Hidden Things (13 page)

“Nice place.”

Calliope starts awake. She is still on the futon. The bedroom doorway is dark. The apartment is cold.

A lean silhouette stands at the front door. “I'm sorry to wake you up, Calliope, but we need to talk.”

Calliope sits up, scanning the room, trying to get her bearings; trying to remember what is going on, where she is, where—“Where's Josh?”

Special Agent Walker sucks air past his teeth, grimacing. “Bad question, Miss Jenkins. Not something you want to get into with me.” He leans against the refrigerator. “Anyway, I'm really here to ask you things, not the other way around.”

Calliope shakes her head, trying to clear it. “What—”

“Another question I'm not going to answer right now.” Walker sucks at his teeth, popping his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Let me try: where's the Fat Man?”

Calliope blinks, leaning back, her shoulders tense. “Excuse me?”

“Gluen, Miss Jenkins.” Walker's voice grows rough. “The Fat Man. I'd like to have a talk with him.”

“I don't—”

“How about this,” Walker cuts in. “You tell me. I leave.” A light comes on in the bedroom. “And you can get back to your regularly scheduled programming.”

The light shifts, pushing back the cold in the room. Josh is—

Calliope squints at the light, trying to remember.

Josh is—

Calliope turns back to Walker, her eyes gone hard. “Josh is dead.”

Walker's eyes go wide, and everything goes dark.

8

THE DOOR OPENED
to Vikous's first knock. Calliope's face was wan, her eyes shadowed and bruised from lack of sleep. She said nothing, her hand still on the doorknob while those hard eyes took in his hooded form. She held her phone to her ear with her other hand.

“Darryl, this is Calliope. Sorry I missed you. Figure you're at lunch. Anyway, that thing we talked about is happening. I just wanted to let you know, because . . .” She walked away from the door, leaving it open behind her. Vikous stepped inside. “Well, because I said I would, I guess. I'll let you know if I figure anything out.” She glanced at Vikous. “Don't tell—anyone. Okay? Thanks. Bye.” She shut the phone and set it down, then slowly turned toward Vikous.

At her blank expression, he said, “You told me to come back here at noon. It's noon, I'm here.”

She turned and headed toward the back of the house.

“What's the plan, boss?”

She stopped, but didn't turn. “I'm going to pack. Then we'll start driving.”

Vikous raised an eyebrow. “No questions about flying out there?”

“Well, you're not getting through a security checkpoint, are you?” Calliope looked back at him, sidelong. “They make you take your shoes off. That would be interesting.” She turned away, but paused at the doorway. “Besides, he told me it had to be on the ground, that we had to stay close to the earth.”

Vikous watched her back. “Gluen?”

“The message Gluen gave me.” She waited, but Vikous didn't reply. “Josh.”

Vikous kept his voice quiet. “Did he say anything else?”

“He told me who killed him.” Silence filled up the space between them like cold water. “He said good-bye.” Calliope turned and walked out of the room.

“The hardest part is getting started.” Vikous stood outside the house in front of the Jeep. His hood was raised again, and his voice seemed to come from the dappled shadows beneath the autumn-colored tree that reached over the drive.

“No.” Calliope turned toward him from where she had been looking out over the street. “The hardest part is hearing your friend's voice when you know that he's dead and that's all you have left.” She locked the door, coming down the steps to Vikous. “Where's my stuff?”

“Packed it.”

She gazed into the too-dark of his hood for a moment, glanced over his shoulder and back again. “I don't see anything in there.”

“It's all the way in the back, behind the second row of seats.”

“No way it could fit there.”

He lifted the hood slightly, enough for her to see his caricature features. “You remember the clown cars in the circus? We're really good at packing things.”

She blew air through her teeth and walked around to the back of the Jeep, peering in through the window. Her eyes widened, just a bit, then narrowed. For a few seconds there was no sound but distant traffic and a breeze running through the leaves over their heads.

“This trip is going to take a couple days.” She was still looking in through the back window of the Jeep.

The hood bobbed. “Probably more, but yeah.”

