Elvendude (7 page)

"Hi, Adam," she said, sounding weary. She put the ceramic dagger away and reached for a 7UP, sitting in the chair the boy had just vacated, the rope lying at her feet. "Talk to Daryl lately?"

Adam groaned.

"I'll take that as a yes," she said, meeting his eyes. Lately she'd been using a dark brown mascara and applying it with greater skill than what he remembered in junior high. Her eyes were tar pits, boy traps. His spine melted.

Adam sat in a vinyl chair under an old-fashioned hair dryer. An employee had sculpted a papier-mÉchÇ hand, complete with huge diamond ring, around the bowl of the dryer. When it was down, it looked like a giant was picking the customer up by the head.

"I drove by there today, on my way to work," Moira said. "There were cop cars in front of the house."

"What?" Adam said, jumping up. His head barely missed the dryer's right index finger.

"Sit down," Moira said. Adam sat. "You can't do anything about it now. Whatever went on over there, just be glad we weren't there when it happened."

"How many cars?" Adam asked.

"Four or five."

Then he remembered the dark feeling, which strengthened now with Moira's eyewitness account. "I knew we should never have gone over there."

"And that's exactly what you said last night when we left. And I'll bet that's what you've been saying all day."

Adam shrugged.

She pointed at him with her finger, its false, silver nail as long and menacing as a Bowie knife. "Well, get over it! You are not Daryl's keeper. Whatever grave he's digging is only big enough for one."

Adam looked the other way. "And my mother's a cop."

"Exactly!" Moira said.

"But that's not what's bothering me," Adam said, and turned to look at her. He felt very young and very vulnerable right then, as if her eyes had become the twin barrels of a shotgun. "I know it's best for me to just get away from him. Hell, he's even started pushing me away. On the phone today, he didn't even want to talk to me."

"That's not surprising," she said, examining her nail with ostentatious care. "He probably felt like shit."

"He sure sounded it," Adam said.
Cops?

Moira pulled out a bottle of silver fingernail polish and began repairing a chip on her dagger. "Talk to your mom today?"

"No, and I need to. She might know what's going on over there. In a way, I hope she hasn't heard anything yet."

"Why?" she asked, blowing on the nail.

"She's in homicide."

"Oh," Moira said. "Anyway, since last night was such a bust, do you feel like doing something tonight?"

Adam stared at her breasts.

She noticed. "Besides
that.
"

He shook himself out of the trance, his face reddening with an instant embarrassment-rash. Moira giggled, a high-pitched trill that pierced .50-caliber holes in his young male ego.
She saw me staring at her! What else does she know about me?

Gathering as much composure as was possible in three seconds, Adam said, "Come over after work and we'll decide. How 'bout . . . ?"

"A movie?"

"Or something. Anything besides a party." Adam rolled his eyes. "Had enough of those for a while."

A little old lady with a walker hobbled into the shop. "Time for me to get back to work," she said, blowing him a kiss.

Now what was
that
supposed to mean?
Adam smiled, feeling a longing that started from his dry throat and reached down past his belly. Sweat broke out on his chest. He left before other portions of his anatomy betrayed him.

Filled with confusion, Adam left the shop and merged with the sea of humanity which filed out of the Marketplace, now that happy hour was over. Soon, his own age group would start showing up at the Yaz. Perhaps, he hoped, with news of the situation at the Wintons'.

In the mall he bumped into a kid who, he first thought, was Daryl. He wore a black tank top and a bandana around his dark hair, which Daryl often did, but this boy was a few years younger, maybe fourteen, and more slender. He didn't react to being jostled. Then slowly, he looked up at Adam, his expression dreamy and distant. And smiled.

What is this kid on?
Adam thought, disgusted. He tried to walk past, but the boy grabbed his arm with amazing strength. Instead of reacting the way he wanted to, which was to take a swing at him, he looked directly into his face.
I know you. Your name is Cory. You're not even in high school yet.

