“Heh-heh.”
Beyond the gate, I saw it. The moonlight and streetlamps gave it a kind of perfect, white metal sheen. The color fit. It was bouncing around the fenced yard like a silver pinball: hitting a wall, changing direction, hitting a fence, changing direction again. Sometimes, out of frustration, I think, it lashed out at whatever was nearest, like a lawn mower. Something like that must’ve happened to the dog. Either Annie had been stepped on, or she got wide-eyed at all those yummy bones and attacked.
“Heh-heh.”
As for the skeleton, left on its own, eventually it’d either fall into the pool or find the exit and wander out. We didn’t have time to see which, because the house lights came on. We didn’t have time at all.
Moving fast, I grabbed the longest thing lying around, a pool net, and whacked the skull with it to get its attention. Jaw slack, it turned, laughed, and headed toward me.
Careful to stay out of its reach, with a few more well-placed whacks I managed to steer it out the gate, all the way across the next yard, and then into a little patch of trees near the security wall.
So far so good, and I knew what had to happen next. But with all of Misty’s soul talk and Jonesey insisting on calling it he, I was having trouble. I had to wonder if Ashby might still be in there. It was the fucking heads all over again, theme and variation.
Was he still thinking, still feeling?
If I played it long enough, the guessing game would drive me feral all by itself. I had to tell myself it didn’t matter. It just didn’t matter. It couldn’t. It, it, it.
I gave Jonesey the pole, told him to keep whacking the skull and backing up. I took out the crowbar. The skeleton moved past me, blind, oblivious. I came up behind it.
In case it was an issue, I wanted it to be quick, merciful. There was survival involved, too. I had to make sure the first blow immobilized it, so I wouldn’t wind up clawed to pieces. So did I hit the neck or the hips first?
I swallowed hard and swung at the neck for all I was worth. The bones were strong. The first blow only staggered it. It took another swing, so strong it nearly yanked my arm out of the socket. It sent the skull flying. The body crumpled. The skull careened into the stucco, bounced off, and fell where I couldn’t see. It was only quiet for a beat.
“Heh-heh.”
Damn. It was still talking. I didn’t want to think about it. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. Behind us, a door was opening.
“Annie? Where are you, girl?”
They’d find the dog. Even if the alarms didn’t work, there’d be lots of screaming.
I stepped toward the bushes where the skull had landed.
“Jonesey, grab those bones,” I whispered.
“What’re you going to do?”
“Finish it.”
I saw a clump of white and poked it with the crowbar. A stone. A big white stone. I had to wait until I heard the laugh again. It only took seconds.
“Heh-heh.”
The sound was waist-level. It hadn’t hit the ground. There it was, held by a web of branches, wedged in the bush. I stuck the crowbar in and lifted it by the eye socket. The jaws kept moving. Alas, poor Ashby.
“Heh-heh.”
Trying to act dead, like an it myself, I laid it sideways on the stone, pulled back, aimed, and swung. I didn’t just swing once; I did it again and again. I cracked the skull, snapped the jaws, and kept swinging. It—fine, maybe he—had saved my neck, or to be accurate, everything below my neck, and here I was pummeling his remains.
Misty’s words echoed in my ears: It could have been worse.
When I was finished, the stone was covered with white dust and a few pieces no bigger than a marble. But I swear—I’m telling you, I swear—that even the white flakes looked like they were still moving, curling, twitching.
I backed away, scaring the shit out of myself when I bumped into Jonesey.
We both stared at the shivering pieces a while before they finally stopped.
“How the hell was he moving at all?” I whispered. “No muscle, no ligature. Nothing.”
I was thinking out loud, but Jonesey answered. “A luz.”
“A what?”
He shook his head apologetically, like he was sorry he hadn’t thought of it sooner. “It popped into my head just now. It’s from the midrash. A luz is a bone in the human body that’s completely indestructible. They believed it contained the soul. Maybe after everything else was burned away, your friend was one big luz.”
“The midrash? You Jewish, Jonesey?”
“I . . . I don’t remember.”
