Underground (13 page)
“We were looking for John Bear and Little Jolene, or Lass, or Tanker. You seen any of them?”
Dan just grunted, but Jenny spoke in a slurry, waltz-time voice. “Those guys were here. We’re all partying and Lass was all hitting on me and then the dog comes around the corner and— wham!—the dog’s all like a rabid monster, yipping and howling, and then mean ol’ Tanker’s all mad. The dog’s all mad and growling and we’re all like, ‘Shut up, man.’ Tanker’s all in my face and then Lass’s. Then he ran off. Asshole. Didn’t like our party, so he left, too.”
I was confused as to which of the men was an asshole and which didn’t want to party. Unless it was Bella, but it was fairly obvious she hadn’t been in a party mood.
Quinton looked stormy. “Damn it. I told Lass not to tag that dog.” He turned to me. “Didn’t I tell him to stay away from Tanker?”
“Yes, you did,” I affirmed.
“See, that’s what I was afraid of. They both said they were coming down here and sure enough Lass has to act like a jerk.”
“Hey, dude, don’t be so rough,” Jenny said, giggling, and turning the Grey mist around herself a drunken shade of magenta. “The dog started it.”
Quinton sighed. “If you say so. So Bear and Jolene were down here, too?”
“Nah, stupid. Just Dan, here, and Lass and Tanker. And monster dog.”
“When did Bear give you his hat?”
Jenny sat up, sending a moment’s red flare into the tangled energy around them, and yanked the earflaps of the kooky leather and fur hunter’s cap down so the bill rode onto her eyebrows. “Fuck you.”
“Don’t hassle my girl, Q,” Tall Grass warned, leaning into the light so he looked like a monster from a silent film. “We found it down here with some crappy broken stuff someone dumped over there.” He pointed into the dark just behind my right shoulder where the street wall was. “Isn’t that so, Grandfather?”
Dan didn’t actually answer, but Tall Grass took his silence for confirmation before going on. “Just keeping it until Bear comes around again. Haven’t seen him in weeks. And not Jolene, either. Lot of folks gone to warmer places, I think. Bear probably got smart and went, too.”
“Not hassling you, Grass. Just trying to find some people. Seems like there’s a lot of people missing and dead this year.”
“Well, that’s sad, but it’s the cycle of life, brother. Some go, some come. Like those guys with the wagon and like that crazy lady in the park—you know, the one who laughs at everything?”
“Yeah, I know. She’s native, right?”
“First Nations, white eyes.”
“What’s with the politically correct Candianism? I thought you were a Washington Nisqually.”
Grass tried to look noble but didn’t carry it off. “We are all one great people, without boundaries. It’s your people who want to cut everything up and make countries and territories and reservations out of it.”
Quinton did not take the bait. “I just wondered if she was from a local tribe. I hadn’t seen her around before Thanksgiving.”
“I think she’s Kwakiutl—funky accent like Bella Coola Valley. Y ’know—in Canada,” Tall Grass added with a sneer at Quinton.
“Dudes, you’re bringing me down,” Jenny whined. She pulled a sloshing bottle of brown liquid from the shadows by her side and waved it. “Sit down, drink up, shut up. Or fuck off.”
“All right.” Quinton squatted down near the pail of burning junk and held out his hand.
Jenny leaned forward, trashed and unsteady, and slapped the bottle into his hand. “S ’better.” She petted his hand a second. “You loosen up good. Hey . . . you wanna screw? S ’quiet down here. . . .”
Quinton took a swig from the bottle, but I noticed he didn’t swallow. “Nah. Gotta work tonight,” he added, handing the bottle back to Jenny.
Jenny pouted insincerely and took the bottle, drinking and passing it to Tall Grass, who made a show of looking me over as I squatted down between Quinton and the silent Dan.
“Working,” Grass said with a laugh. “That’s not work, brother. That is a long, slow pleasure ride.”
“Can’t ride what you can’t catch,” I started, then was cut short by a soft snort from my left. Tall Grass just laughed, hearing nothing of the sound and not even noticing the old man getting to his feet.
He was still bent even standing and the light made red rivers on his creased face. It almost seemed as if only I could see him, for all the notice the others took. He just stared at them and then looked around at the fluttering insects and deeper into the blackness beyond the fire’s light. I watched him, tuning out the conversation on my other side as I noticed a silvery shadow clinging to his form.
“Fools,” Grandpa Dan muttered at last, the ghost shape gleaming on him. “The ravens say death comes here.” He glared at the air. He paid none of us any heed as he started off into the dark, disrupting the fluttering moths that swung in crazy circles, making odd eddies in the Grey mist that almost took form before collapsing into nothingness. A rustle of feathered wings trailed away behind him, and the shadows of crows closed him into the dark.
I stared after him, wondering what that meant. Then I was jarred from my thoughts by a hand on my back. I turned to see Quinton, his brows drawn down and a small orange light outlining his form as he peered at me in the waning light of the fire.
“Did he say something?”
A rattle of wings from the darkness made me cover a shiver with a shrug. “Something about death and fools. I think he’s unimpressed. ”
“Grass and Jenny and I have made a list of who’s missing.”
