by Neil Mcmahon
“I’m not lying!” Hazeldon bawled the words into the wind.
Monks was dimly aware that his ordinary consciousness was no longer in control of his mind. Some part of it—a part that was usually buried deep, that was primitive and ferociously bent on survival—had been operating his body.
Now he had the distinct sense of another facet coming into play: asking something or someone what to do.
And if no answer came, this voice requested mercy.
Monks stared at the approaching light, estimating the seconds that remained out of three minutes.
The answer came.
He shoved Hazeldon to the starboard gunwale and shouldered him over, to fall flailing into the sea. Monks dove after him, burying his face in his arms. He slammed into the hard surface tension of the bay and plunged down into instant shocking cold. The saltwater bit fiercely where Hazeldon’s teeth had ripped his neck.
Monks’s groping hand found Hazeldon’s sweatshirt—Monks’s sweatshirt. For dizzy seconds Monks twisted, all direction lost, until a decades-old memory from scuba training led him to follow upward the bubbles from his thrashing. He struggled for the surface, his air almost gone, dragging the burden of the other man—starting to understand that he was not going to make it.
Then the burden was gone: slipped away like a fish out of a net, leaving Monks holding only the empty sweatshirt. He let it go.
His head broke the surface just before blackout and he managed to suck in one breath before a wave caught him and filled his mouth. He clawed and kicked and hacked the burning saltwater from throat and nose until finally he was afloat and breathing, and thought returned.
He looked for Hazeldon, pumping his legs in an egg-beater kick, striving to rise out of the water. There was nothing but the foaming whitecapped chop. Two hundred yards away, the Mjollnir was starting to roll, with no hand at the wheel. The approaching vessel was within a quarter mile now, the low, lean shape of a cutter becoming visible through the fog. Its spotlights were focused on the Viking boat.
Monks raised a hand in a futile wave.
A ball of flame appeared where the Mjollnir had been an instant before—a yellow flash the size of a house, erupting like a giant Roman candle into a spray of burning debris. A thunderous boom rolled across the water. The flaming chunks started to land, a couple of them falling close to Monks. He went underwater again and stayed as long as he could.
When he cautiously came up, what was left of the Mjollnir was outlined in flames. The central section, with the cabin, was mostly gone, with great gaping holes blown in the hull. The boat was filling quickly with water and the stern was sinking.
Within another minute, the dragon prow began to tip backward, seeming to rear up out of the sea as the stern dragged it down. Then it slipped quickly under water, its only visible remains the scattered flaming chunks of debris.
The cutter moved in, its lights playing over the wreckage. But it was still a quarter mile away. Monks understood that he would not be able to stay afloat for many more minutes. The chances of the cutter seeing him, a tiny white face amidst the fog and chop, were almost nil.
He started his slow journey toward Sausalito, about a half mile away. He tried to angle north, fearing the currents that could pull him from the calm of Richardson Bay into San Francisco Bay itself, where he would have no hope of making it. He moved in a mix of breaststroke and dog paddle, pausing to rest when a wave furthered him a few yards. Slimy tendrils of kelp tugged him back, and once he imagined the brush of a sea creature, curious or hungry.
Quickly, he was all out of energy and heat, his body sucked clean. Moving his arms was an increasingly impossible task. Something started to happen that he had felt once before. It was like an iron band tightening, not around his flesh, but around whatever lived inside. It was pitiless; not painful, just impossible to endure.
He had almost fallen into a dream that he was never, afterward, able to recall, when he felt sand squish between his toes.
Monks reluctantly came awake. He could tell from the lights that he was just south of Sausalito, facing a deserted stretch of coast. He plodded forward, rising from the sea like a creature emerging from the primeval soup. When he reached dry ground, he fell to his knees and then his face. The sand clung to his bloodless outer flesh, bringing warmth and peace.
Then he was aware of someone beside him. There was a distinct sense to the presence. It seemed to be urging him to look out there.
Monks lifted his face out of the sand. In the bay, the last burning chunks of the great longboat drifted in the mist like the remains of a Viking funeral.
