Mercury Retrograde

by Laura Bickle

  Cal. What if the person they were after was Cal?

  Petra stepped back and tugged Sig away. She scanned the parking lot. No one had seen her. Her heart thumped in her chest. What if she wasn’t being insanely paranoid . . . what if the hospital had freaked and called not the university, but someone up the food chain in the government, who would be thrilled to get ahold of a boy who was bleeding mercury? The idea of that as a bioweapon was chilling.

  Damn it. She should have thought of that last night. She had majorly fucked up. Cal had trusted her, and she might have betrayed his trust in a big way.

  “Shit.” She pulled Sig away, back toward the hospital.

  The entrance looked the same as last night, but she did notice that now there was a guard posted at the door, checking IDs. And there was a portable metal detector set up with two more guys working it. Nice. She emptied her pockets of change and got past on the third try, when it was determined that the studs on the back pockets of her jeans were giving the machine fits. Nothing more exciting than having a guard who looked like he was fifteen pass a wand over her backside a dozen times. He blushed furiously when he patted her down. Sig slunk through the process with his head and tail down, expressing displeasure with every fiber of his being.

  The young security guard held his hand up. “No pets, ma’am.”

  “He’s a search dog,” Petra insisted. “My friend disappeared from the hospital last night. My dog might be able to figure out which way he went.” She said it loudly enough for others in the emergency room to hear. Whispers began to circulate: “ . . . missing patient?” “How does someone disappear from the hospital?”

  Sig looked around with interest, inserting his rear foot into his ear in a very professional, search-­dog sort of way. He then twisted around to look at his claws, as if he’d mined something very interesting that merited further scrutiny.

  The security guard backed down. “He disappeared from the back parking lot, at the helipad.” He grabbed his keys and led her outside, around to the back of the hospital. Fairly vibrating with the idea of doing something official, he pointed to large circle painted in orange on the asphalt near the parking lot.

  “Is that where the helicopter landed?”

  “Yeah. He got loose before they could shovel him in. Probably a good thing that he went apeshit while they were still on the ground. The guys on duty said that he was dripping with mercury and strong the way a guy can be when he’s hopped up on meth.”

  Petra surveyed the area. The asphalt was wet, as if it had been thoroughly decontaminated. If there was any hope of getting Cal’s scent, it was dwindling quickly.

  She knelt before Sig. “Cal. The kid you hate. He smells like patchouli and stale energy drinks. Remember him?”

  Sig turned his head away and wrinkled his nose. Petra was pretty sure that Sig remembered what Cal smelled like. “Can you find him?”

  Sig glanced back over his shoulder.

  “Please? For a deli sandwich with salami on top?”

  Sig’s ears perked up. That got his attention. He took two steps away across the asphalt and lifted his nose.

  “Looks like he’s got a scent,” the security guard observed.

  “Or else he’s pranking me,” Petra muttered under her breath.

  Sig took off through the parking lot, snooting around tires and pissing on a fair number of expensive cars. Petra scrambled to keep up, getting more excited as Sig bounced along. Hopefully, Cal was sleeping off his bad trip and would be easily found within a mile or two. Hopefully.

  Sig led her away from the parking lot, down a shallow drainage ditch. He circled that twice, peering in. It was empty. He kept going, into some scrub forest, his nose pressed to the ground. He continued for a half mile, crossing back and forth through the scrub. Petra followed him a respectful distance behind, watching where his tail flickered above the weeds. For an instant, he seemed to plunge into the brush, giving an excited yip.

  Her heart in her mouth, she raced to catch up to him.

  But the coyote had only found an empty fast food bag. His head was deeply installed in the bottom as he made snorkeling noises.

  “Some search dog,” the security guard said.

  “Mmm yeah,” Petra agreed. “I think he needs some remedial training. Can I talk to Cal’s doctor? It was Dr. Burnard.”

  “Let me check.” He keyed his radio to ask if Dr. Burnard was still on duty. To Petra’s disappointment, she wasn’t.

