“May I keep this?” I asked Lilly.
She nodded. “It feels dirty. I don’t want to touch it.”
We left Lilly there with a cup of tea and with hope that, if it could have been measured, might not have equaled the volume of juice she could squeeze from the lemon wedge on her saucer.
Descending the porch steps, Sasha said, “Bobby, you better bring Jenna Wing back here as quick as you can.”
I gave him the sketch of the crow. “Show her this. Ask her if she remembers any case Louis worked on…anything that might explain this.”
As we crossed the backyard, Sasha took my hand.
Bobby said, “Who’s spinning music when you’re here?”
“Doogie Sassman’s covering for me,” she said.
“Mr. Harley-Davidson, the man-mountain love machine,” Bobby said, leading us along the brick walk beside the garage. “What program format does he favor—head-banging heavy metal?”
“Waltzes,” Sasha said. “Fox-trots, tangos, rumbas, cha-chas. I’ve warned him he has to stick with the tune sheet I gave him, ’cause otherwise, he’d just play dance music. He loves ballroom dancing.”
Pushing open the gate, Bobby stopped, turned, and stared at Sasha in disbelief. To me, he said, “You knew this?”
“No.”
“Ballroom dancing?”
Sasha said, “He’s won some prizes.”
“Doogie? He’s as big as a Volkswagen Beetle.”
“The old Volkswagen Beetle or the new one?” I asked.
“The new one,” Bobby said.
“He’s a big guy, but he’s very graceful,” Sasha said.
“He has a tight turning radius,” I told Bobby.
The thing that happens so easily among us, the thing that makes us so close, was happening again. The groove or rhythm or mood or whatever it is we so routinely fall into with one another—we were falling into it again. You can handle anything, including the end of the world as we know it, if at your side are friends with the proper attitude.
Bobby said, “I thought Doogie hangs out in biker bars, not ballrooms.”
“For fun, he’s a bouncer in a biker bar two evenings a week,” Sasha said, “but I don’t think he hangs out there otherwise.”
“For fun?” Bobby said.
“He enjoys breaking heads,” Sasha said.
“Who doesn’t,” I said.
As we followed Bobby into the alleyway, he said, “The dude is a way skilled audio engineer, rides a Harley like he came out of the womb on it, dates awesome women who make any Ms. Universe look like the average resident of an oyster shell, fights drunken psycho bikers for fun, wins prizes for ballroom dancing—this sounds like a bro we want with us when we go back to Wyvern.”
I said, “Yeah, my big worry has been what we’ll do if there’s a tango competition.”
“Exactly.” To Sasha, Bobby said, “You think he’d be up for it?”
She nodded. “I think Doogie’s always up for everything.”
I expected to find a police cruiser or an unmarked sedan behind the garage, and unamused authority figures waiting for us. The alley was deserted.
A pale gray swath of sky outlined the hills to the east. The breeze raised a chorus of whispers from the windbreak of eucalyptus trees along the canyon crest, as if warning me to hurry home before the morning found me.
“And Doogie has all those tattoos,” I said.
“Yeah,” Bobby said, “he’s got more tattoos than a drunken sailor with four mothers and ten wives.”
To Sasha, I said, “If you’re getting into any hostile situation, and it involves a super-huge guy covered with tattoos, you want him on your side.”
“It’s a fundamental rule of survival,” Bobby agreed.
“It’s discussed in every biology textbook,” I said.
“It’s in the Bible,” Bobby said.
“Leviticus,” I said.
“It’s in Exodus, too,” Bobby said, “and Deuteronomy.”
Alerted by movement and by a glimpse of eyeshine, Bobby snapped the shotgun into firing position, I drew the Glock from my shoulder holster, Sasha pulled her revolver, and we swung toward the perceived threat, forming a manic tableau of paranoia and rugged individualism that would have been perfection if we’d just had one of those pre-Revolutionary War flags that featured a coiled serpent and the words
Don’t Tread on Me.
Twenty feet north of us, along the eastern side of the alley, making no sound to compete with the soughing of the wind, coyotes appeared among the trunks of the eucalyptus trees. They came over the canyon crest, through the bunchgrass and wild flax, between bushy clumps of goatsbeard.