20
The same oak tree got us back over the fence. We dumped the bones, luz and all, into the sewer. It hadn’t rained in a while, so they landed with a low, distant clatter.
Ashby, ripped and RIP.
Alarms were beeping and clanging everywhere. Police, with their flashlights and flamethrower, rushed into the front entrance of Collin Hills. We waited, then made it back into the park.
Soon all the screams were behind us. Annie’s owners might be bereft, but for the cops it’d just be a dead dog. There’d be a few chakz dragged out of bed, more tension, more patrols, but nothing as bad as if that thing had stumbled in on some family curled around the TV laughing over Tea with the Dead.
The deeper into the park we went, the fewer working lights, leaving us to rely on what there was of the moon. We tramped through the grass, silent as zombie church mice. I kept rubbing my hands, thinking little pieces of Ashby were still on my fingers. I didn’t want to say anything to Jonesey. I especially didn’t want to tell him how I’d nearly moaned before he walked in on me, or how I wasn’t sure what was holding me together now.
But as the shapeless bushes and half-dead trees gave way to the broken-box rectangles of our beloved neighborhood, Jonesey decided to tell me what I was feeling.
“You must be pissed.”
Pissed? More like if there was a button on the wall that said, PUSH TO END WORLD, I was ready to press it. I wiped my hands on my pants and looked at him.
“I know I’m pissed,” he said. “Now, more than ever, I’m ready to pull myself up by my bootstraps and get out there and organize.” To punctuate his clichéd imagery, he slammed his fist into his hand. “And you’re going after whoever did this, right?”
Me? I said, “Yeah.”
He shook his head. “You don’t sound so sure of yourself, Hess. You have to sound sure of yourself.”
“Oh, for the love of . . .”
He stepped in front of me, stopped me in my tracks. “Say it again, Hess, but this time like you mean it.”
My sympathy only goes so far. I growled at him. “I swear, you tell me to turn my frown upside down, I’m going to rip off what’s left of your lips and feed them to the rats.”
“Good. At least now you look pissed,” he said. He grinned as if he’d accomplished something.
By the time we hit the sidewalk I figured I’d grunt something more. “I said yeah; I meant yeah. Of course I want to find him. I’m just not sure I can. I’ve been going from one horror show to another for days, and more often than not, I’m the star. This guy’s a major screwball. I don’t know why he’s doing it. I don’t even know if he knows. I’m not sure I could have found him in my best days, and those are long gone.”
He nodded sympathetically. “I hear you. But you know what I’m going to say. You gotta act as if.”
If I’d met Jonesey when he was alive, I would’ve hated him, thought him a parasite for shoveling a crappy line of shit at people, living off their hopes and dreams. But seeing that ridiculous Pollyanna expression plastered on his grayish skin was, if nothing else, funny.
I threw my hands up. “Fine. You can act like an asshole, no reason I can’t act like a detective.”
“That’s the spirit!” He slapped me on the back.
Whatever. As if. As if what? Turgeon was probably an alias, and I didn’t even have fake names for Grandpa or Watt. My only leads were the two chakz I’d fou
nd on the police database. A quick check on the recorder gave me their names—Nell Parker and Odell Jenkins.
Two chakz. Right. And here I was standing next to my own personal chak database.
“Jonesey, you know a Nell Parker?”
He went into his little mnemonic dance. “Bell . . . toll . . . death . . . Nell Parker. Oh, man, oh, man.”
“What? Believe me, at this point I’m pretty sure I can take it.”
“She’s hooked up with Colby Green. Colby Green. You don’t want to go down that route. Forget it.”
I made a face at him. “Geez, you run hot and cold. I thought you wanted me to act as if.”
“Yeah, but you should act as if you’ve still got a brain. I mean . . . Colby Green? I home-delivered some ketamine to his estate once. He has these special bug zappers set up out front. Bug gets fried, falls into a small reanimator at the bottom, then comes back, only to get fried again. And that’s what he does to bugs.”
I knew the stories. “So I take it you don’t buy the press about how he fights for chak rights?”
