The Reckoning (10 page)

Kate sat back, studied him, a warning sign. “You've got to try to…soften your heart about Rainey, Nick.”

Nick had tried that and had been doing okay until Alice Bayer died. He refrained from saying this, which was just as well. Kate was as wary of another fight as he was. They were still hoping to have another shot at parenthood. Fighting over how to raise someone else's child had cracked open a lot of good marriages.

Time to shift the topic.

“Anyway…”

“Anyway?”

She gave him a wry smile, dried her eyes.

“Anyway, to take an off-ramp, Beth got some good news.”

“Did she?” said Nick, happy to get away from the Rainey issue.

“Byron's estate cleared probate. She's getting most of it. It includes Byron's controlling shares in BD Securicom. She could get as much as seven million in stock and equities.”

“Good for her. But I thought the feds were going after his assets for selling classified technology to a foreign government?”

Kate gave him a look. “Well, the case sort of fell apart after those Chinese spies died in the plane crash and then you and Coker shot Byron dead, didn't it? He had never even been formally charged, because he was still trying for a plea bargain when he escaped.”

“So Beth is in the clear?”

“Yes. Finally.”

“Any plans?”

“She's thinking of buying a house here in Garrison Hills. Or perhaps down in Cap City, to be near her work. She thinks she's crowding us.”

Nick liked Beth, an older and less sunny version of Kate. Boonie Hackendorff had given her a job in his FBI office in Cap City. She was spending four nights a week down there and coming home on the weekends. Hannah was in the FBI day-care facility on Fountain Square, which left Axel and Rainey in Kate's care, and of course Eufaula's too.

Nick liked Beth's kids too, although he worried about Rainey's relationship with Axel. Axel looked up to Rainey like an older brother.

“Well, she's welcome to stay here as long as she wants. This was her house too, and Reed's. You guys all grew up here.”

“We do have a full house, don't we?” said Kate. “You sure it doesn't bother you?”

“No. I like it. While I was growing up in Santa Monica, there was Nora and me, the only adults in the house, and two aging hippie wing-nut parents smoking weed and going to protest marches to save the Delta smelt.”

“Of what?” she said.

“Pardon?”

“The Delta smelled of what?”

“It's a fish. The Delta—”

She laughed. “I know it's a fish. I was trying to make you smile.”

“Anyway, I like having a family.”

A pause. Kate gave him a tilted look. “Even a family with a schizophrenic kid?”

He smiled at her. “Long as I have you, we can handle anything.”

He yawned, stretched, feeling suddenly bone weary. He looked at the kitchen clock, a replica of an old railway station clock. It was ten after five.

“Bedtime, babe?”

Kate nodded, picked up the glasses, went to the sink and then back to the fridge, opened the door, leaned in, poking around inside. “See anything you want before we go to bed?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Yes,” he said, standing up and coming over to her. “And here it is.”

She laughed softly, straightened up, moved back into him, pushing her hips into him, leaning her head on his chest as he moved his arms around to hold her waist and belly.

“You don't
feel
sleepy right now,” she said.

“I don't feel Sneezy or Dopey either. What I
feel
is you.”

She sighed, relaxed into him. “I was wondering how long it would take for this nightgown to get to you.”

Around the same time that Kate and Nick were climbing the stairs in their house in Garrison Hills, Lemon Featherlight's bedside phone rang in the Charlottesville Hampton Inn. He caught it on the third ring, checked the clock—5:16 a.m.

“Lemon? Did I wake you?”

“Helga?”

“Yes. It is Helga, Lemon. You sound funny.”

That made Lemon smile.

Helga Sigrid was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, and still had an accent right out of Wagner. She was almost as tall as he was, and as Nordic as it was possible to get without disappearing altogether whenever the sun came out. And he was as tanned and dark and angular as American Indians can get. When they were together they looked like photo negatives of each other. The only physical quality they shared was that they both had green eyes.

“Yes, sorry. I guess I was asleep.”

A pause, during which she must have looked at a clock somewhere nearby. “Oh,
fjandinn!
Skit og fjandinn!
It's only five in the morning. I am in my office, and I lost track. Look, I will call you back, yes?”

Lemon was sitting up, reaching for the glass of water he had on the sideboard. “No, no…I'm up—I was already up—”

“You are already up because you had to answer the phone. I am such an
hálfviti
—”

“Helga, stop it. You're not a half-wit. Why are you working so late?”

“Actually I am working so early. I have just worked through the report from Dr. Burnham at the University of Kansas—”

Lemon was trying to kick-start his brain.

