Dragon Tears (35 page)

“Okay,” he said, “I can understand being crazy for the early Elvis, memorizing the early songs. But later?”

Shaking ketchup onto her burger, Connie said, “In its way, the end’s as interesting as the beginning. American tragedy.”

“Tragedy? Winding up a fat Vegas singer in sequined jumpsuits?”

“Sure. The handsome and courageous king, so full of promise, transcendent—then because of a tragic flaw, he takes a tumble, a long fall, dead at forty-two.”

“Died on a toilet.”

“I didn’t say this was Shakespearean tragedy. There’s an element of the absurd in it. That’s what makes it
American
tragedy. No country in the world has our sense of the absurd.”

“I don’t think you’ll see either the Democrats or Republicans using that line as a campaign slogan anytime soon.” The burger was delicious. Around a mouthful of it, he said, “So what was Elvis’s tragic flaw?”

“He refused to grow up. Or maybe he wasn’t able.”

“Isn’t an artist supposed to hold on to the child within him?”

She took a bite of her sandwich, shook her head. “Not the same as perpetually
being
that child. See, the young Elvis Presley wanted freedom, had a passion for it, just like I’ve always had, and the way he got total freedom to do anything he wanted was through his music. But when he got it, when he could’ve been free forever…well, what happened?”

“Tell me.”

She had clearly thought a lot about it. “Elvis lost direction. I think maybe he fell in love with fame more than freedom. Genuine freedom, freedom with responsibility, not from it—that’s a worthy adult dream. But fame is just a cheap thrill. You’d have to be immature to really enjoy fame, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t want it. Not that I’m likely to
get
it.”

“Worthless, fleeting, a trinket only a child would mistake for diamonds. Elvis, he looked like a grownup, talked like one—”

“Sure as hell sang like a grownup when he was at his best.”

“Yeah. But emotionally he was a case of arrested development, and the grownup was just a costume he wore, a masquerade. Which is why he always had a big entourage like his own private boys’ club, and ate mostly fried banana sandwiches with peanut butter, kids’ food, and rented whole amusement parks when he wanted to have fun with his friends. It’s why he wasn’t able to stop people like Colonel Parker from taking advantage of him.”

Grownups. Children. Arrested development. Psychosis. Fame. Sorcery. Fairy tales. Arrested development. Monsters. Masquerade.

Harry sat up straighter, his mind racing.

Connie was still talking, but her voice seemed to be coming from a distance: “…so the last part of Elvis’s life shows you how many traps there are…”

Psychotic child. Fascinated by monsters. With a sorcerer’s power. Arrested development. Looks like a grownup but masquerading.

“…how easy it is to lose your freedom and never find your way back to it…”

Harry put down his sandwich. “My God, I think maybe I know who Ticktock is.”

“Who?”

“Wait. Let me think about this.”

Shrill laughter erupted from a table of noisy drunks near the bandstand. Two men in their fifties with the look of wealth about them, two blondes in their twenties. They were trying to live their own fairy tales: the aging men dreaming of perfect sex and the envy of other men; the women dreaming of riches, and happily unaware that their fantasies would one day seem dreary, dull, and tacky even to them.

Harry rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, struggled to order his thoughts. “Haven’t you noticed there’s something childish about him?”

“Ticktock? That ox?”

“That’s his golem. I’m talking about the real Ticktock, the one who makes the golems. This seems like a game to him. He’s playing with me the way a nasty little boy will pull the wings off a fly and watch it struggle to get airborne, or torture a beetle with matches. The deadline at dawn, the taunting attacks, childish, as if he’s some playground bully having his fun.”

He remembered more of what Ticktock had said as he had risen from the bed in the condo, just before he’d started the fire:…
you people are so much fun to play with…big hero…you think you can shoot anyone you like, push anyone around if you want.
…

Push anyone around if you want…

“Harry?”

He blinked, shivered. “Some sociopaths are made by having been abused as children. But others are just born that way, bent.”

“Something screwed up in the genes,” she agreed.

“Suppose Ticktock was born bad.”

“He was never an angel.”

