Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

  I was steps away from the saloon’s porch, and didn’t dare look back to see how much of my lead was left. I focused on the building, chased my shadow across the porch, and hit the front door with my shoulder. It probably had to be pulled open, not pushed, but with my hands bound behind me, I was just doing what I could.

  Of course the door didn’t budge.

  The headlights swung again to catch me, lighting up the door and the walls. I turned and faced the SUV, which was now idling twenty feet away. The driver’s door swung open. I saw a leg step down. He’d have a gun, of course. If he hadn’t been carrying one of his own, by now he’d have reached into the back seat to take his companion’s.

  I waited until he had both feet out of the vehicle and then began to run again, down the dark corridor of the porch. The first gunshot was a sharp crack. The bullet missed my face by inches, hitting the barred window beside me. The glass pane didn’t shatter, but inside, the neon tubes of the saloon’s Budweiser sign exploded in a spray of sparks.

  I ducked and kept running.

  A burglar alarm was going off. I heard a second shot. I couldn’t tell where the bullet went, but it hadn’t hit me. I reached the end of the porch and turned around the building’s corner.

  I saw another business: Anna’s Asian Palace. I hit the dark glass door with my shoulder, hard enough to crack it. A second alarm joined the first. Maybe somewhere, a sheriff’s deputy was getting a radio call. Not that I was going to stick around and find out. I was running toward the back of the building. If there were any other shots, I didn’t hear them. I reached the end of the parking lot, where high weeds grew from scrabbly ground and an overfilled dumpster sat amid a glittering sea of broken glass.

  I dashed toward it, then ducked behind it. I didn’t see the man. The SUV was on the other side of the building—if it was still there at all. The man could have cut his losses after the second shot. I didn’t know if this town had a police department, but if it did, maybe he didn’t want to linger while two burglar alarms were going off.

  I looked behind me. There were a couple of houses on a back street, and a long cinderblock wall, which must have been built to shield the neighborhood from the highway’s noise.

  The dumpster, all alone at the rear of the parking lot, was the most obvious place to hide. I made a run for the wall. The vision in my right eye was getting better, but that improvement was counterbalanced by screaming pain. My head throbbed, my shoulders felt like they’d been broken on a wheel, and my bare feet were getting shredded.

  I reached the wall and tucked up into its shadows, and not a moment too soon.

  The SUV rolled around the side of the building. It paused and the driver switched on his high beams, then sped toward the dumpster. He skidded to a halt in front of it, jumped out, and ran around the rear with his gun out.

  I pressed against the wall and knee-walked backwards. There was some kind of thornbush growing here, climbing the cinderblocks. I got myself wedged between the wall and the twisting branches, and lost my balance. With my hands behind my back, there wasn’t much I could do. I fell flat on my chest, and then I had a rat’s-eye view of the world in front of me. If it hadn’t been for the burglar alarms, he might have heard me. But he didn’t react at all. He opened the dumpster’s lid, fired two shots inside, leaned up on his tiptoes, and looked inside.

  Apparently, questioning me was no longer the priority.

  The man dropped the lid and looked around, contemplating the path I might have taken. He studied the houses, and then the wall. He looked right at me. I tensed, ready to roll sideways and struggle to my feet if he raised the gun.

  But instead, he tucked the gun inside his jacket and got out a phone. He’d seen the shadows and the thorn branches, but not me. I watched his phone’s screen light up, watched him type out a message. He stood a while longer, looking at the screen, waiting for a response. Then he put his phone away and went back to the SUV. I had a cloudy memory from earlier in the night. I’d walked across a clearing and approached the same vehicle. I’d knelt to look at its plate. But whatever I’d stored in that memory slot had been beaten to a pulp. It was too dark, and I was too far away, to read the plate now. I watched the man climb into the vehicle, slam the door, and peel out of the lot. He went back to the highway, turned right, and disappeared.