“I'm sorry, Helga—Dr. Burnham?”

“He's the expert in vertebrate paleontology at the University of Kansas. We sent Freddy out to him?”

Freddy
was her name for the sixth bone basket they had pulled out of the willow roots by the Tulip River. Like the other six—Adam, Billy, Charlie, Doug, Eric, and Gunther—Freddy was what looked like the fossilized remains of a human being, but subjected to some odd process that had turned it into a kind of delicate stone basket made of slender spokes that looked like ribs, curving up from a row of cylindrical objects that looked a lot like human vertebrae, but were not, or at least not exactly. Each “rib” tapered to a fine point as it arched upward and inward to create a closed arch over the interior, in the center of which was a single spherical object about the size of a five-pin bowling ball, covered in tiny seams that made the thing look like a model of the planet Mars, with those lines that everybody once took to be canals. The bone baskets varied in size, almost the way a child's skeleton would differ in size from that of an adult, and they varied in color as well, ranging from pale jade green to a deep ruby red.

No one in the forensic archaeology community had any idea how the hell they came to be, or exactly what they were made of, so Helga had sent four of them away to various other experts around the world, to see what they could make of them.

Apparently Helga had gotten her first answer tonight—this morning—from a paleontologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. That it was worth a call at five in the morning was clear in her voice, which was low and vibrating like an oboe.

“Yes, he is very excited too, Lemon. What he says is—”

“Helga, wait, hold on, I'm just going to put some clothes on.”

“You are in the nude?”

“Yeah, well, pretty much.”

“Too bad we do not have a videophone. I would like to see you in the nude.”

Helga, being Icelandic, had no boundaries about sex, which to her was a cross between Pilates and judo.

“Yes, well, everyone needs a goal. Wait one.”

He climbed out of the bed, padded across the thick carpet and slipped on the robe that came with the suite, flicked on the automatic coffee machine, sat down at the desk, picked up the extension.

“Okay. I'm good. Tell me.”

“First exciting thing is that he says Freddy contains a high amount of a metal called actinium. Actinium is a radioactive metal formed during nuclear reactions. It is also rare and he says it is also quite valuable. They use it as a neutron source—”

“Helga, wait—these things are radioactive?”

“Yes, but do not worry. They are not harmful to us. Or maybe not too much harmful, anyway. He had Freddy tested in their metallurgical facility—”

“So Freddy's not made of bone?”

“You remember how fossils work? How they are made? Say, if a bone is buried inside a matrix, like limestone, then gradually the organic material of the bone dissolves over many years, and since it is buried inside a matrix, it leaves a hollow space, like a mold, and over many thousands of years the minerals from the matrix fill up the space—the mold—left by the bone. If it is then brought back to the surface, and found, what it looks like is something that was once alive, but what it really is just an exact three-dimensional copy of whatever creature—”

“Okay, yes, I understand that. So Freddy and all the other bone baskets, are they really copies of what was once a human skeleton? Human remains?”

“Dr. Burnham says very much so. But he is also quite puzzled, because as you know, this fossilizing process takes thousands of years.”

“So these bones are seriously old?”

“He says some may be, and he is in touch with the others, the people who have Eric and Billy and Gunther, to see if there is an age difference. They are trying to carbon-date them. So here is the thing, Lemon, that is making for so much excitement. Dr. Burnham is absolutely convinced that Freddy was once a Native American Indian who died only maybe two hundred years ago.”

“But how can that be possible?”

“It
cannot
be possible. The excitement is because we are all so wrong. We do not know what we are talking about. We must totally rethink our entire profession. It is all quite thrilling, to be involved in something this significant.”

“Because Freddy is a fossil that's not old?”

“Yes, exactly. Because Freddy is a fossil of a Native American Indian just like you who was maybe twenty when he died and who is now radioactive because of the actinium in him. Somehow he got made into what he is all at once, in terms of paleontology, and not in a hundred thousand years.”

“I'm not getting this. Help me out here?”

“So, silly, if Freddy is made all at once, we have a puzzle, and the puzzle is, what made him?”

“What do you mean,
what
?”

“Sorry? I do not understand?”

“By
what
do you mean a
process
or…”

“A person? No, of course not. Not a person, Lemon. A
process
. A natural phenomenon we know nothing about. This is so exciting, Lemon. Much work will have to be done. Grant money must—”

“But whatever
made
it, is Freddy now made of the thing that used up all of his organic stuff?”

