“She’s still there!” he said, in surprise.
“What’s happening upstairs?” asked Larry.
“I’ve sealed it off for forensics. There’s nothing we can do for that nurse. Rickenbacker’s gone to lie down.”
They were still talking and waiting when they heard a loud dry squeal of tires. A black Chevy van came speeding along Potreto, and slewed to a halt right beside Edna-Mae, blocking her from view. They heard a door bang, and then the van roared away again, leaving the opposite sidewalk empty.
Houston stared at Larry and Larry stared at Houston.
“She has friends,” said Houston, in disbelief.
“The Fog City Satan, of course,” snapped Larry, furious with himself for not making sure that he had a car close by.
Houston took out his pocket radio and called for an APB. “Black Chevy van, ’81 or ’82, no license plates, black-tinted windows. Locate and follow but do not, repeat, do not attempt to stop. Follow them to Eureka if you have to.”
“Damn it,” said Larry. It was all he could think of to say.
“What next?” asked Fay.
“What’s next is I have to hang around here for hours, and you can do what you like.”
The street began to warble with sirens as police reinforcements arrived. A van from KCBS television came to a violent stop right beside them, and a tanned bald man in Ray-Bans leaned out of the window and called, “Kuhn! What’s happening, my angel?”
“Hold on, Henry!” called Fay. She took hold of Larry’s sleeve, and looked at him seriously. “Are you still happy with that story?”
Houston said sharply, “What story?”
“It has to come out sometime,” said Larry.
“So I can go ahead? No second thoughts?”
“Hey, what story?” Houston repeated.
“Wait for tomorrow’s paper, Sergeant Brough,” Fay smiled at him, as she turned to go. “It’s about time you learned to read without moving your lips.”
Houston watched her go with the expression of a man appreciating a good horse. “Attractive-looking woman,” he remarked.
“Sure,” Larry replied. “But you and me, we’re both old married men.”
“All the same, it’s not too wise to do things for attractive-looking women unless you’re sure you’d be just as happy doing them for ugly-looking old men.”
“What’s that? Brough’s First Law of Faithfulness?”
“Unh-hunh. It’s rule 22 in How To Survive In The SFPD.”
He didn’t get home until well past midnight. Linda had left him a huge turkey sandwich in the icebox, and he sat in the kitchen on his own, with a bottle of Anchor Steam and a large jar of mayonnaise, and loyally chewed his way through it, while he watched Lobster Men From Mars on cable.
After he had finished he took a shower, and shaved. When he looked at himself in the shaving-mirror he thought he looked changed. Maybe it did change you, when you started to believe in the supernatural. Maybe it showed in your face; the same way that you can tell when a girl has known hundreds of men.
The boys were still away at Kirby Cove, sleeping under canvas, but all the same he went into their rooms to look at their empty beds. Then he eased himself in beside Linda, who was deeply asleep with her blue velvet airline mask on. He guessed that she had probably taken a sedative. She always found it difficult to sleep when he was working on a dangerous or difficult case.
He switched off the bedside lamp and lay in the dark and wondered what it would be like to go to sleep thinking that you had nothing more important to worry about tomorrow than what to have for lunch; or what book to read; or where to go for a walk. He had forgotten what simplicity was like. He had forgotten what sleep was like.
Although he was gradually piecing together a picture of the Black Brotherhood and their apparent attempt to resurrect Belial, he still found his logical mind rebelling against the things that he had seen. When he thought back over Edna-Mae’s grotesque departure from SFG, it seemed more like a television program that he had been watching, rather than reality. Rickenbacker had fired directly at Edna-Mae and yet his bullets had struck the nurse, ten feet behind him and off to his left, and shielded by a six-inch concrete wall. Even the most eccentric of ricochets couldn’t have done that.
No—she hadn’t been killed by the normal laws of physics.
She had fallen victim to that critically dangerous condition that Wilbert Fraser had warned him about. If any other being steals or borrows your ectoplasm, you daren’t attempt to kill it or hurt it—not without killing or hurting yourself. They may have taken your essence somewhere else, but it’s still you.
