The Everborn (13 page)

***

Melony Polito had to remind herself of the reasons for her arrival at a pit-stop corner bar known insipidly as
The Crow Job
. The black painted wood cut-out of a sickly, red neon-laced crow intermittently tipped a yellow neon straw hat beside the heralding rooftop
Crow Job
sign, bringing to Melony’s mind the flock of crows in Disney’s
Dumbo
singing a twisted variation of seeing an elephant die in there, rather than fly. And by the look of things, more than
that.

And the handful of rent-a-pussies dispersed amongst the overflow of parking lot slum mobiles appeared like extras in a John Waters movie lost in the used car lot of a third-world country. But trailing along the rickety wooden railway leading from the outer sidewalk and encasing the double front entrance doors opposite the lively Friday night motor traffic of Stewart Avenue stood a spirited and sizeable line of above-average bar patrons. Above-average, much like Melony herself visiting
this
dive, or at least above-average
looking
.

And just like Melony, most likely, a good many of these anxious party-mongers would not dare to risk their necks and wallets around such a place on any night, if not for the wow and the newsworthy spectacle of one of modern day’s most celebrated novelists jammin’ with his own rock n’ roll band at a premiere gig. What hit the public even more was how Ralston Cooper negotiated temporary ownership of the bar just to ensure his own total control over the entire venture.

And contrary to press jargon, this writer’s venture was in Mr. Cooper’s eyes anything but experimental.

This band was going to
fly
.

And yes, even fly like the Disney crows’
Dumbo
.

But Melony was here for more than this. Sure, she had read more than a Cooper book or two. Even still, her interest in Ralston Cooper went to anything truly
but
his frighteningly entertaining works. Frankly, she was more into King, like the other remaining half of the world.

Here, at
The Crow Job
, Melony Polito was a private investigator doing her job, not for anyone else this time but for the ambitious investigative efforts of herself and her husband, for blowing the lid wide open on a case shrouded in secrecy and years of pursuit.

Here, at
The Crow Job.

Melony hoped she hadn’t gone nuts. She continued towards the entrance, towards the two door attendants, one big and chunky, one big and tall, and they looked like professional wrestling equivalents of Abbott & Costello keeping alert stances at the head of the line. They checked the opened flaps of wallets drooping like leather and velcro tongues before them and beneath the scrutiny of each of their flashlight beams, each of them nodding, allowing a few to enter, halting the next few with outstretched hands, waiting for the next unconcerned bar regular to escape to a less distressing waterhole, then checking the I.D.’s of the next in the herd.

Melony stifled any exhibition of nervousness and lifted her purse from her side. Still approaching the entrance, she unsnapped the purse and withdrew a glossy I.D. badge almost instantly, confidently prepared for the impending confrontation she was stepping into. Behind her, the sonorous blasts and pulses of a familiar car alarm rang suddenly and disturbingly from the street.
If that’s my car
, she flashed a thought, and then....

“Okay okay lady, I got a lot goin’ on here. Press is to the right of the stage. We have a special place for ‘em. Otherwise, by now, you’ll find yourself in standing room only.”

With that hassle-free entrance, Melony found herself the next second immersed within
The Crow Job’s
night world. Inside, it was difficult not to exhibit nervousness for one usually as carefully self-guarded as her. It had been quite a season since she’d found herself within an environment so loose and so...so free. It was almost like being single again, particularly so without Max’s presence beside her as in countless stuffy business parties. Here, it was less difficult to stifle nervousness once one took the chance to unwind. And God, did Melony need unwinding.

She had to show her press pass once more, a legitimate one as she and Max indeed published their own Diverse Arcanum Newsletter to worldwide UFO enthusiasts, and the cashier at a wooden cubbyhole counter motioned her on past a clinkety turnstile.

Melony clasped her purse shut and refit its strap over her shoulder. At first, she could move no further than the dawdling Cooper fans before her, the heads of each turning about and eyes roaming, scanning for unoccupied seats and tables without realizing they’d do better conducting their search while moving themselves onward. Some were more enthusiastic than others, Cooper books both hardcover and soft clasped within hands sweaty for celebrity signature. Some bopped their heads and bobbed their bodies to the rhythmic pulsations of rock ballads and top forty riffs of present and yesteryear jukebox jamming. Others crowded about the stage front, beckoning and conversing with the hired hands busying to double-check amps and instruments for the impending spectacle. A few bouncers dispersed periodically to clear the stage front until one of them thought it best to position himself there until the show began. An event clearly unorganized, Melony noted.

She now was allowed room enough to approach a handful of carpeted downward steps until an embracing, necking couple barred her from completing her descent, pitting her momentarily against a polished brass handrail. Turning into it, she found herself face to face with her own full-length image in a wall mirror stretched across the expanse of the sloping side wall.

She had admittedly dressed for the club scene as though she
were
single, purposely undertaking the outing alone for a low profile’s sake despite the risk of danger. And alone as she was, her chances of intimate chats with those questionably human were undoubtedly at their greatest.

Her Central American heritage graced her with skin naturally dark, yet unobvious enough to be mistaken by some for a tan. Grapevine swirls of black held at bay the lighter and brighter splash of sunset yellow/orange and peach of a summer pullover dress, which clung limply from shoulder strap strings and folded scantily outward above medium breasts which appeared braless. The outfit displayed her figure nearly to the point of flaunting it, yet it was a figure to be flaunted, all the way down to the black nylons stretching downward and into low-heeled shoes. Shoes, which supported the stance of a mid-thirties black-haired professional who carried herself well but scarcely found time enough to be aware of her own beauty.