“You're going to have plenty of time to explain this crap.” Without waiting for a response, she walked around the vehicle and climbed into the driver's side. Vikous seemed about to say something more, but he went to the passenger side and got in instead.

“I never liked this place,” Calliope said.

“The house?” Vikous followed her gaze, tipping his head speculatively. “Doesn't seem too bad.”

“We used to have this apartment,” she murmured. “It was really . . .” She looked at Vikous, straightened in her seat, and started the engine. The Jeep pulled into the street and left the house behind.

 

Two blocks down, a young man Calliope would have recognized watched them from the confines of a reasonably new but nondescript vehicle. As they pulled away, he pulled out a cell phone and pressed a button. “Sir? It's Hyde. She just left the residence. The guide was with her sir, yes. The one you expected.” He paused, listening. “Yes, sir. I'll call the others.” Again, he waited. The smile below his mirrored sunglasses was broad and showed too many teeth. “Thank you, sir.”

 

Vikous kept his hood up as they drove through the suburban streets. The angle of the opening indicated he was watching the streets scroll by through the side window. His body, overlarge for the space it was crowded into, was tense. Calliope found herself glancing at him as she drove, waiting for him to say or do something.

“What's going on?” she finally said.

The hood moved slightly. “Unfriendly regard,” he said in a strangely ritualistic cadence and tone. He shook himself, his shoulders shifting beneath the layers of clothing in ways that Calliope couldn't quite explain or follow. “Someone watched us leave,” he explained in his normal, sandblasted voice.

“How do you—” She stopped herself. “Bad guys or good guys?”

“There aren't any good guys,” Vikous said. His hood made an abortive move in her direction. “Besides us. Not involved in this business, anyway.”

“Real informative,” Calliope muttered.

“No offense, but you don't exactly react well when I play it straight with you.” His voice was dry.

Calliope stiffened defensively. “I don't think anyone would blame me for not immediately running to my guide for answers when he looks like a reject from Barnum and Bailey's.”

“You don't exactly make it easy. You're acting like this is a”—he waved his hand, exasperated—“a dress-up party you crashed.” He paused. “I'd say you weren't taking it seriously, except for the time you kicked me in the chest, or the time you teargassed me, or the
other
time when you left me in a parking lot to go deal with Gluen by yourself.”

Calliope's jaw was tight. “I can't
help
but think that all has one particular asshole in common—the one who never explains anything, just does something weird and waits to see if I freak out, like it's a test.”

“
Everything
is a test,” Vikous muttered. “If you haven't figured that out by now, I'm really not going to be able to help you. You'll leave me in another parking lot, or smack me with your little swagger stick.” He turned in his seat as best he could, leaning back against the passenger door. “Or maybe you could get about halfway and turn around and run home,” he growled. “Again.”

Calliope yanked on the wheel of the Jeep and brought it to a screeching halt next to an open park in which the grass had gone autumn brown. Without a word, she ripped her keys out of the ignition.

“That didn't take long,” Vikous said, his voice flat and harsh. He opened the door and swung his legs out of the vehicle. “This is a joke.”

“That's a little ironic from someone who looks like a friggin'
clown.
” Calliope's voice rose as she spoke; she shouted the last words through a door Vikous had already closed. She sat in the silence of the cab for a few seconds, then got out, stalking around to the passenger side of the vehicle. Vikous was already ten feet away by the time she got to the sidewalk.

“I'm
trying,
” she shouted at his back.

Vikous stopped. His hood shifted as he looked up at the overcast sky, then he turned back, hands jammed deep in his pockets, walking stiff-legged back toward the Jeep. “You're
playing
at trying.” He was nearly shouting, paying no attention to the sparse traffic on the sidewalk that first looked and then quickly looked away. His hood was still raised, but pushed back enough that she could make out his features. The snarl in his voice spread to his face, where the corners of his mouth had drawn up to reveal several uneven, yellowing teeth. Something along the line of his shoulders moved
wrong
.

Calliope felt a queasy surge in her stomach. “I don't know what you mean.” She shook her head, as though to clear it. “I don't know how you know about . . . me. And I don't know what I've been thinking. I'm about to drive out of town on a weeklong road trip with a com
plete
stranger, a homeless man who's been stalking me for who knows how long.” She glared at the sidewalk, working her jaw. “I'm going home.”