But there was no one standing near him after all.
25
It was just past dawn the next morning when Monks drove up his own driveway, and his own house came into view. He had never been so glad to see any place in his life.
He switched off the ignition of Martine Rostanov’s Volvo, got out, and opened the passenger door for her. They walked slowly up the porch steps, his arm around her waist, both of them beyond exhaustion. They had been up all night talking to police.
Inside, she dropped her purse on a chair, looking around at the comfortable but tasteless bachelor digs he lived in. The house was dark and cold. There were no cats to be seen.
“The vodka’s in the cabinet left of the sink,” Monks said. “Ice and a lemon twist for me. I’ll make a fire.”
He crouched in front of the iron stove and built a rising pyre of crumpled newspaper and kindling topped by larger splits of oak. It started crackling at the touch of the match, flames shooting upward in the strong draft through the slightly open door and wide-open damper.
Martine came to him, holding two brimming, ice-filled glasses with crescents of lemon on the rims. She and Monks touched the glasses together and drank, but it was not the celebration they had talked about. Her face was pale, her eyes dark and hollow. She had been silent during most of the drive here.
Lex Rittenour had died in the helicopter on the way to Bayview Hospital. Surgery would not have saved him even if he had made it there. He had simply lost too much blood.
“Why don’t you take a bath and get some sleep,” Monks said to her.
She nodded, holding the vodka glass in both hands like a child.
“What are you going to do?” she said.
“I’m going to have one more drink,” he said. “Maybe two or three. Then I’m going to sleep too.” There were going to be many more meetings with law enforcement authorities, attorneys, media people. But Monks had insisted on taking a break. They had dispersed—Stephanie to her mother’s to be pampered, Larrabee to John’s Grill on Ellis Street to drink under the portrait of his hero, Dashiell Hammett.
Martine had insisted on coming with Monks.
He showed her where things were and got her clean towels and a robe. Then, hesitantly, he pushed open the door to a medium-sized bedroom, with posters of rock stars on the walls and stuffed animals on the bed.
“This is Steffie’s room,” he said. “I want you to be comfortable.”
Martine touched his cheek in the way she had done before. It could have signaled anything: Thanks, you’re sweet. I was wrong to come here. Good-bye. She stepped into the bathroom and closed the door firmly.
This time, walking down the hall, he had company: all three cats had appeared, winding through his feet, glaring at him for bringing someone else into their home, but not so angry that they failed to herd him toward the kitchen. The food in their bowls was relatively fresh—a stack of mail and newspapers on the table showed that Emil Zukich had been coming by, as he had promised—but Monks got out clean bowls and doled out generous portions of Kultured Kat Kidney Feast, a guaranteed favorite.
Monks brushed his teeth and washed at the kitchen sink, hissing as water found its way beneath the bandage on his neck. He took a couple of filet mignons from the freezer and put them on the counter to thaw. Then he poured another vodka and walked out onto the deck. Clouds hung low over the surroun
ding hills and stretched to a solid gray front toward the Pacific, promising drizzle soon and later, a rain that might last days. But it was getting toward the end of that season.
He had put together enough information by now for a basic grasp of the forces that had interacted behind the scenes: Pete Hazeldon’s rage at living in Lex Rittenour’s shadow; Walker Ostrand’s sadistic penchant for playing with human subjects; Gloria Sharpe’s hard-heartedness and greed. The details would be coming under an intensive investigation. The Korean pimp, Kwon, had been arrested, and the process of questioning his stable of women for their sad stories would begin soon.
Hazeldon was presumed dead, although his body had not yet been found. In all probability it was lost in the deep murky waters of the bay, where, with currents and kelp and scavengers, it probably never would be. But Monks could not shake a touch of dread. Robby Vandenard had supposedly been dead for fifteen years, during which he had murdered an unknown number of people.