“You are talking as if Freddy was eaten and then spit out. This is crazy talk, Lemon.”

“But you said that whatever Freddy was in—”

“The matrix.”

“That is what Freddy became. I mean, the stuff he's made of now—”

“Would be the stuff of the matrix he was in, yes. But Freddy was not
devoured
, Lemon. He was simply
processed
. By
nature
, not by some animal.”

Lemon was thinking about the Kalona Ayeliski, the eater of souls. The Raven Mocker demon.

She needs to know about the “presence.” The thing in Crater Sink. The Kalona Ayeliski. She needs to know now.

“Helga, we need to talk. There's something you've got to know about.”

“You sound so serious, Lemon.”

“I am, Helga. Deadly serious.”

“Okay. I will be right over. Stay nude.”

Blue Eddie's restaurant, owned and operated by Blue Eddie Fessendein, had been designed to look like the bar in Edward Hopper's painting
Nighthawks,
complete with the white walls and the big curved mahogany bar and the overhead lights and the wraparound picture windows. The idea came from Blue Eddie's wife, Rosamunda, whose family had been “quality” and had, by some kind of osmosis, burdened Rosamunda with avant-garde pretensions.

Except that Blue Eddie's Diner wasn't in some nostalgic forties-era street corner in Chicago's South Side or Philly or Brooklyn, but at the intersection of Virtue Place and Atchafalaya Way, on the northern limits of Tin Town.

This was the kind of neighborhood where a wide-open wall of picture windows would have been stitched full of bullet holes or had an ash can tossed through it as soon as somebody could sober up enough to combine thinking about it with actually getting up and doing it.

This was a brutal fact of daily life in Tin Town that had, after fifteen years, persuaded Blue Eddie's wife Rosamunda to become Blue Eddie's ex-wife Rosamunda.

So Frank Barbetta and Charlie Danziger were sitting at a booth in the rear of a diner that looked exactly like the Hopper painting except all the windows were covered with chicken wire and steel bars, which made the place feel more like a dog pound than a diner.

It did, however, make beat cops feel safe, since there were only two ways in, the front door or through the kitchen, and the booth at the back had good lines of sight on either entrance, so there were usually uniform cops or detectives in or around the place, except for right now.

Tonight, this morning, whatever—it was still foggy and damp outside—Barbetta and Danziger had the place pretty much to themselves.

Blue Eddie was a fat man with long dirty blond hair and the general outlines of a walrus. A pale
blue
walrus, since some kind of blood condition had given his skin a vaguely bluish tint. Hence the name Blue Eddie.

He was sitting under a stopped wall clock on a badly overmatched swivel chair behind the antique cash register up front, listening to some kind of piano music, meticulously cleaning a .357 Llama Comanche revolver. He had recently taken this weapon away from a drunken Bandido biker who failed to anticipate that six feet and three hundred pounds of pale blue walrus might keep a baseball bat under the counter.

Blue Eddie had greeted them as they came in out of the rain with his usual witty banter—a guttural gargle in which the words
Hey dere Charlie Frankie how yoo doon
could be discerned by a practiced ear.

Barbetta ordered steak and eggs and a side of cornmeal muffins. Blue Eddie was an excellent cook and as long as you never, ever, under any circumstances, looked into the kitchen, you could enjoy almost everything that came out of it.

Danziger looked over the menu, Blue Eddie standing there staring down at him over the top of his half-glasses, breathing through his mouth and smelling of gun oil, cooked coffee, and bacon fat.

“Coffee, strong and black, three eggs over easy, bacon, sausage, side of pancakes with maple syrup—”

“Don god nun.”

“Don god nun which?” said Danziger, who knew Blue Eddie of old.

“Mepple srup.”

“God
ady
srup?”

“God anjamima.”

“That'll do fine.”

Blue Eddie oiled off to perpetrate their meals and left Barbetta and Danziger alone to contemplate the events of the night.

Which they did in silence, each man alone with his thoughts, until Blue Eddie came back with two cups and a carafe of strong black coffee. Danziger poured and Barbetta accepted a cigarette from Danziger's pack. Danziger lit them up with a match from the book with the ad for Blue Bird Bus Lines. They sat back into the battered green vinyl booth and looked out at the street, the rain pouring down, the fog shrouding the night, the streetlamps glowing through the mist like alien moons, both men feeling dead beat and vaguely blue.

“You think Gordon will talk?” asked Danziger.

