Puppets

by Daniel Hecht

  "Mo?" Carla's voice.

  He blew out a breath of relief and quickly stuck the gun into the waistband of his pants. "Yeah."

  She came into the dark room tentatively."You still awake?"

  "Yeah," he said again.

  They went back into the lighted rooms. Carla wore a short, summery dress of some filmy fabric, and she looked shapely and very female. Yes, she still got to him. She came into the living room and looked around at the unresolved mess with an expression of concern. Mo sat on the couch, leaving her the option of standing or sitting next to him.

  She sat, eyeing the Glock when he pulled it out of his belt and set it on the floor."Jesus. Who were you expecting?"

  "I don't know."

  "How are you?Your bruises are getting better, that's nice."

  Mo made an indeterminate gesture.

  "I remembered some other things I needed to get. And I wanted to talk to you. Wanted to check in."She looked at him warily. Part of the rhetoric of parting had been that they'd stay close, they'd keep in touch, maybe do things together now and then.

  "How're things in Mount Vernon?" he mustered. "Heavenly?"

  "Come on, Mo. Please?"

  He made another ambiguous gesture, okay or maybewhatever. Actually, she didn't look that good. She held herself tensely. Her eyes were a bit too bright, and she looked slimmer, almost too thin. "So what've you been up to?" he asked, trying a different tack.

  "I've been doing some great work on the book. It really is very handy to be a little closer to the city, I can go back and forth if I need to. I finally got an in to that voodoo group in Brooklyn, got to observe some prediction rituals with this old Jamaican woman. Pretty amazing. Oh, and I also scheduled an interview with Hope Christian son, she's very big right now. The Christian prophet?"

  "Great."He got the sense that she was beating around the bush, avoiding something.

  She chuckled insincerely. "All these people I interview? They take it so seriously. I mean, they read the future, they talk to the dead, some of them channel guiding spirits. They make me feel like I've been, almost like, I don't know . . . a hypocrite. I've always been so . . . rational about it."

  "You came here to talk about that?At ten o'clock at night you drove up here from Mount Vernon?" He felt like hurting her, just a little.

  Carla put her hand on Mo's thigh. Deliberate or just habitual he couldn't tell, but instantly his body ached for more. He didn't move.

  "This is stupid," she went on, "but I had a scary premonition. It seemed very real. About you. I thought I should tell you."

  "Hey,terrific," he said blackly.

  "Mo, please? Do you want me to tellyou or not?"

  "Sounds likethese people you're researching are getting to you. Ididn't take you for the gullible type. I thought your book wasgoing to be an objective look at—"

  "That's completely not true!I've always taken my intuition seriously, I've just neverclaimed it was infallible. If you think it's stupid, fine, butlet me tell you and you can decide yourself. And then I've gotto get a few things together and go."

  "Okay. Go ahead. Shoot." Shereally did seem to need to tell him. He slouched down against thecouch back, looking disinterested.

  "You'retaking an attitude, sure, I'll humor you, toget back at me. I can understand that. Look, I'm sorry wedidn't work out, okay? But we didn'tl Wehad to face it, didn't we?" Her bright eyes rimmed withtears that she quickly wiped away, and suddenly her sincerity got tohim. So he sat there on the couch with her and listened, facing thedoorway to the shadow-mottled living room, the bare front windowsoverhung with heavy oak branches.

  It was after thevisit to the mudda-woman in Brooklyn. Carla had tried a visioningtechnique the voodoo priestess had recommended, she said, andunexpectedly she had seemed to break through into some other place. Telling him now, Carla leaned forward intently, staring with her darkeyes into the middle of the room as if still seeing it, as ifwatching some invisible movie. Mo felt a little chill.

  In this other placewere moving shapes. There was a big, dark place, but with aperturesof light, not really windows, that gave it just enough light to seeby. The moving forms were hurting each other, and there had beenhurting in that place before.

  Carla's voice had gotten a little shaky. "It was like the time, remember, when we went up to Adirondack State Park?"