The shock waves of all this were going to reverberate fiercely and worldwide. The IPO had been called off. Kenneth Bouldin was already maneuvering with high-powered smoothness, declaring grief for Lex, deploring Hazeldon’s research, denying any responsibility for himself or Aesir Corporation—deciding which of the underlings, like Tygard, would be thrown to the wolves.
And Monks was already sure that Bouldin had been right: REGIS was far from dead. On the contrary, for all the public outrage that the research would arouse, it would affirm, to the elect, that health, beauty, even immortality—things that had been the sole province of heaven—were coming available here on earth. If the cost was heavy to the damned, that was the way it was ordained.
Then there was Lex.
Monks went down to the car and got his grip. The blood sample was where he had left it, rolled up in a towel. He took the glass tube out of its plastic bag and held it in his hand, his mind moving again to some realm of faith or superstition.
As near as he could tell, Lex had died at just about the time that Monks had washed up on the beach—the moment when he had imagined that presence beside him.
When he climbed back up onto the deck, Martine was there waiting. He saw with surprise that she was not wearing the terrycloth robe of Stephanie’s he had found for her, but one of his own, an old buff-colored chamois. It came to her ankles and her hands were lost in the sleeves. She was sipping his drink.
She looked fresh now, her hair damp, her faded makeup washed away. The hot water had given her skin a faint rosy flush. But her eyes were filled with hurt from all that had happened.
He had not intended to show her the tube of blood, but he could not hide it now.
“Steffie nicked it from the hospital,” he said.
“She told me.”
“I’m sorry for you, losing him. It must be hard.”
“I cared for him enormously,” she said. “But these last years—we both got very far from who we’d been. I just got lost, but Lex was used up. In pain: not physically, but in his being. He tried everything to stop it, but he kept getting backed farther into a corner.”
She took the tube and held it between her palms, as if trying to warm it.
“What are you going to do with it?” she asked.
“I have a safe. I could make it into a reliquary.”
“A place where they keep holy bones, that sort of thing?”
“Yeah.”
“You were with him last. Was he scared?”
“I think he was ready to cut loose and voyage,” Monks said.
He offered her the rest of the vodka in the glass. She shook her head. He drained it.
“We need to rest,” he said. “When we wake up I’ll grill steaks.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
He walked to the door and opened it. She watched him without moving, her eyes dark and anxious.
“I’d like you to hold me,” she said. “But I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
“That you won’t want me after you see me.”
Monks walked back to her.
“Let me see you,” he said.
Slowly, still holding his gaze with her own, she tugged her belt undone.
Monks parted the robe with his hands, resting them lightly around her waist. He took his time looking her up and down. The brace was off, her thinner leg as naked as the rest of her. It was delicate, fawnlike, just bent at the knee, toes touching the deck and heel slightly raised.
Monks started kissing her: lips, neck, small rose-nippled breasts. Her eyes were closed now. He knelt, working his way down, finding the soft flesh inside her thighs, then clasping her and pressing his face against her until she knelt too, and shook the robe back off her shoulders and pulled him down.
Acknowledgments
The author is deeply indebted to many people who helped in the making of this book. Special thanks to:
Kim, Lois, Chuck, and Jeff Anderson; Frank and LaRue Bender; Carl Clatterbuck; Dan Conaway; Mike Koepf; Georgia, Barbara, and the two Dans McMahon; David and Dick Merriman; Bob Rajala; Kuskay Sakeye; Nikola Scott; Xanthe Tabor; Jennifer Rudolph Walsh.
And Eric Warfield Johnson, builder, educator, and longtime comrade, who carried many aspiring writers on his broad Viking shoulders.
Here’s an exciting excerpt from
TO THE BONE
the next Monks novel
by Neil McMahon
1
Mercy ER, this is Medic Twelve with Code Three traffic.”
The voice, choppy with static and backed by a wailing siren, came over Mercy Hospital’s paramedic radio, from an ambulance out on the San Francisco streets. Code Three meant that it was racing toward the hospital as fast as the night allowed.
The Mobile Intensive Care nurse monitoring the radio leaned closer and pressed the talk button on the microphone.