And, as Larry had seen before, the spirit world was neither rational nor predictable. It was a world where dead people walked, and flesh flowed like cotton-candy, and lives could be swallowed whole.
He turned on his side and tried to sleep, but sleep slunk away again, and lay sulking in the shadows. He began to wonder whether he had made a mistake in talking to Fay Kuhn. It had seemed like sense at the time. Bold, even rash, but sense all the same. Now, however, in the silence of the night, he wasn’t so sure. Dan Burroughs would blow fifteen rows of fuses, he was sure about that. But would the Fog City Satan really care that his real objectives had been brought out into the open? He had shown complete disregard for the police when he had rescued Edna-Mae from the hospital, why should he worry now? He was obviously going to do just what he had set out to do, whether Larry tried to push him or not.
Larry eased himself out of bed and went through to the study. He punched out the Examiner number and waited for nearly two minutes for somebody to answer.
“Examiner.”
“Is Fay Kuhn still around?”
“No, I’m sorry, sir. She left about a half-hour ago.”
“This is Lieutenant Foggia, of the San Francisco police. Do you think you could give me her home number?”
“I’m sorry, sir, I’m not permitted to do that.”
“Well, could you call her and have her call me back? It’s urgent.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t think I can do that either.”
“How would you like to be busted for obstructing a homicide investigation?”
“All right, sir. No need to get mad. I’ll call her now. But I can’t guarantee that she’ll want to call you back.”
“And I can’t guarantee that I won’t talk to your boss and tell him what an asshole you are.”
“Sir, there’s no need to be offensive.”
Larry took a deep breath. “No,” he agreed. “There isn’t. So will you please accept my apologies and please put a call through to Ms Kuhn. I’ll give you my home number.”
Fay rang back almost immediately. “Lieutenant? I was almost asleep.”
“Did you write the story?”
“For sure. It’s page one, main lead.”
Larry dry-washed his face with his right hand. “All right. Tell me what it says.”
“Well, the strapline reads Supernatural Only Explanation Says Detective, and the headline reads ‘Bizarre Death At SFG.’”
Larry was silent for a very long time. Then he said, “I suppose that’s already running now.”
“We usually start printing at eleven or thereabouts, yes. We may change the story during the night.”
“There’s no chance of pulling it, then?”
“Lieutenant!” Fay protested.
“All right, Fay. It was my decision, I guess I’ll have to run with it. But in the cold light of rational reflection, it suddenly doesn’t seem like such a great idea. You saw how Edna-Mae was picked up, right in front of our noses. This guy doesn’t care squat what we do, or what we say.”
“Lieutenant, I’m sorry, but—”
“All right, all right,” Larry told her. “It’s not your fault. I think I just made the worst career decision of my entire life, that’s all.”
“At least you’ll force Burroughs’ hand.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well… when tomorrow’s paper hits the street, he’s going to be put into the position of having to come out publicly and say whether he thinks there’s anything occult about this investigation or not.”
“You know what he thinks,” said Larry. “It’s all fairy-stories, as far as he’s concerned.”
“Even though he regularly subscribes to Al Omla La?”
Larry frowned. “This time you got me. What the hell is Al Omla La?”
“Al Omla La is a limited subscription magazine produced twice a year by the Night Society, which is a very secretive collective of people interested in things like magic and spells and hallucinatory drugs and out-of-body experiences and the mystic implications of pleasure and pain. It’s very specialist, always densely written, beautifully illustrated, if you like illustrations of goats being disemboweled and women’s breasts with fish-hooks in them. Not only that, it’s a hundred bucks a copy.”
“And Dan Burroughs is a regular subscriber?” said Larry, in disbelief.
“Charter subscriber, since the fall of ’83.”
“So how did you find that out?”
“A good reporter never reveals her sources, lieutenant, you should know that. But it’s true, cross my heart and hope to choke on a Chicken MacNugget.”