These prairie wolves, smaller than true wolves, with narrower muzzles and lighter variegated coats, possess much of the beauty and charm of wolves, of all dogs. Even in their benign moments, however, after they have hunted and fed to contentment, when they are playing or sunning in a meadow, they still look dangerous and predatory to such an extent that they are not likely to inspire a line of cuddly stuffed toys, and if one of them is chosen as the ideal photogenic pet by the next resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we can be reasonably sure that the Antichrist has his finger on the nuclear trigger.
Slinking out of the canyon, among the trees, into the alley in the earliest ashen light of this cloud-shrouded morning, the coyotes looked post-apocalyptic, like the hellish hunters in a world long past its doomsday. Heads thrust forward, yellow eyes glowing in the gloom, ears pricked, jaws cracked in humorless serrated grins, they arrived and gathered and turned to face us in dreamlike silence, as though they had escaped from a Navajo mystic’s peyote-inspired vision.
Ordinarily, coyotes travel overland in single file, but these came in a swarm, and once in the alleyway, they stood flank-to-flank, closer than any canine pack, huddling together rather like a colony of rats. Their breath, hotter than ours, smoked in the coolish air. I didn’t attempt to count them, but they numbered more than thirty, all adults, no pups.
We could have tried to get into Sasha’s Explorer and pull the doors shut, but we all sensed that any sudden movement from us or any show of fear might invite a vicious assault. The most we dared to do was slowly reverse a step or two, until our backs were to some degree protected by the pair of parked vehicles.
Coyote attacks on adult human beings are rare but not unknown. Even in hunting pairs or in a pack, they will stalk and chase down a man or woman only if desperate with hunger because a drought has lowered the population of mice, rabbits, and other small wildlife. Young children, left unattended in a park or in a backyard adjacent to open range, are more often seized and savaged and dragged away, but these incidents are also rare, especially considering the vast expanses of territory that human beings and coyotes inhabit together throughout the West.
I was most worried not by what coyotes might usually do, but by the perception that these were not
ordinary
animals. They could not be expected to behave as usual for their kind; the danger was in their difference.
Although all their heads were turned in our direction, I didn’t feel we were the primary focus of their attention. They seemed to be raptly gazing past us, toward something in the distance, though for its eight-or ten-block length, the alley was quiet and deserted.
Abruptly, the pack moved.
Although living in families, coyotes are nonetheless fierce individualists, driven by personal needs, insights, moods. Their independence is evident even when they hunt together, but this pack moved with uncanny coordination, with the instinctive synchronization of a cruising school of piranhas, as though they shared one mind, one purpose.
Ears laid back flat against their skulls, jaws cracked wide as if to bite, heads lowered, hackles raised, shoulders hunched, tails tucked in and held low, the coyotes raced in our direction but not directly toward us. They kept to the east half of the alley, most of them on the blacktop but some on the dusty verge, gazing past us and straight ahead, as if focused intently on prey that was invisible to human eyes.
Neither Bobby nor I came close to firing on the pack, because we were at once reminded of the behavior of the flock of nighthawks in Wyvern. At first the birds seemed to have gathered with malicious intent, then for the purpose of celebration, and in the end their only violent impulse was to self-destruction. With these coyotes, I didn’t sense the bleak aura of sorrow and despair that had radiated from the nighthawks; I didn’t feel they were searching for their own final solution to whatever fever gripped them. They appeared to be a danger to someone or something, but not to us.
Sasha held her revolver in a two-hand grip as the pack streamed toward us. But as they began to pass without turning a single yellow eye in our direction and without issuing one bark or snarl, she slowly lowered the weapon until the muzzle was aimed at the pavement near her feet.
These predators, breath steaming from their mouths, appeared ectoplasmic here on the cusp of dawn. If not for the slap of paws on blacktop and a musky odor, they might have been only ghosts of coyotes, engaged in one last haunt during the final minutes of this spirit-friendly night, before making their way back to the rough fields and vales in which their moldering bones awaited them.
