Coyote

by Rhonda Roberts

  And what about Prairie Rose? Even nearly naked, her fierce black eyes had dared the beholder to even think about putting a finger on her.

  Why had that angry girl stayed with someone like Hector Kershaw? What’d happened after Hector rescued her from the Corsairs?

  I pieced together a rough answer …

  Okay, so, after her rescue from the Corsairs, Prairie Rose was stuck in merciless boom-town San Francisco. Her little sister, Running Deer, was dead … She was the only survivor of her nation and far from her homelands. So Prairie Rose was penniless, lost in hostile territory and, no doubt, now hunted by the Corsairs, who wanted their starring attraction back.

  Prairie Rose didn’t have a choice. That had to be the reason she went with Hector … and probably why she stayed with him too. In fact, I’d bet real money that the fierce warrior princess even helped Hector destroy the men who’d kept her and her little sister captive.

  I silently asked Prairie Rose, ‘Where did Hector take you, girl? Where did he hide you?’

  No one answered.

  I gazed back at de Vivar Library.

  The librarian at the information desk made a phone call and directed me up to what he called The Model Room. It was at the very top of the strange pueblo tower at the front — Rodrigo’s Tower. Apparently when Rodrigo de Vivar visited the library, he used to spend most of his time up there.

  ‘Make sure you check out the view from the lookout at the top,’ the librarian said.

  The computer room had been as efficiently gleaming as modern technology — and a whole lotta dough — could make it. But the tower looked, and even smelt, like it hadn’t been used since it’d been built. There was no elevator, only a narrow spiral staircase running up the centre. There were rooms off to the side at each level but no sound of occupation from behind the old wooden doors. As instructed I continued up to the top floor at the end of the spiral staircase.

  There was a choice of two doors. I opened the one on the left. It led onto a narrow set of stairs, which I climbed up to find another door. I opened it and …

  Suddenly, I was on the tower battlements.

  I sucked in an impressed breath. The fog had momentarily cleared and, to the west, I took in the San Francisco skyline. It was dusk and the lights were starting to glimmer. To the east, the view was blocked by the five stone chiefs.

  They perched there like massive gargoyles, contemplating their targets on the plaza below. I shook my head at that thought. No, not gargoyles … they weren’t that kind of caricature.

  I took a closer look.

  They were intricately carved red basalt, inlaid with semi-precious stones. Each statue was lovingly portrayed, from the clothing down to their scars …

  These were statues of real people. Five real chiefs. But who were they? And why had Rodrigo de Vivar put them up here? From their clothes and decorations, they were certainly from different nations …

  I studied them. They may’ve been different people, but their expressions were all the same. They were watching for something, waiting …

  Holding onto the shoulder of the nearest chief, I leant over to see what they were all focused on.

  It was straight below — the Dry Gulch Memorial.

  I checked again. Every pair of eyes was focused on the Dry Gulch Memorial.

  The more I learnt about Rodrigo de Vivar, the more I was beginning to suspect he was a significant part of the puzzle I was trying to …

  A sudden flash of light from my right blinded me.

  I spun to face South Hall. I searched for the light source — but it was gone. Then I noticed I could see straight into Jackson River’s office from up here. I searched for a better view. River was sitting at his desk, talking on the phone. He put the phone down and moved to his open window. He was wearing jeans and a red T-shirt. He was staring down at the plaza, just like the first time I went to his office.

  I pulled my binoculars out of my bag.

  River placed both his wrists on the window frame above his head and stretched. I felt my temperature rise. Oh yeah, he was in just as good shape as his ancestor, Coyote Jack.

  I frowned. Every time I saw him, I could only see Coyote Jack with different eye colour and a punk haircut.

  I climbed back down the stairs from the roof and opened the right-hand door instead.

  It was like another world … the old West, even to the dusty smell.

  The round room at the top of the tower extended right out to the original pueblo stonework and the roof and supporting beams were made of huge tree trunks. It was lined with bookshelves crammed full of dusty old volumes and faded manuscripts.

  But it was what was in the middle of the room that caught my eye.

  It was an immense antique model of old San Francisco, full of authentic detail. There was no Golden Gate Bridge, and sand dunes and countryside surrounded the city, but San Francisco Bay sparkled the same steely blue it does today. There was no mistaking that hilly peninsular. The cityscape even had little model figures climbing its steep streets, all in tiny little nineteenth-century costumes, and ships rode at their moorings in the crowded harbour.

  Hector’s diary was somewhere in that very city. I leant over the old model like Gulliver, ready to reach down and grab it.

  A librarian, standing at one of the shelves, heard me and came over. He looked almost as old as the model, but had an intelligent twinkle in his faded blue eyes. I told him what I was after and we both stood and pondered the miniature city.

  ‘Well, you’re in luck,’ he said. ‘Rodrigo de Vivar had this model made in 1868, so it’s accurate to the right period.’

  ‘That’s good …’ I said, silently urging him on.

  ‘Hector Kershaw and his wife, Edwina, lived here on Nob Hill.’ He pointed to a fancy house sitting on the top of one of the hills in the centre of old San Francisco. ‘This is where Kershaw’s father-in-law lived.’ He pointed again, to an even bigger mansion that sat on the crest of the same hill and loomed over Hector’s. ‘His wedding gift to the newly married couple was the house next door.’

