Domino clearly didn’t know shit. I figured out he was only squatting so I made plans for better locks and prepared to evict him … but I couldn’t. He wouldn’t let me, and he had a good excuse. His little sister was somewhere in the building and he couldn’t find her. He couldn’t leave without her, could he? No, no of course not.
I gave him twenty-four hours to shoehorn the kid out of her hiding spot and told him that when I came back, they’d both better be gone.
But when I came back, she was still hiding—or she’d gone into hiding again, whichever. Domino begged another twenty-four hours off me, and when I came back yet again, I couldn’t find either one of them. To this very day I don’t know where they were hiding. They won’t tell me, in case I get a wild hare up my ass and decide to throw them out again.
How did they know I wouldn’t call the cops and force an eviction? My guess is that they’d done enough exploring and/or opening of boxes to gather that I wasn’t exactly jonesing for civic scrutiny. Or maybe they were just stubborn enough not to care, I don’t know.
From then on out I started treating them—to abuse the comparison again—like stray cats. I tried to coax them out of hiding with food, and that didn’t work. So I tried to coax them out with money, and that didn’t work either. Then I tore the place apart trying to find them and fling them out onto the streets with my bare hands, if necessary, and I failed royally at this attempt also.
It took me more than a year to figure out that I was taking care of them. All that time, I thought I’d been trying to eliminate some pests. But no. I’d been feeding the strays, and now they belonged to me.
The more I thought about it, the more accustomed to the idea I became. After all, if homeless people were going to make themselves comfortable on my property, they might as well be homeless people who answered to me. Eventually I gave them a prepaid cell phone (for emergency use only, thank you, Pepper, good girl) and turned the power on so they wouldn’t freeze to death during the winter. Could I do more for them? Probably. But remember what I said about not keeping pet people? This factory isn’t my doll-house, and those kids aren’t my Barbies.
But I let them keep the duvet. They’d already been sleeping all over it anyway; I’d have had to dry-clean it, and I hate the smell of dry-cleaning chemicals. So it was just as well.
I asked Pepper, since she was more pleasant to talk to, “You guys still doing all right for food?”
She nodded. Domino answered. “Duh. Yes, we’re fine for food. I bring in plenty.”
He meant he stole plenty, but what was I going to do, lecture him about it? “Okay,” I said instead. “As long as you’re covered, I won’t worry about you. Good job on the lookout, Peps. Keep up the good work.”
She beamed up at me, and I gave her a wink.
I told the pair of them to keep their eyes peeled in case Trevor had any friends, and I barred the place up behind me as I left. I wasn’t worried about locking the siblings inside. They’d get out if they wanted to. They always did.
I finally convinced myself that future intruders would have a tougher time gaining entry, and that the kids would hardly sleep the rest of the night anyway, for all the excitement.
I pinched my purse and felt Ian Stott’s envelope distorting the bag’s shape from within. Morning was coming in another couple of hours, and I had some reading to do.
3
Back at the homestead, I was too wound up to settle in for the day—even though the first light streaks of dawn were working their way up over the mountains. I shut all the blinds and drew down the curtains, closing myself up in my little cave. I flipped on a couple of lights for the sake of ambience and booted my laptop.
It was too late in the evening (or too close to morning, however you look at it) for me to get much work done, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet I could still get prepped and ready for the next night’s business.
Ian Stott’s envelope sat on the desk beside the computer. The blind vampire was a paying client and I should’ve started with his case, but floating somewhere in my purse were two scraps of paper relevant to Trevor, and they were fresher in my memory.
I retrieved the business card and the torn sheet of notepaper. The card had a handy-dandy URL listed on it: www.northwestparcoursaddicts.com. Sounded manly. I plugged it in and let it load, and yes, the testosterone reeked out from the digital window.
The home page looked like a high-school boy’s idea of a good time on the weekend. Lots of black, lots of bulky guys wearing gray-scale camo, lots of gear, lots of posing in an adventuresome fashion. Up top there was a link “About Parcours,” and on that page I learned that my idiot trespasser might well have been telling the truth after all.
If I was feeling uncharitable, I might call parcours a French martial art designed around the skill of running away. But I was forced to admit, some of the videos looked pretty cool. It consisted mostly of running, jumping, and climbing around on stuff in odd places.
And oh, look. Another link.
“Two great tastes that taste great together: Urban Exploration and Parcours.”
Oh dear. The more I read, the more it appeared that the dumb-ass had been on the up-and-up. He belonged to a club of people who liked to (a) poke around in abandoned buildings, and (b) climb around on stuff while dressed like commandos from a video game.
Even so, I couldn’t beat myself up about it too much. After all, he wasn’t just unlucky to pick my building—he was stupid, too. As I understood the rules on the website, you don’t explore anyplace that people routinely visit, occupy, or presently utilize. My old factory may look like a dump from the outside, but once he got in, he should’ve known he’d blown it. He should’ve turned around on the heels of his faux army boots and left the way he’d arrived.
It was his own fault that he was dead.