As the final ranks of the pack poured past us, we turned to stare after the swift procession. They dwindled into the distance, chased by the gray light from the east, as though following the night toward the western horizon.
Quoting Paul McCartney—after all, she was a songwriter as well as a deejay—Sasha said, “Baby, I’m amazed.”
“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” I said. “We’ve seen way more than this tonight, stranger stuff.”
“A catalog of the mondo weird,” Bobby assured her.
In the darker distance, the coyotes seemed to shimmer out of existence, though I suspect that they slipped from the alleyway, over the canyon crest, returning to the deeper realms from which they had ascended.
“We haven’t seen the last of them,” Sasha predicted, and her voice was shaded by a disquieting note of precognition.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Definitely,” she insisted with quiet conviction. “And the next time they come around, they’ll be in an uglier mood.”
Breaking open the shotgun and shaking the shell from the chamber into the palm of his hand, Bobby said, “Here comes the sun.”
He was not to be taken literally; the day was overcast. The relentless morning slowly stripped off the black hood of the night and turned its dead, gray face upon us.
A solid cloud cover affords me no substantial protection against the destructive force of the sun. Ultraviolet light penetrates even black thunderheads, and while the burn may build more slowly than on a searingly bright day, the irreparable damage to my skin and eyes nevertheless accumulates. Sunscreen lotions protect well against the less serious forms of skin cancer, but they have little or no ability to prevent melanoma. Consequently, I have to seek shelter from even a daytime sky as gray-black as the char and ashes in the cold bowl of Satan’s pipe after he’s smoked a handful of souls.
To Bobby, I said, “We’re no good without a little sleep. Grab some mattress time, then meet Sasha and me at my house between noon and one o’clock. We’ll put together a plan and a search party.”
“You can’t go back to Wyvern till sundown, but maybe some of us ought to get moving sooner,” he said.
“I’m for that. But there’s no point in quartering off Wyvern and searching every foot of it. That would take too long, forever. We’d never find them in time,” I said, leaving unspoken the thought that we might already be too late. “We don’t go back until we’ve got the tracker we need.”
“Tracker?” Sasha asked, fitting her revolver into the holster under her denim jacket.
“Mungojerrie,” I said, tucking away my 9-millimeter.
Bobby blinked. “The cat?”
“He’s more than a cat,” I reminded Bobby.
“Yeah, but—”
“And he’s our only hope.”
“Cats can track?”
“I’m sure this one can.”
Bobby shook his head. “I’m never gonna be at home in this brave new smart-animal world, bro. It’s like I’m living in a maximum-wacky Donald Duck cartoon, but one where, between the laughs, dudes get their guts ripped out.”
“The world according to Edgar Allan Disney,” I said. “Anyway, Mungojerrie hangs out around the marina. Pay a visit to Roosevelt Frost. He should know how to find our tracker.”
Out of the pool of shadows in the canyon east of us, the eerie ululant cries of coyotes rose, a sound like no other on earth, like the tormented and hungry voices that banshees would have if banshees existed.
Sasha put her right hand under her jacket, as if she might draw her revolver again.
Such a frenzied choir of coyotes is a common sound at night, usually signifying that a hunt has reached its bloody end, that some prey as large as a deer has been brought down by the pack, or that the full moon is exerting its peculiar pull, but you rarely hear such a chilling chorus on this side of the sunrise. As much as anything that we had yet experienced, this sinister serenade, which escalated in volume and passion, filled me with foreboding.
“Sharky,” Bobby said.
“White pointers,” I said, which is surfer lingo for great whites, the most dangerous of all sharks.
I climbed into the passenger seat of the Explorer, and by the time Sasha started the engine, Bobby pulled past us in his Jeep, heading for Jenna Wing’s house across town.
I didn’t expect to see him for at least seven hours, but here at the dawn of April 12, we didn’t realize that we were entering a day of epic bad news. The nasty surprises were coming at us like a long series of triple overhead monoliths churned up by a typhoon in the far Pacific.
