“Diego could almost pretend Fox had fled. Except on moon nights. Mostly, then, I hunted rabbits.
“One of my son’s brothers pulled at my sleeve and pointed. The creek ran through a valley, washing gold down from the mountains. Up on the lip of the valley were seven white men, five or horses. Chispa del Oro had no problems with anglos. We were too removed from the big strikes, our yield was too meagre. We panned mainly for placer, the thin sand from which gold could be distilled only with more patience and skill than most anglos could summon.
“With the red of the dying sun behind them, the seven men were shadow figures. But I saw their faces as blobs of gloomy light. I told the boy to fetch a gun. He was barely ten yards from me when a bloody gobbet exploded in the back of his neck. One man had a long rifle, and was a fine shot with it.
“I stood, howling my rage and felt a push in my chest, the force spinning me off my feet. I dropped my batea and fell backwards into the creek. Water ran all around me, soaking through my clothes, trailing my hair away from my face.
“The horsemen passed me, cold shadows washing across my face.
“ ‘Greaser ain’t kilt,’ one said.
“ ‘I allus has to finish your leavin’s,’ another replied, voice close.
“A man knelt over me, face upside-down over mine. The glow on his skin was so bright I couldn’t make out his features. A shining blade passed below my chin, cutting. I choked blood out through the hole in my neck.
“ ‘A clean job, Hendrik,’ the rifleman said. ‘Crick’ll bleed him dry ‘fore sun-down.’
“ ‘Clean and quiet,’ said Hendrik.
“I lay still, hearing and feeling, unable to move. The current kept open the throat wound. Water streamed in as if through the gills of a fish, gulping out of my mouth.
“Hendrik stood up and doffed his wide hat. From inside his placket shirt, he produced a hood which he slipped over his head. Ragged scarecrow eyeholes shone like candleflames in the night. All were hooded now, night-riders.
“ ‘Gotta run them greasers off,’ someone said. ‘They dirty up the crick. Dang Meskins.’
“The night-riders moved on. In time, I heard more shots, and whoops, and the slow crackle of fire.”
“The moon rose, and the hole in my throat closed. Fox slipped out of Diego’s wet clothes and padded towards Chispa del Oro.
“The shacks were ablaze, casting a circle of light. The dead lay in heaps. Fray Juniperro, our gambussino priest, was slumped dead on his knees, bleeding from the gashes in the side of his head. His ears had been cut off. Juan Ochoa, who had fled North from Santa Anna’s soldiers, was several times gutshot and dying slowly. The night-riders had staked out my Julietta and torn her clothes. They took turns to violate her.
“Fox leaped from the dark and closed daggered fingers in the throat of a man who was holding a firebrand. I threw him at the feet of the others. With a clawed swipe, I stripped a zig-zag-zig of skin from the side of one of the horses, exposing ribs and vitals. The beast neighed and collapsed, gore gouting around my ankles.
“Pistols were discharged into my chest and I felt mosquito stings. I tore the hooded head off the man who knelt between Julietta’s legs, working with his bowie knife. My woman had been dead for minutes. I crushed the head like a rotten grapefruit.
“ ‘Well, if it ain’t a weirdwoof,’ Hendrik said, calm.
“I killed two others and howled, the blood of my kills bubbling in my throat. I had meat scraps between my teeth.
“One of the night-riders was down on his knees praying and sobbing and tearing at his hood. I grasped his chest with my feet, crushing ribs with my barbs, and I ate out his eyes, chewing through the cloth of his hood.
“ ‘Look at him feed,’ said Hendrik.
“Only Hendrik and the man with the rifle still stood. The rifleman was tamping powder in the barrel. His hood was up over his nose, a powderhorn dangled by a string from his mouth. I stood up, flexing my limbs and growling.
“The rifleman was a cool hand. He got a ball into his weapon and packed it down, then brought the gun up and pointed it at me. I laid a hand on the barrel and held its aperture to my forehead. With my animal’s snarling mouth, I called him an accursed gringo, a killer of women and children, a man with no honour . . .
“He fired and the ball flattened against my skull. I smelled the singe of my furred face, but felt no pain.
“The rainbow ecstasy of killing was on me.
