Local news normally consisted of some business moving to town, some business moving out; an event of importance in the life of the mayor; some trial for fraud or embezzlement; a parade; or what Tom referred to as "pretty puppy" news. Today Tom would have expected the big headline to be about the snowstorm. And it was. At least the headline just beneath the title of the paper, in dark blue letters, was "Goldport Slammed by Storm." But above the fold, and in screaming red letters just beneath the newspaper's name was "Strange Animals Seen Around Town." And beneath that "Dragons and Saber-Toothed Tigers and Smoking Squirrels."
"Smoking squirrels?" he said, looking up at Kyrie, whose hand was shaking so much that the newspaper was oscillating before his eyes.
"Whatever. But dragons? Saber-tooth?"
"It wasn't a saber-tooth," Tom said, reasonably. "It was a dire wolf."
"Oh, yes, and I'm sure that the international spotters of extinct animals would care," she said, as she set the kitten on top of him and started reading from the paper. "Last night, amid the howling gusts of the storm—who writes this paper? The Bronte sisters?—a man passing by a building near the aquarium swears he saw in the parking lot a dragon or some other large creature battling it out with what he swears was a saber-toothed tiger. With great presence of mind he snapped a photo with his cell phone." Kyrie stretched the paper towards Tom so he could see an indistinct picture of dark shapes amid white snow. "He took a picture of us." Kyrie said.
If Tom squinted and sort of looked at it sideways, the dark blobs in the snow did look like Kyrie, the dire wolf and himself. In shifted forms. Or perhaps like three sacks of potatoes. "Kyrie, it's completely fuzzy. No one could recognize a dragon in that."
"No, but . . . if it hadn't been snowing, someone could have gotten a real picture of you and me and the dire wolf."
"All right. I will do my best not to get in fights with homicidal maniacs," he said, and sat up. "At least not when people might get a clear picture of me. Do you have any idea how I should sell this truce to the homicidal maniacs?"
But Kyrie only looked at him with a blank and panicked look. "But they know. Someone knows."
"Kyrie!" Tom said. "How many times do people read this sort of thing, or think they see it, or report it? It doesn't make any difference. Black panthers up in Ohio, I remember reports of that—"
"Yeah, a lot of them when I lived there."
"Oh, really?" he smiled briefly. "Well, I was on the cover of the Inquirer once. I mean, the real one, the tabloid. Someone got me, flying over town, with a telephoto lens. No one believed it of course. Not after half the tabloids spent the nineties reporting on the president's alien baby." He put his hand out to her, and held her wrist. "No one will believe it, Kyrie. That picture doesn't look any better than the countless pictures of the abominable snowman. And if it did, people would say it was Photoshopped. Calm down will you? Everything is fine. And look, about the cat, if you don't want it—"
"No, I always wanted a cat and he seems very nice . . . in an insufferable male feline way."
"I don't know if he's a male, I just—"
"Oh, he's a male, trust me. I just know." She grinned, and tossed the newspaper down. "Right, I must go and find him a litter box."
By the time she came back, carrying a small plastic box filled with grey granules, Tom was reading the paper, frowning, very puzzled over reports that a giant squirrel—the size of a German shepherd—had been seen in various locations downtown "wearing a beret and smoking cigarettes," he told Kyrie. "I mean, and you're afraid people will believe the thing about the dragon when they finish with this."
Kyrie looked confused. "Are you sure it's not someone like us? I mean . . . a shifter squirrel?"
"The size of a German shepherd and wearing a beret? What are the chances?"
"Not high," Kyrie said. "But if it's true . . ."
"If it's true," Tom said, feeling as though he had a bit of ice wedged in his stomach, "then he's gone completely around the bend. Which I suppose would make him an ideal suspect for the aquarium murder."
"And perhaps for whoever unleashed the executioner on us," Kyrie said.
At that moment, the phone rang. And Kyrie sprang towards it. "It's Rafiel," she said.
* * *
Tom raised his eyebrows at Kyrie, as she pushed the button on the speaker and Rafiel's voice filled the room. He sounded nervous . . . or perhaps hassled was a better term. "Kyrie?"
