Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (15 page)

    
It was
an ache he knew well, equal parts loneliness, dread, and perverse exhilaration.
It was a feeling, he was certain, that had been known to every scout or tracker
who’d ever gone ahead of the war party or the wagons. It was accompanied by an
awareness ofthe heartbeat behind his left ear and the hollowness in his
stomach.

    
Aquino
had neglected to mention—although it probably went without saying—that the
police had boarded and padlocked the Coronado’s once stylishly rustic
buildings. The main lodge had a stonework portico fit for a Bentley, and
eight-foot doors of solid oak. The huge logs of which the lodge was made had
claimed a small forest of old-growth trees, but now looked as sad and sunken as
the walls of an abandoned outhouse. Three long, one-story outbuildings of
knotty pine had accommodated the resort’s guests in comfortable, if not exactly
luxurious, fashion. All but one of them looked to have been badly damaged by
fire. The dance hall, angled forty-five degrees from the lodge and connected to
it by a covered stone walkway, was a scaled-down version of a vintage Jazz Age
pavilion, built to hold a big band and a couple hundred ginned-up swingers.
Though its roof had partially collapsed and its walls had succumbed to dry rot
and termites, Raszer saw instantly why Johnny Horn had seized it for his last
rave.

    
He
circumnavigated the hall, looking for a way in. It would be bad form to break
the police tape or jimmy the locks, but he wasn’t about to leave without going
in. In the rear of the building, at shoulder level, was a small casement window
that presumably opened into a dressing room or toilet. Raszer spent five minutes
trying to force it, then gave up and broke the pane without compunction. It was
a small marvel, he rationalized, that it had remained unbroken for this long.

    
He
dropped down inside with a
krruunch
that informed him the foundation was no more solid than the roof. He was indeed
in the ladies’ room, where fragments of an art deco mosaic, and the corroded
remains of a makeup mirror, were scattered on the floor and walls. The door was
off its hinges, and Raszer stepped out into the ballroom. A gaping hole in the
arched roof provided a bit more light.

    
An empty
dance hall is as empty as empty gets. A quick scan confirmed that it was little
more than a shell, and that the police had scoured it. Nonetheless, he wanted
to cover every warped square foot of its hardwood floor, to stand where Katy
had stood, breathe the air that she had inhaled. He regarded this as an
empirical exercise, rather than a mystical one, but that was because mysticism
was ingrained in his method. If, for one moment, he could feel the morphic
resonance of her past presence, he might better sense it when she was truly
within his grasp.

    
From the
same deep pocket that held his penknife, he removed a small, high-powered
flashlight and swept its beam across the floor as he walked. There was no
debris, no matchbooks or cigarette butts, but the hall’s very emptiness seemed
to reflect the fevered breath of the dancers and the jackhammer rhythm of
Johnny’s music, driving his acolytes to a place where nothing was true and
everything was permitted. Raszer recalled reading that as the rave scene in
England had degenerated from ecstatic community to paranoid dystopia, the
ravers had talked of “obliviating,” of entering a state of “bewilderness.”

    
Ecstasy
and oblivion were, of course, two sides of the same coin, the difference being
that for a Zen monk, nothingness was a glass at least half-full, where for the
nihilist, it was well below half-empty. He wondered where Katy’s glass had
stood.

    
The
thought of music caused him to pause and regard the raised bandstand. On the
night of the rave, there would have been no trombone section, no torch singer,
just a solitary DJ with two turntables and a microphone. There was a single
item on the bandstand: a common folding table, the type used in cafeterias.
Raszer beelined for it, narrowly skirting an open gash in the floor. He vaulted
up onto the stage and approached the table. No piece of furniture could
possibly have held less promise: no hidden drawers, no deep cracks in its
Plasticine surface. And yet Raszer had a feeling. He remembered something he’d
once seen at a club. It was in his mind’s eye now, and the question was whether
it would manifest itself for him.

    
He
squatted, took out his penknife again, and ran its point along the hairline gap
between the particleboard underside of the table and its aluminum base. DJs—or
MCs in club argot—leapfrogged from gig to gig on the strength of their last
mix, and if someone staggered up and shouted, “How do I hire you?” there wasn’t
time for talk or free hands to write a number. They kept business cards at the
ready, wedged into any available cranny for fast access. There was only one
such crevice on this table.

    
What
Raszer had seen in his mind’s eye was a train of business cards, lined up in
the crack under the table’s edge, easy to grab between needle drops, but all he
needed was one, and one was what he found when the knife edge suddenly stopped.
With great care, he extracted it.

MC H
akim

-T
rance
M
aster
-

213/666-0230

    
A good
DJ kept his hands on the platters and his eyes on the dance floor, monitoring
the vital signs of every ass, searching every face for hints of ennui, gauging
his command of the crowd. “God is a DJ, and this is his church,” went one
famous “callout hook.” The DJ saw the whole and its parts, and he was
especially on the alert for walkouts. MC Hakim, whoever he was, might have seen
Katy Endicott leave the building. He might recall the pretty girl with the ’40s
movie-star hair and doe eyes, and whether her expression as she left had
suggested delirium or coercion, lassitude or terror. Raszer slipped the card
into his pocket and went back out through the window.

    
Starting
at the front doors, Raszer took the walk that Katy and her four male companions
had taken, through a stand of pines to the road, and up the slope to where the
yellow police tape marked the killing ground. It took less than three minutes,
but by the time Katy would have reached the parked Dodge convertible, her teeth
would have been chattering.
Whose car
?
Were there, as Silas suggested, drugs in
the trunk
?
Had that been the lure to
get Katy outside
? There was nothing at the site to evidence the horror that
had occurred, no
X
to mark the spot.
Only the slack yellow tape, flapping in the icy downdraft, and the hiss of the
pine needles. Something stirred in the underbrush—a deer, or maybe an
opossum—and the hair on Raszer’s neck bristled.