Barbetta gave it a moment, sucking on his Camel. “Probably. Thing is, who's gonna believe him? And even if they do, it's gonna be ‘Forget it, Jake, it's
Chinatown.
' ”

“How come you didn't put him in the Tulip along with Ollie? I thought that was the plan.”

Barbetta looked down at the coffee cup in his hands. “Maybe I shoulda. Just didn't…feel like it. Tell you the truth, Charlie, I don't feel like me tonight. I mighta caught something, like a bug.”

“Like the flu?”

He shook his head. “No, not like the flu. Like a headache. A migraine…Listen, Charlie, where were you coming from when Ollie and Gordon took you on?”

“I was in the MountRoyal. Came out for a coffee, which I never got until just now.”

“So you heard all the sirens and shit?”

“Your news guy, Juko the Monkey Boy?”

“Yeah?”

“He told me a guy was trapped in a cave-in, down in the sewers. That was what the sirens were all about, he said.”

“Yeah. That was my call. I was on that.”

“What happened?”

Blue Eddie was coming with trays.

“Tell you in a minute.”

Barbetta waited until Blue Eddie had laid out their plates, set down a bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup, sides of toast, and strawberry jam.

Everything smelled wonderful and they spent some time digging into it. Danziger realized that he couldn't remember his last meal, and that made him think about this whole concept of being dead, but he pushed that down. Worry about that later.

They ate in silence, the only sound in the place the piano music Blue Eddie was listening to, something complex but soothing, slow but insistent. Classical, figured Danziger, and then he remembered that Blue Eddie was always playing classical music, that he would never play anything else, even when the beat cops were howling for
anything
else, please, for the love of Christ.

After a while Barbetta pushed his plate aside, wiped it with a piece of toast, popped the toast into his mouth, and wiped his hands on a napkin, looking out at the street.

A Niceville patrol car was gliding down the street, and the cop at the wheel rolled his window down, raised his hand to them, then made the
call me
sign with his thumb and little finger. He cruised on down the line and was gone.

Barbetta picked up his cell, flicked it on, stared down at the screen. “Jeez. Fuckin' hysterics,” he said. “Fifteen messages and a buncha texts—Mavis, the duty desk. You'd think I never went freelancing after hours.”

“What's going on?”

He read down the screen, touching it with his thumb, frowning a bit as he read. “Busy night. No wonder we had Tin Town all to ourselves. All the squads are busy up north. All points out for a red Benz SLS coupe. Another from Mavis Crossfire for a guy wanted for a home invasion up in The Glades. Nasty—I was there when Nick got the call. Suspect may be driving a 1975 blue Caddy Fleetwood plate number Alpha Romeo 2987 Zebra registered to a Maris Yarvik—I
know
him, he owns Yarvik GM on Peachtree. Car ran a red-light camera near the Glades thing…That red Benz BOLO is connected to what happened in…what I was gonna say…in the cave.”

He shut the phone off, set it aside.

“The cave-in?” Danziger said, prompting.

“Yeah. Jeez. Pretty fucking extreme.”

Barbetta laid it out for Danziger, the whole thing, the Thorsson couple getting wiped out by this Jordan Dutrow kid, the kid's dying declaration to Lacy Steinert and Nick Kavanaugh.

Danziger heard him out while he finished his meal, pausing only when Blue Eddie came back to clear the table, after which he set down a Kool-Aid jug full of Chianti and two juice glasses with kittens and butterflies romping around the outside.

Barbetta and Danziger watched him lumber back to his swivel chair and pick up his Llama Comanche. The clock on the wall above him was eternally stopped at 3:48 in the morning. The rumor ran that it was 3:48 in the morning when Rosamunda had bailed out on Blue Eddie.

Barbetta seemed to be drifting, so Danziger brought him back. “So this kid, Dutrow, he said he had something in his head? Like he was hearing voices?”

“Not voices. A voice. Kinda like a whiny buzzing sound, it was in his head. Thing was, we could all sort of hear it: the EMT folks; Jack Hennessey the fire guy, he was there; I think also Lacy and Nick. Like in the air all around, faint, like it was a long way off, or real high up at the edge of what we can hear.”

“And it was screwing up the radios?”

“Yeah, seemed to be anyway.”

“Okay…and?”

“And, well, okay, don't laugh, but I think it's in my head now.”

Danziger let that simmer for a bit. “
In
your head?”

“Yeah. I know. Crazy. But I can kinda feel it, right here—” He tapped the side of his left temple, where a vein was throbbing.