  She didn't go into details, knowing he'd remember it all too well. Summer before last, they'd driven upstate to get away, out where things were clean and pretty. They'd planned on staying at a motel, but on the first day they'd taken picnic stuff out to the woods, just driving until a spot took their fancy and they pulled over and walked away from the road. Bright sunny day, wading through some tall-grass fields and then into the forest with the idea of eating and lazing around on the blanket and then making love outdoors. They went in a couple hundred yards, sat down in a nice grove of trees. Carla leaned back and then sat forward suddenly, looking at the palm of her hand. Ow,she said. Something had poked her. Mo looked and there was apiece of an animal jawbone half-buried in the soil, and she'd put her hand on a tooth. Okay, bad coincidence, but they just moved down the little ridge a bit, set up again. This time Mo saw bones in the soil, not just one but several, ribs and long bones, and then a cloven black hoof sticking up. A dead deer. That was okay, the woods were full of deer, they had to die somewhere, coons and dogs had probably spread the body around. So they moved the blanket and the tote bags over the ridge another thirty yards and spread out again on the edge of a little clearing. But then the breeze shifted and brought a smell that was too familiar to Mo, and he scanned the woods with sudden unease. Suddenly the landscape became full of bones, as if they were springing out of the soil, and not clean ones either, many with rotting flesh and hair. Skulls, legs and hooves, rows of ribs with tattered hide attached, knuckled sections of backbone. Whole sheets of empty, maggoty hide emerging from the dirt, or half-submerged in puddles of green-scummed water. It was a charnel place, the earth full of dead things. It was all wrong, it was hideous, why would so many animals die in one place? They practically ran back to the car, and after they'd driven fifteen miles and found a park-office, the ranger had laughed and told them they'd had the bad luck to picnic in a regional roadkill disposal site. The state highway crews and park personnel picked up dead deer and other animals and threw them into scrapes they'd bulldoze each spring and cover over in the fill.

  So Carla's vision or premonition or whatever had happened in a place like that. Mo got the picture.

  "You were one of the people there, Mo," she whispered quaveringly. "When I saw it was you, I tried to see the details, I thought I should know so I could tell you?" She looked to him for understanding.

  "What details?" he asked. He realized he was whispering, too.

  "I could sort of see auras around the people, the moving shapes. And there were lines of, like, energy or . . . power . . . between people."

  "Lines."

  Carla nodded. "I tried to see the details. Lines from your hands, lines from your feet, from your head?They moved with you, or maybe they . . . they moved you? I know it doesn't make sense." She looked disappointed with herself.

  Mo was thinking that this cut a little too close to home. To Howdy Doody and the copycat. He'd never told Carla one word about the new cases.

  "I tried to see the other forms, people, in there with you. They had the lines on them, too. The people were, this is hard to explain, they were telescoped,or superimposed . . . or one behind the other behind the other, farther and farther away. I wanted to see them more clearly, and all I could get was the image of like, a doctor.Not in a white suit and stethoscope, not a physical resemblance, but someone who knew things about the human body? A bad doctor. The closest association I got was like a Nazi medical experimenter, I don't know, like Dr. Mengele or somebody."

  Carla had gotten shakier and less sure of herself as she went on, groping for the right words, trying to crystallize her impressions, and Mo looked at her with
alarm. She'd seemed so confident and in charge of herself when she'd moved out, only five days ago. He almost wanted to ask about the voodoo mudda-woman she'd visited, whether drugs had played a role in whatever ceremony they'd done. Then he thought better of mentioning it. It would make her furious.

  "Maybe this isn't good for you," he said. "The book, the people you're seeing—" He almost said, Moving out of here. Ending it with me.

  "I don't like it when you tell me how to live," she said.

  "I'm not, I'm just—"

  "I thought I should tell you this!Okay? Have I ever done this before? Have I ever made exaggerated claims about any of this? You know I'm a skeptical person, you know I wouldn't tell you this if I didn't think it was important. God, I knew you'd laugh at me and feel superior—"

  "Carla, Jesus, I'm notlaughing—"

  "How many times have you told me about one of your cases and how your'gut' or your 'instinct' or your fucking'radar' steered you in the right direction? That every investigator does it that way, that it's vital to police work. Right? So, what, I'm not supposed to use those same things when I'm figuring out somebody's personal problems? Or when I get clear signals from my own goddamned 'radar'? Maybe you should face up to your own hypocrisy!"