“Medic Twelve, this is Mercy ER,” she said. “Go ahead.”
Carroll Monks walked across the Emergency Room and stood beside her, listening.
“Mercy ER, we’re bringing you a young white female, age approximately twenty-five. She’s unconscious,
with almost no blood pressure. She does have a very weak femoral pulse, but no radial pulses. Ah, hold on a second, Mercy.”
Monks heard the driver yell something to his partner in the ambulance’s rear. His words and the reply were lost in noise.
The driver’s voice came back on. “We haven’t been able to start an IV. We can’t find any veins. Repeat, she does not have an IV running. She has respiratory depression and we are oxygenating her.”
The nurse said, “Medic Twelve, do you have any history on her?”
“Negative, Mercy, not much. She was in an apartment, alone. Looks like she’s had a recent surgery, probably her breasts. We found some Valium, but we don’t think it’s an overdose.”
“Who called her in?”
“She managed to call 911. We got sent by City Triage.”
Monks took the microphone from the nurse, and said, “Any signs of massive bleeding?”
“There’s some vomit with blood in it,” the driver rasped through the static. “But not massive.”
“Nothing from the surgery? Other external wounds? Blood around the apartment, or in the bathroom?”
“Negative, Mercy,” the driver said again.
Monks’s mind started tracking a flow chart of probabilties, for a young woman who was bleeding badly, with the blood staying inside her. None of them were good.
The nurse was watching him questioningly, a look asking if he wanted any more information. He shook
his head, giving her instructions as he handed her the microphone.
“Take her directly to the trauma room, Medic Twelve,” she said.
“Roger, Mercy. ETA is six minutes.”
Monks turned back to the ER and the next pressing task—organizing who was going to need to be where, during the next half hour. Screws had been tightening in his head all night, and this had the feel of being the most s
evere one yet.
It was 3:51 A.M., an early Friday morning in July. San Francisco was going through a heat wave, with temperatures that had hovered in the nineties for the past several days. The usual cooling sea breezes and evening fog were gone, driven off the coast by hot winds that swept through the Central Valley like blasts from a furnace. Inland, the thermometer had been topping a hundred and ten.
But inland, they were used to it. Here, the leaden air and damp armpits and gummy asphalt underfoot were like a sudden sneaky enemy, one that worked just below the level of consciousness. Monks could sense it in faces—tension, friction, as if a layer of social lubrication had been eroded by the heat. People were rubbing too close together, and the ER had been simmering hotter as the hours passed. It was amazing how many people were up, about, and in need of medical help, all through the night.
He had just left the bedside of a seventeen-year-old girl who was giving birth to her third baby, a process she had started some twenty minutes earlier in her
boyfriend’s car. Staff were trying to get her sent to OB, but OB was busy, and the on-call doctor was not yet available. It looked like the youngster was going to appear in the ER, any minute now.
In the next bed, a fat middle-aged man was doing his best to die of a heart attack. They had shot him full of clot-busting drugs and shocked him back to life three times, but the monitor needle kept quavering in the danger zone. This was tying up two nurses and the other ER physician on duty. A cardiologist was supposed to be on the way to take him to the Cath Lab, but cardiology was busy too.
The knife wound in Bed Five was coming around without complications, but during the past minutes, his voice had risen from querulous to strident and he was becoming combative. The SFPD police who had brought him were gone, back on the streets to deal with their own hot night. Hospital Security would probably have to be called to put him in restraints, but Security had their hands full right now in the lobby. One uniformed officer was moving uneasily among the crowd of at least twenty, while another flanked the desk where the triage nurse worked to separate out the gravely injured. Many of the rest were in pain, most had been waiting a long time, and there was a volatile racial mix of young black and Hispanic males, with girlfriends or wives who looked at least as tough as the men. Monks had been peripherally aware of a lot of restless movement on the other side of the lobby’s glass doors—bobbing heads and strutting bodies, a dizzyingly alive collage that made him think of a huge, many-limbed beast about to fall into a frenzy and tear itself apart.
