Bones of the Barbary Coast (44 page)

62

B
ERT SAW HER face in his flashlight beam and felt both relieved and betrayed. He scrambled the last few feet, ignoring the pain in his shins and knees, then half-fell down a slope of shifting rubble into a more open space. Some kind of underground warren, a catacomb beneath the terrace. Cree must have figured out something with the wolfman and then she and her freak boyfriend had gotten rash and opened up the wall.

He got to his feet and drew his Beretta and held it alongside the flashlight with his wrists crossed. He put the light full on Cree, then angled it down a bit as she winced and put a hand up to cover her eyes.

"Where is he?"

She didn't answer but the involuntary tick of her head made him look past her, to the rectangle of light at the end of the hallway, forty feet away.

"Cree, he's a killer. Go back into the house, get in your car. Get out of here and let me handle this."

"You've got it wrong. He's not what you think he is."

"You don't know crap about what he is! Guy's a
freak. A
murderer. Get back here and let me handle him. Do as I
say\
I don't want you hurt."

"Nobody's going to be hurt!"

Bert saw the light change at the end of the hall and he brought his flashlight and gun up again. Cameron Raymond came out of the doorway with a contractor's lamp in his hands. From here it looked like his eyes reflected.

"Cree?" Ray called. He put up one hand to block Bert's light.

"Ray, it's Bert. He's got his gun. He—"

"Don't fucking move, Ray. Move and I shoot a hole in your ugly face."

Ray's light clattered to the ground and went out and then he was just gone. Bert started down the hall, but Cree got in front of him. When he swept his arm at her to get her out of the way, she dodged and grabbed his forearm and was back in his face.

"Bert, you stop. You
stop.
He's not a killer."

He shook off her grip, but he hesitated. She was still in front of him, and he couldn't catch his breath he was so mad: pissed at Cree for letting it come down like this, for complicating it, for taking
Rays
part. He took a step back and brought both arms up in front of him again, flashlight in Cree's face, gun aligned with the beam. She fell back a couple of steps, still blocking the middle of the tunnel.

"Hey, Ray! Cree says you're not a killer. Why don't you tell her about your switchblade? Maybe you saw it yourself, Cree, in his bedroom? The knife on his bureau?"

"I didn't see it. You mentioned it to me."

"Yeah, that's right, probably Ray dumped it before you got there. But I took photos. And lo and behold, it matches exactly two separate knife attacks, one a homicide. Right down to the nick on the blade. Hey, Ray, tell her about it."

Cree had her forearm across her eyes, but her mouth bent in a way that suggested she was having second thoughts.

Still no sound from the end of the hall, and Bert goaded him: "Cat got your tongue, Ray? Sure there isn't something you want to 'fess up to Cree?"

And then Ray was there. He came out of the room on the left and stood in the center of the hallway. Cree was between them but she was so much shorter that Bert still had a pretty good view of him. Ray winced against the flashlight glare, and his chest and face were as clear in Bert's sight as the profile targets at the department shooting range.

Cree half-turned her head. "Ray, don't come out. Don't even answer him. Let me talk."

But Ray just stood there. "That knife wasn't mine. I took it off a guy who was acting like he might use it on me. I was asking him about wolves and werewolves and killing and he didn't like my questions. Maybe because he killed whoever Bert's talking about, maybe that's why he was so touchy, I don't know. I don't have it because I mailed it back to the guy. I had never meant to keep it."

"Yeah, the other guy did it," Bert jeered. "Heard it before, Ray. Smart guy like you should be able to come up with something more original."

"Cree," Ray called. "I'm telling you the truth. And Bert is a werewolf. I was right about that. You're the worst kind, Bert. The kind that doesn't even know it's a wolf. The kind no one sees until it's too late."

"Whereas Ray is Mahatma Gandhi. He's Mother Teresa and Jesus all rolled into one."

"I know what I am," Ray said quietly. "How about you, Bert? Do you even remember you were human once?"