Larry said, “Okay, I’ll believe you. Listen, I have to catch some zees. I think I’m going to need all the strength I can get for tomorrow morning.”
“Sweet dreams, lieutenant.”
Larry went to the kitchen and poured himself a large glass of cold milk. He stood in the darkness swallowing it in palate-numbing gulps. Of course, it didn’t necessarily mean anything at all that Dan Burroughs subscribed to some black magic magazine. He probably subscribed to Guns & Ammo and San Francisco and Playboy, too.
But he had been so vehement in his denials that the Fog City Satan case had anything to do with the supernatural that it struck Larry as singularly odd that he should show enough interest in it to part with $200 a year. Maybe he was a sado-masochist. Maybe he was doing his policemanly duty, and keeping a check on what the further-out citizens in the Bay Area were getting up to.
But all the same—There was something here that gave him one of his bad feelings. A piece of jigsaw that obstinately refused to fit, no matter which way around he turned it.
He crept back to bed, and slid between the sheets. Linda was warm and deeply asleep. He tried to remember the last time they had made love. It seemed like about six months ago. In a storm… with rain spattering against the windows. Afterwards they had knelt on the bed and watched the lightning wriggle from Coit Tower and the Trans America pyramid.
He tried to put himself to sleep by reciting as much as he could remember of the Ode To Coit Tower. ‘“O anti-verdurous phallic were’t not for your pouring in height like a sick tree—’ no, that’s wrong ‘—looming in tears like a sick tree or your ever-gaudy comfort jabbing your city’s much-wrinkled sky.’”
God almighty, did I really used to like that poem? Did I really find it a revelation?
But he plowed on all the same. “‘—fresh with the labor sweat of cablecar & Genoa papa pushcart.’”
He wasn’t aware that he had stopped reciting. He slept, a shallow sleep, no more than lying in six inches of shadowed water. First of all he dreamed of nothing. Then he dreamed that the water was receding and that he was being gradually dragged out with the tide, into the deeper shadows, into the darkness, soundlessly, beneath a Golden Gate bridge that gleamed deathly white instead of orange, out toward the ocean, where nobody could save him.
He was awakened by a rustling sound. A rustling sound so soft, so ghostly, that he wasn’t sure at first if it was anything more than his own breathing. He lay with his eyes closed, listening. Then he heard another, sharper rustle, and he opened his eyes wide.
He was so frightened by what he saw that he made a “wah!” yelp like a startled dog.
The faintest outline of Roberta Snow, the little girl from Wilbert Fraser’s seance, stood beside his bed in her drowned party-dress, with one hand out, staring at him wide-eyed. More than wide-eyed, beseechingly.
Her face was gray as lake-water, and her hair flowed up from her head as if she were still trapped inside that slowly sinking car. Maybe she always would be, forever and ever.
Her mouth moved, and Larry heard a sound like someone blowing down a bamboo pipe.
“What do you want?” he whispered, tautly.
DEAD she breathed.
Larry turned over quickly to see if Linda was awake; but she hadn’t moved.
“I don’t understand.”
DEAD
Larry swallowed. He was so frightened of Roberta Snow that his throat seemed to close up, and none of his muscles seemed to work. Even the heaving apparition of Edna-Mae, swathed in sheets, hadn’t paralyzed him as much as this.
“I’m dreaming, right?” he asked her.
She shook her head, and her hair waved from side to side. DEAD she repeated, in frustration.
“Dead? You’re dead?”
Again, the phantom girl in the party dress desperately shook her head. She flickered intermittently, and sometimes she almost disappeared, as if she didn’t have enough energy to sustain her presence in Larry’s house for very long.
“You’re not dead? You mean, somebody else is dead?”
This time she managed a smile, and nodded.
“Somebody else is dead? Who? Listen to me, Roberta. Who else is dead?”
WIL—
“Will? Will what?”
FRASER
“Are you serious?” Christ almighty I’m soaked in sweat I’m scared shitless and I’m asking a drowning ghost in my bedroom if she’s serious. He was so frightened and it was all so ludicrous that he almost laughed.
