John Shirley - Wetbones (18 page)

Now he drove the van West, onto the freeway, glad he wasn't going East; traffic Southeast-bound, on the other side of the freeway divide, was thick as coagulated blood.

He'd spent five hundred bucks on a deposit for a detective agency, a cheap gumshoe who was just another warm body to go about asking have you seen this girl have you seen this girl have you seen this girl, anyplace she'd be likely to turn up.

Of course, he could be wrong about where Constance would likely turn up. And he could be wrong

about it even being in this city. And even if it was in this city, the town was
so fucking big
.

But he'd learned to trust his intuition; he thought that maybe - along with the patterns of incidents and coincidences that made up the flow of life - pulses of intuition were God's Morse Code.

Or maybe he was kidding himself.

He had to stay busy. Had to. So he started on Hollywood Boulevard, showing a display cardboard taped with several pictures of Constance to anyone who'd talk to him. He wandered tirelessly but fruitlessly through Hollywood and the Fairfax and downtown L.A. . He talked especially to prostitutes, trying to get a handle on the local trade in chickens. Who was dealing in young flesh? Where were they?

It could be that the son of a bitch who had her would market her in those shadowy and seamy venues.

He walked the streets for two days, sleeping at night in his van to save money for bribes, before he began to hear the recurrent note. The rumours kept cropping up:
The More Man
. A rich movie industry sleaze who sometimes scattered largesse on compliant teenagers.

And then he began hearing about the murders. The kids on the street would try to sound knowledgeable about the murders. But all they really knew, apart from the condition of the corpses, was what to call them: Wetbones.

Culver City Los Angels

Prentice was trying not to think A universal skill, a widely applied survival technique: Sometimes you have to just close your eyes and just do what you have to do.

"Jeff - you know where Mitch probably is?"
Careful
,

Prentice told himself, leaning back in the desk chair of Jeff's office.
You don't want to come off sounding like that cop that came over here. That'll turn Jeff against you in a hot second
.

Jeff was sitting pensively on the edge of the desk. Afternoon sunlight came in dusty stacks through the cantilevered blinds. "Do I know where Mitch probably is? If I knew where the fuck Mitch was we wouldn't be having this fucking discussion," Jeff said.

Prentice thought: I'm helping him, I really am. This whole paranoid thing is just making a wreck of our lives. Both of us feeding on it emotionally - me because of Amy, Jeff because he feels bad about not taking care of Mitch.

The dreams Prentice had been having about Amy were enough to convince him he had some kind of morbid entanglement with her memory. Best all that were jettisoned. .

"Mitch is probably
deliberately
letting you stew, man," Prentice said. Everything he said was an attempt to convince himself as much as Jeff - an escape from culpability. From the sense of something precious inside him rotting away because he was trying to play along with Arthwright. "I mean, think about it - Mitch is into rock'n'roll. Wants to be a head-bangin' rockstar. Chances are he's hanging out with that crowd on Sunset Boulevard, down by the Whisky, the other clubs down there. I mean - he probably
was
at Denver's, and then that didn't come to anything, and he split for town."

But what about Amy? Prentice asked himself. Her connection to Denver. Her death.

He squashed the thought. Sometimes you have to just close your eyes and . . .

"Maybe you're right," Jeff said grudgingly. "But

that headbangin' crowd is
big
, man. How am I supposed to find him in it - if that's where he is.

"A private eye. Go on foot and ask people in the lines outside the clubs. Maybe even see Mitch there. I mean, if you . . ." He broke off. He was about to say,
If you tangle with the Denvers in court you could lose a lot of money - and and make an enemy of Arthwright
. But if he said that, Mitch might realize that Arthwright had put him up to this.

Prentice writhed inside.
Wrongwrongwrongwrong
. The word like a bell pealing in his mind. Wrong.

Jeff hugged himself wearily. "I'm fucking tired of thinking about this. I'll decide what to do tomorrow."

The desk phone rang. Jeff answered it in a monotone. "Yeah. Hello . . . Yeah, he's right here."

He passed the phone over to Prentice and left the room.

Prentice put the phone to his ear. "Tom Prentice here."