“Sure, he fights for our rights, but that’s just to keep his access, Mann. He runs the biggest chak-up palace in the country, as a hobby. In his basement, he’s got chakz in pens, like cattle. Some of his friends are into dead kids, you know what I’m saying? Cancer victims or whatnot whose parents brought them back in the early days, then abandoned them when they decided they were freaks. Anyone tries to press child-rape charges, Green’s lawyers argue that since they died six years ago, even though they were ten at the time, now they’re sixteen, the age of consent, so it’s legal. It doesn’t get more perverted. And Nell Parker? She’s his favorite stripper.”
“That’s a long walk. Her file said she used to be a women’s advocate.”
“Yeah, well, she walked the walk. Right now she’d be better off if your psycho got her.”
“That’s sort of what Misty said about Ashby, but I don’t see it. It’s not as though she can quit when she’s a head.”
“Funny. Stay away. You need someone to help? Fuck, help me. I’ve got maybe thirty chakz lined up for the rally, but, honestly, most can’t march in a straight line, let alone hold up a sign. I could use you. What do you say?”
He pulled out one of his flyers and handed it to me.
“Come on, at least read it.”
Crazy as life was, the rally struck me as crazier. I crumpled the flyer and stuffed it in my pocket. “Sorry, Jonesey, wrong as if. I liked your first speech better.”
Two blocks north there was a train station on a line that’d take me north to the Colby estate. It practically had its own stop. I’d missed the last one for the day, but there’d be another in the morning.
“Hess, you do this and I’ll . . . I’ll tell Misty.”
With a bit of effort, I managed to glower. “Tell her or not, I’m going. But do us all a favor and don’t. She’s got her own problems. After I’m gone, I’m sure she’ll be happy to help you paint some signs, though.” I pulled some bills out of my pocket. “For supplies, and a couple of hot meals for Misty. She likes breakfast, home fries, but make sure she eats the eggs, too.”
By the time he stopped looking at the money, I was half a block away.
“You’re nuts!” he called out.
Depends on how you kept score. Colby Green was the shit you find on the bottom of a shit pile. I could easily, real easily, wind up stuck there as one of his playthings. But I had this weird idea that someone as fascinated with chakz as he was might believe what I had to say about Turgeon. Whatever his reasons, he might even help try to stop him.
And that was worth the risk.
Back at the office, Misty looked like she was asleep, so I stepped over her. She wasn’t.
“You find Ashby?” she said in a half mumble.
“Yeah, it’s all fine now.”
Her eyes popped open. She propped herself up. “Meaning you put him down.”
“Had to, Misty. You know that.”
She slumped. “I do. You’ve got to pull yourself together and get the guy who did this, Hess; you have to.”
As if. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
She went on. “No more lying around watching the inside of your eyeballs.”
“Did you hear what I just said?”
I headed for my office, but she grabbed my arm. “Don’t act like we both don’t know how close you were. You were into that, that . . . torpor shit. And then I’m supposed to smash your head in? I can barely lift that sledgehammer. You scared me, you son of a bitch; you really scared me.”
I looked at her. “I’m back now, okay? I’m back and I’m going to try to find Turgeon, at least warn his victims.”
She let go.
It was only when I stepped into my office that I realized how tired I was. I didn’t want to sleep, but my brain insisted. I threw myself down and closed my eyes. It was the real deal. If I dreamed anything, I didn’t remember.
Judging from the shadows through the blinds, I slept the morning away. It looked like noon. If I was going to do this thing, I’d better be on my way. I took a few hundred for expenses and thought about how nice it was for Turgeon to provide the funds for his own investigation. Then I had a funny feeling.
I decided to check all the bills. I’d looked over the first wad when he handed it to me—that was legit, but not the other two. At least half were phonies, unless they elected Dumbledore president of the United States and nobody told me. Shit. By the time I finished counting, I had about a third of what I thought. So much for redecorating.
Cursing, I grabbed it all and headed out.
Misty was still lying down. “Where you going now?” she said, still half-asleep.