  “Did any of Cal’s friends drop by last night?” Petra asked casually, as they walked back to the lot.

  “I don’t know, ma’am. I wasn’t there. But we’ve sure gotten a whole bunch of calls about him—­from the county sheriff’s office, and even some from the military police. Is he AWOL or something?”

  Awesome. “I don’t think he joined up. But anything’s possible,” she said mildly. She sure didn’t want to get on those guys’ radar.

  She thanked the guard and stuffed Sig into the truck, gnawing on her lip. Mike used to be an MP with the Army. Maybe he’d have some advice. She fished her cell phone out of the glove box to give him a ring.

  “Hello?” It sounded like chaos in the background behind him—­children shrieking.

  “Hey, Mike. It’s Petra. Is this, uh, a bad time? Are you roasting kids on a spit or something?”

  An aggrieved sigh crackled over the receiver. “I seem to be chaperoning a kids’ party, as the parents are nowhere to be found. My partner and I flipped a coin to see who had to find the parents and who got to stay and babysit the ankle biters.” A mighty splash sounded, and Mike barked at someone to “put that down, already, and get away from the water! That is not a pool noodle!”

  Petra winced. “Sorry. You sound like you’ve got your hands full.”

  “I’ve got time to talk to anyone who’s capable of carrying on an adult conversation. What’s up?”

  “Cal showed up on my doorstep last night, in a bad way. Looked like he’d been drenched in mercury. I took him to the hospital, but he ran away.”

  “Well . . . that sucks.”

  “It does. And I’m out looking for him. But something curious happened . . . the military police are looking for him, too. And I have no idea why.” It was a half-­truth. Mostly.

  “Huh.” Petra could hear him rubbing his stubble. “Do you think he ran afoul of anybody in the nearby military installations?”

  “Don’t know. All I know is that he was leaking mercury like it was blood.”

  “Maybe he got into some kind of a hazmat situation. Let me do some checking around through some back channels and see if I can find anything out.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “No worries. I hope the kid isn’t in bad trouble, but—­Hey!” he shouted. “Get out from under there!”

  “Good luck, Mike,” she said as the phone went dead.

  To be certain that Cal was well and truly gone, she pulled a pocketknife and the Locus out of the glove box. The Locus had been able to detect Stroud when he was alive. And Cal seemed to have his magic now, whether he wanted it or not. She didn’t yet have a good sense of the range of the device . . . that was something she would have wanted to ask Gabe about.

  A lump rose in her throat. She would not think of Gabe. Gabe didn’t need her. Cal did.

  She jabbed one of her left fingers with her pocketknife and dripped some blood in the Locus. The red sank into the metal, without hesitation. She drove around the parking lot and access roads with it in her lap, but there was no change. Clearly, Cal was long gone.

  Her next thought was to head over to the Garden, Cal’s old home.

  “I know that it’s just a heap of rubble now,” she told Sig on the way over. “But maybe he went back someplace familiar?”

  In the passenger’s seat of the Bronco, Sig snorted. He’d never been a big fan of Cal, and res
ted his head in the open window to register his displeasure at wasting time that he could be spending sleeping.

  “I know that you don’t like the kid. But he is just a kid. Cut him some slack.”

  Sig huffed. But at least he was along for the ride. There was something to be said for that kind of reliability in a crime-­fighting partner.

  The Garden was three hairpin turns off a long, deserted dirt road. What had once been a two-­story white farmhouse was now a charred, rotting heap, punctuated by weeds. The remains of the collapsed chimney were providing a nesting space for rats, it seemed, and foot-­tall sapling trees were growing up along the foundations. It seemed like nature was hell bent on reclaiming this land from Stroud, as if it could wipe away the memory of his existence.

  Sig trotted up to the trees and began to pee on them.

  Petra waded into the weeds. “Cal?” she called. She rested one hand on her gun belt. The metal was still cold to the touch from being stuffed under the seat of the Bronco. She had hoped that Stroud’s followers had all moved on to greener pastures or wound up in prison after the DEA raided the place, but she wasn’t sure. Maybe someone was still here. Maybe not. And it would be a toss-­up if they meant her any harm.