“And suppose this incredible power of his doesn’t come from some weird lab experiment. Maybe it’s also a result of screwed-up genes. If he was born with this power, then it separated him from other people the way fame separated Presley, and he never learned to grow up, didn’t need or want to grow up. In his heart he’s still a child. Playing a child’s game. A mean little child’s game.”

Harry recalled the bearish vagrant standing in his bedroom, red-faced with rage, shouting over and over again:
Do you hear me, hero, do you hear me, do you hear me, do you hear me, DO YOU HEAR ME, DO YOU HEAR ME
…
?
That behavior had been terrifying because of the hobo’s size and power, but in retrospect it distinctly had the quality of a little boy’s tantrum.

Connie leaned across the table and waved one hand in front of his face. “Don’t go catatonic on me, Harry. I’m still waiting for the punchline. Who is Ticktock? You think maybe he actually
is
a child? Are we
looking for some grade-school boy, for God’s sake? Or girl?”

“No. He’s older. Still young. But older.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I’ve met him.”

Push anyone around if you want…

He told Connie about the young man who had slipped under the crime-scene tape and crossed the sidewalk to the shattered window of the restaurant where Ordegard had shot up the lunchtime crowd. Tennis shoes, jeans, a Tecate beer T-shirt.

“He was staring inside, fascinated by the blood, the bodies. There was something eerie about him…he had this faraway look…and licking his lips as if…as if, I don’t know, as if there was something erotic about all that blood, those bodies. He ignored me when I told him to get back behind the barrier, probably didn’t even hear me…like he was in a trance…licking his lips.”

Harry picked up his brandy snifter and finished the last of his cognac in one swallow.

“Did you get his name?” Connie asked.

“No. I screwed up. I handled it badly.”

In memory, he saw himself grabbing the kid, shoving him across the sidewalk, maybe hitting him and maybe not—had he jammed a knee into his crotch?—jerking and wrenching him, bending him double, forcing him under the crime-scene tape.

“I was sick about it later,” he said, “disgusted with myself. Couldn’t believe I’d roughed him up that way. I guess I was still uptight about what had happened in the attic, almost being blown away by Ordegard, and when I saw that kid getting off on the blood, I reacted like…like…”

“Like me,” Connie said, picking up her burger again.

“Yeah. Like you.”

Although he had lost his appetite, Harry took a bite of his sandwich because he had to keep his energy up for what might lie ahead.

“But I still don’t see how you can be so damn sure this kid is Ticktock,” Connie said.

“I
know
he is.”

“Just because he was a little weird—”

“It’s more than that.”

“A hunch?”

“A lot better than a hunch. Call it cop instinct.”

She stared at him for a beat, then nodded. “All right. You remember what he looked like?”

“Vividly, I think. Maybe as young as nineteen, no older than twenty-one or so.”

“Height?”

“An inch shorter than me.”

“Weight?”

“Maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. Thin. No, that’s not right, not thin, not scrawny. Lean but muscular.”

“Complexion?”

“Fair. He’s been indoors a lot. Thick hair, dark brown or black. Good-looking kid, a little like that actor, Tom Cruise, but more hawkish. He had unusual eyes. Gray. Like silver with a little tarnish on it.”

Connie said, “What I’m thinking is, we go over to Nancy Quan’s house. She lives right here in Laguna Beach—”

Nancy was a sketch artist who worked for Special Projects and had a gift for hearing and correctly interpreting the nuances in a witness’s description of a suspect. Her pencil sketches often proved to be astonishingly good portraits of the perps when they were at last cornered and hauled into custody.

“—you describe this kid to her, she draws him, and we take the sketch to the Laguna police, see if they know the little creep.”

Harry said, “What if they don’t?”

“Then we start knocking on doors, showing the sketch.”

“Doors? Where?”

“Houses and apartments within a block of where you ran into him. It’s possible he lives in that immediate area. Even if he doesn’t live there, maybe he hangs out there,
has friends in the neighborhood—”

“This kid has no friends.”

“—or relatives. Someone might recognize him.”

“People aren’t going to be real happy, we go knocking on their doors in the middle of the night.”

Connie grimaced. “You want to wait for dawn?”

“Guess not.”

The band was returning for their final set.