Bert's anger made flashpoint and he pivoted his locked arms slightly, shifting the line to the right of Cree's head. When the gun fired, the flash lit her whole body and the glare seemed to tumble her aside. The explosion was deafening. Down on the floor, Cree rocked in pain, gripping her head with both hands, but Bert decided the cordite spray couldn't have burnt her too badly, she'd had her arm up to block the light. And he didn't mind getting her out of the middle of the corridor and putting her out of commission for a while. She was a loose cannon here, hard to tell how she'd come down.

Bert could see the divot the bullet had made in the wall behind Ray, well to the right. He'd expected Ray to dart away again, but instead the freak raised one hand to block the light and started forward. He seemed more concerned with Cree than with Bert.

Bert fired again, and the hand that Ray had been holding up snapped back and spun him half around. He bent at the waist, folding himself over his forearm, gripping it with his other hand. A wet pink splash had appeared on the far wall. An exultant sense of triumph rose through Bert, sweeping from his heels up his legs and groin and then bulging through his belly and chest, ending in a shimmer of sensation at the top of his head. He drew a huge gulp of breath and put the light and the gunsight square on Ray's scarred face.

Which wasn't right. The face wasn't crumpled in pain and fear and Bert very much wanted to see both expressions there. Ray was holding his forearm with his other hand and walking slowly forward with a freakish calm. Bert's fury crested in a feeling of absolute determination and exquisite clarity. He felt the weight of the gun and the crisp return pressure of the trigger and the hate that welled up and commanded his hand.

He would have fired but there was something wrong with the face and the hate and he needed just a second to consider it. The hate was aimed at Ray but when he pictured what it was he hated, he realized its face didn't really look like Ray's. What, then? Bert recoiled from the question, took a step back, turned his ankle on a brick, stumbled backward and sat hard against the rubble mound. He kept the gun raised, but he didn't jump right up. Off to the side, Cree rolled and sat up and blinked at him.

Actually there was a lot to think about. And the gun was heavy. He set the flashlight aside and put his hands in his lap to rest his arms and then he lay back against the hard angles of the bricks. Just to take a load off, catch his breath. Just to have a moment to think.

There was a shape hovering above him in the indirect light. A face. It was Fran, her smooth skin and nice hair, that look of concern in her eyes that always made him feel at the center of the universe. Frannie was a woman to be proud of. Chinese women, most beautiful in the world, bar none. But then he thought no, Fran was sixty-one, this woman was too young, and anyway her features were not so Asian. His chest clenched as he realized it was Megan, she was alive and full grown and beautiful and she'd found him somehow and that meant he could let go of it all. Let go that sinewy ropey relentless thing held so tight in his guts all these years. He could forgive the world, at least for that. That would be good.

"Uncle Bert! Try to answer me! Is it your heart?"

Her voice startled him.
Right. Cree. Cree Black, Ben's kid. God, Ben was a
long time ago.

"Yeah," Bert croaked. "Yeah, it must be my heart." Bad joke. What heart? He almost laughed out loud.

Cree was doing something and he noticed his head wasn't hurting from the corners of the bricks, she'd folded something soft behind him. Then her face was gone and he heard clinking noises and there was another face. Ray. Ray's face, watching him closely. Fucking ugly son of a bitch he turned out to be.

Okay, yeah, I did that,
Bert thought
I am the wolfman. I am the werewolf.
Now it seemed right. Feeling bad about Ray was part of the ropey thing. /
was crazy when that happened, been crazy half my life. Got a thing in me, comes
up and hurts people.
He looked up at the dark subterranean ceiling and it felt familiar.
Those bones that were in there, the wolfman, that freak, that's me,
Ray. Whatever was left over of me, walled up and sealed in and forgotten and
nobody
ever knew.
He wasn't sure if he was thinking it or talking out loud.

"She's gone upstairs to call for help," Ray's face said. "Her phone doesn't work under here, she had to go upstairs. She'll be right back."

Bert was thinking about being a wolfman and a werewolf and for a while it definitely seemed right. Everybody was a werewolf. Ray was, whoever took Megan, Rich Nearing, probably even Cree or Horace, it was always down in there, waiting, dangerous. Too fucking sad.