  She was right, he'd never quite thought of it that way. But reflexively he tossed it back at her:"Another way I single-handedly fucked up our relationship."

  She stood up quickly. He tied to hold her arm, but she shook his hand loose. "I've got to go. It's very late. I left some of my CDs here."

  "Look,I'm sorry. You're right." He let her see his desperation. And she paused, looking down at him, those fine cheekbones and dark eyes. He could feel the nearness of her body, her smooth olive skin and supple waist arid her sweet summer-night smell. After another moment he said quietly, "Stay here with me tonight, Carla."

  For an instant she almost seemed to consider it. Then she turned away, went to the shoebox of CDs on the floor, began sorting through it. He watched as she found several and then went to the closet, where she dug around inside and pulled out a pair of her sandals.

  He walked her to the front door, stood in the dark hall with her.

  "I don't know what it means," she said. "I guess, just take care of yourself."

  "I will. Thanks. You, too, okay?"

  Then she was out the door and stepping lightly down the front porch steps, a fey shadow in the hot night air. He watched until she'd gotten into her car and pulled out, thinking, Believe me, Carla, I'm notlaughing.

  Later, he was still awake, lying naked on the bed in the dark, too hot to cover himself even with a sheet. The empty house bothered him. Carla's description of the"place" being dark with apertures of light, with the ambience of that patch of woods full of death, stayed with him. You could picture it all kinds of ways. It could be the power station, for example, a big dark place where bad things had happened. Or it could even be this house, the empty, dark rooms with tree shadows cutting the streetlight into sharp blue shards, and the hurting that had happened was what they'd done to each other as the relationship began to fall apart. Or someplace else. Or nowhere but Carla's imagination, something going wrong with her.

  This was nuts, he'd have to get another place. This house was perfectly nice and he really hated it. He felt the empty rooms upstairs, the basement down below, sandwiching him between layers of darkness. After another hour, he sat up, took the Glock out of its holster. Glocks were weird guns, he hadn't initially endorsed the State Police shift to the Glock over the old Smith & Wesson Model 65 because he didn't like the feel of the Glock—the overlarge, too square hand grip, the blocky barrel. But they fired nicely, had a reliable magazine and a manageable recoil. And once you learned it, the trigger was sweet. In the State Police you were trained to walk toward your target, emptying your whole magazine, and some Glock advocate had once said, if your adversary could still get off a shot at you after you'd fired eighteens hots from one of these babies, you deserved to die.

  Mo got up, holding the gun, and prowled through the house. He hated the pressure of the empty rooms and the acid light in them, and he wanted to strike back at them, push back the perimeter. What isthis, Ford, he asked himself, angry at what you're scared of, or scared of what you're angry at? He walked stealthily through the living room with its glistening floors, then the hall, holding the gun as if he expected to use it. Come on, he thought, come and get it. He went up the stairs just as quietly. Long hallway to either side, six dark doorways. Stopping to listen, hearing only his own heart and the occasional slight tick and rustle of the house, two A.M. and only now beginning to cool down. He leapt through into each room, one after the other, landing with legs wide in shooting stance and pivoting quickly left and right. Dark, empty rooms, stuffy air, shiny floors, bare windows with a few dead flies vaguely visible on the sills.

  Come on, he thought furiously. Come at me.

  But there was nothing there, as he knew there wouldn't be. He was prowling naked and mad and scared around his ex's mom's house, hunting nothing but Mo Ford's loneliness, and he knew it, and no goddamned Glock was going to be any help at all.

  18

  ONE DAY FOR THE NEW baby, for the tired wife, for the nesting instinct, and then St. Pierre was back at work bright and early Friday. Mo almost said something, but then thought Mike might take it the wrong way. They got back into the routine with only a few words about Mike's domestic life.