"And Tom," Kyrie said. "We're on the speaker."
"Oh? Oh. Good. That saves me telling you stuff twice."
"What stuff?" Tom asked.
"Well . . . this morning, we got a call. At the station. They found . . ."
"Another arm?" Kyrie asked.
"Yes, but in this case, there was a body attached to it. Badly mauled. Aquarium. We're . . . processing it."
"Do you need our help?" Tom asked.
"Processing a body?" Rafiel asked, incredulous.
"No. With . . . anything."
There was a hesitation. Rafiel cleared his throat. "Yeah, but I can't . . ." His car horn sounded. "Did you see the paper, this morning?"
"The squirrel?"
"And the . . . you and the dire wolf."
"And?" Tom asked impatiently, waiting—fearing—what would come next but needing to hear it because until he heard, it was always worse than he thought. Until he heard it, he would think he'd been found, he'd been recognized, he'd been . . .
"And this morning, when we were called in, there were already reporters in the parking lot. From the Weekly Inquirer. They were looking for fur or scales, or who knows what. But they got hold of the murder, right at the beginning. And considering, they seem really interested . . . you know, the thing is the Weekly Inquirer was bought recently?" He seemed to wait for them to comment and when all that Kyrie and Tom did was exchange a look, he clicked his tongue. "The Weekly Inquirer was bought by Covert Corp."
"Covert what?"
"The corp. thing is sort of misleading. I mean, they are a corporation. But they are a family company. They own several magazines. Crosswords, mystery. But the most important property, the one they started with, is called Unknown. It's a magazine of cryptozoology."
"Crypto what?"
"Animals that aren't supposed to exist, or animals that aren't supposed to be there. Dragons and . . . that."
"Oh. But if they own many companies . . . What could it mean for the WI in particular?"
"The patriarch of the clan, Lawrence Stoneman . . . He's very hands-on, you could say. He seems to keep one of his kids in charge of each place the corp buys. His daughter, Miranda, is in charge of the Weekly Inquirer. And she grew up on cryptozoology. I think their interest in the murder is secondary, frankly, as opposed to what interesting animals they might find lurking around. In other words . . ." Rafiel hesitated.
"We can none of us afford to be obvious?" Kyrie said.
"With a maniac stalking us, and a second murder at the aquarium—where there are two, maybe three shifters running around?" Tom said.
"Exactly. So, yes, I do want your help, but I do need to be more careful about getting that help than I've been. I'll come in if I can, tonight. Meanwhile, if you must shift, be careful where you do it, and who might see you. More careful than normal, that is."
"Right," Tom said. And sensing Rafiel was about to hang up, he added, "Oh, do you have any relatives who could fix our bathroom?" And in response to a scowl from Kyrie, he added, "Not for free. We'll pay. I'd just like to get someone who can start right away, so we can move back home soon, and who won't ask . . . awkward questions." This brought up his deep-seated envy of Rafiel, who not only hadn't lost his family over his shifting nature, but whose family stood ranked behind him, solid, bolstering and protecting him.
Tom had been told that Rafiel's parents knew he was a shifter. This explained—or at least Rafiel thought it did—why Rafiel still lived at home. Tom didn't know how many other members of the extended family knew about it, and he was afraid to ask
. In a world where the lack of safety of a shifter meant revealing the existence of them all, he didn't want to learn of the possible issues with Rafiel's security. Rafiel's family seemed to have done well enough with the secret so far, and Tom, who had no personal knowledge of how real families behaved, would not judge.
"Oh," Rafiel said. "I see. Yes, we have plumbers in the family, and one of my uncles can probably do the drywalling stuff or tile or whatever." There was a silence that gave the impression he was trying to think things out. "Yeah, it will do very well. It will give me an excuse to come by the diner later this evening. We'll just have to be careful there."
