Once again, Ben’s appearance was ill—or perhaps well—timed and we dropped the conversation to pile into the Rover and head to Pioneer Square in search of Sisiutl, or his hunting buddy— whichever we got to first.
I let Quinton and Ben out at Second and Cherry so I could scout a parking space Laguire’s watchers wouldn’t pick up instantly and Ben and Quinton could walk down the Cherry Street side of the Square. I found a space on Western and sat in the truck a few minutes to check my cell phone for the first time in twenty-four hours.
I wasn’t surprised to see that the intrusion alarm had signaled my phone about six p.m. on Monday. They’d probably walked into the building and hidden until most of the offices cleared out, and then picked my less-than-stellar locks and been on their way in minutes. I’d have to be very careful what I said in my office for a while. I made note of the other numbers and messages on a pad of paper and shut the phone down again, removing the battery as Quinton had instructed. It was a pain, but I couldn’t risk being stalked by Laguire and her minions. With no other way to find me—and through me, Quinton—I hoped they’d keep their eyes on my office and not start prowling around, stirring up trouble.
I walked up into Pioneer Square and found Quinton and Ben standing by the Chief Sealth bust, talking to Fish. I joined the cabal.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked.
“Grandma Ella called. Which she doesn’t do. So when she said I should come down here and find you, I figured I’d better . . . come looking for zeqwas.” He blushed and the blanket of color around him flashed in swirls of yellow and green—nerves and uncertainty. “I was thinking . . . y’know . . . it’s crazy, but . . . there’s some power in belief and if . . . someone thinks there might be a monster after them, maybe, in a way, there is. Maybe . . . maybe there are things I could do to help you. With my people down here. I’m a bad Indian but I speak Lushootseed, at least.”
I nodded, not sure what to say.
“Fish has been talking to Grandpa Dan and some of the other Native Americans down here,” Quinton said. “They don’t think we’re crazy.”
“Grandpa Dan said it was their duty to be attentive—whatever that means,” Fish added. “And that we’d be granted the aid of the spirits to stop the killing.”
“Someone besides us thinks Sistu is eating people?” I asked.
Quinton replied, “They’re not sure of that specifically yet, but they do think there’s something magical going on—they’re getting superstitious and scared.”
“They’re not all scared,” Fish corrected. “Some are mad. They don’t want a monster on the loose. It’s a bad sign. They want it to go away. They”—he looked a little embarrassed again—“they said they’ll help when the time comes. I don’t know what they think they can do. . . .”
“Did any of them have a crow with them?” I asked.
Fish gave a nervous laugh. “There are crows all over around here, with all the garbage from the restaurants. Of course there were crows.” The apple green color of his aura got brighter as he got more nervous. I’d have bet money there had been crows— and ravens, too—in the thick of that discussion, listening in like crafty old women and carrying off their information afterward. It appeared that Quinton and I were no longer the only people taking this seriously. I also wondered how a single phone call from Ella Graham had convinced him we weren’t nuts and wound his nerves so tightly—he’d been on the verge of rejecting the whole thing by the time we’d dropped him off Monday night.
I smiled at him. “I’m glad you came. Let’s go find a monster.”
Ben and Fish stood watch while Quinton and I popped in and out of the underground, looking for any sign of Sisiutl. We had no luck. Even in the monster’s lair, there was nothing, though there was some sign there might be more zombies somewhere around. Recent casts of the Grey zombie nets and a hand that was still fresh enough to ooze blood made me fear someone else was missing and unable to give up the ghost properly. We came back up into the alley knowing time was against us; Sisiutl was moving.
“It doesn’t look like it’s abandoned its den,” I said as we rejoined Ben and Fish, “but where does something like that hide in broad daylight? Where is it now?”
“I don’t know,” Quinton replied. “Just guessing, I’d say it’s sticking close to its master, so we need to find him.”
“Who, what?” Fish asked, looking from one to the other of us.
“It’s not down there. We think it’s on the move,” I explained. “It’s been cagey so far, so if it’s moving, it’s either following its master, or following his orders.”
“Master? I’m confused. Qamaits is Sistu’s mistress,” Fish said.
“I should say we need to find whoever currently has Sistu on loan from Qamaits. We think someone did her a favor and she lent them the monster’s aid in hunting—like Grandma Ella said. But so far, I haven’t seen any of our likely choices for the role.”
“That’s kind of unusual,” Quinton added. “Most of these guys usually hang out right around here or over in Oxy Park.”
We all walked down to Occidental Park. Under the glass picnic house, enjoying the beam of the sun through the panes in the comparative heat of 34 degrees—the warmest day since the storm—we found Zip and Sandy still standing watch over Tall Grass, who was babbling and looking sick by turns.
