Bobby said, “So this place with the red sky, the black trees—is it your mom’s future, bro?”
“Sideways, Delacroix said.”
“But what does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did
they
know?”
“Doesn’t sound like they did,” I said, pressing the
rewind
button on the remote.
“I’m having some quashingly funky thoughts.”
“The cocoons,” I guessed.
“Whatever spun the cocoons—did they come out of Delacroix?”
“Or through him, like he said. Like he was a doorway.”
“Whatever that means. And either way, does it matter? Out of or through, it’s the same to us.”
“I think if his body hadn’t been there, the cocoons wouldn’t be there, either,” I said.
“Gotta get some angry villagers together and march up to the castle with torches,” he said, his tone of voice more serious than the words he had chosen to express himself.
As the tape rewound and clicked to a stop, I said, “Should we take the responsibility on this one? We don’t know enough. Maybe we should tell someone about the cocoons.”
“You mean like authority types?”
“Like.”
“You know what they’ll do?”
“Screw up,” I said. “But at least it won’t be us screwing up.”
“They won’t burn’em all. They’ll want samples for study.”
“I’m sure they’ll take precautions.”
Bobby laughed.
I laughed, too, with as much bitterness as amusement. “Okay, sign me up for the march on the castle. But Orson and the kids come first. Because once we light that fire, we won’t be as free to move around Wyvern.”
I inserted a blank cassette into the second deck.
Bobby said, “Making a dupe?”
“Can’t hurt.” When the machines started working, I turned to him. “Something you said earlier.”
“You expect me to remember all the crap I say?”
“In that bungalow kitchen, with Delacroix’s body.”
“I can smell it vividly.”
“You heard something. Looked up at the cocoons.”
“Told you. Must’ve been in my head.”
“Right. But when I asked you what you heard, you said, ‘Me.’ What’d you mean by that?”
Bobby still had some beer. He drained the remaining contents of his bottle. “You were putting the cassette in your pocket. We were ready to leave. I thought I heard somebody say
stay
.”
“Somebody?”
“Several somebodies. Voices. All speaking at once, all saying
stay, stay, stay
.”
“Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs.”
“So you’re studying to be a jock at KBAY. The thing is…then I realized the voices were all my voice.”
“All your voice?”
“Hard to explain, bro.”
“Evidently.”
“For eight, ten seconds I could hear them. But even later…I felt they were still talking, just at lower volume.”
“Subliminal?”
“Maybe. Something way creepy.”
“Voices in your head.”
“Well, they weren’t telling me to sacrifice a virgin to Satan or assassinate the pope.”
“Just
stay, stay, stay,”
I said. “Like a thought loop.”
“No, these were like real voices on a radio. At first I thought they were coming…from somewhere in the bungalow.”
“You panned your flashlight over the ceiling,” I reminded him. “The cocoons.”
The faint glow from the audio equipment was reflected in his eyes. He didn’t look away from me, but he didn’t say anything.
I took a deep breath. “Because I’ve been wondering. After I called you from Dead Town, I started to feel vulnerable out in the open. So before I called Sasha, I decide to go into a bungalow, where I wouldn’t be so exposed.”
“Out of all those houses, why did you pick that one? With Delacroix’s body in the kitchen. With the cocoons.”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering,” I said.
“You hear voices, too? Saying,
Come in, Chris, come in, sit down, come in, be neighborly, we’ll be hatching soon, come in, join the fun.”
“No voices,” I said. “At least not any I was aware of. But maybe it wasn’t by chance I chose that house. Maybe I was drawn to that place instead of the one next door.”
“Psychic hoodoo?”
“Like the songs that sea nymphs sing to lure unwary sailors to destruction.”
“These aren’t sea nymphs. These are bugs in cocoons.”
“We don’t know they’re bugs,” I said.
“I’m way sure they aren’t puppy dogs.”
“I think maybe we got out of that bungalow just in time.”
After a silence, he said, “It’s crap like this that takes all the fun out of the end of the world.”
“Yeah, I’m starting to feel like a piece of chum in a school of hammerheads.”
The tape was duped. I took the copy to the composition table and, picking up a felt-tip pen, said, “What’s a good neo-Buffett song title?”
“Neo-Buffett?”
“It’s what Sasha’s writing these days. Jimmy Buffett. Tropical bounce, parrothead worldview, fun in the sun—but with a darker edge, a concession to reality.”
“‘Tequila Kidneys,’” he suggested.
“Good enough.”
I printed that title on the label and inserted the cassette nto an empty slot in the rack where Sasha stored her compoitions. There were scores of cassettes that looked just like it.
“Bro,” Bobby said, “if it ever comes to that, you would low my head off, wouldn’t you?”
“Anytime.”
“Wait for me to ask.”
“Sure. And you me?”
“Ask, and you’re dead.”