Connie chugged the last of her coffee, pushed her chair back, got up, took some folding money from one coat pocket, and threw a couple of bills on the table.

“Let me pay half,” Harry said.

“My treat.”

“No, really, I should pay half.”

She gave him an are-you-nuts look.

“I like to keep accounts in balance with everyone. You know that,” he explained.

“Take a walk on the wild side, Harry. Let the accounts go out of balance. Tell you what—if dawn comes and we wake up in Hell, you can buy breakfast.”

She headed for the door.

When he saw her coming, the host in the Armani suit and hand-painted silk tie scurried into the safety of the kitchen.

Following Connie, Harry glanced at his wristwatch. It was twenty-two minutes past one o’clock in the morning.

Dawn was perhaps five hours away.

Padding through the night town. People in their dark places all drowsy around him.

He yawns and thinks about lying under some bushes and sleeping. There’s another world when he sleeps, a nice world where he has a family that lives in a warm place and welcomes him there, feeds him every day, plays
with him anytime he wants to play, calls him Prince, takes him with them in a car and lets him put his head out the window in the wind with his ears flapping—feels good, smells coming at him dizzy-fast, yes yes yes—and never kicks him. It’s a good world in sleep, even though he can’t catch the cats there, either.

Then he remembers the young-man-bad-thing, the black place, the people and animal eyes without bodies, and he isn’t sleepy any more.

He’s got to do something about the bad thing, but he doesn’t know what. He senses it is going to hurt the woman, the boy, hurt them bad. It has much anger. Hate. It would set their fur on fire if they had fur. He doesn’t know why. Or when or how or where. But he must do something, save them, be a good dog, good.

So…

Do something.

Okay.

So…

Until he can think what to do about the bad thing, he might as well look for some more food. Maybe the smiling fat man left more good scraps for him behind the people food place. Maybe the fat man is still there in the open door, looking this way and that way along the alley, hoping to see Fella again, thinking he would like to take Fella home, give him a warm place, feed him every day, play with him anytime he wants to play, take Fella for rides in cars with his head sticking out in the wind.

Hurrying now. Trying to smell the fat man. Is he out in the open? Waiting?

Sniffing, sniffing, he passes a rust-smelling, grease-smelling, oil-smelling car parked in a big empty space, and then he smells the woman, the boy, even through the closed windows. He stops, looks up. Boy sleeping, can’t be seen. Woman leaning against door, head against window. Awake, but she does not see him.

Maybe the fat man will like the woman, the boy, will have room for all of them in his nice warm people place,
and they can play together, all of them, eat when they want, go for rides in cars with their heads sticking out windows, smells coming at them dizzy-fast. Yes yes yes yes yes yes. Why not? In the sleep world, there is a family. Why not in this world, too?

He is excited. This is good. This is really good. He feels the wonderful thing around the corner, wonderful thing coming that he always knew was out there somewhere. Good. Yes. Good. Yes yes yes yes yes.

The people food place with the fat man waiting is not far from the car, so maybe he should bark to make the woman see him, then lead her and the boy to the fat man.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes.

But wait, wait, it could take too long, too long, getting them to follow him. People are so slow to understand sometimes. The fat man might go away. Then they get there, the fat man is gone, they’re standing in the alley, and they don’t know why, they think he’s just a stupid dog, stupid silly dog, humiliated like when the cat is up in the tree looking down at him.

No no no no no. The fat man can’t go away, can’t. Fat man goes away, they won’t be together in a nice warm place or in a car with the wind.

What to do, what to do? Excited. Bark? Don’t bark? Stay, go, yes, no, bark, don’t bark?

Pee. Got to pee. Lift the leg. Ah. Yes. Strong-smelling pee. Steaming on the pavement, steaming. Interesting.

Fat man. Don’t forget the fat man. Waiting in the alley. Go to the fat man first, before he goes inside and is gone forever, get him and bring him back here, yes yes yes yes, because the woman and the boy are not going anywhere.

Good dog. Smart dog.

He trots away from the car. Then runs. To the corner. Around. A little farther. Another corner. The alley behind the people food place.

Panting, excited, he runs up to the door where the fat man gave out scraps. It is closed. The fat man is gone. No more scraps on the ground.