I’d lost a few minutes in my reverie. I glanced at Tall Grass and Jenny, who both appeared a lot more trashed than before. I shot a questioning look at Quinton. He pointed at the empty bottle on the ground.
Jenny tittered. “Good stuff, Maynard.”
“Jet fuel is what it is,” Quinton corrected.
“S ’good though,” she replied, and broke into half-swallowed guffaws that sounded like whale hiccups.
Tall Grass wrapped his arm around her and pulled her into his chest, kissing drunkenly at her head and mostly getting the hat under his lips. He growled and jerked it off, revealing messy, butched-out brown locks. He managed to snare her short hair in his fist and yank her head back, exposing her thin face to his slobbering assault. They tumbled sideways into the ice-coated wall, groping and pawing at each other.
I rolled my eyes and pushed to my feet, banishing the complaints of my knee to a back compartment of my attention. I hoped those two wouldn’t get frostbite or set fire to anything, but that was about as far as my concern for Jenny and Grass went. “How do we get out of here?” I asked Quinton.
“Out’s easier than in.” He grabbed my hand and we went the same direction Jay had taken, away from Occidental, around the Second Avenue corner, and down the short stretch of tunnellike sidewalk to a recently installed metal door with a push bar on it. The door led into a tiny space with two more doors. The one on our right opened on a modern fire stair, and we went up it to exit on Second between the Cadillac Hotel and its neighbor.
We peered out of the doorway like frightened animals and found the cold street empty of all but ice and the unearthly chill of Grey mist. Quinton nodded. “OK. Let’s move. It’s too cold to stand here.”
We walked away toward my office. I felt a little disoriented, as if I’d missed something, so I kicked the conversation back into gear as we went. “All right. Who’s on the list?” I asked.
“The first of the strange dead bodies was a guy named Hafiz. No one was sorry to see him go. The Women in Black didn’t organize a vigil but just stuck him on the leaflets for the next time—that’s how much people didn’t like him.”
“Hafiz. Was he Muslim?”
“Not that I heard and certainly not that anyone cared. Being a mean-spirited ass seems to have universal application. Then Chaim Jankowski and now Go-cart. There’ve been a couple of other deaths, but they were from things like heart attack and drug overdose, so I’m not counting those. Just the weird ones.”
“Go on. Who else?”
“John Bear and Little Jolene, Tandy, Pranker Jheri—no idea what his parents were thinking with that name—and Felix.” He pronounced it the Spanish way: Feh-LEEHKS. “There may be others, but that’s for sure. None of them would just take off or had anyplace else to go, and if they moved up, they’d have told someone. The Enhancement League tries to keep track of who makes it into housing, and there’s usually talk if someone’s been seen in another part of town. None of that’s true with those five.”
“So you’re thinking all of them are victims of vampires or whatever it was that killed Go-cart.”
“I’m leaning that way.”
We’d come to my parking garage and I stopped by the gate. “Sandy’s talk about the lack of blood gives me pause, but I’m still reserving judgment on the vampires. There is something going on, creating a pattern, and that’s disturbing. Even crazy ladies and homeless criminals are picking up on it—though I’m not putting too much store by any one set of remarks.”
“Smart. I live with these guys and I understand them, but most of them are at least a little nuts.”
“Crazy sounds like self-defense, here.”
“Yeah.” He looked at me for a moment in silence before continuing, his expression hidden by the shadow of his hat brim. “Better go home. It’s too cold to stay out here.”
“Yeah. I’ll try to get some info from the medical examiner about Go-cart—Robert Cristus, right?—and look into cause of death on the others to see if there’s a real pattern or just an appearance. I’ll let you know what I find and see if that moves us anywhere.”
“All right. Then I’ll be seeing you.”
“Yeah.”
We stood and stared at each other for a moment. I felt exhausted and uncertain of a lot of things and Quinton seemed hesitant himself, but for a wavering second it seemed he might do or say something. But he didn’t and I wondered if my disappointment with Will was making me think all men were on the verge of untoward actions.
At last Quinton turned away a little and started to walk back toward First, lifting a hand to wave. “OK. Good night, Harper.”
“Good night,” I echoed and lingered a few frowning seconds before going to my truck and heading home to West Seattle.
It felt much later than it was and I was tired, cold, and distracted. I let Chaos out of her cage to romp around the living room while I took a shower and warmed up some soup for my dinner. The ferret followed me into the bathroom but had abandoned her post beside the tub by the time I got out.
I found her in the living room, curled up around a squeaky toy that was shaped like a small eggplant sporting Richard Nixon’s face. I scooped her up and put her in my lap while I ate dinner, but she didn’t want to stay there either and slithered down the chair leg to the floor to wander off and throw herself down on the living room carpet with a sigh, doing the flat ferret thing and staring at me as if I’d let her down by spending time outside her company. I just wasn’t measuring up to anyone’s expectations and I found myself irritated by it. I wanted to yell at someone and tell them off about what they could or couldn’t have from me. Chaos wasn’t the one who deserved it, but I wasn’t quite sure who did.
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