’m a lady.”

  “And yet here you are in a man’s bedroom.”

  “An invalid,” she said, “and I’m on an errand of mercy.”

  “I was wondering about that.” She didn’t usually come over these days unless I called, and sometimes not even then.

  “Why don’t you get dressed?” she asked. “If you can. And we’ll talk about it.”

  “Whenever you say, ‘We’ll talk about it,’ I begin to perspire.”

  She got up. “Well, perspire your way into the living room, and we’ll have a chat.”

  I got more toothpaste on my chin than in my mouth, and I cut myself shaving, but other than that my ablutions were uneventful. The orange shirt I chose first clashed with my Mercurochrome, so I traded it for a loose robin’s-egg blue number with long sleeves to cover the damage and a pair of white drawstring pants Eleanor had brought me from the solo trip to Bali her first book advance bought her. It was eleven o’clock, and the air was hot enough to melt bacon fat.

  Eleanor was sponging the back of the couch with a paper towel and muttering under her breath when I came into the living room. When she heard me she held up the paper towel accusingly. It was wadded and rust-brown with dried blood. “You need a full-time nurse,” she said. “Or a mobile hospital following you around.”