“I made a hole in his head with my thumb, then jammed his powder-horn into the hole and held his head in one of the fires. The explosion was satisfying, scenting the air with burned powder and blood.
“I dropped the rifleman’s body and looked at Hendrik. He was clapping, slowly.
“ ‘Savage critter, ain’t ye?’
“As I bounded towards him, he slipped off his hood. His eyes still glowed, but his skin was rough and dark, angry fur swarming across his face.
“I must have frozen in the air.
“ ‘What be matter, fox. Ain’t ye never met a wolf afore?’
“Hendrik’s mouth was misshaping as teeth crowded out of it. As his body expanded, his clothes split along their seams. Bony knives burst through the fingers of his gloves. I howled and threw myself at him, tearing and gouging and rending. Powerful claws ripped my hide.
“We fought to the death, only neither of us could die.
“Hendrik chewed clean through my shoulder until one arm was hanging off on a thread of gristle. I wrestled his jaw free of the skull, yanking it to one side. We both healed within minutes, struggling still.
“Hendrik was a bigger beast than I, and master of the creature he became. Finally, he bested and humiliated me. He ground my face into dirt soaked with the blood of my woman, and sprayed me with a jet of thick piss. I smelled him on me for years.
“At sun-up, we both changed. The killing frenzy was gone from me, though daylight disclosed more atrocities done my family and my people. My baby son hung from a post by his ankle.
“Hendrik and I didn’t talk, but we sat opposite each other in the burned village. I heard the rushing of the stream and the settling of the embers.
“ ‘I’m sorry for ye, greaser, that I am,’ Hendrik said, before leaving. ‘I’ve got what I’ve got and it’s my way, but you’ve got the curse . . .’
“Still, I didn’t understand.”
IX
“And this baby is the Leveller,” said Muldoon Pezz. “State-of-the-art all-in-one burpgun, grenade launcher and flamethrower. An ideal Riot Weapon.”
The comedian, whose sculpted hair made his head look like a sugar loaf mountain, hefted the Leveller and posed with it. His arm disappeared entirely inside the weapon. He might be auditioning for Black Terminator.
Stuart looked into his half-coconut of fruit-filled exotic alcohol as guests oohed and ahhed over the array of gleaming steel deathware. He had thought the guns and knives mounted on the display wall were movie props, but Pezz was eager to explain how real they were.
“Is that loaded?” gasped Leitizia Six, the coffee-skin starlet. She was stapled into a brief flame-red dress.
“What the use of a gun that ain’t loaded, child?”
Pezz shimmie-jerked with his metal partner, hip-thrusting at the girl. He wore a leather codpiece, decorated with a sequinned roaring lion, over a pair of the baggily diaphanous harem pants popular (and costly) this year. He made a dakka-dakka-dakka sound and raked imaginary death at his laughing guests.
Welcome to the Black Pack, Stuart thought.
This was the Ethnic Elite: scratchrappers, foulmouth comics, Spike Lee or Wesley Snipes gottabes, colour-coded execs, MC-DJ alpha beta soupers, lower echelon politicos, transvestite TV anchors. Instead of eye candy, the party had chocolate drops, like Leitizia Six. It was impossible not to imagine five earlier Leitizias who hadn’t worked out so well.
Stuart wandered out of the gun room into a sunken area where a jacuzzi full of young black writer-directors waiting for their fir
st credits passed around a smoky crystal ball. They sucked the ball’s nipples and described projects, competing yarns of how onstreet the hoods they’d left behind were.
The wri-dies wore nothing but gold: necklaces, bracelets, armlets, cock-rings, nose-plugs, belts. Extras from a black porn Cleopatra.
“Homes,” shouted the wri-die of Mama Was a Crack Ho, “get in on the bubbles, man. Anyone can write Shudderslash and get out of the hood has earned bubbles.”
Stuart wasn’t sure whether the bubbles were in the jacuzzi or the crystal ball. He certainly wouldn’t be comfortable stripping to his Marks & Sparks boxers and hanging with this crowd. His worst teenage experiences had been on a rugby pitch.
“I’ll take a rain check,” Stuart said, using an expression from his English-American phrase book.
“Don’t know what yo missing, my man.”