"Hi, 'Tom Prentice here.' It's Lissa."

Prentice's gut did another flip-flop. There was anticipation in it, and fear. "Hi. I'm glad you called."

"Listen - Zack wanted me to invite you to a party he's giving for some of his friends. He's giving it at their place, but he's setting it all up, I guess. Oh and I'm supposed to ask you - it was all very cryptic - how it's going 'with Jeff'? Whatever that's about."

"Uh. Fine." Could Jeff be listening on the extension? No, why would he? "It's taken care of."

"Good - I guess. I'm not in on that loop. Anyway - taking me to a party's a nice cheap date, don't you think?"

"I'd love to take you on the expensive kind." But he was glad he didn't have to, yet. He was veering

dangerously close to flat broke. God, he might have to write that video. ''For that matter, I'd take a trip to Baghdad with you in an F-16."

"Good. I like an explosive date. But, in the meantime, Arthwright's party at the Denvers' is on Saturday -"

"It's
where?
" Unable to hide his startlement.

"At the Denvers'. You're supposed to
not
bring you know-who. Can you pick me up?" She gave him the time and her address and they exchanged a few more vague innuendoes and he hung up.

Telling himself,
This way I can clear up the question of Mitch being out there
 . . .

Then asking himself,
What are you so scared of?

West Hollywood

"First time I saw a Wetbones body, I didn't want to believe it used to be people. If I believed that, shit, I'd have to puke," Blume said. "Eventually, I did have to puke." He was six inches taller than Garner, but slumped in his chair almost to the same height; he had bushy hair receding with clown-like frontal baldness. A tired, cynical face built around a long, thin nose; the nondescript clothes that private detectives wear. He took another long pull on his beer. "You sure you don't want a beer or something?" he asked Garner. "I don't like to drink alone."

Garner was tempted. He ached for a drink, sometimes, to put out the smoldering anguish of fear for Constance. But he wasn't going to throw away all those years of sobriety for anything so sickly as a mere temptation.

Garner shook his head. "Naw. I'll have a Seven-Up

though, if that helps." They sat in a corner booth under a buzzing Felix The Cat clock. Garner wished they'd sat nearer the door. The tavern stank of old beer and a piss-choked bathroom.

"How many of these bodies have you seen?" Garner asked.

"If you can even call 'em bodies . . . Two."

Blume heaved himself abruptly out of the booth and went to the bar. He came back moments later with a double tequila in one hand and a fizzing glass of soda in the other. He sat down, passing Garner the glass. "They didn't have Seven-Up. Sprite."

"Great. Fine. You were saying . . ."

Blume knocked back the double tequila in one swallow. Blew out his cheeks. Then shook his head sadly. "If there hadn't been a skull, you wouldn'ta been able to tell it was human. Too much of a mess. Just a lot of . . . wet bones. Broken up wet bones. Wet with blood and . . . gunk. Piss and phlegm I guess. Even shit from the busted intestines. Busted bones and guts in the middle of a puddle of blood. No clothes around. It didn't look like it was dug up, neither. Too fresh. Not like somebody'd messed with a grave. You could just see these bones were new. And in one there was this busted skull, and the eye - well, one of the eyes was intact. But no lids . . ."

Garner swallowed. His mouth was very dry. He took a long drink of the Sprite. His tissues seemed to soak it up like desert sand sucking a raindrop. "Seems to me it could still be . . . a hoax. Stolen bones from some medical school or . . . Were there organs?"

"Yeah. Some. What wasn't mushed into . . . gunk."

"And skin?"

"I didn't see it. But there was a lot of stuff I couldn't

quite make out what it was and I didn't wanna look that close."

It's a big city. it wouldn't be her
.

"But - why do you bring this up . . .?"

'They were all young girls, I heard, these bonepiles . . ." He shrugged. "I don't wanna be insensitive or nothin' but . . ."

"Any identification of the . . .?" He waited, heart thudding so hard in his chest he thought that Blume must be able to hear it.

"Nope. That's part of why this thing hasn't really broken into the papers much because they're not connected to specific missing girls and the cops are taking the same tack that you did - that they're stolen bones . . . I.D.ing them's hard. There are so many missing kids in the L.A. area it's unbelievable."