Something still felt “off” about it, though. The rules on the website were clear, and when I clicked through the image galleries, all the posted pictures depicted places that had been visibly empty for decades. All the other boys were playing by the rules. So why not my supper?
The other piece of paper drew my eye. Major, said the one legible word. Major as in “British slang for important”? Or major as in “ranking military official”? I didn’t imagine that a five AM phone call would please anyone waiting at the other end of the line, so I didn’t do any dialing yet, but on the off chance it might tell me something, I plugged the digits into a search engine and came up with nothing.
Que sera.
Oh well. I could sit and obsess about the intruder all day, or I could use the residual energy from feeding on him to be productive.
I reached for Ian’s envelope.
It’d become battered while riding in my purse, but everything inside was intact. There wasn’t much to mess up—mostly just some photos and negatives, and some documents that had been declassified, though only in the loosest sense. Long black bars blocked out huge chunks of text for the sake of national security, ass-covering, or God knew what else.
The photos were grainy black-and-whites, with coordinates listed on the back and time/date stamps in yellow. The dates roughly matched Ian’s incarceration ten years previously. At the center of each picture was one building in particular—amid several others, with what appeared to be a wall around the whole compound. It could certainly be a small military base.
What I could see of the surrounding terrain wasn’t very helpful. There were trees, some of them quite bushy and dark, as if the base was smack in the middle of a jungle. Had Ian mentioned from whence he’d escaped? I was a moron for not asking, but I had his number. I’d call him come evening and clear up a few things.
Beside my laptop I kept a pad of paper, and in a drawer underneath the desk I store enough pens and pencils to last an innercity school for months, but it took me a couple of minutes to find a functional writing implement. Everything was broken or dried up, and I don’t own a pencil sharpener, which is ludicrous, I know. You’d think
I could throw some of that old junk away, but perhaps by now you’ve realized that I’m a bit of a hoarder at heart.
So. I found a pen that didn’t tear up the paper with its spinster-dryness, and I made a little list:
1. Ian escaped from base; he must know where it is. Find out.
2. How did he escape?
3. What does he remember from the procedures?
That was all I could think of for the moment. I took the paper and working pen with me into the bedroom and left them on the nightstand while I washed my face and stripped for bed.
Finally I slipped in between the sheets and pulled my (sadly, not red silk) duvet up across my chest. I leaned over and turned on the electric blanket because I don’t care that I’m not technically so much alive anymore—that’s no excuse to be cold all the time. Then I turned on the tiny bedside lamp, put my pen in my mouth, and began to read between the black bars.
It was an eyelid-punishing task. Every time the content was about to get good, some asshole would black it out with a Sharpie and I’d spend a few ridiculous seconds squinting madly at the black boxes, trying to make them tell me something.
No such luck.
But this is the condensed version of what I was able to ascertain about Ian Stott’s mysterious capture and incarceration:
In the mid-nineties, the army instituted Project Bloodshot. At least four subjects (and maybe as many as seven) were acquired and relocated to a base that was so small and so secret that there was, in effect, no record of it at all. One of the subjects died within the first week; another one died some months later, both of unspecified causes. Of the remaining two subjects, one ceased to be mentioned in the documentation—but whether he (or she) had died or gone missing, the black lines refused to divulge. And as for the final subject—Ian, I assumed—he broke out of the facility and disappeared, doing some damage on the way out. After his flight, the documentation abruptly ended and there was a final note saying that the program had been scrapped by the higher-ups.
I picked up my pad of paper again and added more questioning notes:
4. Were the other subjects vampires?
5. What other experiments were being performed? If Ian only went blind but a couple of the subjects died, something else must’ve been going on, too.
6. What did Ian do to the compound when he left?
Inside the folder I only had one more stapled clump of papers to read, and even though the sun was fully up outside—gold and runny like a frying egg—I was still riding high from my first meal in ages so I kept on reading. This last batch of paperwork had fewer strokes of the obfuscating marker.
It was a letter from one blacked-out name to another, discussing Project Bloodshot as an expensive failure and a potential PR nightmare. This letter urged discretion. It suggested in no uncertain wording that the recipient of the missive should shut up about the project, already, and turn his (her?) attention to a different line of scientific inquiry, because Uncle Sam wasn’t going to pony up the bill for any more of this nonsense—especially not after what happened at Jordan Roe. Furthermore, the note’s author made abundantly clear that he (she?) expected all paperwork on the matter to be shipped to the facility at St. Paul.
Cal’s exquisitely bad handwriting coiled sharply in the margin. If I read it right, his addendum said, “Stored at Holtzer Point, St. Paul. Mr. Stott’s serial number: 63-6-44-895.”
“Okay,” I said out loud.
Tomorrow night, I’d look into the security system at Holtzer Point and see about letting myself inside.
I set the aggravatingly and minimally declassified documents aside and turned in for the day.
The phone woke me up a little after five PM. The sun was still up but it was on its way down; I could feel it immediately, without bothering to futz with the curtains. I hated that stupid phone. It jangled away in my purse, in the other room, nowhere near my bed, which was where I wished to remain.