17
Sasha parked the Explorer in the driveway, because my father’s car was in the garage, as were boxes of his clothing and his personal effects. The day would come, with his death far enough in the past, when I would not feel that disposing of his belongings would diminish him in my memory. I was not at that day yet.
In this matter, I know I’m being illogical. My memories of my dad, which give me sustaining strength every day, are not related to what clothes he wore on any particular occasion, to his favorite sweater or his silver-rimmed reading glasses. His
things
do not keep him vivid in my mind; he stays with me because of his kindness, his wit, his courage, his love, his joy in life. Yet twice in the three weeks since I’ve packed up his clothes, I’ve torn open one of the boxes in the garage simply to have a look at those reading glasses, at that sweater. In such moments I can’t escape the truth that I’m not coping as well as I pretend to be. The cataract of grief is a longer drop than Niagara, and I guess I’ve not yet reached the river of acceptance at the bottom.
When I got out of the Explorer, I didn’t hurry into the house, though the grizzled morning was now almost fully upon us. The day did little to restore the color that the night had stolen from the world; indeed, the smoky light seemed to deposit an ash-gray residue on everything, muting tones, dulling shiny surfaces. The cumulative UV damage I would sustain in this shineless sunshine was a risk worth taking to spend one minute admiring the two oaks in the front yard.
These California live oaks, beautifully crowned and with great canopies of strong black limbs, tower over the house, shading it in every season, because unlike eastern oaks, they don’t drop their leaves in winter. I have always loved these trees, have climbed high into them on many nights to get closer to the stars, but lately they mean more to me than ever because they remind me of my parents, who had the strength to make the sacrifices in their own lives required to raise a child with my disabilities and who gave me the shade to thrive.
The weight of this leaden dawn had pressed all the wind out of the day. The oaks were as monolithic as sculpture, each leaf like a petal of cast bronze.
After a minute, calmed by the deep stillness of the trees, I crossed the lawn to the house.
This Craftsman-period structure features stacked ledger stone and weather-silvered cedar under a slate roof, with deep eaves and an expansive front porch, all modern lines yet natural and close to the earth. It is the only home I’ve ever known, and considering both the average life span of an XPer and my talent for getting my ass in a sling, it’s no doubt where I’ll live until I die.
Sasha had unlocked the front door by the time I got there, and I followed her into the foyer.
All the windows are covered with pleated shades throughout the daylight hours. Most of the lights feature rheostats, and when we must turn them on, we keep them dim. For the most part, I live here in candlelight filtered through amber or rose glass, in a soft-edged shadowy ambience that would meet with the approval of any medium who claims to be able to channel the spirits of the dead.
Sasha settled in a month previous, after Dad’s death, moving out of the house provided for her as part of her compensation as general manager of KBAY. But already, during daylight hours, she moves from room to room guided largely by the faint sunshine pressing against the lowered window shades.
She thinks my shrouded world calms the soul, that life in the low illumination of Snowland is soothing, even romantic. I agree with her to an extent, though at times a mild claustrophobia overcomes me and these ever-present shadows seem like a chilling preview of the grave.
Without touching a light switch, we went upstairs to my bathroom and took a shower together by the lambent glow of a decorative glass oil lamp. This tandem event wasn’t as much fun as usual, not even as much fun as riding two on a surfboard, because we were physically weary, emotionally exhausted, and worried about Orson and Jimmy; all we did was bathe, while I gave Sasha a seriously condensed version of my pursuit of the kidnapper, the sighting of Big Head, Delacroix, and the events in the egg room.
I phoned Roosevelt Frost, who lives aboard
Nostromo,
a fifty-six-foot Bluewater coastal cruiser berthed in the Moonlight Bay marina. I got an answering machine and left a message asking him to come to see me as soon after twelve o’clock as was convenient and to bring Mungojerrie if possible.
I also called Manuel Ramirez. The police operator said that he was currently out of the office, and at my request, she switched me to his voice mail.
After reciting the license number of the Suburban, which I had memorized, I said, “That’s what Jimmy Wing’s kidnapper was driving. If you care, give me a call after noon.”
Sasha and I were turning back the covers on the bed in my room when the doorbell rang. Sasha pulled on a robe and went to see who had come calling.