“You'll never be
home,
” Vikous said. “Not till this is over. You know there's something out there now and you know it killed White. You won't be able to shut down the last three days and fool yourself.”

“You don't know anything about me,” Calliope said, barely audible.

“I—” He clenched his jaw. “I know you're too good a liar to believe your own stories, and you notice too much to pretend you're not seeing what you're seeing.” With one gloved hand, he reached up and yanked his hood back under the cloudy afternoon sunlight. “You want me to play it straight?
Look
at me.”

Calliope looked, unable to keep her eyes from dragging over his features or dismissing anything as a trick of the light in a strobe-lit bar, or the shadows of a predawn street, or the dim haze of her shaded house. Eyes the color and sheen of hard plastic buttons bored into her, completely bereft of whites, despite the fact that they were open wide and staring right at her. The green spikes of hair on his head were too regular, too solid. His white face paint didn't flake or peel, didn't look like paint or stain at all, and the same was true of the crimson smear that surrounded his mouth—a mouth that was too wide, that opened too far when he spoke, dropped too far open when he drank . . .

and had too, too many teeth.

To her left, Calliope heard a gasp. She turned, confronted with the terrified face of a young boy clinging to his mother's side. The pair had been walking down the street but the boy was now hauling frantically backward on his mother's arm, his eyes locked on Vikous.

“Darien, stop it, quit acting so—” she managed a smile toward Vikous. “I'm sorry, he doesn't mean to; he's always been afraid of clowns.”

Vikous smiled and Calliope couldn't help but see, now, that it went too far around his face, but the woman was struggling with her son and didn't notice. “It's all right, ma'am. They scare me, too.” He turned to a bench facing the park and scooped up a discarded newspaper. Using it as a shield for his other hand, he made a gesture and a rose pivoted out of thin air and into his outstretched hand as he pulled the paper away.

The woman jumped, startled as she turned to find the flower in her face. “Oh! My . . . thank you.” She hesitated a moment in reaching for the flower, then accepted it. “Thank you,” she repeated, then turned to her son. “See? He's just a nice magician clown.” The boy shook his head, his eyes still locked on Vikous, and shook free of his mother's grasp, running into the park.

At least I can see the whites of the
kid's
eyes,
Calliope thought.

Clearly mortified, the woman called after her son. “I'm sorry,” she mouthed to Vikous and hurried off into the park. Vikous watched her go.

“Maybe we should get back in the car now.” He pulled his hood up.

“We're not done yet,” Calliope said. Her eyes followed the woman as she approached her son, who had barricaded himself inside a jungle gym. “But yeah . . . let's go. I'll drive, you talk.” She turned and walked around the back of their vehicle.

A nearly invisible smile played around Vikous's mouth. “Works for me,” he murmured, his voice almost too low to carry. He rolled the newspaper into a tube, tapped it again with his hand, and climbed back into the Jeep.

 

“Before we get into this,” Vikous said, rubbing at his eyes, “understand that there's only so much I'm going to talk about right now. There's too much to explain all at once, even just about the parts that have to do with you. Even if there weren't, there's parts that won't make any sense to you now and I'm not wasting my time on them.” He took a deep breath. “Plus, there are rules about this sort of thing. Okay?”

“Sure, I guess.” She glanced over at him. “Start out easy. What are you, exactly?”

He exhaled into something like a laugh. “I can't really say.”

Calliope's eyes narrowed. “Oh, son of a—”

“Now wait.” Vikous raised a gloved hand. “Explaining why I said that will tell you some things, so let's not go back to kicking me out of the car just yet.” Calliope's face remained tense, but he continued: “The only real rule we've learned is to keep our heads down. All of us.”

“All of you . . . what?”

He glanced in the side passenger mirror as they pulled onto the highway. “Well, rule out aliens and all that garbage. What I'm talking about are the sorts of things you heard about when you were a kid or when you read old stories. You know dragons and boogeymen, right?” Calliope nodded, her expression still set and cautious. Vikous nodded in turn. “Okay, which one of those can you describe?”