WILBERT FRASER’S DEAD
“You are serious. He’s really dead? What happened to him?”
The little girl began to grow dimmer and dimmer. All he could see was the edge of her taffeta dress and the darkness of her eyes.
MAN—she breathed.
“A man killed her? What man? Come on, Roberta, try! What man?”
MAN—
She had almost disappeared now; trembling, intermittent, like the last dull glow of a flashlight before its battery dies; a glow that it is somehow darker than the darkness which it is supposed to illuminate.
She vanished. Larry immediately jumped up in bed and Linda shouted out: “Larry! For God’s sake! Do you have to bounce up and down all fucking night!”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I just thought of something.”
“Do you have to bounce up and down when you think? Most normal men can think without moving.”
“Listen, I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry. I’ll go sleep on the couch.”
She turned over and lifted her eyeshade. “No, come on… you don’t have to do that. Why don’t you make love to me instead?”
He sat on the edge of the bed exhausted frightened soaked in sweat. His head was bowed his hair was scruffed up he needed a shave. He hesitated for a very long time and didn’t say anything.
Linda knelt up in bed and wrapped her arms around him. “You’re so hot! You’re not running a fever, are you?”
“No, no. My brain’s going around and it won’t stop, that’s all.”
She kissed the back of his neck, and then his cheek and smoothed back his sweaty hair.
“You should’ve taken your father’s advice, and gone into the family business.”
He kissed her hand. “I might have done, if I could’ve found out what the family business was.”
“Your father was in import-export, wasn’t he?”
“Import-export, that’s right. Covers a multitude of nefarious activities.”
“Mario’s Ghost,” she teased him, and kissed him again.
She lay back on the bed. He turned around, and leaned over her and kissed her again, on the lips this time. It was a long, unhurried, romantic kiss, one of those kisses that onl
y lovers who have lived together for a very long time can give each other, because it’s not just a kiss but a memory of all of those other kisses; and the reason why all of those other kisses were given.
Larry tugged at the ribbon of her nightgown, and it opened, baring her large rounded breasts, lying to the side of her chest because of their weight. He licked and kissed each nipple in turn, drawing it by suction to the roof of his mouth and drumming it lightly with the tip of his tongue. He could hear Linda breathing quick and low.
His kisses trailed down her stomach, as if he were dropping a flower on her body with every kiss. His hands caressed her shoulders and massaged her breasts, squeezing them tightly so that they stood up proud and high, their nipples swollen and shiny.
He kissed her navel. He breathed in perfume and perspiration; and the musky aroma of sex.
Slowly, she opened her thighs wider, and let him do what he liked. He opened her lips with his fingers, and let his tongue slide down her slippery, liquid vulva. There was nothing on God’s earth that tasted or felt like this. No fruit, no honey, no silk, no flower. The tip of his tongue explored and aroused her clitoris, and the tiny hole from which she peed, and the then the warm embracing depths of her vagina.
He licked her and caressed her until she clutched his hair in her fingers and almost wrenched it from his scalp. He heard her gave a cry that was almost as alien as the cry that he had given when Roberta appeared in the room. He wondered momentarily if humans become something else in moments of intense ecstasy, or intense fear. Perhaps they become less than human: closer to beasts.
He rose up over her, with the taste of her still in his mouth, and slowly slid his penis inside her. She shivered again, and again, with aftershocks, and murmured things that he couldn’t understand, but which he knew were descriptions of her sexual fantasies, of people watching while they fucked, of being touched by strangers, of posing for obscene photographs. He made love to her slowly, a long, loping, muscular pace, penetrating deeper with every lope.
He loved her so much at that moment, he was sure that he loved her more than he ever had done, or ever would. She was his pride, and his redemption. She was his family, his lover, and his friend.
His ejaculation seemed long and slow, warmly pouring rather than spurting. As he closed his eyes in the darkness of his own satisfaction, he heard a voice in the room that whispered AX—
Black Angel Page 27
