Greywalker (11 page)

Once inside, he said, "I hope you like fish."

I didn't get to answer before a hyper efficient host bustled us to a booth away from the windows. It was a little more intimate than I had expected and a bit darker. My defenses started to rise. I slid around so I was facing into the room while Will was forced to turn his back to the other diners.

I murmured, looking at my menu, "So, what do you recommend?"

"Everything. The cook does a spectacular salmon with ginger and lime, and all the shrimp dishes are wonderful. Did you know that people who eat a lot of shrimp have a higher baseline radioactivity level than people who don't eat shrimp?" Will added.

Shrimp? What did I care about radioactive shrimp? Then I realized that Will was babbling about crustaceans because he was nervous. That was kind of sweet. Most people who get nervous around me have something more to hide than first-date anxiety.

I grinned at him. "Maybe I'll go for the salmon, then. I wouldn't want to glow in the dark."

He laughed and ordered drinks and food, then started in on the serious chatting and flirting. We were interrupted by a musical beeping from Will's waistband. He snatched a pager out of a fold of his clothing and looked at it.

I watched him study the number, then put the pager away. "Is it something important? I can wait if you need to make a call."

"Nothing like that. It's just Mikey's code."

"Your son pages you?"

"Son?" Will began to laugh and I quivered. The sound of his laughter was like a warm touch on my spine. "Michael is my little brother. He pages me with this code when he goes out. Lets me know he arrived safely."

"Oh," I muttered.

He shook his head in amusement. "It's OK. Lots of people make that mistake. I am old enough to be his father, technically. The relationship is kind of somewhere in between, though. He was a late baby and I was already out of the house—in Europe, in fact—by the time he was a real human being, so I missed a lot. When our folks died, I got the responsibility for raising him. So now I'm Father Goose. I keep tabs on him all the time, which is a little paranoid, but I guess I'm afraid I'll misplace him or something. We both carry pagers so we're never out of touch. Overprotective, right?"

I shrugged to cover both my surprise and my chagrin. "Can't ask me—I'm an investigator, not a family counselor. So you always know where he is? Or at least where he should be?"

"Pretty much. He always knows where I am, too. We're like two weights on a rubber band—we always bounce back toward each other."

"I wish more people were like you and Michael. It would be a lot easier to find some of them."

"You mean your clients?"

"No. Their kids and spouses. Most missing persons are routine," I explained. "There's often a strong clue in their past behavior or habits that will lead me right to them, once I've figured out the habits in the first place. Most people don't have any idea how to disappear. Most don't even mean to. They leave tracks like elephants in mud. But I have one of the other kind right now. Kid just broke his routine and habits completely and disappeared."

Will blanched. "Oh, God, I'd go crazy if anything happened to Michael, if he just disappeared someday... If somebody took him, I'd—I'd lose it. Do you think someone took this kid?"

I reached over and touched his arm. "No. I think he went for a reason and I'm getting an idea of where he might be. But I've got to admit, I'd really like to know why. That's what's bothering me. When I know why someone's vanished, I can make a good guess of where, but the why often turns out to be the most important question. I wouldn't want to have to approach someone in, say, a crack house, without knowing what I was getting into first."

He nodded. "I can understand that." He played with his glass. "You've got a dangerous job," he added, trying to steer the conversation back to my lane. I accepted the transfer, for the time being.

"It's not so bad. A lot of what I do is hunting down paperwork, filing forms, and waiting around. But it beats milking cows."

He grinned and raised his eyebrows. "Cows?"

I nodded. "Yeah. When I was little, I went to visit my Mom's family in Montana. They lived on a cattle ranch, but they kept a few milk cows for themselves. One morning—about four thirty—my cousin got me up to help him milk the cows. I think it was supposed to be fun. But I am not a cow person—my favorite cow comes on a bun. I was sleepy and the cows were large, smelly, and scary. And milking is nasty—which is the real reason they invented automatic milking machines."

Will chuckled. We chatted on about inconsequential things. Around the time our dinners were served, I was starting to have a strange, queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. The feeling was familiar. I looked around out of the corner of my eye as I bent over my fish.

I saw a face flicker in the edge of my vision like one of those persistence-of-vision tricks you can only see when you look away. I pretended to remove a fine bone from my boneless fish, lowering my head and breathing slowly until I could settle the Grey and look with-out falling in.

A ghost, staring at me with a long and dour face, stood against the wall beside the prosaic RESTROOMS sign. He was thin and weedy, dressed in a suit long out of fashion.

I stared and whispered, "Albert?"

He beckoned to me with an impatient gesture.

I looked up at Will, who was frowning down at me. "Excuse me. I've just remembered a client I needed to call. I'll only be a minute."

Curiosity quirked the corner of his mouth, but he didn't ask. "OK. I'll wait right here."

I smiled and slid out of the booth, grabbing my purse, and headed for the restrooms.

As I walked down the hallway across the back of the building, I looked for Albert.

What was the Danzigers' ghostly housemate doing here? My stomach was flipping and roiling as if the fish I'd eaten had come back to life, but I forced my concentration toward looking for Albert without being sucked into the Grey completely.

I spotted him stopped ahead in a doorway of dragon smoke. I didn't want to go in there, but he motioned me forward. I gritted my teeth and caught myself hyperventilating. Then I stepped across into the cold and the smell of the Grey.

I staggered and Albert flickered solid, then rain-thin, beckoning impatiently. I felt the fluttering edge of the Grey nearby. The world seemed darker and overlaid with a wavering silver projection on fog. I groped after Albert, pushing through smoke doors and down stair-cases built of dry-cold mist, holding myself as close to the normal world as I could. Albert was a flickering match light in the down-drawing darkness ahead.