“Hey,” Quinton greeted them. “Have you guys been here all night?”
“Of course not,” said Sandy. “Grass didn’t want to sleep inside, so we took turns.”
Fish muttered something in Lushootseed and Grass jerked his attention to him, letting out a torrent of the language too fast for my uneducated ears to make out as anything but shushes and trills. Fish was taken aback and stared at the older man, crouching down beside him to talk.
We all watched a moment as the two Indians conversed in rapid harmonies of speech.
“I wonder if he knows where it went,” Ben said. “That’s a pretty intense conversation.”
“Where what went?” Sandy asked.
“Um . . . Tanker. Or Lass,” I supplied, speaking the first names on my tongue, pretty sure I didn’t want to ask Sandy if she’d seen any snake monsters with her zombies.
“Lass took off,” Zip said. “Tanker, too.”
“Took off for where?” Quinton demanded.
“I dunno. I in’t Lass’s buddy; dun’t go drinkin wid im much. Not like Tandy.”
“Hey . . . Do you know if Lass was with Tandy the night Tandy disappeared? Thanksgiving I guess it was,” Quinton asked, forcing himself to lower his intensity, which roared around his head in tangerine spikes.
“Sure was. Hit me up for smokes—traded me a swig on t’J.D. Dunno where they got it . . .”
Ben and I didn’t know which conversation to watch.
“Did you see them later that night?” Quinton asked.
“Nah. They dun’t come by me. I was down to the Union fer some turkey afore, but I’s long gone to bed whenever t’ey finished off that bottle.”
Quinton shot me a glance. Then he turned back to Zip. “And you don’t know where Lass is now?”
“No, I dun’t! I said so, din’t I?”
“He said he was going to the Showboat,” Sandy said. “I don’t know why he’d say that, though. They tore it down in ’94. But Tanker was taking Bella to the U, so maybe Lass was following them. I can’t say I like Lass’s behavior lately. He’s obsessed with that dog!”
“Showboat?” I wasn’t as familiar with the campus as I was with Pioneer Square and some of the neighborhoods.
“Showboat Theater. On Showboat Beach on the south end of the campus,” Sandy explained. “It burned in the eighties and they left it for years because of the asbestos. They finally tore it down in 1994.”
“Why would Tanker go to a torn-down theater?”
“He didn’t go there,” Fish said, looking up from his conversation with Tall Grass. “He went to the University dock. Grass says Tanker was going to t
ry to get a job on the research vessel’s dock crew. He says Lass and . . . Sistu followed him. Grass’s pretty freaked out. He says he saw it following Lass like a dog. . . .”
“Shadow of a dog,” Grass corrected. Then he hid his face in his hands and started shaking.
“Oh, shit,” Quinton muttered. “It’s Lass.”
SEVENTEEN
We bundled into the Rover and went after Lass. The three of us who’d seen the bodies had no desire to see another. Ben caught our fear and started blurting nervous questions. I just concentrated on getting us there as fast as possible in the fog that was boiling up from the icy water of the lakes and canal, muttering pleas to whatever gods might bother to listen that we not find another body.
“What’s going on?” Ben demanded. “Who are we chasing?”
“Lassiter,” I replied, making the connections. “He’s one of the homeless guys and the monster is trailing him around like a faithful hound. He also sent Quinton and me to Sistu’s lair last night, and neither of us—who spend a ton of time around the Square and thought we knew every inch of it—knew about the back door to the comfort station,” I started, reconstructing my thoughts out loud.
“What comfort station?”
“The one under Pioneer Square.” I turned a glance at Quinton. “That’s what the revenant on the tour meant—a place with no comfort, between the tides. What are the chances that Lass, who came to you worried about monsters following him in the underground, would know a bolt-hole you didn’t know about? The hole was camouflaged and there was no evidence anyone had ever used that bit of the underground as a flop. And if Lass—the paranoid—knew about such a snug little hole, why would he be sleeping in the bricks and risking the wrath of Tanker and Bella— whom he is now chasing?”
“How would he get control of Sisiutl?” Fish asked. “There has to be a gift made, not just a favor.”
“A gift? What sort of gift?” I demanded.
“A token from Qamaits to signify his command of— Sistu.”
“Well . . . if it’s following him like a dog, maybe Qamaits gave him the thing’s leash—it must have a leash of some kind; that’s how these things work,” Ben said.
“Why would he want the stunner if he had the monster’s leash?” Quinton asked.
“If he doesn’t speak Lushootseed, he might not know what the ogress had given him. He might not understand that Sistu meant him no harm since he wouldn’t understand what she told him,” Fish said.