No one around them seemed to notice what was going on, not even the security guard who walked past. He felt invisible in the mall, which pulsated with people. He tried to push past the stoned kid, but his grip was like steel.

". . . it's like, the sky opened up, and Gabriel tore loose with horns of brass. And Armageddon was here. And the black Eagle saw the ruined castle, and all the dead within waited for the night to take the palace." Cory hesitated, then said, "And you were there. And you did not die."

Adam stared at him. His pupils were enormous. And the whites, for a moment, glowed.

Where is that security guard?
Adam thought frantically. Cory released him, and Adam staggered backward a few steps.

"Is the bus here yet?" Cory asked. "I was out to lunch."

You're still out to lunch,
Adam thought. Cory's breath stank of cheap beer and something else. Then,
this guy needs help. Why are all the addicts flocking around me today?
He remembered Daryl.
And last night.

"Have some of this," Cory said, handing him a small glass vial with a black stopper. Adam didn't know what it was until he examined it.
Crack. Why the hell did he give me this?

Then something about the black stopper triggered his memory.
Black stopper. Street name, Black Dream. Mom told me about this.

"No, I don't think . . ." Adam began, but Cory started walking away.

"Hey," he said to Cory's back. The kid kept walking, till he vanished down the stairs. Then,
Hell, let him go. I don't want to give this back to him anyway.

But what to do with it?
A security camera pivoted toward him, and he realized the entire exchange was probably on tape somewhere.
Great. Now I gotta get rid of this.
If he didn't get rid of the vial, security might bust him.

The trash can was out of the question.
Doesn't really go anywhere.
Nonchalantly, he started toward the rest rooms.
Damn you, Cory.

The commode made a gratifying
sploooosh
as the contraband vanished into the Dallas sewer system. He flushed again to be certain. It occurred to him he might have hung on to it for his mother to examine, but if he were caught with it, he doubted she would be able to bail him out. Even if she could, it would be an awkward situation, one his mother didn't need. Being a cop was hard enough without having to fix charges against your son.

The hallway just outside the johns was vacant, and he concluded that no one was after him. They knew him here; he was clean, and he was, to the off duty cops who moonlighted there, family.
Still. Better safe than sorry.

From the rest room, he should have turned right to return to the Yaz. That's where he needed to be. Instead, he hesitated and took note of his surroundings. The walls in the corridor were painted white, with blue on the lower half. The effect, he assumed, made the space look larger than it was.

Why am I going down here?
he thought as he turned left.
I need to get back to work.

The encounter with Cory left an acrid taste in his mouth. He felt tainted, as if whatever drug or drugs the boy was on had transferred to his bloodstream. Cory's breath had been foul, and he wondered if he had inhaled something evil, intoxicating; he felt a desperate need to take a shower, run laps, something, anything.

What's wrong with me?
he thought.
This is crazy. There's no way he could have infected me.
But his feelings told him something different. He felt . . . poisoned.
Cory, what did you do to me?

Got to get back to the Yaz. Biz is picking up. Spence doesn't even have the bank yet. Got to . . . 

But he couldn't. He proceeded down the hallway with the white and blue walls, toward another area of the Marketplace, a large space that hadn't been leased yet. He'd seen it before, a nice large room with lots of exposed ducts and hanging lights, the ubiquitous concrete columns. Six large rectangular windows, eight panes, about a foot square, in each.
This would make an excellent nightclub, good dancing, even bet the acoustics are favorable. . . .
The place reminded him of an old gymnasium, with the high ceiling, wooden floors. Only thing missing was the basketball hoops. Here, in this unoccupied space, he smelled the age of the building, something he missed in the other shops, which had new equipment and furnishings and goods, all made in the last ten years. Ancient and earthy; Adam sensed something reaching from below, several floors down, past the basement.

His mind glazed over with a mixture of exhaustion, confusion, and a lingering surge of hormones from his talk with Moira. If perhaps he had caught some secondhand something from Cory, he could imagine how messed up the kid was. A lightness seized him, as if he were suddenly a hundred pounds lighter, or if he were drifting away; but no, his sneakered feet still touched the wooden floor. Though his knees felt like wet sponges, they firmly supported him.