  When the man was gone, I embarked on a minutes-long ordeal of extracting myself from the thornbush, rolling to my side, scissoring my legs until I was sitting up, and then bracing my shoulders against the wall so that I could stand. By the time I finally got to my feet, I was so winded that I wanted to lie down again. Instead, I walked down to the end of the wall, where I could rub my bound wrists against the rough-edged corner.

  Five minutes later, I had my hands free. I brought my wrists around and looked at them. I used my teeth to pull off the remaining tape, then swung my arms until I could feel my fingers again. When that was done, I checked myself. No wallet, no phone. They hadn’t taken my watch. It was two thirty in the morning. It had been nine thirty or ten last I’d looked. I’d been out a long while. I had no idea how much of that time we’d been driving. No idea where I was now.

  I began to limp along the wall. I didn’t want to cut back through the parking lot, in case the police showed up. The adrenaline was fading now, and it was getting harder to walk. I wanted to sit down, to hold my bare feet and ball myself up against the cold, but I kept walking. I reached the end of the wall, and then went along the side of an auto body shop. There were pickup trucks in various states of disrepair. An abandoned-looking school bus. They all had California plates. That didn’t do much to narrow my location.

  I could still hear the burglar alarms, but they were fading now. I rejoined the highway, and walked on its shoulder. I told myself that if I saw headlights, I’d run for cover. But the road was quiet for five minutes. Enough time for me to walk halfway into town. There was a coffee shop that looked like a barn. A used car lot across from it, deflated balloons hanging on the chain-link fence. Later on, I passed a sign that pointed down a dirt track and unconvincingly beckoned passersby to a dairy.

  The air was cold and smelled of fallow land and pine needles. In the distance there was the silhouette of rising hills. I passed a hand-painted sign for Paco’s Tacos, and after that was a closed-down gas station, everything dark except the pumps.

  I was about to move on, and then I stopped.

  There was a phone booth next to the building. I wondered if it worked. I wondered who I would call. I looked at my watch again. It was three in the morning. There was one number I knew by heart, and one person who would almost certainly be awake.

  The woman on the other end of the line had been reluctant to place my call. She warned me, twice, of the time. Now we were listening to the phone ring. Two times, three times, four.

  “Hello?”

  “Good morning, ma’am, this is the operator,” the woman said. “Will you accept a collect call from a Leland Crowe? You will incur charges.”

  There was a pause. It went long enough for me to wonder what I’d do if she hung up.

  “Lee? I mean—yes, I’ll accept. Put him on.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. I’m putting the call through.”

  The operator vanished with a click.

  “Lee?”

  “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “You know my schedule,” she said. “Are you in trouble?”

  “A bit.”

  “Are you hurt? You sound—I don’t know. You sound bad.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “But I need a ride.”

  “I’ll come get you,” Juliette said. “Just tell me where.”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know.”

  “Jesus, Lee. What happened?”

  “Look up Boomer’s Saloon,” I said. “And Anna’s Asian Palace. That’s where I am.”

  “Hang on.”

  I waited, and after a while she came back on the line.

  “Laytonville,” sh
e said. “You’re in Laytonville. That’s like three hours north, on 101.”

  “Can you still come?”

  “I’m walking to the garage,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the saloon?”

  “Not there—it’ll be crawling with cops.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t want to know,” I said. “I’m at a Chevron next to Paco’s Tacos. There’s a hill with some pine trees behind it. I’ll go up there and lie down. If you’ve got a first-aid kit, bring it.”

  A car appeared on the highway. It was moving fast, but when it passed, I didn’t miss the Mendocino County Sheriff’s seal adorning its side.

  “Lee?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nothing—I’m coming.”

  At the top of the hill, after scanning around to make sure I wasn’t in someone’s backyard, I sat down against a tree trunk. My feet were caked with blood and debris. In the darkness, probing carefully with my fingers, I found a few slivers of glass that hadn’t come out during my half-mile walk from the saloon.