"Yeah. I know." Garner fingered his soda glass. Stared at the slowly, slowly melting ice. "But you drive around in this town for a day or two - especially when you're from out of town - and you find the statistics about missing kids very believable indeed, Blume . . ."

"You got any kind of fingerprints on your little girl?"

"Yes. I left them at your office with your boss when I first came in. And I've given the police a stat of them. They should be in the police computer."

"As far as I know they haven't got any fingerprint I.D. on these Wetbones things yet. Hey, don't give me that look, it's a long shot - but we should push the cops into crosschecking it just to eliminate that longshot, when they've got some fingerprints on those bodies . . . If you can call 'em bodies . . ."

"You already said that," Garner pointed out, through grating teeth.

Suddenly he felt like he was going to vomit. The smell of the men's room, the stale beer, the reek of booze off Blume himself. He wanted to shout at Blume that he was killing himself with alcohol, an addictive drug that's sold on television to children, sold in advance through hundreds of thousands of beer and wine commercials, but then his automatic guard against self righteousness came into play, and he said nothing, except, "I need some air. Just keep looking for her, all right? I'll call you."

Garner lurched out of the booth, staggered outside, as so many drunks did, coming out of Blume's favourite low-cost boozery.

For a few moments Garner was staggering like a drunk but - he was horribly, terribly sober.

Santa Monica

She was beginning to see pictures in her head that seemed to come from nowhere at all. She knew where they were from, though - not from Ephram, not from God or the Devil. They were from her, the part of her that she couldn't stop from feeling.

Constance was sitting under a lemon tree in the backyard of the little condo that Ephram had rented, sitting in a lawn chair, wearing a white bikini that Ephram had picked for her, and sunglasses she wore as often as he'd let her. Ephram had pushed some buttons in her head and she felt no pain.

Ephram was in the house scribbling in that little book of his. It was the only time he left her alone and she was trying to enjoy it - though she knew he was still watching her in some way, and she mustn't even think fleetingly of climbing over that white wooden

fence and running. So instead she was sitting there quietly, seeing herself transfixed by steel poles.

It was sharp, mental image, like a slide projection: Constance with three shiny steel rods, each an inch thick, thrust laterally through her breasts; another transfixing her neck; another through her temples, passing, presumably, through her brain. Constance smiling happily through it all, talking, chattering, saying nothing.

And then it would vanish, this picture, only to be replaced by another: Constance walking through a party, talking to people like she was the hostess, only she had a noose around her neck, already tightened, her face swollen and black, as if she'd already been choked to death, or - no, she wasn't quite dead, she was perpetually on the verge of choking to death, but never did, not quite, she just walked around chatting, shaking hands, hugging people, smiling as she said,
"Excuse the rope,"
in a strangled voice. No one seemed to mind.

And then she saw herself in a steel globe that was just a little bit too small for her body but big enough so that she could wriggle around looking for the escape hole that she knew must be there but she couldn't find She kept trying but still couldn't find it, and the globe was tightening, was getting smaller . . .

"Constance?"

She'd felt him coming before he'd spoken. "Yes?"

"We're going to go out tonight, we're meeting someone at a motel . . ."

She nodded. She tried to feel nothing. She was getting pretty good at it . . .

Lately, Ephram had got into this prostitute thing. First that girl they picked up at the disco, then call-girls chosen from classified ads in the
Los Angeles Swingles Guide
. Constance could see the logic, that the girls he picked weren't with pimps or madams, they were working alone, and they usually didn't tell anyone where they were going. Or so he assumed. But maybe he was wrong about that. Constance had pointed out that they'd know it was risky going out with all these strange men, maybe some would tell their boyfriends or whomever, have them waiting outside . . .

But no, Ephram said, they were complacent and too-confident, these girls, and besides he mentally frisked them for traces of accomplices. "These are girls," he said, "one can snip off at the stem - and no one will notice them missing in a tree already heavy with rotten fruit, ha ha."

None of the girls were surprised to see Constance with Ephram; with the trick. They were used to threesomes and foursomes.