“It goes up and down, in and out, fades away and then gets stronger. The kid said you'd be okay if you didn't listen to it, if you didn't start hearing words. So far I'm doing okay, but…”

“But tonight?”

“Yeah. Might be affecting me, anyway. Thirty years, I never fired a shot in anger. Not one. And tonight, I take Ollie Kupferberg's head off for looking at me sideways.”

Danziger kept his hands on the table, and said nothing, only nodded.

“And I do this after I start hearing this thing in my head. So, I'm wondering, you know…I'm
wondering
. About all of this. I'm just…trying to think it through.”

He sat back, looked at Danziger. “And then there's
you
, Charlie.”

“How come me?”

“Well, Charlie…you were saying, inna car there, that you were having trouble remembering shit. Recent shit, not way back stuff.”

“Yeah. Some of it's coming back, bits and pieces.”

“Like what?”

“Like I remember being in an old garage up in the Belfair Range—”

“The Belfair Pike Saddlery?”

“Yeah. And this matchbook here—”

He held it up.

“The Blue Bird Bus. Got this from your news guy when I bought the cigarettes. It means something, me getting it, like a clue, but I can't figure out what. Not yet, anyway.”

Barbetta was nodding. “Yeah, right, all of a piece, this weird shit, it seems to be everywhere. All of a sudden, we got home invasions and crazy shit everywhere…including me and you…So here's the thing…gonna be blunt here.”

“Always the best way.”

“Yeah. Okay. Way I see this, either you've got amnesia or you're dead. One or the other. If you've got amnesia, it means you didn't really get shot and killed during a gunfight with some mobsters up at your ranch, and your whole cop funeral was faked for some conspiracy spy-shit federal dickhead reason we can't think of…”

“Personally, I'm leaning toward that.”

“Because if we go the other way, you being actually dead, I think we're both fucked.”

Danziger considered that. “You mean, if I'm dead, how can you see me?”

“Yeah, and Blue Eddie over there, and Gordon and Ollie and Juko. Everybody's seeing you, including me.”

“Therefore I'm not dead.”

Barbetta rubbed his temple, sipped at his juice glass of Chianti, grinned at Danziger. “Maybe not all the way dead.”

“You're either dead or not dead, Frank. Like you can't be sort of pregnant. I don't
feel
dead, Frank, whatever that feels like.”

“I'm being serious here, Charlie. If you're not all the way dead yet, maybe I'm not either. And that's why I can see you. Because of this thing that's moved into my head. There's another thing. Whatever's in my head, it doesn't like you.”

Danziger sat back, his smile going away.

“Not
me
, you asshole,” said Barbetta. “The
thing
in my head. It's gone all quiet, like it doesn't want to get noticed by you. I think it's…afraid of you. I can hardly hear it now. But before I got to you, down by the hotel, it was so loud it was like a dental drill going right through my skull.”

“Migraine, that's all.”

“No. Not a fucking migraine. Brenda had fucking migraines, so I know what they are. Compared to this thing in my head, a fucking migraine is—”

There was a burbling sound in the night air, and they both looked out the window. A sleek red blur, low and menacing, rolled out of the fogbank, shimmering in the light from the diner, gliding through the mist, headlights raking across the window, flaring into their eyes, moving on slowly. It was a scarlet Benz. It slithered through the light from Blue Eddie's and vanished into the fogbank again.

“Dammit,” said Barbetta, standing up, flicking his cell phone back on, looking straight down at Danziger, throwing some money on the table. “Yeah, Central, this is Barbetta…yeah, I know I know. I was just cruisin'…Well, fuckin' sue me…Listen, willya, listen…I'm rolling at Blue Eddie's…I just saw that red Benz everybody is looking for…Christ, Billy, of course I'm fucking sure! It's a fucking SLS AMG, some piece of German steel like that, fucking quarter mill a pop, we only got two in the whole state…I'm rolling now! Like right fucking now! Get some cars on it…yeah, that's it, Blue Eddie's Diner!”

He put the phone in his pocket. He was up and moving fast down the aisle, looking back. “You coming, Charlie?”

“No. I can't. I gotta figure things out.”

Barbetta stopped there, looking at Danziger.

“Hey, Charlie, I don't see you again, well, you were a great cop, and you died pretty good—”

“Yeah, well, I love you too. Now fuck off.”

“Okay. You got my number. I gotta fly.”

He was at the front now. Hand on the door, he paused, looked back again. “Charlie, one last thing. What about the buzzing in my head? If it's really afraid of you, got any idea what I should do?”