Thin trails of smoke poured from the vents, but he didn't assume this meant fire; he found the sight tranquilizing, not alarming, as it might have been under other circumstances.

But what's happening now?
he thought, and a small part of him told him it was nothing, this was as natural and necessary as the sun rising in the morning.

The smoke was actually fog, heavy fog, which clung to the wooden floor and spread out from several points. Sunlight pouring in from outside flickered, dimmed, as if dark storm clouds masked the sun. The round hanging lights simply ceased to be on, though he didn't remember when they switched off.

At some point the voice within him that fought against the change gave in and allowed him to go with this new experience. He felt comforted and safe, despite the strangeness of what he was seeing. What it was he saw remained vague, and at the same time he knew that he was not capable of comprehending any further.

Just below the surface of the fog, which continued to spread in a layer, lights flickered. A circle of small fires formed in the center of the fog.

He tried to count the candles, but found he could not focus long enough to do so. While the atmosphere felt safe and protective, he found that his mind was muddled beyond use. On a deeper level, the inability to use his mind disturbed him, but the reassuring inner voice calmed him, explained to him that it wasn't necessary to think right now.

He heard the thought,
I will understand when I need to,
and allowed it to become his own.

Adam closed his eyes, because that was what his thoughts told him to do. He was no longer in control, and nothing in him suggested he do anything but surrender. He found sanctuary in this sudden loss of control, knowing that whatever this power was, it would not harm him. With his eyes closed against the fog and the candlelight, he felt time drift, like a light breeze brushing against his skin.

He did not know how much time had actually passed. Staring at the empty room, Adam wondered if he imagined the entire psychotic episode.

Time to get back to work,
he thought.
Weird doesn't even begin to describe what just happened.

To distract himself from the itchy rash which etched itself on his upper body, Daryl scribbled random words on a paper napkin with a number two pencil.

Detectives are pricks.

He erased the "pr" of
pricks
and was about to replace it with another consonant when one of the detectives came back into the dining room, holding a pen and notepad. Daryl had been sitting in the hard oak chair for hours while cops went over the Winton mansion, trying to amuse himself while praying to the gods they didn't find anything.

The several ambulances and fire department paramedics had left an hour earlier, after managing to load all the victims in the trucks; some openly wondered if they would have to make two trips. One boy wasn't quite dead, or so the medical examiner said, though he sure could have fooled Daryl. The CareFlight helicopter came and left with the one survivor, the fifteen-year-old kid named Colm. Everyone alive, or dead, was en route to the morgue or the trauma ward at Parkland.

Except, of course, Daryl. The police had many things they wanted to ask him.

From the kitchen he heard a cop retching his guts out, perhaps in the sink. Daryl frowned, annoyed.

They never seen dead bodies before? What gives?
He yawned, and tried to get comfortable in the heavy dining room chair. No easy task, particularly when dealing with the early stages of a class-A hangover.

The detective calmly took a seat next to him, turning the chair out to face him. The man feigned patience, but Daryl saw the mask for what it was. For some reason the air-conditioning had quit working in the house around six that afternoon, and everyone inside had started to melt. Odors Daryl had never smelled before greeted his nostrils, antagonizing his already unhappy stomach. The detective wore a pinstripe business suit, but had shed the coat and vest soon after arriving, having apparently seen it would be a long ordeal. In his crossdraw shoulder harness Daryl saw an angry looking .45 automatic. Huge wet stains appeared under his arms, and while he could have been no older than thirty-five, he bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Daryl's father.

And his father had no patience, and would have resorted to knocking the crap out of him long ago to obtain the answers this detective now seemed to want.

The detective looked up, wearily, with perspiration pouring off his forehead. He glanced once at the paper napkin, wadded it up, and with no expression whatsoever, bounced it off Daryl's forehead.