Rafiel disconnected, and Tom limped towards the shower to wash. He and Kyrie needed to eat something, and one of them should probably go in early to relieve Anthony. Normally, they should have had three shifts. They hadn't, mostly because Tom hadn't had time to even think of hiring a third manager, much less one who was practiced in using the complex new stoves. But they couldn't ask Anthony to do a twelve-hour shift, not when he was newly wed, anyway, so Tom would go in early. He grabbed a change of clothes and headed towards the bathroom, Not Dinner happily winding in and out between his ankles. "I wonder if that Laura person who was supposed to come for an interview yesterday will show up today. Do you think they've cleared the roads enough for traffic?"
Kyrie giggled, and as Tom stared, she said, "I'm sorry, but with everything going on, it's so much like you to be worried about the diner, and getting another manager/cook for the diner."
Tom grinned, seeing her point, but shrugged. "Well, Kyrie, look at it this way—if we survive this, then we'll need the diner in good shape, particularly considering the repairs to the bathroom. And if we don't survive, the fact that I was worried about running the diner won't make a bit of difference."
* * *
But Tom found, as he crossed the slush-filled parking lot of The George, that things were not that clear-cut in his mind. It was sort of like telling someone to stop worrying because nothing could be done about a problem. It wasn't in the human mind to stop worrying—to stop looking for the door out of the sealed room; to stop searching for the one true route through the labyrinth. He was sure that if the world were doomed to destruction by asteroid within a day or two, and everyone on Earth were informed of it, at least half of them would go to their graves still frantically looking for an escape from the approaching cosmic collision. In the same way, the sane thing to do, surrounded by problems he couldn't solve, might be to concentrate on the problems he could solve—on the diner, his bathroom, and the fact that his hands—though well enough to go without bandages—still hurt and would probably be sensitive to the heat from the stoves.
That would be the sensible thing to do, and the sane one. Which meant, of course, that his mind insisted on going through everything he couldn't do anything about—the murders at the aquarium; the executioner come to town; whatever the organization might be of old shifters, and beyond that where Old Joe might have gone and whether he was alive.
The weather had done one of those sudden reversals that Tom's almost year of living in Colorado had got him used to—it had gone from several degrees below freezing the day before, and blowing snow and howling wind, to fifty degrees with a very slight breeze which stirred the branches of the icicle-hung trees. All the icicles were dripping, too—from the branches of the trees and the edges of the buildings, a drip drip drip that seemed to be waiting only for a conductor and some rhythm to turn into an animated movie's symphony of thawing and spring.
Only it wasn't spring at all. And tomorrow could very well be freezing again. Or alternately it could be eighties, with everyone wandering around in sandals and T-shirts.
As Tom took a long detour around a melting pool in the middle of the parking lot, he fancied that even the birds on the trees that lined the streets were piping in tones of surprise, as if asking themselves if this was the last of snow or the beginning. He was smiling to himself at the idea of birds driven to Prozac by Colorado weather, but his detour brought him full-face with a poster on the wall of the diner—where it wouldn't have been visible from the back door. That wall was in fact where the storage rooms protruded a little from the otherwise square plan of the building.
The poster was glued at an angle on the whitewashed wall, and it was the sort of poster—printed on cheap paper, in two colors—that normally advertised a dance or a new more or less non-registered nightclub or, alternately, some new band come to town. At first Tom thought it was a new band. It might still be a new band. Only what the words across the top read, in huge bright red type—rodent liberation front. Beneath it was a rant in pseudo-Marxist terms, urging "The downtrodden, the despised who live at the edges of society" to "rise up and take what you want. No more foraging for fallen nuts, no more eating discards. Rise up and take your freedom in your hands. There are more of us than them. Rodents of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your mousetraps."
Tom blinked at the page. It was possible it was all allegorical and meaningful and too symbolic for words. They were, after all, not that far away from CUG—Colorado University at Goldport—and since fully half the students seemed to eat at The George any given day—or more typically night—Tom was aware how the minds worked who might be behind this pamphlet. They were the sort of minds that were convinced coming up with a particularly clever image or metaphor excused not having anything new to say.