It wound through its cycle and I lay there, expecting the electronic blip that warns of incoming voice mail, but no. It began to ring again with an immediacy that implied the caller was prepared to go on doing this all night, if necessary.
So it must be Horace.
I mentioned earlier, when I was trying to contain my natural tendency to digress, that I have a contact at a museum. He’s a crooked little motherfucker who used to work as an acquisitions manager at a big NYC auction house, retired, and took a leisurely sort of job as a collections assessor at a museum. If ever there was a corollary to the old adage about the fox guarding the henhouse, this is it.
I’m not going to lie and say it hasn’t been good for me. I get most of my best cases from Horace, so he’s a handy fellow to know. He’s mercenary to the core, with no regard whatsoever for art, history, or sentimentality. His whole business model could best be described as, “I know a guy who wants a thing. Raylene, I’ll pay you fat sacks of cash to go and get it.”
Usually I say yes. Sometimes I say no.
I hauled myself into the living room and answered the cell phone before he’d finished his third round of persistent redial. He didn’t wait for me to say anything like “Hello,” “Raylene here,” or “Damn you, you bastard, you woke me up.” He just dove right into his sales pitch.
“This will be an easy one, if you’re game,” his nasally voice wheedled. “It’s just a little box, somewhere in the basement of the Smithsonian. I’ve got a collector who thinks there’s an Aztec relic inside. I’ve emailed you the details, the deadline, and the budget.”
“Tell me …” I cleared my throat and tried again. I tasted clotted O-positive in the back of my throat, which was not nearly so nice as the fresh stuff. “Tell me what the deadline is.”
“Why? Do you have a hot date or something?”
“I have another client,” I told him.
“You’re shitting me!”
“I shit thee not.”
He paused, and if I knew him, he was chewing on the end of his glasses while he thought about it. “Another client. But I’m your favorite, right?”
“Favorite?”
“Most reliable. Highest paying. Most flattering, oh my beautiful, sticky-fingered queen of the night?”
I yawned. “You’re pushing your luck.”
“Then let me give it another little shove. This woman I’m talking to, she’s got a wish list as long as your arm and more money than God. You’ll love her.”
“I don’t want to love her if she wants her goodies anytime in the next couple of weeks.” I guessed at how long I’d need for Ian’s assignment. It might go as quickly as forty-eight hours, or it might take me a month. A couple of weeks was a good middle-of-the-road estimate, and one that was flexible.
“We’re talking next month. Is next month too soon? She wants it in time for some weird calendar event; I think she’s one of those multicultural hippie pagans who’s trying to get in touch with someone else’s tradition.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“She’s a white woman who’s inordinately fond of indigenous religious artifacts.” He stopped, as if he was finished with the thought. Then he added, “If you want my opinion, she’s a little creepy about it.”
“Next month,” I echoed his earlier statement, since that was the one I found important. “Next month might be doable.”
“Is that a yes?”
“It’s a maybe. It’s a probably yes, but it isn’t a yes.”
Not everyone can sulk out loud without saying a word. Horace has elevated it to an art form. “What are you, a Magic Eight Ball?” he finally demanded. “Ask again later? Is that how it’s going to be?”
“Ask again later, yes. That’s an excellent idea. It’s a perfect idea, in fact, and it’s one I plan to insist upon. Let me get a bit deeper into this current case, and I’ll get back to you.”
“You will? You promise? You’re not just trying to get rid of me?”
“Oh, I’m trying to get rid of you, yes,” I assured him. “I
just woke up. I need a shower. It’s kind of cold in here, and I’m in my underwear. So make no mistake about it—I am trying to get rid of you. But I’ll also make a point to call you in another week or so. Deal?”
The pretty-pretty princess sighed and said, “Fine. I suppose I’ll have to take it.”
“I suppose you will,” I said, and I hung up without any more salutation than he’d offered at the start of the conversation. It’s okay. He knows me. I know him. We never take it personally … or at least I don’t. Maybe he takes it personally sometimes, but as long as he continues to throw work my way once in a while, I don’t give a damn.
But I didn’t really need the work right at that moment, and if he was going to get pissy about it, he could kiss my ass. Sometimes I swear he thinks I’m on call for him, 24/7. Well, I’m not. And he could learn it the hard way, if he had to.
Besides, I had to assume he had other, um, “acquisitions specialists” on the payroll somewhere. If he wasn’t willing to wait a few weeks, he could field the job out to a member of the B-team—if it was such an easy job as all that.
Of course, this made me think that it wasn’t such an easy job after all. Otherwise he would’ve been happy to pay someone else a lot less money to take care of it. Even more reason to put him off.
I wandered back into the bedroom, gathered a few clothes, and took a nice, hot shower—during which I mentally sorted through the things I’d need for the evening. I could start on the Internet, and why wouldn’t I? The information was easy, free, and even if it wasn’t accurate (which was always a risk), it usually gave me a good starting point for finding better facts elsewhere.
Within about half an hour, I’d learned that Holtzer Point was a top secret facility in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’d gathered that much already, but it was nice to have it confirmed by a series of websites that appeared to have been composed by middle-school-aged conspiracy theorists with a passion for stupid-looking animated graphics.
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