Revolution No. 9 (18 page)

He glanced at the firefighter who had found the corpse and said, “Give me your glove. I'll be careful.”

Monks crouched and very gently swept the film of ashes off the skeleton's pelvis. Its heart-shaped cavity was wide, and rounded on the insides of the ilial bones between the sacrum and the pubic symphysis.

He closed his eyes, knowing that he could be tricking himself. He counted to ten, then looked again. His impression was the same.

“I think it's a woman,” Monks said. “That's all I can tell you, and I'm not at all sure about it. You'd better get an expert.”

He handed the glove back to the deputy and waded out of the ashes—somber with guilt because his pity for the victim was overcome by the ugly wash of relief that it was not his son.

“Doctor, are those human remains?” someone shouted. It was a newswoman, shoving a microphone past the restraining tape, while a man beside her focused a camcorder on Monks.

He thrust his hand out at them, palm flat, and walked on past.

M
onks cut the last of the pressure-treated two-by-ten deck joists with a Skilsaw and laid it on a stack with the others, then paused to rest, wiping a film of sweat from his forehead. He glanced out to the hazy Pacific horizon for signs of incoming weather, as he had gotten in the habit of doing. It was early March. Spring came more slowly to the North Coast than to other parts of California, and storms were still frequent. But this was a clear day, and the afternoon sun was warm on his shoulders.

He had found out why Lia—he still thought of her as Marguerite—had recognized tools like bolt cutters and pipe wrenches. Her mother, Sara Ferraro, was a professional builder, with her own all-female construction company. She lived in the hills above a little town called Elk, about fifteen miles south of Mendocino and a two-hour drive from his own home in Marin County. He had spent quite a bit of time here over the past couple of months, and had volunteered to re
build the deck behind her house, one of those things that she had been meaning to get to for years but never had the time. His carpentry skills were decent, but nowhere near Sara's level, and he was feeling under the gun, performance-wise.

His watch read 4:43
P.M.
Sara often worked late, but this was Friday, so she'd be home soon. He figured he had just enough time left to set the joists in place. Then he would have the completed substructure to show off to her.

Standing in the middle of the deck's twelve-by-sixteen-foot rectangle, he fit the two-by-tens, one by one, into the metal hangers he had nailed at twenty-four-inch intervals along the rim joists. He was careful to keep the lumber crowns pointing up—that was important, he had learned from her, for load-bearing members.

When he finished, it looked pretty good, and he was feeling pleased with himself.

Then he noticed that some of the joists were as much as a quarter-inch higher than the rim joists where they met.

“What the
fuck
,” he said. When he got his tape measure and checked, he found out that the two-by-tens varied from about nine inches in depth to almost nine and a half inches. The bigger ones were sticking up too high. He dropped the tape back into his tool belt, feeling disgusted, ripped off. What the hell kind of world was this when you couldn't trust lumber dimensions?

He could hardly leave the joists as they were—that would create humps in the decking. He supposed he would have to pull them out again and notch them underneath—a major, and time-consuming, pain in the ass.

But not today. He got a cold bottle of crisp Kronenbourg beer from the kitchen, then went back out and sat on the lumber pile. The beer was cold and rich, and that dry pilsner taste was just right for the end of a sweaty day of physical work.

In the weeks after the fire at Freeboot's camp, Monks had
dealt extensively with law-enforcement authorities, and had lobbied hard to get Marguerite a deal without jail time. The courts took into account her brainwashing and her help in escaping, and agreed that there was nothing to be gained by punishing her. She had been sent to live with relatives in Phoenix. Privately, Monks thought her cooperation seemed more dutiful than wholehearted, but as long as she kept her job and stayed out of trouble, the law would consider her on probation.

Monks had driven her and the Sara to the San Francisco airport to send her off. When the boarding gate closed, Sara, tough and fiery through the entire ordeal, had collapsed against him and said, “Now take me home and fuck me, will you?”

That first coupling had been more combative than gentle, and it had lasted some time. He had his own tensions to work out. He had battled with guilt about taking a lover while his son was still missing, and with the fear that both he and Sara were in brittle states—using each other for the wrong reasons, which could come around to harm them. It might have been better to cut clean. But it was also really good, and as those things will, it kept happening.