  The sunlight in this place had always seemed thin to her. Even in the bright light of day, it trickled sallow and anemic through the overgrowth. Petra picked her way around a shattered plastic lawn chair, over bits of barbed wire, mattress springs, and old tires.

  She paused before the shed in which Stroud had held her prisoner. The door had been taken off its hinges—­perhaps that had been the DEA’s doing. When she peered inside, she saw nothing but broken plastic pots and busted lawn mowers.

  Something moved in the grass, chortling. Sig pressed his ears forward.

  “Cal?” She fumbled with her gun, sucking in her breath.

  But it was only a quail. Sig took off after it like a shot, bounding into the grass.

  “Jesus, Sig.” She holstered the gun and reached for the Venificus Locus.

  She sat down on an upturned bucket. Fishing her pocketknife out of her pants pocket, she stabbed her barely-­clotted finger, summoning a nice glob of blood to sacrifice to the Locus. The blood settled into the track and she swished it around, willing it to do something. She stared as the liquid soaked into the compass with a nearly audible slurping sound. The compass wasn’t giving anything up.

  She whistled for Sig, who came bounding back with his tongue covered in feathers.

  “Did you eat that bird?”

  Sig cocked his head, as if to say: Duh.

  “Did you?” she demanded.

  One ear flopped over, and he went to go drink out of an abandoned tire that was likely chock-­full of wriggling mosquito larvae.

  “Get in the car.”

  Petra called the county jail, with no luck. The county deputies had picked up some minors for underage drinking overnight, but none of them fit Cal’s description. The only other arrest had been a sixty-­eight-­year-­old man who was charged with public indecency and the theft of a lawn mower with a subsequent DUI charge involving the lawn mower. After confirming that the culprit was not Frankie, Petra didn’t want any more details.

  The only other place she could think of to look was the Compostela. Cal had hung around there when Stroud was alive. Perhaps he knew some of the employees. Petra headed back into town, checking her watch to confirm that it was finally open.

  Petra parked in front of the bar on the main street of Temperance, told Sig to stay in the truck, and headed inside. The stained glass played bright golden colors on the floor and walls in the setting sunlight. Dust motes were suspended in the air, giving the impression of time suspended in amber.

  The bar wasn’t in good shape. Long scratches had been dug into the wood floor. Two tables and several chairs were missing from the main floor, stacked in pieces in the corner. A ­couple of the lights over the bar had been broken.

  Petra scanned the booths and headed for the back, to the bar in the apse. A blond man dressed in black was wiping down the counter, not making eye contact.

  Petra slid onto a barstool. “Looks like the bar’s seen some action?”

  The man flicked her a glance with pale blue eyes and kept wiping the epoxied heart of what had once been a giant tree. “Drink and women and gambling. Always leads to fighting. What would you like to drink?”

  “I’m wondering if you’ve seen Cal lately.”

  The bartender stopped wiping for a moment. “Cal?”

  “Yeah. About five-­nine, black hair, silver ankh earring. He used to hang out here a lot.”

  The bartender’s mouth twisted. “Ah. That Cal.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “He was here last night. He wasn’t looking too hot when he was here. Little pale, if you know what I mean.”

  “Was he in the fight?” Her gaze scraped the ruined tin star light dangling above them from one wire.

  “That boy’s not much of a fighter.”

  “Do you know Cal well?”

  “Well enough.”

  “Did he say where he was going?” she persisted. She knew that the bartender knew more than he was saying, but the truth had to be dragged out of him.

  “No. There was one hell of a fight, and he disappeared afterward with some women on bikes. Haven’t seen him.”

  “Which women?”

  “Dunno. Thirteen of ’em, out-­of-­towners, in a rush to cause trouble.” The bartender shrugged.

  Petra didn’t have anything to lose by fishing. Even with a club. “Cal worked for Stroud. Did you?” Stroud used to own the Compostela. She had no idea who it belonged to, now.