  I eyed Hector’s ritzy new house. Bet daddy-in-law wanted to keep an eagle eye on his little teenage princess … But, fancy new house or not, I bet Hector’d been just itching to get away from his nosy relative.

  ‘Thanks, but I’m looking for Prairie Rose,’ I said. ‘Have you got any ideas where she would’ve lived?’

  The librarian scratched his head. ‘Could be anywhere. As soon as Hector arrived he began building what is now the Kershaw real-estate empire. Hector owned tracts of land all over the city.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think even Hector would’ve kept his mistress anywhere near to his doting father-in-law …’

  The elderly librarian shrugged. ‘The real-estate development furthest away would be Mr Kershaw’s pet project, the Little Boston Precinct, of course.’

  Hector had a pet project? The excitement began to rise. ‘That sounds much better. Does it still exist?’

  He nodded. ‘Little Boston was in a part of San Francisco that survived the earthquake and fire of 1906, but the precinct is derelict now. After Hector went missing the Kershaws just boarded the whole thing up. I believe it passed out of the family in the 1960s … and I know the present owners originally intended to bulldoze it … but it’s still there.’

  This description was starting to sound very familiar. ‘Is Little Boston in SoMa?’

  The librarian was surprised. ‘Yes, that’s correct. How did you —’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In the street Hector Kershaw had specially named to commemorate the memory of his elder brother, Lysander. You know — the one who died a hero in the Indian Wars.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ That made me suspicious. In old Santa Fe, every time Lysander’s name had been mentioned, Hector’d looked ready to detonate. So why would he name a street after someone he hated? ‘My office is in SoMa but I don’t know any Lysander Street —’

  ‘No, he used Lysander’s middl
e name, which was Prendergast … Little Boston is on Prendergast Street.’

  That was just too weird … Little Boston was on the same street as the Zebulon Hotel. My hotel.

  But then I’d moved into the Zebulon because it was cheap and full of character. And it was cheap because it was falling down … and it was falling down because the city wouldn’t let the owners demolish it along with the other historic buildings in the area …

  Maybe there was some cosmic justice after all …

  I leant over the model, orienting myself.

  The librarian moved with me, squinting down. ‘That’s Prendergast Street there. And that’s Little Boston Precinct.’ He pointed.

  Five buildings, arranged around a central courtyard, sat on the northern side of Prendergast Street. A tall fence enclosed the compound.

  There was no Zebulon Hotel.

  I studied that tall fence — it was made of iron bars with sharp points on the ends of them. Was Hector keeping people in … or keeping them out?

  ‘Okay, I need everything you have on Little Boston … everything from the blueprints through to the —’

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t help you —’

  ‘What d’ya mean?’ I snapped, already mentally hot on the trail.

  ‘I’m sorry but everything we had — all the original documents, the plans, the architect’s notes … Everything on the Little Boston Precinct was stolen in the break-in.’ He looked down at the old model. ‘This is all we have left.’

  ‘Break-in?’ I squeaked, unable to believe my ears.

  ‘Yes — the one that happened about a week or so ago.’

  Night was falling and there were still thick patches of fog here and there … but I left Berkeley like I had rockets attached.

  According to the librarian, Mayor Hector Kershaw had declared that new role models were the only way to really change brutal, corrupt old San Francisco. So Little Boston was to be a model precinct, one that’d create patterns that could be replicated in the wider society. It held a reformatory for delinquent girls and a women’s prison, a school and a hospital. But Hector’d disappeared before the buildings became operational and now, without the missing documents, no one knew which of the five buildings were which.

  I’d had trouble keeping a straight face while the archivist raved about Hector Kershaw being so progressive … so far ahead of his time. What a pity it had never come to fruition.

  Psychopathic Hector had built a model community designed to improve San Francisco’s moral fibre?

  Oh, sure!

  And named Prendergast Street after his hated elder brother?

  Oh yeah, I was definitely checking out that little hive of lies and deception. Apart from a driving need to know what that fiend, Hector Kershaw, had been really up to, Prairie Rose could’ve been kept in any one of those five fenced-in buildings.

  I parked in front of the Zebulon Hotel, changed into dark clothes in my office, put my break-and-enter tools in my black backpack and went downstairs. It was still early but there was live music pouring out of Jake’s Place on the ground floor. Some country and Western singer was playing the banjo and pleading for another chance. He kept underlining his torment with a chorus of yodelling trills. Even so the bar and grill appeared full. There was no one in sight on the street, but if the singer kept making that demented racket it wouldn’t stay that way for long.

  I stepped out onto the pavement, then heard someone whistling to my left. I pressed myself into the shadowed wall of the Zebulon. No point in letting anyone witness what I was about to do — not if I could avoid it.

  It was Jake, the ex-con restaurateur. And from the delicious fragrance wafting out of the boxes he was carrying, he was making a home delivery. The scent almost lifted me off my hungry feet and pulled me out of the shadows. I salivated as I watched him whistle his cheerful way down Prendergast Street.