Mandrake was in a long-term care ward for juvenile diabetics, and much improved; tests had found him free of HIV or other serious complications. Monks had been to see him once—an official visit to consult with medical and social services authorities. Mandrake's reaction to Monks was one of wariness and withdrawal. Psychologists had decided that it would be best if Monks faded from his memory, along with all the trauma that he represented. Monks agreed, but it hurt.

There had been no news about Freeboot, or any of the others—including Glenn.

The human remains found at the fire scene—the only ones—were, in fact, female. They belonged to Mandrake's mother, aka Motherlode, whose real name was Alexandra
Neville. All indications were that she was unconscious, perhaps already dead, when the fire got to her. Given her addiction, she might have passed out, or even overdosed, and been overlooked by the others until it was too late.

But the possibility of murder existed, and Monks couldn't help suspecting that Freeboot had killed her because of his insane conviction that she was responsible for Mandrake's illness.

If this were true, then killing Glenn to get revenge on Monks seemed an all too likely possibility. That fear ate at Monks like a sarcoma, keeping him awake for hours at a time in the middle of most nights. Rationally, he had over and over again justified leaving Glenn there. But when it came to something like this, rational thought didn't cut it.

 

When Sara's beat-up Toyota pickup truck pulled into the driveway, Monks got up to greet her. She leaned out the window and eyed the deck approvingly.

“Good boy,” she said. “You're due for a reward.”

“I screwed up.” He pointed to one of the uneven joints.

“Oh. You should set the hangers low, then shim. There's no ceiling underneath, so it doesn't matter down there.”

“Now you tell me.”

“Hey, I can't be giving away all my secrets too fast. You already know plenty of them.”

She got out of the truck, dressed in blue-collar drag—boots whitened with drywall dust, faded jeans stained with construction adhesive and caulk, and a torn sweatshirt. Her dark hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail. It was a look that wouldn't have worked for a lot of women, but on her it was sexy. The hard labor of her job kept her taut and lithe—she could touch her palms flat to the ground without bending her knees. In bed, she liked to clasp her ankles behind his neck.

He saw that she had groceries, and went to help carry them inside.

“Shrimp, scallops, and rock cod,” she said, handing him a plastic sack filled with cold paper-wrapped parcels. “We're going to have seafood pasta.
Frutti di mari
. Okay?”

“Wonderful,” Monks said.

She frowned. “What's the matter?”

“Nothing,” he said, but then realized that his uneasiness must be showing. “Do I seem out of it?”

“Like you're carrying a granite block on your back, baby. More and more.”

“Sorry. I'm fine. Really.”

“Yeah?” she said, and smiled, maybe a little sadly. “I know it's tough for you, Carroll. I can't even imagine. At least I know where my kid is.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek and went inside.

Monks gathered up the rest of the groceries and followed her. The kitchen was small and neat, smelling of herbs and garlic, its butcher-block counters scarred and the Creuset cookware much used. Like the deck, it was something she intended to redo if she ever got the time. He liked it as it was.

“You pour us a drink and shell the shrimp, I'll do the rest,” she said. She liked to get everything ready in advance, then kick back, and do the final cooking when they were good and hungry.

“Done,” Monks said. He opened the bottle of Guigal Côtes du Rhône that she had brought—seafood or not, Sara was a red wine drinker, with a keen sense for good inexpensive varietals—then poured himself his old standby of Finlandia vodka on ice, touched with fresh lemon. This was the time of year that he had planned to be in Ireland, but that had been put on indefinite hold.

He dumped the big tiger prawns into a bowl. Sara turned on the TV news, and Monks half-listened as he pried apart
the carapaces. They were barely thawed, the shells' icy edges stiff and sharp against his thumbs. While his hands moved automatically, his senses drank in the pleasantness around him—the lovely woman, the cozy place, the savory food and drink. He had enough money, enough of everything. What he needed was to feel more useful, he decided—not
too
useful, just a little.

His mind started going over employment options. He still worked as an investigator for a malpractice insurance firm in San Francisco. His case load had been light lately, but only by his choice. He could let them know that he was willing to take on more. There were also many hospitals and clinics that would gladly hire him for temporary
locum tenens
work, including a couple around here. He could arrange a schedule that would satisfy him and still leave him plenty of free time. That would be the ticket.