  They decided to divvy up Irene Bushnell's mother and husband, then rendezvous back at the power station to assess the scene again, try to figure what it might reveal that the O'Connor home did not. St. Pierre took the mother, who lived in Tarrytown, leaving Mo to drive to the victim's home outside of Ossining, ten minutes farther north.

  He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other rubbing his eyes. He'd slept for maybe two hours. After his existential hunt through the house, he'd gone to bed and dropped off to sleep. But after only a few minutes, the phone had rung. The bedroom was still pitch-dark, and the clock told him it was almost four A.M. He groped for the phone, knocked it off the table, found it in the tangle of clothes on the floor. When he finally he got the receiver right and put it to his head, his voice was a croak. "Mo Ford," he said.

  "Detective Ford," the voice said. "You wanted my assistance."

  "Gus," he said. "Thanks for returning my call—"

  "What do you need?" Grisbach's voice seemed barely capable of the expressiveness needed to make a question. Although he'd never met Grisbach, Mo had a clear image of him: somewhere in Manhattan in a darkened apartment filled with arcane high tech, pale-skinned and hugely fat in his wheelchair, a spider at the center of his web.

  "I was hoping you could get me information on—this is a little touchy—on an FBI guy. I'm involved in a task force, I just figured I should know more about who this guy is so that—"

  "Name?"

  Mo felt a moment of relief. He'd been afraid that looking into a federal agent might be beyond Grisbach's reach, or something he wouldn't want do for any number of reasons. Fortunately, it looked as if his first hunch was right: Gus's past career had left him with a city cop's typical distrust and dislike of the FBI. "Erik Biedermann," he said. "Currently SAC in the Manhattan field office, formerly out in San Diego. Supposedly fought in Vietnam, I don't know which service. I'm particularly interested in his work on maybe two murders in the San Diego area, maybe two, three years ago. Anything you can find out about his transfer here. Any connections to, uh, other agencies." When Mo stopped, he could hear the tapping of keys at the other end.

  "Anything else?"

  Mo thought about it. "A guy named Zelek. Anson Zelek, also FBI." Just out of curiosity.

  Keys tapping, then: "I'll call you."

  "Look,I'm really grateful—" Mo began. Then he'd realized that the line was already dead. No, Grisbach wasn't much for social niceties.

  He'd rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, and then the alarm was ringing and it was time to getup. Daylight had bee
n like sand in his eyeballs.

  The address St. Pierre had given him for Byron Bushnell was a ranch house with dirty white-aluminum siding in a poorer, semirural neighborhood of similar homes. It was easy to find because it was the only lot on the road that contained a fifty-five-foot semi with a Kenmore tractor, a vehicle bigger than the house itself. Mo parked on the worn grass next to a white Toyota pickup and got out. A movement in the window caught his eye, and then Byron Bushnell opened the front door.

  Bushnell looked like shit. He was a smallish man with sloping shoulders and longhair, T-shirt, jeans worn low on his hips, cigarette in his lips. His red, swollen eyes suggested he'd been crying or drinking or both, and the smell of stale cigarette smoke hit Mo like a wall as he came up the steps. When Mo introduced himself and offered condolences, Bushnell just turned around and made an ambiguous gesture with the back of his hand. He went back into the house, threw himself on a recliner, fumbled on a side table for a can of Bud. He put aside his cigarette to suck at the can, looking at Mo with crazed, hostile eyes.

  "I'm hoping you can tell me more about your wife, something that will help us identify her killer—her contacts in the community, her friends, her job, what she did in her spare time, that kind of thing."Also about her husband, Mo thought. Copycat MO or not, you always started with the husband.

  "You don't catch the fucker, I will," Bushnell said, "I'll fucking feed him his own nuts."

  "We'll catch him. With your help." Bushnell was pretty unsteady, would require a lot of steering. Mo made a show of getting out his notebook and pen and looking officious. "Why don't we start with her employment? Did she work?"

  "Why don't we start with you can go fuck yourself. Cops don't give a fuck about us, gonna hassle us every time, and now Irene's dead you're gonna do what for her?" Bushnell finished off his beer and flung the can across the room. It hit the wall and fell to the floor with several others. He stared at Mo with I don't give a shit in his eyes.