Melony Polito was stunned with a self-admiration such as this and so suddenly, and here, in such a public place. Perhaps a big piece of the nervousness pie which plagued and grappled with her will to stifle it found its blame within her own timid self-consciousness in the very way she presented herself tonight.

Or perhaps it was something more, something she was growing all the more recently dissatisfied with, a yearning, a void to be filled, a piece of her soul that once was but now lay flooded with marital and occupational duty, and the desire to find something
more
.

Something
out there
.

Something perhaps as close as somewhere in this crowd.

Moving right along and released from the stall of smoochers, Melony made her way onto the
Crow Job’s
main floor. People with drinks pushed past her, table chairs dodged her path as their occupants rose up or sat down or arched forwards or tipped backwards on rear chair legs. She rounded a lengthy stool-studded bar and overcame the darting trays of barhop traffic, her attentions struggling between the human obstacle course about her, the urgency of her mission to locate the faces of those she’d come for, and to find her own table and
sit down.

Press is to the right of the stage....

The stage was opposite the bar. She followed the capillary flow of one-at-a-time commuters until she was in the area to the stage’s confined right, where the round wooden club tables narrowed into two rows back to back. In the center of the back row, she found her empty table. A grey card propped against the bubbly red glass of a candleholder displayed her name above DIVERSE ARCANUM NEWSLETTER, MALIBU, CA. The table was small, surrounded by two lonely chairs of padded wood. She at last sat down and slid her purse onto the tabletop, then relocated her purse to her lap upon seeing how the table space doubled without it.

Every table around her was chocked-full with assumed press agents, or perhaps music industry moguls, each one in every aspect looking no more or less important or enthusiastic or even reckless than anyone else she observed. A short distance away, two barhops separated, one in Melony’s direction. As much as she needed a drink by then, she couldn’t forsake the need to focus on faces. To search for secret souls.

Maxwell had been on a personal assignment in a village on the southwestern border of Brazil two mornings ago when his wife/secretary had contacted him with the news. He was busily researching a case where half the village’s population of children vanished overnight with barely a trace, to emerge twelve days later from the forest unharmed but for surgical punctures on their ankles and behind their left ears.

Children.

Vanishing....

Much like the six-year-old black child whose body was found freshly mutilated last weekend in the alley between
The Crow Job
and the neighboring apartment complex, the news of which reached Melony through close law enforcement peers who kept in touch with issues of the insolvably unspoken. It was news enough to contact Max, for Max to wash his hands quickly of third-world close encounters struts and to hurry his way back to Southern Cal, for Mel herself to jot down orders and to prepare and plan pinpoint spur-of-the moment itineraries and urgent strategies.

No ordinary homicide could cause such a secretive stir as to involve the likes of Max and Mel, and although Melony herself had made ordinary investigations including homicide her occupational fortè, Maxwell’s unwilling involvement in this particular matter had become the backbone in his search for the unknown years ago, when it all started.

For the body of young Nigel had been declared missing and assumed dead since his own encounter with the unknown within the bowels of a condemned building in 1968. Maxwell had been there. And so had someone else. And something else.

That someone and something were alive to this day, and had left a trail by which Max himself and later Melony followed, a history of incident and mishap which led to Nigel’s discovery, the discovery of a boy still six years old after three decades, murdered as he was thought to have been, but found as though he’d been murdered that very same day.

And after three decades, three of the beings which came to be involved were now together, whether or not either one knew it, and were now together
here
. At a two-bit dive called
The Crow Job.

And Melony Polito was right there with them.

Not really knowing what she was getting herself into, or how high into the clouds she had flown.

9.

Andrew Erlandson at the Crow Job

For heaven’s sake and all the saints, meet someone....

Andrew Erlandson had ceased wondering what Bari had meant by the time he’d completed his journey to the end of the block and made his way past the flock of Cooper fans and followers and through the front entrance of
The Crow Job
. He ceased wondering because wondering wouldn’t do him any good and he knew it, when it came to Bari matters. But he also ceased wondering because Bari tended to be right with those trivial prophesies of hers, right on the nail, and he knew that, too.

He’d rather not deal with that right now.

Besides, he had enough to wonder about with the Ralston show and all; if Ralston’s band sucked, Andrew would never hear the end of it, simply because (like it or not) he and the mega-ego mock horror writer were so damn close. There was another matter, too, regarding the completion of Andrew’s latest ghostwritten novel for Ralston....

Now that the manuscript for the latest and brand newest of Ralston books was presented to his majesty hot off the typewriter key-stroked assembly line, Andrew wondered how high the book would fly.

Not how high it will fly with the public, the millions of fans returning time and again to flip their millions of coins into the addicting story-snack machine that was Ralston Cooper. That was a given.

Andrew wondered how high it will fly with
Ralston himself
.

More often than not, Andrew found himself anticipating
Ralston’s
own appreciation for the latest written work rather than the public’s.
Ralston's
appreciation was
personal
, considering how
he
was the one Andrew was truly writing for. That, and considering how Ralston was the only person besides Andrew who knew of their joint little secret, how he was the only one from whom the true author could directly receive credit as well as praise.