I must have left the restaurant, because the space sounded like a tunnel now—wet and dank and lit only by ghost lights that came and went. There was noise ahead of me, a distant, raucous clamor and a roar of music.

Reality wavered and pitched. I hesitated and my concentration stumbled. Couldn't panic now. I had to keep going, had to keep chasing Albert, concentrating only on Albert, because it was the only thing

I could think of to do. I didn't know what would happen if I jolted out of the Grey into some unknown place: the middle of a wall or three inches from a speeding truck. And I hoped that the presence of a ghost—a creature who belonged here—would keep that dark beast away. I held on to the idea of Albert and kept going, quivering inside and wet with ice-water sweat.

I followed a flight of twisted steps down a dim shaft to a heavy door and along a short, narrow tunnel. I trudged on, tight with fear.

The dim flicker ahead winked out. The sounds died.

"Albert? Where are you?" My ears throbbed in the silence.

"Albert!" I howled, whipping around. I lost my balance in the shifting world and yelled, falling...

And crashed into a solid wall. I tumbled and sat down hard. I huddled on the cold ground and panted and held back tears of relief and exhaustion, and a desire to throw up.

Finally I looked up and around. I was in a basement storage area. There was a sound now, one I had been ignoring for a while: a burglar alarm going off.

I swore and promised under my breath, "Albert, I'm going to get you for this."

I crashed around in the dark for a minute or two before someone opened the exterior door to the basement. I breathed a thankful sigh and moved toward the shaft of streetlight illumination striping the floor. A body cut off most of the light and I slowed my steps.

"Police. Stop where you are and leave your hands in plain sight."

My relief soured to resignation and I raised my hands to shoulder level, open and empty.

The arresting officers were quite polite until they found my gun. Then the chill came on. They drove me to the downtown police station for processing, without a word beyond Miranda. The booking officers weren't happy, either, but they did concede that I had all the proper paperwork. They still put the gun in an evidence bag before they would let me use the phone, though.

It took only moments for the restaurant to find Will, who was still sitting at the table.

"Hi, Will, it's Harper. Look, I'm sorry. Something work related came up and I had to go. I didn't mean to leave you in the lurch like that."

"Something work related," he repeated.

"Yes. What? Do you think I just ran out on you? It was something I couldn't control."

"All right," he said, but it didn't sound all right.

"Will. Don't be angry. My job is like this. Weird stuff comes out of nowhere and I have to chase it down when the opportunity arises. If I hadn't wanted to have dinner with you, I wouldn't have called you back." There was a lot of silence at the other end of the line. "Will, I'm at the police station, so I can't stay on the phone. I don't know how much longer this is going to take. I'll have to call you later. OK?"

"All right," he said again. "If you call me later, we can talk about it." Then he hung up.

Great. Well, there went that romance. This was not turning into the sort of evening I'd had in mind.

I'd been booked and fingerprinted and had gone through a care-fully edited version of my story once. The owners of the property weren't home when the alarm went off, and when they arrived to press charges, they wanted to hear what they'd missed.

I lied. I told them, as I had the cops, that I had been tailing an insurance fraud suspect from the restaurant and had stumbled through the remains of an old bootlegger's run into their basement. The owners of the house—now a bed-and-breakfast—were kind of charmed by the idea that their house might have a secret past as a speakeasy. The cops, on the other hand, were not charmed by the discovery of a rotting tunnel behind a bit of broken plaster, but that thin evidence was a lot more comfortable than explaining that I'd somehow man-aged to get into a basement which was still locked from the outside.

It was after eleven p.m. when they decided they couldn't hold me.

The cops returned my stuff, including the pistol, and I went down* stairs to call a cab and get my car back.

When I paid off the cab, I was relieved to see that Will's truck was gone from Dan's parking lot, and then I got angry with myself for feeling relieved. I damned Albert with catholic breadth as I slammed the truck door behind myself. I sat still for a good two minutes, calming down before starting the drive home.

I pounded up the back stairs to burn off my lingering fury. I slammed out of the stairwell onto my floor to see my front door standing open. I stopped and gaped, then bent down and snatched up the ferret as she tried to scamper past me.

I stared into my living room. Chaos dove out of my arms and raced across the floor in wild, ferret delight. She danced across the face of disaster. The burglar alarm was off and the living room was a wreck. The ferret's cage was tilted on its side, the door hanging open. The surgeons’ cabinet had been knocked over and the chair was dribbling stuffing from the underside of the cushion. Books and paperwork drifted around like autumn leaves.

I caught the ferret one more time and stuffed her into my jacket before going to knock on my neighbors’ door. I left the place just as it was. It couldn't get much worse, after all.

"May I use your phone?"

He let me in and I called the police, asking for a detective I knew, but was told he was off duty. I'd have to take potluck.

I slammed the phone down and waited for the cops while watching my neighbor's half-breed pit bull sniff and whine in the direction of the lump of ferret moving around under my jacket. Once they showed up, my neighbor Rick let me wait in his living room eating cold pizza while the evidence crew found nothing. Once they were gone, I thanked Rick and his dog and went straight back to my place. I slammed the door, locked up, and headed to bed. And threw my damned, silly loafers against the bedroom door hard enough to dent it.

In the morning, I called Mara, my mood very little improved.

She answered the phone herself.

I started straight in. "Mara, I don't know what's going on, but Albert popped in to see me last night and I got arrested following him. What the hell was he doing?"

"You were following Albert... through the Grey?"

"Yes! And I ended up in someone's basement with their alarm going off like a teenage girl at a Hanson concert."