  I swept a pile of pine needles and forest loam over my feet. Not much of a blanket, but better than nothing. Down below, another sheriff’s car went past. Engine racing, but no siren and no rooftop lights. They wouldn’t find much at the saloon beyond a couple of bullet holes and a broken glass door at the Chinese restaurant. Around here, that was probably enough intrigue to keep them busy for hours.

  I thought of Juliette because I didn’t want to think about Madeleine. It had been bad enough to think that she’d double-crossed me. The alternative, which now seemed infinitely likelier, was worse. So I pictured Juliette, walking barefoot through her house, slipping a jacket over her shoulders and stepping into a pair of sandals. She’d hit the lights in her garage, then press a button to open the door. I could picture it easily, her path from the bedroom to the car. I’d lived in that house, briefly, and when I’d moved out His Honor had moved in. He’d had his own divorce to contend with, and anyway, Juliette’s place was better than whatever he could afford.

  I had to admit: After this, I would owe her. Two days ago, that would have been unthinkable. Now it didn’t seem so bad. I fell asleep thinking about her, the possibility of us falling together again. But once I was asleep, that was all gone.

  Toward the end, I dreamt of Claire Gravesend.

  She was walking down a mirrored hallway, unclothed. Copies of herself stretched to infinity on either side. A hundred million perfect selves, just out of reach beyond the glass. She came right up to me, her eyes unseeing. Then she stepped into me, a ghost passing through a wall. It felt like a cold breeze. I turned. The scars on her back had opened again. New blood poured from fresh wounds, trickling down her naked skin.

  “Lee.”

  She was walking away from me, leaving bloody footprints on the cracked glass floor.

  “Lee!”

  I opened my eyes and saw the dawn sky above the trees. Gray and overcast. Juliette was kneeling over me, her hands cupping each side of my face.

  She let go and moved back when I sat up. I looked at my watch. It was five thirty in the morning.

  “You said three hours.”

  “So I sped,” she said. “Jesus, Lee—look at you.”

  “I know.”

  “What happened?”

  “Did you bring the first-aid kit?”

  She nodded, then shook her head. She’d always had big eyes. Right now they were as wide as I’d ever seen them.

  “It’s not enough,” she said. “We’ll have to stop somewhere. What happened to your head?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “A club. A shovel. I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  “Can you stand?”

  “I got up here, didn’t I?”

  But it turned out I needed her help to stand, and needed her arm around my waist as a steadying force before we could pick our way down the hillside to her Bentley. She didn’t hesitate to offer it, and I didn’t think twice about taking it. It was all perfectly natural, the way people act toward each other when everything is stark and the line between life and death is visible to the naked eye. It’s the easy patches we need to watch out for.

  She drove a mile to a grocery store, and left me sitting in the car while she went in. I struggled to stay awake. The passenger seat was wide and deep, and it was warm. Juliette was back in ten minutes with a paper sack and two cups of ice. I briefly wondered if she was going to mix us a couple of cocktails, but the paper sack was full of first-aid supplies, and the ice was for the lump on my head. She had butterfly bandages and big gauze pads. Rolls of white tape and tubes of antibiotic ointment. She helped patch me up, right there in the parking lot. She cleaned my feet and plastered them with bandages, and helped me out of my shirt so she could dress the wounds I’d gotten sliding along the road. She put Band-Aids on my chin and my right cheek—covering cuts I didn’t even know I had—and then she filled an ice pack and handed it to me.

  “I’ll take you home now.”

  “I can’t go home—it’s bugged.”

  “Your apartment is bugged?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought it was an FBI agent I crossed. Something to do with a case I was working for Jim—you remember Jim?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “Okay—sorry. I thought it had to do with a trial. This guy Lorca. But I was wrong. It’s something else. You remember I took that picture—”

  “Claire Gravesend. The girl who jumped.”

  “I don’t think she jumped.”