Back in the gun room (which was where people ended up chatting at this party, rather than the kitchen) Pezz was ranting. When “the next time” came, he’d be onstreet with the Leveller, “protectin my home, my people.”
Having missed the set-up, Stuart didn’t know whether Pezz would be protecting his people from rioters or cops. One of the wri-dies, who had read a synopsis of Shadowstalk, shoved him in a corner and preached at him for quarter of an hour: Stuart had to change his hero from a cop to a gangsta. “The cop is the natural-born enemy of the black man, Finn. We gotta stop makin cops heroes.”
The wri-die got sidetracked by a diatribe against all the performers who had sold out to the man by playing cop heroes: Poitier, Whoopi, Murphy, Washington. The wri-die was rapping along to “Cop Killer” when someone reminded him Ice-T played a cop in New Jack City.
Pezz was weighed down with more weapons. Chocolate drops draped him with guns as if he were a terrorist Christmas Tree. Stuart had seen Pixie Patrol, Pezz’s last hit, and not thought much of it. His catch-phrase was “bitch, fuck that shit!”, also the title of his best-selling comedy CD and scratchrap single. Pezz played a cop in Pixie Patrol; he maliciously thought of mentioning it to the wri-die on the next pass around.
Now Pezz was completely tooled up – his display case was empty, and he was wearing all his weapons – he wanted to party. One of the girlies, a bald freeway shaved through her hair, climbed up on a stool with an eye-dropper and squeezed fluid-smidgens into both his eyes.
Stuart didn’t think zonking up a walking armoury was too clever. Pezz yelled encouragement and jiggled his guns, clanking like a junk-cart. Sooner or later, he was going to go off. If he wasn’t too zonked, he’d do it in the yard because this was his house; if he was too zonked, he could afford to replace a ceiling or a wall. Maybe even a guest.
“Yez hear about the time Muldoon dropped a frag grenade in Mike Ovitz’s swimming pool?” Leitizia asked.
Leitizia was very friendly whenever Stuart got near. She was the star of the Velvet series of “erotic thrillers”, rated NC-17 on the top shelf at a video store near you. In his blazer pocket, Stuart had Leitizia’s card: it was plastic with a chip set into it that breathed her name and number when caressed.
Last night: a garage full of dead kids. Now: swimming pools, movie stars. Los Angeles was disorienting. Mood Change City.
“Stuart Finn?” said a young man with goldwire-rimmed glasses.
As they shook hands, Stuart realized the young man wore surgeon’s gloves. He’d seen that in the last few days. It was a health fad, ANSC: Absolutely No Skin Contact.
“Ouesmene Collins,” he said.
Leitizia’s scarlet-tipped fingers slipped up and down Stuart’s shirt buttons. He had the idea she believed in skin contact.
“I’m with Reality Programming, Channel 187. CrimiNews. We understand you were at the Obregon Street Crimescene?”
“Obregon Street?”
“The garage.”
Stuart knew where Collins meant.
“We’re doing a follow-up newsbite, and would like to schedule an interview.”
Collins spoke in a monotone and had no expression. Stuart thought he was squirmy.
“I’m afraid I signed a contract with LAPD,” Stuart shrugged. “One of the conditions of my ridealong is that I not discuss anything with the media.”
“Indeed. But there are ways around contracts.”
“I’ve another five nights to go,” he said, looking at his watch. “In fact, I should be leaving. The patrol starts at midnight.”
“There are serious questions about Obregon Street,” Collins continued, intent. “Ryu has stated that there are no concrete suspicions.”
Something warm and wet slipped into Stuart’s ear. Leitizia’s tongue. He’d waited twenty-three years for this and now had to skip out. Would the Velvet Vulva, as she introduced herself, “take a rain check”?
“It was the van, surely,” Stuart said. “The men in the van.”
“What van?”
“The black van leaving the garage.”
“There’s no van in the reports.”
“Ouesmene,” Leitizia purred out of the side of her mouth, “disappear, would you.”
Collins, still thinking van, vanished.
“You British guys,” Leitizia said, “you’ve just got it.”
A tiny thought (shouldn’t have mentioned the van: contract violation) shrivelled in his mind. Other thoughts loomed larger, more pressing.
“Yo,” shouted Pezz, “Velvet Vulva, all the waayyyy!”