But then he lost the logic of it and it didn't seem quite right. Wrong animal. Because it wasn't that, or not only that. All his life he'd been looking for a certain feeling. Even just wanting it, that had to be worth something. He'd found it fleetingly when he danced. The sweep and glide and upbeat bounce. The weightlessness, that was it. You wanted weightlessness. To be unbound. Airborne. He could almost feel it right now, like he was swooping or skating airborne above an endless smooth surface.

He looked at Ray's face and was surprised by what he saw.
jesus, he's
another
one, he's going back and forth forever and can't find the place to come down.
Another poor restless fuck.

He felt his arc rise steeply with a jab of scary vertigo and something sweeter, breaking or releasing. Suddenly he understood it clearly. It was very important, an astonishing truth. He could hardly make his mouth work, but he wanted badly to tell Ray.

No,
he said or thought,
not wolves. We're birds, see. We're dark, shiny birds.
We can fly.

63

Y
OU REMEMBER THE discussions we had," Horace was saying, "about pure tissue metrics versus the Russian school?"

"Yes." Cree was glad to see him again. He had met them in the lobby of the Life Sciences Building to walk them down to the lab. Ray had greeted Horace warmly, but now wasn't saying anything. He'd admitted that the prospect of seeing the wolfman's face, at last, disturbed him.

"My assistant and I each did a reconstruction, intentionally independent of each other—a differential experiment, you might say, similar to the Tutankhamen project of last year."

"How have you found time, Horace? With all you've been doing? Ray and I have kept you pretty busy!"

Horace tapped the elevator button and smiled sadly at her, his eyes swimming huge in his glasses. "Yes. Well, your discovery lit something of a fire under my behind," he said.

It was only eight days since that night. By the time she'd gotten back from calling for help, Bert was dead. Ray was sitting at his side, staring intently at him, as if keeping a vigil.

Of course the police had taken them in, Ray to the hospital for his arm, Cree to a police station for a long night of questioning and a short sleep in a holding cell. In the morning, she had called Horace, who came down and corroborated what he could. Fortunately, Bert's autopsy got expedited and left no question as to the cause of his death. He was overweight and chainsmoked and had been an alcoholic for forty years; probably it was only his fifty-eight steps, twice daily, that had kept his heart functioning this long. Cree also sensed that Bert was in some kind of trouble anyway, because the investigators seemed only too willing to believe he'd gone over the edge. After they'd both been released, Ray told her about the two cops Bert had sent to his place. He didn't tell her earlier because he didn't want it to get in the way of anything. Revenge or legal action would be complications he didn't need, distractions. He didn't have time for distractions.

It had been hard to explain what they were doing, knocking holes in somebody else's basement wall. Horace helped with that, telling about the wolfman's bones, how Cree had been retained to investigate and had the owner's permission to enter the house. The police had called the owners to verify that and to report the incident, and later Ray and Cree called to promise they'd pay for replacing the bricks. The owners were actually very glad to know about the secret suite attached to their house. It made them reconsider whether to even move in—the whole thing upset them, and they had their kids to think about. They declined to file a vandalism complaint.

When he'd heard about the underground apartment and Ray's discoveries in the last room, Horace had swung into action. Within days, he'd secured permissions from the house owners and university administration, then put together a research team of professors and grad students from the Anthropology and History departments, headed by himself, to systematically explore and document the suite.

The lab looked the same as it always did, orderly and bright. Karen Chang looked up when they came in, welcomed them, then led them to the workbench where the two reconstructions stood side by side. Skobold had done his sculpting in the back room, she explained; she had concealed hers whenever Horace was nearby or when she was not working on it. They had both used plaster casts from Horace's skull molds, but Karen had copied the features supplied by the computerized modeling program and strictly applied tissue metrics, while Skobold had used the "Russian school" approach and more of his own intuition.

They looked at the two faces in silence. Ray looked stunned at first, cradling his bandaged arm as he looked from one to the other. After a moment, he smiled.

"Gosh," he said. "Let me see if I can guess which
one
is yours, Horace."