  “If you can’t go home, where am I taking you?”

  “I need to talk to Frank Chang,” I said. “A homicide inspector with SFPD.”

  “So, Bryant Street?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ll have to stop somewhere first. You can’t go into a police station like that.”

  I didn’t want to disagree with her so early in the day. Between here and San Francisco lay a hundred and sixty miles of highway, and at least as many opportunities to get into an argument. But the fact is that you can walk into any police station in San Francisco with a bloody shirt, and no shoes, and your pockets turned out, and fit right in.

  “We don’t have to stop,” I said. “Nothing will be open, and anyway, they took my wallet.”

  “I can make a call,” she said. “And don’t worry about the money. You can pay me back later. If you want.”

  “Okay.”

  She put the car in gear and did a sharp turn out of the lot. We passed back through Laytonville, rejoined Highway 101, and began to speed south. For several miles, we didn’t speak. We sped through the woods and the low hills, walls of trees on either side moving past in a green blur. I closed my eyes because it was making me dizzy.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” she asked.

  “Okay.”

  So I sat there, in my ex-wife’s Bentley, with my eyes closed, and told her everything that had happened to me since stepping out of the Westchester Hotel on the last day of Claire Gravesend’s life.

  26

  When I finished, we were just outside of Santa Rosa. Juliette pulled off the highway and into the parking lot of a coffee shop. She went in and came back a moment later with two paper cups. She handed me mine, then dug into her purse and took out a prescription pill bottle. She shook two pills into her palm, took one, and held out the other for me to take.

  “What is it?”

  “It’ll pep you up.”

  “You know it’s a federal offense to share prescription drugs?”

  “Just shut up and take it. Don’t be such a prig.”

  “Okay.”

  I took the pill with a sip of the coffee. I figured I could use some pepping up, illicit or otherwise.

  “Are all your cases like this?”

  “Hardly,” I said.

  “You know that carving of the snake eating its tail—the one you and Madeleine saw in the Creekside?”

  “Yeah.”

  She’d driven to the edge
of the parking lot. Now she checked her side-view mirror to be sure the lane was clear. She punched the gas and we accelerated onto the highway.

  “I’ve seen that.”

  “What?”

  “Well, not that one specifically, but ones like it. It’s called an ouroboros.”

  “A what?”

  “An ouroboros,” she said, pronouncing it slowly. “It’s an Egyptian symbol. It was adopted later by alchemists, in like the third century.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “High school in Paris. Unlike you, I was generally awake in class.”

  Her purse was on her lap. She tapped its side so that her pill bottle rattled. I got the point. Juliette’s doctor had been fine-tuning her attention span since she was thirteen.

  “They teach that crap in French high schools? Egyptian symbols and alchemy?”

  “It’s called art history,” Juliette said. “There’s an ouroboros carved into the east façade of the Louvre.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But what’s it mean?”

  “The magnum opus.”

  “The masterpiece?”

  “No—in alchemy it meant something else. Literally, ‘the great work.’ The pursuit of the philosopher’s stone.”

  “You mean the quest for eternal life.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And that’s what they’ve got over the fireplace at the Creekside.”

  We sat on that for a mile or two.

  “Maybe it’s what the club is all about,” Juliette finally said. “Looking for immortality. It’s all the rage right now, in some circles.”

  “Your circle.”

  “I don’t go for that kind of thing.”

  “But you’ve heard of it.”

  “People talk,” she said. “Of course, a lot of it sounds like bullshit. Blood transfusions. Supplements. Calorie restriction. Some people will try anything.”

  “And some people will go too far.”

  We reached San Francisco at nine thirty in the morning. She had driven above the speed limit most of the way, but our pit stops had eaten up time. The Chinatown stores where I bought most of my clothes would be open, but Juliette would have none of that. She parked illegally at the corner of Geary and Grant, just east of Union Square. Her regular haunts should have been closed until ten, but as promised, she’d called ahead.