“The only fluttering I feel is in my stomach,” I said.
“I figure that’s normal right now.”
I heard a hard snap and a series of clicks, followed by the same sounds again—then the unmistakable creak of the back door opening.
Bobby blinked at me. “Sasha?”
I went into the candlelit kitchen, saw Manuel Ramirez in his uniform, and knew the sounds I’d heard had been from a police lock-release gun. He was standing at the kitchen table, staring down at my 9-millimeter Glock, to which he had gone directly, in spite of the dim light. I had put the pistol on the table when Bobby’s news about Wendy Dulcinea’s kidnapping had left me shaky.
“That door was locked,” I said to Manuel, as Bobby entered the kitchen behind me.
“Yeah,” Manuel said. He indicated the Glock. “You buy this legally?”
“My dad did.”
“Your dad taught poetry.”
“It’s a dangerous profession.”
“Where’d he buy this?” Manuel asked, picking up the pistol.
“Thor’s Gun Shop.”
“You have a receipt?”
“I’ll get it.”
“Never mind.”
The door between the kitchen and the downstairs hall swung inward. Frank Feeney, one of Manuel’s deputies, hesitated on the threshold. For an instant, in his eyes, I thought I saw a veil of yellow light billow like curtains at a pair of windows, but it was gone before I could be sure that it had been real. “Found a shotgun and a .38 in Halloway’s Jeep,” Feeney said.
“You boys belong to a right-wing militia or something?” Manuel asked.
“We’re going to sign up for a poetry class,” Bobby said. “You have a search warrant?”
“Tear a paper towel off that roll,” the chief said. “I’ll write one out for you.”
Behind Feeney, at the far end of the hall, in the foyer, backlit by the stained-glass windows, was a second deputy. I couldn’t see him well enough to know who he was.
“How’d you get in here?” I asked.
Manuel stared at me long enough to remind me that he was not a friend of mine anymore.
“What’s going on?” I demanded.
“A massive violation of your civil rights,” Manuel said, and his smile had all the warmth of a stiletto wound in the belly of a corpse.
19
Frank Feeney had a serpent’s face, one without fangs but with no need of fangs because he exuded poison from every pore. His eyes had the fixed, cold focus of a snake’s eyes, and his mouth was a slit from which a forked tongue could have flicked without causing a start of surprise even in a stranger who’d just met him. Before the mess at Wyvern, Feeney had been the rotten apple on the police force, and he was still sufficiently toxic to cast a thousand Snow Whites into comas with a glance.
“You want us to search the place for more weapons, Chief?” he asked Manuel.
“Yeah. But don’t trash it too much. Mr. Snow, here, lost his father a month ago. He’s an orphan now. Let’s show him some pity.”
Smiling as if he had just spied a tender mouse or a bird’s egg that would satisfy his reptilian hunger, Feeney turned and swaggered down the hallway toward the other deputy.
“We’ll be confiscating all firearms,” Manuel told me.
“These are legal weapons. They weren’t used in the commission of any crime. You don’t have any right to seize them,” I protested. “I know my Second Amendment rights.”
To Bobby, Manuel said, “You think I’m out of line, too?”
“You can do what you want,” Bobby said.
“Your boardhead buddy here is smarter than he looks,” Manuel told me.
Testing Manuel’s self-control, trying to determine if there were any limits to the lawlessness in which the police were willing to engage, Bobby said, “An ugly, psychotic asshole with a badge can
always
do what he wants.”
“Exactly,” Manuel said.
Manuel Ramirez—neither ugly nor psychotic—is three inches shorter, thirty pounds heavier, twelve years older, and noticeably more Hispanic than I am; he likes country music, while I’m born for rock-’n’-roll; he speaks Spanish, Italian, and English, while I’m limited strictly to English and a few comforting mottoes in Latin; he’s full of political opinions, while I find politics boring and sleazy; he’s a great cook, but the only thing I can do well with food is eat it. In spite of all these differences and many others, we once shared a love of people and a love of life that made us friends.
For years he had worked the graveyard shift, the top cop of the night, but since Chief Lewis Stevenson died one month ago, Manuel had been head of the department. In the night world where I had met him and become his friend, he was once a bright presence, a good cop and a good man. Things change, especially here in the new Moonlight Bay, and although he now works the day, he has given his heart to darkness and is not the person I once knew.
“Anyone else here?” Manuel asked.
“No.”
I heard Feeney and the other deputy talking in the foyer—and then footsteps on the stairs.
“Got your message,” Manuel told me. “The license number.”
I nodded.
“Sasha Goodall was at Lilly Wing’s house last night.”
“Maybe it was a Tupperware party,” I said.
Breaking the magazine out of the Glock, Manuel said, “You two showed up just before dawn. You parked behind the garage and came in the back way.”
“We needed some Tupperware,” Bobby said.