“…this country better be ready for a wake-up call, because it's about to get one,” a man's angry voice said on the television. In the background came the shouts and mutterings of a crowd.

Monks paused, his attention caught by something he could not quite identify.

“It's bad enough they don't give a damn about us, but then to come in here and treat us like
this
,” the speaker fulminated. “Those politicians better start realizing, there's twenty million people out here who got nothing. Outlaws, or damned near.”

Monks dropped the shrimp he was holding and strode to the TV. Sara glanced at him in surprise.

“What—” she started to say, but he held his hand up for silence.

The television screen showed a fiftyish white man with the look of the homeless—thin and bearded, wearing a greasy parka and mismatched pants and shirt—stabbing a
forefinger with violent emphasis as he spoke. A mob hundreds strong was grouped behind him, murmuring and erupting in shouts of anger and menace. The background looked somehow familiar—a slum in an older city, four-and five-story brick buildings with rickety back porches hung with laundry.

“There's an army already out there, and it's ready to fight
back
.” The speaker thrust his fist into the air in a Black Power salute. The crowd repeated the gesture, pumping fists up and down and raising its collective voice to a roar.

The TV screen switched back to the studio anchorwoman, well groomed and professionally poised.

“Again, Chicago police came down hard on an urban homeless camp after items were discovered there that might be linked to the ‘Calamity Jane' killings,” she said.

Chicago. That's where he'd seen those buildings—on the South Side, where he'd grown up, down by the Rock Island Railroad tracks.

“Officials deny that any brutality was used, but a videotape has surfaced of police rampaging through the area, evoking outraged comparisons to the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles,” the announcer went on. “Authorities say they're looking into the matter.

“Up next, a look at the weekend's sports. Stay with us.”

Sara's face was questioning.

“Freeboot said the same thing to me, in almost those same words,” Monks said. “The same number, twenty million outlaws. The riff about the army already being out there.”

He flipped to a different channel and this time caught the story as it was starting.

“…now we'll hear how a shocking murder in an Illinois gated community has led to a near riot in a homeless camp,” another anchorwoman said. “Here's Ted Derrick in Chicago. Ted?”

The screen flashed to a good-looking young man with a microphone, standing at the fringes of the same slum and crowd that the earlier newscast had shown.

“Kelly, events have taken a strange and even uglier turn here, since the murder yesterday of Walter Krieger and his wife,” he said. “This morning, items of Mrs. Krieger's lingerie, believe it or not, started turning up in this urban homeless camp—very expensive stuff, Italian silk and what-have-you, not the kind of thing you'd expect to find here.”

Sara was watching now with dismay, holding a chopping knife in a posture that looked unconsciously defensive.

“They stole her underwear?” she murmured. “
That's
creepy.”

“Police received an anonymous tip about the lingerie, is that right?” Kelly, the anchorwoman said.

“Correct. There's speculation that the tip came from the killers themselves, wanting to link this to the previous Calamity Jane murders.”

“
Why
are they doing this?” she said, leaning forward suddenly and slapping her hand down on her desk, with the petulance of a teeange girl.

Not just petulance, Monks thought. Fear. It could happen to
her
.

“Nobody seems to have any answers yet, Kelly.”

She leaned back, regaining her composure. “And there are complaints of brutality when police searched the camp?”

“Yes. Residents say they ran amok, with violence, threats, and racial slurs. Here's a video that was taken by a bystander.”

The screen changed again, this time to a scenario that looked like it could have been from a movie of a postapocalyptic world. Unsteady and amateurish, surreally lit by the garish flashing lights of squad cars, the footage showed a dozen policemen in full riot gear charging through an alley,
tearing apart cardboard shelters, kicking men in bedrolls and clubbing those who tried to stand.

“There's a sense that the police were taking out their frustrations on the homeless,” Ted's voice cut in. “Blaming and punishing
them
for the murders.”

The screen switched to the same homeless spokesman who had been on the earlier broadcast, repeating his strident shout:

“It's bad enough they don't give a damn about us, but then to come in here and treat us like
this—
”