Possession (15 page)

The woman holding the monkey tried to put it on the secretary’s desk, but each time she put it down, the monkey jumped back onto her chest and climbed up to sit on her shoulder, wrapping its arms around her head. “Get this damned thing off me!” she yelled. “It’s been crawling all over my stall and throwing fruit on the ground since six a.m. and if I’m stuck with it for one more hour I’m going to drown it. And if that means drowning myself in the process, I will!”

“Where’s Animal Control?” the secretary asked the nearest person passing by. “Didn’t anyone call them?”

“We did, but they said they can’t come for the monkey until they deal with a bear out in Crown Hill,” came the reply as the person vanished behind a wall.

“Oh God . . . is this some kind of hoax? What is this, Animal Planet?”

“City Fish lost a monkfish this morning, and a bunch of shrimp got loose in the main arcade stairway, too,” the absent person called back, accompanied by a lot of rattling and clanging.

The glaring ghost seemed to find the hullabaloo amusing; she smirked at me as if, somehow, this was all a joke I should have gotten. I stared blankly back until she was distracted by something else.

“Please tell me the monkfish wasn’t alive when it went AWOL,” the secretary said.

“It was still flopping. . . . Ah! I got it!”

The woman with the monkey on her head unwound the creature’s arms one more time and held it at arm’s length. “Please let it be a shotgun. . . .”

A man with a pile of cloth in his arms came out from the other side of the wall. “Monkfish was apprehended in the women’s bathroom on Down Under One. And, yes, we have no shotgun—also no bananas—but we do have a tablecloth! Hold the monkey where I can get it. . . .”

“If it were that easy, we’d have wrapped the little bastard up hours ago!”

The man threw the large, dirty tablecloth toward the struggling monkey. The monkey tried to dodge by biting the woman holding it and scrambling up her arms again. It nearly made it, but one side of the cloth got over its head and the woman, now screaming and trying not to move back or sideways, juggled the miscreant up and down, bouncing more of the fabric over the beast’s head. “Get it, get it, get it!” she screeched. “Oh God, just get the little monster off me!”

The man who’d brought the tablecloth grabbed at the wriggling shape under the folds of dirty linen and wrestled it free of the woman, wrapping the extra bits of fabric around and around, imprisoning the monkey in the folds.

“Don’t suffocate it!” the secretary exclaimed.

The monkey, realizing it was trapped, began to howl and let out an unpleasant stench of an origin I didn’t want to think about.

The man fighting with the cloth gave the secretary an exasperated glare. “I don’t think there’s much chance of that. Someone find a damned cage or a box.”

One of the other milling people dragged a large plastic file box into the room, hastily emptying the contents in armfuls onto the secretary’s desk. Once the box was empty, the cloth-bound monkey was dumped into it and the lid slammed down and latched.

“Do you think it’ll be OK in there?” the secretary asked.

“I hope it dies!” said the woman who had recently been its perch.

“Oh, you do not!” The box thumped and rattled, but the lid held tight. “I think it’ll be fine so long as someone punches some air holes in the box,” the man said. “It’s us who’ll be nervous wrecks. Someone get the first-aid kit for Gabby.”

Gabby, the now de-monkeyed woman, looked down at herself. “Oh . . . holy fish guts. It bit me and I’m covered in monkey poo! Gross!”

“I’ve changed my mind,” the man said. “Forget the first-aid kit. Someone get Gabby to a shower.”

The secretary grabbed her desk phone. “I’ll call the hotel—they’ll have something.”

“Good.” The man sat down on the corner of the desk and blew his disheveled hair out of his eyes while another woman came out from behind the wall and ushered the distraught Gabby somewhere less public. The annoying ghost seemed disappointed in the return of relative sanity and the ferret took one peek out of my bag and decided it still wasn’t safe to come into the open—maybe she didn’t like the look of the ghost any more than I did.

The secretary was busy with the phone, so after a moment of my standing there like a stork, the man looked up and said, “I guess it’s all me then, is it?” He held out his right hand. “Hello, how are you? I’m John and I don’t usually wrangle monkeys and shrimp first thing in the morning. What can I do for you? And does it involve livestock, because if so, I’m afraid I’ll have to run screaming from the room.”

“No livestock,” I replied.