  But I’d thought he said he didn’t make deliveries?

  Jake made a right turn into the homeless shelter on the corner.

  Interesting … One day soon I’d have to look into that man’s story …

  I mentally slapped myself. Come on — focus. I peeked out, checked both ways, then sprinted across the road and deep into Little Boston.

  I scanned around.

  Hector’s high metal fence had long since been washed away by time, but all five of the original buildings still stood around a central courtyard. The courtyard had been paved in the dim distant past — but was now mainly clods of soil covered in weeds and dotted with a few smashed-up shelters abandoned by the homeless.

  In the dead centre of the courtyard, rising up like a hand escaping the grave, was a huge, badly battered tree. It was a Canyon Oak with a massive trunk and heavy, spreading branches covered in a spiny, holly-like foliage. The coastal ranges behind my beach house were covered in the same species. But this one was a whopper, maybe ninety feet tall. It was half dead and its trunk was deeply rutted with old carvings.

  Then it struck me. I hadn’t even taken my flashlight out yet. I checked the night sky, looking for the moon … It had to be full — it was early nightfall — but I could still see like it was just before sunset. I shook that thought off. I didn’t have time for one more complication.

  I jogged one full circuit of the precinct, looking for the best routes in. The owner, Crumple Holdings, no doubt wary of squatters, had boarded the buildings up like Fort Knox on heat. There were signs everywhere warning that the area was patrolled by private security.

  That explained the smashed-up shelters … But it also meant that I might find the buildings in relatively okay shape.

  Maybe …

  God knows I was going to need every piece of luck I could get to pick up any clues. The plan was that I’d go through them all quickly now, and then come back tomorrow after I’d pumped Gideon Webb — and maybe even Gilda — for more info.

  I got out my flashlight and worked my way around them, clockwise. I broke into each building, then carefully boarded it back up again when I left. The first three were dirty and broken down, with leaking roofs and too many serious rodent nests, but they were really just empty rows of rooms that could’ve been used for anything.

  Except that each of them had heavy iron bars on the windows …

  But it was the fourth one that worried me.

  I knew what kind of building it was as soon as I broke in.

  I’d been through a similar place in Australia … down in Tasmania. Australia had been colonised as a penal settlement for England. They’d sent the worst of the worst down to the Great South Land, hoping they’d never see the poor bastards ever again.

  But when you send troublemakers over to the other side of the world, you’re just creating a new nation of troublemakers. Anyway, somewhere along the line, the British had to find a new place to put those they couldn’t even bear to keep on mainland Australia.

  That place was Tasmania, the island at the extreme southern tip of the continent … the place where the winds blow straight up from the Antarctic. And that’s where they built Port Arthur, a prison that was so dreaded it acted as a whip handle over the rest of Australia.

  Port Arthur was called a model prison, designed in the very latest mid-nineteenth-century style of scientific control. Physical punishment was known to harden prisoners, and this lot was already as hard as they come, so Port Arthur used psychological methods to break them instead.

  These new psychological techniques were embodied in Port Arthur’s special prison architecture and furniture, which meant prisoners could be prevented from seeing, or even hearing, another human being. Sometimes that isolation was kept in place for the rest of their lives …

  Modern torture experts call it the sensory deprivation technique.

  And it worked.

  In Port Arthur, there was a mental asylum built right next to the frigid prison.

  And here in his very own Little Boston Precinct, Hector had created a women’s prison that was even worse th
an Port Arthur.

  I saw row after row of isolation cells. No natural light, no windows. All completely soundproof and viewproof. Boxes not much bigger than a toilet.

  But it was what was in the basement that really shocked me …

  It held a modified Iron Maiden — a metal, body-shaped cabinet.

  The enclosed female prisoner would be completely blind, completely deaf … and completely defenceless.

  47

  LYSANDER

  The last building to be checked in Little Boston was the only one that actually faced onto Prendergast Street. It was directly opposite the Zebulon Hotel.

  I checked my watch … Damn! I wanted to catch Gideon Webb at The Hue & Cry in twenty minutes.

  But I studied the last building with longing …

  It was three storeys high and the fanciest of the five by a long mile. The others had been mainly redbrick but this one had a marble facade with elaborately decorated Greek columns framing the doorways and windows. Sure it had been worn down by time and dulled by the elements but it must’ve been impressive in its day.

  This was the building I’d caught glimpses of through the mist. The one across from my office window.

  I just knew I HAD to go in there!

  Above the main entrance was the title: ‘The Thackeray Building’. Over the top of the building’s name was a marble frieze, a sculptured scene. The elements had done their best to erode it, so it was difficult to make out exactly what the scene was of …

  Then it seemed to come into focus. It was a sculpture of a handsome Greek hero slaying some fierce mythological beast. The beast had the head of a woman, her features distorted with rage, but the winged body and legs of a bird of prey.

  It was a Harpy.

  Then I realised the Harpy wasn’t enraged — she was in agony.

  The sculpture showed the very end of the battle. The Harpy was dying in his arms while the handsome marble hero smiled in triumph. He’d killed her with a sword downwards through the breast, through the heart.