The bust on the left was a ghastly creature, lipless, very little protrusion of nose, mouth stretching all the way back the sides of the muzzle to reveal the rows of teeth. Karen had opted for slightly pointed, projecting ears. The final effect was of a brutal, alien being, inhuman and expressionless, devoid of any emotion or intelligence.

Though its basic proportions were the same, Skobold's was much more detailed and much more human. With rounded human ears tucked close against the head, fuller lips and nose, a shorter mouth, more padding on the cheekbones, brows that looked mobile, eyes full of alertness, he'd built an expressive face, wary but curious, lined with the creases of a life's experience and feelings.

"I should add that as part of the experiment," Horace explained, "I made full use of the clues available in Lydia Schweitzer's journal, whereas Karen wasn't allowed to read it prior to her sculpting. Lydia reported that his ears were normal, for example. She refers to his 'expression of contentment' or 'despair,' or 'relief,' suggesting mobile facial musculature and a human vocabulary of emotional expression."

"I can't wait to read it," Cree said.

Horace turned somber and gazed at her thoughtfully. "Yes. I imagine you will find it . . . compelling. I suspect you will find you have much in common with Lydia."

Hernandez and his men were almost finished, and the upstairs glowed. Much of the carpentry equipment had been removed, and the spacious rooms begged to be lived in. They didn't stray into them, though, but headed straight for the basement stairs.

The back basement room had been transformed into a research station, with folding tables and chairs, laptop computers, stacks of folded storage boxes, sifting screens, camera tripods. A researcher looked up from her computer to greet them, then went back to typing. In the wolfman's crypt, the team had opened up a full doorway and had removed the rubble from the tunnel. But in the subterranean suite, they had so far done little beyond labeling artifacts, mapping, and photo documentation. Everything was just as it had been seared into Cree's memory, except that the team had rigged good lights that made the details more visible and the ambience less threatening. A pair of researchers worked in the sitting room, but the rest of the suite was empty.

The end room was the largest and by far the best preserved of the four. At its center, a coffin lay on a fine funereal stand. It struck Cree as a beautiful coffin, simple but built with exquisite craftsmanship, pale hardwood boards joined with dovetail joints. At its head stood a little table that had clearly been set up as something of a shrine. It held a photo of Lydia in a gilt frame and a crystal vase draped with the black remains of roses. There had also been the two ledger books that contained Lydia's journal, but Horace had removed them to a humidity-controlled vault. He'd had them photocopied by technical preservation experts, and would give Cree a copy later.

They spent fifteen minutes in the room. Cree couldn't seem to pay attention to Horace's narrative. Lydia's face stared out from the oval frame with eyes that seemed to ask a question of Cree. What was the question? Cree automatically began her inner process, spiraling in toward subconsciously registered perceptions. When Ray called to her, saying they were heading out, she asked if she could stay a few minutes longer, alone. He and Horace left, chatting as they headed down the corridor.

Alone was better. Cree shut her eyes and let herself feel the space in its three dimensions, then in the fourth, time. Time stretched back, invisible, and fanned into other dimensions of consciousness. Cree felt as fully aware as she had ever felt, as open and clear as she could imagine being.

Lydia?

Against the empty canvas of perception, there was only Cree breathing steadily, alone in the silent room.

Lydia?

She gave it a few more minutes, but there was no one here. She roused from the state with some difficulty to realize that almost twenty minutes had passed. Poor Horace and Ray would have been waiting patiently all this time. Still, she stroked the coffin's polished boards for another moment, reluctant to leave the room.

Why no ghost, no affective trace, of such a person? she wondered. She hadn't yet read Lydia's journal, but that face told a great deal about who she had been. And a woman with the compassion, the passion, to rescue an unknown freak or werewolf: Surely such a heart would leave an echo.

Unless at death Lydia's heart's arrow had been sprung and had been received where it belonged. Unless no unrequited feelings had been held. Unless no unresolved emotions had remained to perseverate. A life so fully and roundly lived—was such a thing possible?

Definitely something to think about, Cree decided. She caught the photo's eye one more time and left the room.