“To deposit the cash at an ATM, so the debit card will be good. Then I’ve got to catch a train.”
“To where?”
“A lead. For real. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. Go find Jonesey. He’s got some work for you, and some money for food.”
“You couldn’t tell me that last night? I’m starving,” she said drowsily. “You sound better, like . . .”
Her eyelids fluttered. She mumbled something I couldn’t make out. Poor thing had probably been awake the whole time I was losing it. Now she was catching up. A little bit of drool slid from her half-open mouth, down to the rumpled pillowcase.
I pressed my dry tongue to the roof of my dry mouth and tried to remember what it was like to drool.
21
Turned out I’d slept through more than just morning. By the time I was on my way, it was late afternoon. The ride was nothing to speak of. My car was empty. There were flashes through the filthy windows whenever the power lines sparked. The train passed ticky-tack suburbs, trash-strewn woods where teens ran wild, before it squeaked and shuddered into Cherry’s End.
The only thing visible from the station was the forest. I got off the platform and still didn’t see much of anything. Why? Because that’s how Colby Green planned it. A few years ago, there was a court case over whether or not Cherry’s End was even part of Fort Hammer. Green was rich enough to muddy the jurisdiction. Even got his own area code.
The huge stone wall surrounding his property sneaked up on me. That’s hard to manage with something so big, but this was no Collin Hills, protected by cinder block made pretty with a trowel swish. Consumerism is a superficial sin for superficial people. Ninety-nine percent of the folks living at Collin Hills couldn’t tell you what cinder block was made of. Green knew exactly where his Italian marble came from, the city, the quarry, the name of the foreman. Not that he cared about architecture. From what I understood, he was like that with everything. He knew the world inside and out and now wanted to play with it the way a cat likes to toy with a mouse, amused at the way it hovers between life and death.
Which is probably why he likes chakz so much.
I followed the wall maybe ten minutes until I spotted the front gates, iron monsters buttressed by Italian marble columns. Sneaking
around a lion’s den seems disrespectful as well as pointless, so I figured I might as well walk up and knock. It is, after all, one of the few places open to chakz.
Adjusting my jacket and tie, I told myself that if I presented the case just so, and he really liked this Nell Parker, at the very least he’d want to take steps to protect his property. Made sense to me. But making sense just made me uncomfortable, the world being fucking crazy.
The gate didn’t get closer as I walked so much as bigger and bigger. When I finally got to the iron, I heard some weird sounds—a bzt followed by a gzt. Peering between the bars, I looked up and saw those bug zappers Jonesey was talking about, bugs swarming, dying, being “reborn.” No rumor, then.
Bzt! You’re dead! Gzt! You’re back!
I hoped to hell he didn’t have any puppies.
“Can I help you?”
I was so busy being horrified I hadn’t noticed the camera and monitor. A round face with a lascivious grin that reminded me of the master of ceremonies from Cabaret eyeballed me from some unknown location.
“My name is Hessius Mann,” I said. “I’m a detective. I have reason to believe someone may try to break into the estate.”
His lipstick smile turned upside down. “Detective? No, no. That’s next week. You must have gotten the wrong schedule! Today it’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Chak! A nautical theme. Oh, well, come on in! The party is just getting started!”
“Wait, I’m not . . .”
The screen went dead; the gates swung open. Dogs barked in the distance. Looked like I’d be entering under false pretenses.
There was a wide, white gravel driveway, but I took a gray stone footpath instead, passing bubbling fountains and major landscaping. I don’t know the names of many plants, but there were lots, different leaves, different flowers, different smells, all neatly arranged.
It wasn’t until I passed some rows of tall hemlocks that the main building punched me in the face, and it wasn’t interested in leaving much space for clouds or sky. I didn’t recognize the architectural style, or even if it had one; I only knew there was a lot of it. So this was Xanadu, or the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, on steroids, if you prefer. I’d seen pictures, but they didn’t do the place justice. The only camera that could take the whole thing in was up in orbit and available on Google Earth.
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