“Thank God.” He glanced at the secretary, who was putting the phone down. “Emily, make sure you punch some holes in the box for the monkey.”

“With what?”

“I don’t know . . . a letter opener? You can’t let it smother in there.”

The secretary seemed unimpressed with his argument. “Oh . . . all right. But don’t blame me if it gets poked.”

“Just don’t let it out,” John added. He looked back to me as Emily got on her knees wielding a wicked-looking letter opener. She looked dangerous. “What was it you needed again?” he asked.

“I’m trying to find out if a certain person has a performer’s badge. Is there a list?”

He looked blank for a moment, then blinked, pursing his mouth as he thought, and then raising his eyebrows high. “Oh. I suppose there is. Ah, just a minute. I’ll go look it up. What’s the name?” he asked, getting to his feet again.

“Mine or the performer’s?”

“I’ll take both, if you like.” He started toward the back half of the office.

“My name’s Harper Blaine and the guy I’m interested in is named Jordan Delamar,” I said, following him around the obscuring wall. The nosy ghost tagged along and loomed over John’s shoulder. Against the dark wall, the details of her face and clothing were a little easier to see. She had a long, slightly hooked nose and wore clothes from the early 1900s. She was striking, and I imagined that in the right circumstances she’d been considered quite beautiful, though her expression soured that for me. I found her disturbing.

“All right. Let me just get to the computer here . . .” John said, plopping down into a chair at a workstation that was too cutely adorned with photos in Hello Kitty frames for me to think it was his.

He typed a bit and then peered at the old-fashioned CRT screen. “No. Jordan Delamar does not currently have a performer’s badge. He let it lapse in April—that’s when the sign-ups are.”

“But he had one until then?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know if he was involved in an accident at the slabs in December?”

“That?” His aura flushed a sickly green, fading until it was barely visible. “Umm . . . yes.”

“Do you have a contact address or phone number for him?”

“If it’s in connection with the claim, I would prefer not to . . .”

“It’s not something you have a choice about if it’s connected to a public claim,” I said—which isn’t really true, but I leaned a bit on him through the Grey, pushing for his cooperation.

John visibly deflated and looked glum. “All I have is an address.” He rattled it off. It was the same one I already knew, but I wrote it down anyway.

“Thanks for the help and I’m sorry about your animal problems.”

“Oh . . . thanks. I swear this place is getting weirder by the minute lately—and it’s plenty weird to begin with.”

“Really?”

He made a face. “I’d rather not talk about it. Shouldn’t have said anything.” I felt him mentally pushing back against me as he gathered his wits.

I backed off in the Grey and the normal, taking a step away. “I do appreciate the information, though. Best of luck with your monkey.”

John sighed and waved me out. I went, giving the still-rattling box of monkey and the grimly ventilating secretary a wide berth as I passed, and looking to see what had become of the tall ghost.

The apparition stood at the doorway, watching me again, and her finger brushed over my arm as I passed. I shuddered at the touch and felt a pang of hunger and dizziness as if I hadn’t eaten in days. I staggered a little and got away from her as quickly as possible, not turning back to look for her until I was safely standing on the bricks of lower Post Alley. She remained in the doorway, her chin tucked down and her eyes boring into me. She pursed her mouth a little and for a second her face took on a raptor’s aspect with her hooked nose and sharp eyes. Then she turned around abruptly and vanished with an audible swish of her long skirts.

I shivered and declined to pursue her. I had something more pressing to do than being drawn into the games of bad-tempered specters. I now knew something about Jordan Delamar—he was the “boy who played” and he’d been injured at the market—and it seemed the best way to find out where he was now would be to question more of the buskers. I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of spending precious hours questioning people about his whereabouts, but I had no choice. At least it wasn’t raining at the moment. The tourists were already wandering around, breakfasting on hot pastries from the bakery and paper cups of famous coffee, which meant that the buskers were out, too, hoping to gather some of those tourist dollars for themselves. I just had to find the ones who knew Delamar. . . .

I decided to fend off the lingering sensations of the ghost’s touch by getting some breakfast for myself. There was a busking spot across from Sisters café in Post Alley and another just around the corner from that on Pine Street, so I started there.