    
In the
daylight, he might have lingered awhile to hear whatever tales the place could
tell, but Raszer was not immune to being spooked, and decided that he needed to
be home at his bar with a glass of good, dry Portuguese red and a fire in the
hearth. Still, he remained just a little longer because this was the point of
departure, not only for Katy Endicott and the souls of her ill-chosen friends,
but for him as well.

    
A
hundred yards off to the northeast, up a narrow and badly rutted service road,
were the “buggy sheds” that the old prospector had mentioned.

    
Raszer
would very much have liked to save the sheds for another day. He was clearly
going to be spending a lot of time in Azusa, and poking some more around the
local mountains might reveal something about the alliances and enemies Johnny
Horn and Henry Lee had made during their reign. Furthermore, he felt cold and
uneasy.

    
What
would not let him retreat was his thirst to find out if his chance detour into
the Follows Camp and the appearance out of the fog of a yellow-bearded prophet
were the sort of augurs a man disregards at great cost. The old guy had advised
him to check out the buggy sheds for a squatter named J.Z., and he’d seemed to
know more than he let on. The day’s yield had been good so far. Why not gamble
another round?

    
With
gravity and fear dragging on his heels, Raszer trudged up the service road.

    
The
first of the formerly red-painted sheds was an automotive tool shop, with
everything from ancient fan belts to leather steering wheels in a state of
desiccated preservation. Up on blocks and left to die was the chassis of a very
old Ford, as old, Raszer guessed, as the structure that housed it. There was no
evidence that anyone had adopted the place as a home. It smelled only of old
grease.

    
In the
second shed, he found another automobile carcass, as well as a genuine buggy,
its luggage trough littered with what appeared to be the pieces of a
disassembled still.

    
But
again, no J.Z.

    
The
third building was set apart from the others and had the slightly more
residential look of a caretaker’s shed. The door, peeling old paint the color
of dried blood, was warped tight but unlocked, and when Raszer finally
succeeded in forcing it open, the outrush of feral odor knocked him back, affirming
he’d hit pay dirt. He stepped in, propping the door open with a brick, and
flicked on his flashlight.

    
It
wasn’t the smell of death, animal or human. He’d have recognized that and felt
another kind of uneasiness. This was the organic odor of a living presence, the
smell of armies of bacteria camped on unwashed flesh, and that brought a
different discomfort, because he was therefore invading someone’s home. He
swept the beam around and saw that there was an old stove, long unused, a chest
of drawers, and, in the far corner behind a wall of fruit crates, a man-size
nest of dried grasses partly covered by an oil-stained army blanket.

    
“Hello?”
he called out.

    
Nothing.

    
“J.Z.?”
Still nothing. Confident that he was alone for the moment, Raszer crept warily
over to the makeshift bed. He picked up a corner of the blanket and dropped it
immediately. The smell was overpowering, and there seemed to be nothing else
here. He moved on to the chest.

    
The
drawers were empty. Not so much as a moldy sock. J.Z., Raszer guessed, wore
every article of clothing he owned. But laid across the top of the chest was a
discolored lace table runner, quite possibly from the Coronado’s original linen
closet. Placed with an almost fetishistic neatness on the cloth were a variety of
small found treasures, things that a child or a magpie might collect: a comb, a
key, a shard of mirror glass, assorted junk jewelry, and an assortment of
coins. Some of the coins were new, some at least as old as the Coronado; all
but one were from American mints, and that one exception drew Raszer’s eye,
because the words on the coin were in Arabic.

    
He held
the flashlight close. It was about the size of a half-dollar and hexagonal in
shape, though its sharp angles were worn soft. The barely recognizable face of
a woman was on the head. Raszer had seen pictures of its kind in studies of the
medieval Levant. It appeared to be some kind of dirham of ancient mintage. The
date contained three numerals, of which only the first—
a 5
 
—was legible, followed by the Arabic letters
ah
,
putting it in the eleventh century
ad,
based on
the Muslim calendar.

    
Moreover,
it had been somebody’s lucky coin. A tiny hole was drilled near its top edge,
big enough to pass a chain or a string through, and its dead center was cratered—nearly
pierced—by what must have been a meteoric impact. Whoever had been fortunate
enough to wear this charm around his neck had stopped a bullet.

    
The
walls of the shed trembled, and Raszer stepped back into a semicrouch. The wind
was coming down fiercely. It could have been that. For a moment, there was only
the scraping of branches on the roof, but then he heard a snort, followed by
shallow, wheezy breath. Whatever it was stood directly opposite him, on the
other side of the thin wall. Raszer glanced at the open door and considered a
dash into the open.

    
“J.Z.?”
he called out again, almost hopefully.

    
There
was a quarter-size knothole in the wall. The wind was whistling through it.
Raszer leaned in gingerly, keeping one hand on the dresser for balance, and
brought his eye to the hole. He blinked and froze.

    
A
jaundiced, bloodshot eye blinked back at him.

    
A surge
of adrenaline hit all his limbs at once. He moved back, turned, and made
straight for the door with deliberate speed. No sooner had he crossed the
threshold than his inner ear registered a sickening
ccrraack
and the oceanic rush of blood to his brain.

    
The last
thing he saw before consciousness fizzled out was the wine glass waiting on his
bar. It would keep waiting.