“Where were you all night?”
“Studying Tupperware catalogs,” I said.
“You disappoint me, Chris.”
“You think I’m more the Rubbermaid type?”
Manuel said, “I never knew you to be a smartass.”
“I’m a man of countless facets.”
A subdued response to his questioning would be interpreted as fear, and any show of fear would invite harsher treatment. We both knew that the perverse martial law in force during this emergency had never been legally declared, and though it was unlikely that any authority would ever hold Manuel or his men accountable for high crimes or misdemeanors, he couldn’t be certain there would be no consequences for his illegal acts. Besides, he’d once been a by-the-book lawman, and beneath all his self-justification, he still had a conscience. Wiseass remarks were my way—and Bobby’s way—of reminding Manuel that we knew as well as he did that his authority was now mostly illegitimate and that pushed too hard, we would resist it.
“Don’t
I
disappoint you, too?” Bobby asked.
“I’ve always known what
you
are,” Manuel said, dropping the pistol magazine into one of his pockets.
“Likewise. You should change brands of face makeup. Shouldn’t he change brands of makeup, Chris?”
“Something that covers better,” I said.
“Yeah,” Bobby said to Manuel, “I can still see the three sixes on your forehead.”
Without responding, Manuel tucked my Glock under his belt.
“Did you check out the license number?” I asked him.
“Useless. The Suburban was stolen earlier in the evening. We found it abandoned this afternoon, near the marina.”
“Any leads?”
“None of this is your business. I’ve got two things to say to you, Chris. Two reasons I’m here. Stay out of this.”
“Is that number one?”
“What?”
“Is that number one of the two? Or is that bonus advice?”
“Two things we can remember,” Bobby said. “But if there’s a lot of bonus advice, we’ll have to take notes.”
“Stay out of this,” Manuel repeated, speaking to me and ignoring Bobby. There was no unnatural luminosity in his eyes, but the hard edge in his voice was as chilling as animal eyeshine. “You’ve used up all the get-out-of-jail-free cards you had any right to expect from me. I mean it, Chris.”
A crash came from upstairs. A heavy piece of furniture had been tipped over.
I started toward the hall door.
Manuel stopped me by drawing his billy club and slamming it hard against the table. The rap was as loud as a gunshot. He said, “You heard me tell Frank not to trash the place too much. Just relax.”
“There aren’t any more guns,” I said angrily.
“Poetry lover like you might have a whole arsenal. For public safety, we have to be sure.”
Bobby was leaning against the counter near the cooktop, arms crossed on his chest. He appeared to be entirely resigned to our powerlessness, willing to ride out this episode, so totally chilled that he might as well have had lumps of coal for eyes and a carrot for a nose. This pose no doubt deceived Manuel, but I knew Bobby so well that I could see he was like a dry-ice bomb about to achieve blast pressure. The drawer immediately to his right contained a set of knives, and I was sure that he had chosen his position with the cutlery in mind.
We couldn’t win a fight here, now, and the important thing was to remain free to find Orson and the missing kids.
When the sound of shattering glass came from upstairs, I ignored it, reined in my anger, and said tightly to Manuel, “Lilly lost her husband. Now, maybe, her only child. Doesn’t that reach you? You of all people?”
“I’m sorry for her.”
“That’s all?”
“If I could bring her boy back, I would.”
His choice of words chilled me. “That sounds like he’s already dead—or somewhere you can’t go to get him.”
With none of the compassion that once had been the essence of Manuel, he said, “I told you—stay out of it.”
Sixteen years ago, Manuel’s wife, Carmelita, died giving birth to their second child. She had been only twenty-four. Manuel, who never remarried, raised a daughter and son with much love and wisdom. His boy, Toby, has Down’s syndrome. As much as anyone and more than some people, Manuel knows suffering; he understands what it means to live with hard responsibilities and limitations. Nevertheless, though I searched his eyes, I couldn’t see the compassion that had made him a first-rate father and policeman.
“What about the Stuart twins?” I asked.
His round face, designed more for laughter than for anger, usually a summer face, was now full of winter and as hard as ice.
I said, “What about Wendy Dulcinea?”
The extent of my knowledge angered him.
His voice remained soft, but he tapped the end of the billy club against his right palm: “You listen to me, Chris. Those of us who know what’s happened—we either swallow it or we choke on it. So just relax and swallow it. Because if you choke on it, then no one is going to be there to apply the Heimlich maneuver. You understand?”
“Sure. Hey, I’m a bright guy. I understand. That was a death threat.”
“Nicely delivered,” Bobby noted. “Creative, oblique, no jarring histrionics—although the bit of business with the club is a cliché. Psychotic-Gestapo-torturer shtick from a hundred old movies. You’ll be a more credible fascist without it.”
“Screw you.”