A young, dreadlocked white man in motley clothes was singing old protest songs from the early 1970s from the tiny stage of a tiled doorway across Post Alley from Sisters. I listened to him while I rushed through some food and fed the ferret crumbs and tried to keep her out of my coffee cup. The musician was an adequate guitarist and indifferent singer. I caught him as he reached the end of his hour and started to put his guitar away. A pair of men with a collection of rough-looking hand drums and harmonicas were waiting to take his place, so I addressed all three of them.

“Hi. I’ve been looking for a performer. Have you guys been playing around here long?”

The men with the drums blinked at each other before they shrugged and one replied, “Since April—technically.”

“Technically?” I echoed.

The guitarist leaned into the conversation as he picked up his case. “They mean they weren’t officially here until April. No badge,” he added, pointing to the small round pin he wore on his own shirt. He cut the men a collective dirty look. “Sneakers.” The silvery mist of the ghost world around him flushed red, spreading over us all like blood in water and in a moment his aura flared the same color. A real “angry young man,” I supposed and wondered what he was so mad about. . . .

The man who’d spoken first rolled his eyes, the energy corona around him flickering as if he were fighting the impulse to respond with equal belligerence. “It’s not like we didn’t try to get a badge before, but you almost gotta wait for someone to die before space opens up.”

“Almost as bad as the vendor list,” the remaining man said.

I held up my hands to slow them down. “Hey, I’m not familiar with the system. Is there a limit on the badges?”

The guitarist kept his eyes on the rival musicians as he answered me. “Yeah, unless you know someone’s badge is going to be up for grabs, it’s pretty hard to get a new act in.”

The first man scowled at the guitarist. “You implying me and him had anything to do with that guy getting hurt just so we could get a badge?”

“Not implying nothing. Just saying,” the guitarist retorted.

The first guy spit and narrowed his eyes at the guitarist. “Maybe you better travel on, Dylan. You’re over time.”

The guitarist huffed and spun away, turning his back on the other act before stalking off.

“Jack-off,” the first man muttered under his breath.

“Shine it on, man. We got music to play,” his partner said.

I wedged myself back into the conversation. “So, you guys didn’t know the guy who was hurt?”

They blinked at me again as if they had forgotten I was there. “Well, yeah, we knew him. We’ve been coming around off and on for a couple of years, trying to get a spot. Always seemed to be too late, no matter how early we went to the office to get a badge.”

“How well did you know him?”

“Just like ‘Hey, man, how y’doing?’ kind of thing. He was a nice guy. He let us play with him a couple few times Down Under ’cause the spot’s good for more than one. We split the take. He was a good guy. Feel kind of bad we got his badge. Kind of.”

Sounded like all the performers I’d ever known: sorry for the misfortune of one of the fraternity, but not enough to refuse the chance to take the spot if it were offered.

“So, you guys wouldn’t know where I could find him.”

They shook their heads. “Nah, sorry,” the first one said.

“It’s OK. Thanks for the help anyhow,” I said, turning to go after the guitarist and leaving them to make the most of their chances.

By the time I’d rounded the corner out of Post Alley and was heading to the next spot half a block downhill, I could hear the two men laying down a complex rhythm on the drums followed by the wail of a harmonica. They were better than the guitarist, but it was strange music with roots that reached to unquiet parts of my mind. I hurried to get away.

The guitarist wasn’t at the next spot—it was occupied by a blond man with a small piano on wheels. He played a jazzy, upbeat tune, keeping his head tucked down a little as if concentrating on the keyboard and avoiding the eyes of the crowd. He was good and a shallow basket of CDs sat on the top of his instrument with the obligatory price sign—this one, however, not claiming any special reason for the offering. I waited for him to finish his piece, but he wasn’t any more help than the drummers had been. He knew Jordan by name, knew about the injury and that he had been in the hospital for a while, but he didn’t know where he’d been moved, only that he was gone. Once again I paid for the information by purchasing a CD and moved on before I took up too much of his time.

I walked toward the next spot, fighting my way once more through ghosts and tourists, and found the guitarist again, playing in front of the original Starbucks shop with its brown sign and two-tailed mermaid. Same song, different crowd. I leaned against the wall, letting Chaos crawl out of my bag and up to my shoulder as I waited for a pause in the performance. I figured that anyone as pissed off as this guy had been about the badge transfer probably knew Delamar.