Quinton shook his head. “If Lass understands Lushootseed, that’s news to me.”
“So he wouldn’t understand the monster was a gift, not something stalking him.”
“Probably not. But the stun stick wouldn’t have been much help against that kind of monster. So why did he come to me?”
As we turned in near the oceanography buildings, I made a suggestion. “Given Lassiter’s erratic behavior, I’m not sure he knew it wouldn’t help, or that he understood how Sistu operated. He might have thought it just ate whoever it wanted but hadn’t yet attacked him for some reason.”
“He seems to have gotten the hang of it now,” Quinton said in disgust. “He’s bringing the monster right to Tanker and Bella—he hates them—and you know he’d harm them both if he thought he had the tool to do it.”
“I agree. It’s the known dead who are Lassiter’s victims—those are the ones Sistu killed for him. The others, they were just food for Sistu. The legend says you have to keep the monster fed or the gods get pissed off,” I thought aloud.
“It also says you shouldn’t abuse their gifts,” Fish added as I turned into a parking lot. “Qamaits isn’t a goddess, but she still lent out their pet. A couple of days ago I wouldn’t have taken this seriously, but . . . I may be changing my mind. These legends are kind of specific. This Lass guy will have to answer to the gods for messing up or there’ll be hell to pay.”
The area was under construction here and there behind the medical center—the inevitable expansion of a growing campus— and once I’d parked the truck, we had to run around the west end of the South Campus Center buildings to get down to San Juan Road and the oceanography dock. My cranky knee protested the whole way.
There was no sign of Lass or Tanker at the dock. Quinton skidded to a halt beside me in the thickening mist seeping off Portage Bay. “Where is he?” he snapped. “That damned Lass . . .”
“Where did the Showboat used to be?” I asked.
Ben came panting up behind us. “To the west a little . . . that open area we passed . . . near the gate. We’d have seen him as we came down the street.”
Fish joined us, looking a little ill from the exertion. He bent and put his hands on his knees to catch his breath.
A dog yelped and growled in the gathering mist.
“That’s got to be Bella,” Quinton said, pointing east toward the salmon fishery.
I pushed normal aside and bolted forward into the Grey that was for once easier to see as the normal filled with thick white vapor. I ran toward two knots of bright life circling each other in between the hard lines of the fishery’s upright towers. Quinton and Ben followed with Fish trailing behind. As I pounded across the ground, I put my hand behind my back to check my pistol and couldn’t put my hand on it. It was there—I could feel it pressing into the back of my right hip—but I couldn’t grab it and panic spiked through me—it seemed as if I was too far into the Grey to grab hold of something as normal as a gun. If Lass had his stunner I stood a chance—though unpleasant—against him, but I had none against Sisiutl without the gun to drive it back long enough to run like hell, and I didn’t think anyone but Quinton had any other weapons on them.
The dog let out a yelp as a white arc dashed between the two bright figures ahead. One of the knots of light spun and began to dart away. The other started to chase it.
In the whispering and muttering of the Grey I heard someone else call out in the normal. “Lass!” Quinton shouted beside me. “Lass, don’t!”
I slammed back into the normal with a jolt and skidded to a halt just beyond the spawning pool and a few feet from Lass, who was turning to stare at Quinton and the rest of us. I started to try again for the gun, but Quinton put a light warning hand on my elbow, keeping his eyes on Lass the whole time. He took a slow step toward him while Ben and Fish stumbled to swaying stops nearby. The power grid of the Grey hummed with tension and seemed to color even the normal mist red.
Lass, half crouched and tight as a spring, had whirled to stare at us, his eyes darting over each of us in turn. The little shock stick he held arced and crackled spastically as he twitched with fear and drug withdrawal and squeezed it in his unsteady fist.
“Q-man,” he mumbled, as if he’d struggled to put the name and face together.
A cloud of sickly olive green shattered by bolts of orange swirled around him in the Grey, and he seemed to have a pair of dark shadows where Quinton had none. I wondered for an instant about Ben and Fish, behind me, but I didn’t turn to look. Lass straightened up a little, his fear easing a touch at seeing a familiar face. “Man . . . I—what you want?”
“Where’s Tanker?” Quinton asked.
“I don’t know, man! I was—I don’t know. That dog. That dog, man, it was trying to kill me! All dogs try to kill me. They hate me! They follow me around!”
Quinton eased closer to Lass, the long sweep of his coat meeting the creeping fog and concealing his movement. “The dog’s gone. She won’t be bothering you for a while. I don’t think you’ll need the stunner any more.” He held out his hand, still at a distance. “You can give it back to me now.”
Underground (Greywalker, Book 3) Page 31