I slipped into a robe, too, and padded barefoot to the head of the stairs to listen.
I took the 9-millimeter Glock with me. Moonlight Bay wasn’t as full of mayhem as Jurassic Park, but I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if the doorbell had been rung by a velociraptor.
Instead, it was Bobby, six hours early. When I heard his voice, I went downstairs.
The foyer was dimly lighted, but above the Stickley-style table, the print of Maxfield Parrish’s
Daybreak
glowed as though it were a window on a magical and better world.
Bobby looked grim. “I won’t take long. But you have to know about this. After I took Jenna Wing to Lilly’s, I swung by Charlie Dai’s house.”
Charlie Dai—whose birth name in correct Vietnamese order was Dai Tran Gi, before he Americanized it—is the associate editor and senior reporter at the
Moonlight Bay Gazette,
the newspaper owned by Bobby’s parents. The Halloways are estranged from Bobby, but Charlie remains his friend.
“Charlie can’t write about Lilly’s boy,” Bobby continued, “at least not until he gets clearance, but I thought he ought to know. In fact…I figured he might already know.”
Charlie is among the handful in Moonlight Bay—a few hundred out of twelve thousand—who know that a biological catastrophe occurred at Wyvern. His wife, Dr. Nora Dai—formerly Dai Minh Thu-Ha—is now a retired colonel; while in the army medical corps, she commanded all medical services at Fort Wyvern for six years, a position of great responsibility on a base with more than fifty thousand population. Her medical team had treated the wounded and the dying on the night when some researchers in the genetics lab, having reached a crisis in the secret process of becoming, surprised their associates by savagely assaulting them. Nora Dai knew too much, and within hours of those strange events, she and Charlie were confronted with accusations that their immigration documents, filed twenty-six years ago, were forged. This was a lie, but unless they assisted in suppressing the truth of the Wyvern disaster and its aftermath, they would be deported without notice, and without standard legal procedures, to Vietnam, from which they would never be able to return. Threats were also made against the lives of their children and grandchildren, because those who have orchestrated this cover-up do not believe in half measures.
Bobby and I don’t know why his parents have allowed the
Gazette
to be corrupted, publishing a carefully managed version of the local news. Perhaps they believe in the rightness of the secrecy. Perhaps they don’t understand the true horror of what’s happened. Or maybe they’re just scared.
“Charlie’s been muffled,” Bobby said, “but he’s still got ink in his veins, you know, he still hears things, gathers news whether he’s allowed to write all of it up or not.”
“He’s as stoked on the page as you are on the board,” I said.
“He’s a total news rat,” Bobby agreed.
He was standing near one of the sidelights that flank the front door: rectangular geometric stained-glass windows with red, amber, green, and clear elements. No blinds cover these panes, because the deep overhang of the porch and the giant oaks prevent direct sunlight from reaching them. Bobby glanced through one of the clearer pieces of glass in the mosaic, as if he expected to see an unwelcome visitor on the front porch.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I figured if Charlie had heard about Jimmy, he might know something we don’t, might’ve picked up something from Manuel or someone, somewhere. But I wasn’t ready for what the dude told me. Jimmy was one of three last night.”
My stomach clenched with dread.
“Three children kidnapped?” Sasha asked.
Bobby nodded. “Del and Judy Stuart’s twins.”
Del Stuart has an office at Ashdon College, is for the record an employee of the Department of Education but is rumored to work for an obscure arm of the Department of Defense or the Environmental Protection Agency, or the Federal Office of Doughnut Management, and he probably spreads the rumors himself to deflect speculation from possibilities closer to the truth. He refers to himself as a
grant facilitator,
a term that feels as deceptive as calling a hit man an
organic waste disposal specialist
. Officially, his job is to keep outgoing paperwork and incoming funds flowing for those professors who are engaged in federally financed research. There is reason to believe that most such research at Ashdon involves the development of unconventional weapons, that the college has become the summer home of Mars, the god of war, and that Del is the liaison between the discreet funding sources of black-budget weapons projects and the academics who thrive on their dole. Like Mom.