  A ghost of a smile flickered across the bartender’s lips. “I work for myself. And Stroud is no longer in business, is he?”

  “Guess not.”

  “Yeah. Rumor has it that he got to you and you got to him.”

  Petra pursed her lips. Maybe this was the way it went—­quid pro quo. “Pretty much. Not that I had much to say about it, after Rutherford’s men and the DEA showed up.”

  The bartender reached for a glass, poured a beer from the tap, and pushed it across the slick bar to her.

  He fixed her with his cold gaze. “Want some advice?”

  Petra’s mouth twisted up. “Sure.”

  “That kid is trouble. It follows him, and it’s not gonna let go. Best you leave him alone before it gets ahold of you, too.”

  Petra looked down at the growth rings of the bar, tracing one with her thumb. “Thanks. For that and the beer.” She sure wasn’t gonna follow that advice, but it confirmed her gut suspicions about Cal being a perpetual damsel in distress.

  The bartender nodded and moved away. Petra gazed at the back of his black shirt. She wasn’t sure what to make of him. He wasn’t helpful, but didn’t seem actively harmful. She’d met very few truly neutral ­people in her travels. Maybe he was one of them.

  A man at the far end of the bar hiccupped and elbowed his bottle of beer over. The bartender’s hand flashed out and caught the bottle, setting it upright without the drunk man noticing.

  Maybe he was something else.

  Petra squinted at the bartender, as if he suddenly could become clear, but he turned his attention to wiping glasses.

  She lifted the beer to her lips. She’d never been much of a drinker, and definitely not a fan of beer, but this wasn’t bad. It was cidery and sweet. Lightweight. Maybe the bartender saw more than she thought.

  “Petra.”

  She turned at the mention of her name and saw a man in a booth beckoning at her. Frankie. He was half-­sprawled in a dark corner, his feet draped over the length of one seat. A candle in a red glass holder flickered dimly at him.

  Petra collected her beer, left some money on the bar, and slid into the seat opposite him. “Hey, Frankie.
What are you doing here?” She didn’t really need to ask. She could smell the booze on him.

  Frankie shrugged. “Gotta get out sometime. See the sights. Get some wings.” He wiped his fingers on a stack of soiled paper napkins and reached for a chicken wing in a basket. “Have some.”

  Petra picked around the basket for a wing that hadn’t been gnawed. “Thanks.” She took a bite and scalded her tongue.

  “Jesus, Frankie, that’s hot!” She dropped the wing and reached for her beer, drowning the spice in half a glass of cider ale.

  Frankie chortled and picked his teeth with a bone. “Good stuff, ain’t it? Ghost peppers.”

  Petra wiped tears away with the back of her hand. “How is it legal to sell that?”

  Frankie shrugged. “You gotta toughen up, girl.”

  “So I’m told.” Regaining her composure, Petra wiped the sauce from her hands. “Frankie, if you were trying to find someone, how would you do it?”

  “Is this about your dad?”

  “Not this time. I’m looking for a teenage boy. In a lot of trouble. He ran away from the hospital, and I think he’s hurt, real bad . . . got into some of that stuff Stroud was into.”

  Frankie nodded, sucking the sauce from one of the infernal chicken wings. “Ask the chicken.”

  “What?”

  “I’d ask the chicken.” Frankie’s fingers dipped into the basket of wings, pulling out the bones. He stared at the bits of gristle and fat, sucking pieces from the ends until the bones were as clean as toothpicks. He selected about a dozen of them, seemingly at random, tossing them in the center of the red and white checkered plastic tablecloth.

  “Who’s the Chicken?” Petra envisioned a tall scrawny guy with a line to the underworld of Temperance. “Is that a prison name or something?” It sure wasn’t intimidating, if it was.

  Frankie looked at her as if she was plain stupid, and shook his head. He opened the salt shaker and carefully tapped out a circle of salt around the bones on the printed tablecloth.