Without his knowing he was going to do it, his hand reached out and plucked the paper from the wall. It could be a metaphor, a clever image, a college thing to delude themselves that they were doing something to save the world. But in his gut—in a big, insoluble cold lump at the pit of his stomach—he knew it wasn't. He knew it was . . . shifter business. Squirrels the size of German shepherds smoking cigarettes. Crazy. But how crazy did the dragon thing sound to other people as well?
He folded the poster and put it in his pocket, and started walking towards the diner. And heard the splish-splosh behind him of someone stepping on ice, then on water, then falling butt-first into the water. And turned to see Red Dragon—no, Conan. He had to get used to calling him Conan—sitting in a puddle of water, looking very surprised.
Surprised was the least of his problems, though, to tell the truth. He didn't look good. Not good at all. His skin was pale enough to look almost the color of Tom's and he had big circles under his eyes, and to make things worse, he was attempting to get up, but not managing to balance himself enough to do so, because of his shortened arm.
"I shouldn't go to him," Tom told himself. "I truly shouldn't go to him. How stupid can I be? One day I'm going to help someone who is going to kill me."
But in his mind was his sixteen-year-old self, alone, on the streets of New York City in a bathrobe and as lost and confused as any kid could ever have been anywhere. And he'd survived only because the gentleman down the street—an orangutan shifter, though his family didn't seem to notice he was one—who sold roasted chestnuts on the street corner, had seen him and taken him in, and given him a jogging suit, and let him stay there a couple of days, till Tom had caught hold of the idea of day labor and had got a fake ID that said he was eighteen and could, therefore, be hired.
And he was closing the distance to Red Dragon and holding him on the side of his weak arm and hauling him up, even as he looked down at what he was wearing—the jogging suit that Kyrie had given him and a pair of those shoes that you slip your feet into, which have an almost completely smooth bottom. No socks. "You need boots," he said. "For this weather. We'll take you to the thrift store tomorrow or something, okay?"
"I have money," Conan Lung said, in the tone of someone protesting charity. "I brought money with me. In a pouch. I could buy new boots."
"Oh? Good for you," Tom said, not sure whether to be amused or saddened and being, after all, wholly skeptical. If he had money, why grab the elastic shoes? They weren't that much better than the flip-flops Tom had given him. "And you have family in Goldport, too, don't you?
" he added, remembering that their past adventures seemed to involve Goldport's minuscule Asian minority.
He shook his head. "Tennessee," he said, and wiped his dripping nose to his sleeve, and looked back, at a bottom that was entirely soaked in runoff from melted snow.
"Oh, now, you're just putting me on," Tom said. "And don't worry about the sweatsuit. I have a couple others in the storage room. For . . . this sort of situation." He decided he didn't want to talk about Old Joe to the Great Sky Dragon people. "I'll get you one. Socks too."
"I'm not putting you on," Conan said. He sounded aggrieved and tired, and just the slightest bit exasperated—though Tom couldn't tell at whom. "Mom and Dad have a restaurant in Knoxville. People don't all come in to New York City anymore when they immigrate. Planes go everywhere."
"I'm sorry," Tom said, holding onto himself with all his will power to prevent himself from giggling at the fact that Conan had completely forgotten to have an accent. Or completely forgotten to have an Asian accent. Now that Tom thought about it, there was just an edge of a southern twang to his voice. It sounded, Tom thought, like something he'd tried very hard to rid himself of. Something that he hadn't quite managed to leave behind him. And quite out of place in a triad member.
"And I do have money. In a pouch. I wear it on a flexible anklet when I shift," Conan added, sullenly, clearly having caught Tom's disbelief.
"All right. You have money. Couldn't you have got yourself decent shoes, then?"
Conan shook his head. "No," he said. "I got them at the Short Drugs down the block, and this was the best they had. It was this or flip-flops."
"You know . . ." Tom said, leading him towards the back door of the diner and opening it for him. In the hallway, Conan wiped his feet on the mat at the entrance, and duck-walked into the hallway, his cheap shoes squeaking on the concrete. "It might surprise you, but in a list of shoe stores, Short Drugs wouldn't be in the first hundred, being a drugstore and all."
Gentleman Takes a Chance Page 12