Bobby smiled. “I know you dream about it.”
Manuel appeared to be one more exchange away from wading into Bobby with the club.
Stepping in front of Bobby so that the two of them wouldn’t be face-to-face, and hoping miraculously to raise guilt from Manuel’s graveyard conscience, I said, “If I try to go public, try to mess where I’m not supposed to mess, who puts the bullet in the back of my head, Manuel? You?”
A look of genuine hurt passed across his features, but it only briefly softened his expression. “I couldn’t.”
“Very broly of you.”
Broly
is surfer lingo
for brotherly
. “I’ll be so much less dead if it’s one of your deputies who pulls the trigger instead of you.”
“This isn’t easy for either of us.”
“Seems easier for you than me.”
“You’ve been protected because of who your mother was, what she achieved. And because you were…once a friend of mine. But don’t push your luck, Chris.”
“Four kids snatched in twelve hours, Manuel. Is that the going exchange rate? Four other kids for one Toby?”
Admittedly, I was cruel to accuse him of sacrificing the lives of other children for his son, but there was truth in this cruelty.
His face darkened like settled coals, and in his eyes was the livid fire of hatred. “Yeah. I have a son that I’m responsible for. And a daughter. My mother. A family I’m responsible for. It’s not as easy for me as it is for a smartass loner like you.”
I was sickened that, once friends, we had come to this.
The entire police department of Moonlight Bay had been co-opted by those higher authorities responsible for concealing the terrors spawned at Wyvern. The cops’ reasons for cooperating were numerous: fear foremost; misguided patriotism; wads of hundred-dollar bills in prodigious quantities that only black-budget projects can provide. Furthermore, they had been impressed into the search for the troop of rhesuses and human subjects that escaped the lab more than two years ago, and on that night of violence, most had been bitten, clawed, or otherwise infected; they were in danger of becoming, so they agreed to be participants in the conspiracy, with the hope of being first in line for treatment if a cure for the retrovirus was discovered.
Manuel couldn’t be bought with mere money. His patriotism was not of the misguided variety. Sufficient fear can bring any man to heel, but it wasn’t fear that had corrupted Manuel.
The research at Wyvern had led to catastrophe, but also to positive discoveries. Evidently, some experiments have resulted in genetic treatments that are promising.
Manuel sold his soul for the hope that one of those experimental treatments would transform Toby. And I suspect he dreams of his son achieving intellectual
and
physical transformation.
The intellectual growth might well be possible. We know that some of the Wyvern work included intelligence-enhancement research and that there were startling successes, as witness Orson.
“How’s Toby doing?” I asked.
As I spoke, I heard a stealthy but telltale sound behind me. A drawer sliding open. The knife drawer.
When I had interposed myself between Bobby and Manuel, I’d meant only to defuse the escalating tension between them, not to provide cover for Bobby to arm himself. I wanted to tell him to chill out, but I didn’t know how to do so without alerting Manuel.
Besides, there are occasions when Bobby’s instincts are better than mine. If he thought this situation was inevitably leading to violence, perhaps he was right.
Apparently, my question about Toby had masked the sound of the drawer, because Manuel gave no indication of having heard it.
A fierce pride, both touching and terrifying, couldn’t drive out his anger; the two emotions were darkly complementary. “He’s reading. Better. Faster. More comprehension. Doing better at math. And what’s wrong with that? Is that a crime?”
I shook my head.
Although some people make fun of Toby’s appearance or shun him, he’s the image of gentleness. With his thick neck, rounded shoulders, short arms, and stocky legs, he reminds me of the good gnomes from the adventure stories that delighted me in childhood. His sloped and heavy brow, low-set ears, and soft features, and the inner epicanthic folds of his eyes, give him a dreamy aspect that matches his sweet and gentle personality.
In spite of his burdens, Toby has always been happy and content. I worry that the Wyvern crowd will raise his intelligence far enough to leave him dissatisfied with his life—but not far enough to give him an average IQ. If they steal his innocence and curse him with a self-awareness that leaves him anguished, trapping him between livable identities, they will destroy him.
I know all about unfulfillable longing, the fruitless yearning to be what one can never be.
And although I find it difficult to believe that Toby could be genetically engineered into a radically new appearance, I fear that if any such attempt were made, he might become something he wouldn’t be able to bear seeing in the mirror. Those who don’t perceive beauty in the face of a Down’s-syndrome person are blind to all beauty or are so fearful of
difference
that they must at once turn away from every encounter with it. In every face—in even the plainest and the most unfortunate countenances—there is some precious aspect of the divine image of which we are a reflection, and if you look with an open heart, you can see an awesome beauty, a glimpse of something so radiant that it gives you joy. But will this radiance remain in Toby if he is redesigned by Wyvern scientists, if a radical physical transformation is attempted?
“He’s got a future now,” Manuel said.