I had no doubt that Del and Judy Stuart were devastated by the disappearance of their twins, but unlike poor Lilly Wing, who was an innocent and unaware of the dark side of Moonlight Bay, the Stuarts were self-committed residents of Satan’s pocket and understood that the bargain they had made required them to suffer even this terror in silence. Consequently, I was amazed that Charlie had learned of these abductions.
“Charlie and Nora Dai live next door to them,” Bobby explained, “though I don’t think they barbecue a lot together. The twins are six years old. Around nine o’clock last night, Judy is tucking the weeds in for the night, she hears a noise, and when she turns around, there’s a stranger right behind her.”
“Stocky, close-cropped black hair, yellow eyes, thick lips, seed-corn teeth,” I said, describing the kidnapper I’d encountered under the warehouse.
“Tall, athletic, blond, green eyes, puckered scar on his left cheek.”
“New guy,” Sasha said.
“Totally new guy. He’s got a chloroform-soaked rag in one hand, and before Judy realizes what’s happening, the dude is all over her like fat on cheese.”
“Fat on cheese?” I asked.
“That was Charlie’s expression.”
Charlie Dai, God love him, writes excellent newspaper copy, but though English has been his first language for twenty-five years, he has not fully gotten a grip on conversational usage to the degree that he has mastered formal prose. Idiom and metaphor often defeat him. He once told me that an August evening was “as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart,” a comparison that left me blinking two days later.
Bobby peered through the stained-glass window once more, gave the day world a longer look than he had before, then returned his attention to us: “When Judy recovers from the chloroform, Aaron and Anson—the twins—are gone.”
“Two abbs suddenly start snatching kids on the same night?” I said skeptically.
“There’s no coincidence in Moonlight Bay,” Sasha said.
“Bad for us, worse for Jimmy,” I said. “If we’re not dealing with typical pervs, then these geeks are acting out twisted needs that might have nothing to do with any abnormal psychology on the books, because they’re way beyond abnormal. They’re becoming, and whatever it is they’re becoming is driving them to commit the same atrocities.”
“Or,” Bobby said, “it’s even stranger than two dudes regressing to swamp monsters. The abb left a drawing on the twins’ bed.”
“A crow?” Sasha guessed.
“Charlie called it a raven. Same difference. A raven sitting on a stone, spreading its wings as if to take flight. Not the same pose as in the first drawing. But the message was pretty much the same. ‘Del Stuart will be my servant in Hell.’”
“Does Del have any idea what it means?” I asked.
“Charlie Dai says no. But he thinks that Del recognized Judy’s description of the kidnapper. Maybe that’s why the guy let her get a look at him. He wanted Del to know.”
“But if Del knows,” I said, “he’ll tell the cops, and the abb is finished.”
“Charlie says he didn’t tell them.”
Sasha’s voice was laden with equal measures of disbelief and disgust. “His kids are abducted, and he hides information from the cops?”
“Del’s deep in the Wyvern mess,” I said. “Maybe he has to keep his mouth shut about the abb’s identity until he gets permission from his boss to tell the cops.”
“If they were my kids, I’d kick over the rules,” she said.
I asked Bobby if Jenna Wing had been able to make anything of the crow and the message left under Jimmy’s pillow, but she had been clueless.
“I’ve heard something else, though,” Bobby said, “and it makes this whole thing even more of a mind-bender.”
“Like?”
“Charlie says, about two weeks ago, school nurses and county health officials conducted an annual checkup on every kid in every school and preschool in town. The usual eye exams, hearing tests, chest X-rays for tuberculosis. But this time they took blood samples, too.”
Sasha frowned. “Drew blood from all those kids?”
“A couple school nurses felt parents ought to give permission before blood samples were taken, but the county official overseeing the program flushed them away with a load of woofy about there’s been a low-level hepatitis outbreak in the area that could become epidemic, so they need to do preventive screening.”
As I did, Sasha knew what inference Bobby had drawn from this news, and she wrapped her arms around herself as if chilled. “They weren’t screening those kids for hepatitis. They were screening them for the retrovirus.”