One of his smaller guns went off, putting a thumb-hole dent in the wall. Everybody laughed.
Stuart made excuses.
X From the Corrido of Diego
“If I could change, others must too. I was not greatly surprised to learn I was not the only creature of my kind. The old stories had come from somewhere. But what Hendrik said about a curse disturbed me greatly. I realized I did not understand my condition. Then again, who among us can say he fully understands his condition?
“Maybe ten years later, I crossed trails with a wagon train. Its cargo was women: mail order brides for California miners, paid-for wombs to yield a harvest of anglo babies. Many were from far corners of Europe. Irish, German, Dutch, Hungarian. Gypsy, even. Few spoke English, let alone Spanish.
“For a while, I rode with the wagon-master. It was a harsh trail, across a desert that burned by day and froze by night. There was disease and hardship and privation and accident. As a month passed, I saw a glow growing in the face of one of the trail-hands, who took to what he called ‘breaking in’ the brides. If the wagon-master hadn’t hanged him, I would have killed him.
“Among the women was a Serbian girl who was also a cat, a big cat. From the first I saw her, I knew she could change. Her monthly cycle and mine did not jibe, so Fox never met Cat. In her centuries, Milena had learned languages; this skill made her special, not her ability to change. She was the interpreter, between the women and the trail-hands, and with whoever we chanced across.
“I asked Milena what Hendrik had meant by my curse, but she could not help me understand though she thought she understood herself. I knew it was something quite apart from the moon-change, something that marked me as different from the rest of the changing kind.
“ ‘Men call us the creatures of darkness,’ Milena explained, ‘and they have good reason. Many, perhaps most, of us are like this Hendrik, animals in human skin. Our place is the dark, our strength is the night. But your strength is the moon. The light of the moon is the light of a sun shining back from a silver mirror. You are a creature of the light, perhaps even a prisoner of the light. I hunt where I will, for cats know no rules. The path you walk is narrow and lonely, for you must always hunt the evil in men, must always protect your people. Yet you can never be truly with your people, for you change. I do not envy you, Diego, and yet I accept that you are better than I, perhaps better than us all.’
“Soon after, I killed a German woman without knowing why. Her face had glowed like a ghost-flame, as sickly and bright as the face of the worst ravager or tyrant I had ever sl
aughtered. It turned out the woman had stifled two of her children and taken their water rations for herself. During the desert crossing, a dozen women died who might have been saved by a few drops of water.
“The wagon-master said the woman must have been mauled to death by a mountain lion or a coyote. Gypsies and Hungarians muttered that they knew better. I left the next night, racing off as Fox.
“Later I heard a tall tale about a wagon train who turned on one of their womenfolk and skinned her alive to prove her hide was furred on the inside.”
XI
“Got another high concept, man,” García said. “This cop becomes a Mexican wrestling star, El Demonio Azul, and goes undercover . . .”
A whining shriek cut through García’s movie idea, the public address system’s way of saying “Listen Up”. The cops in the locker room all looked to the wall-screen. Like all public buildings in LA, the police station had its own interactive TV station, narrowcasting from a top floor studio suite. There were commercials: cop insurance and pension schemes, special bilingual coaching for promotion boards, holiday-camp descriptions of faraway stations that needed personnel to transfer in, new brands of body armour. Then the sergeant of the watch, outlined in frizzy blue against a blurry slo-mo explosion, gave a cop news round-up.
Mug-shots flashed by. Scotchman paid attention, nodding slightly at each face he recognized. The sergeant downloaded new charges to his patrol teams: some players were climbing, from rape to armed robbery to murder one; others were slipping down the leagues, narco beefs diminishing as they lost territory to the comers.
“As a result of last night’s Obregon Street incident, the Caldiarres are Off The Board,” the sergeant announced, to general cheers. What looked like home video footage of the garage came on, the camera circling around the hanging boy. Arms outstretched and head hung, he did look as if he had been crucified. A crude computer graphic represented the angry face Stuart had seen on the dead boys’ jackets, and a big black X crossed through it. “This investigation is closed. Chief Ryu has commended the officers on the scene for the speedy mop-up.”
The Mammoth Book of Wolf Men Page 61