Bones of the Barbary Coast (Cree Black Thrillers)

by Daniel Hecht

  "Lucky for me," her husband said. He nuzzled in her hair. Bert got the sense the kid was a little loaded.

  "Okay," the bartender said to Bert, "so let's look you up. What's your handle, pardner?"

  "Bert. With an E. Bertram." He wondered if she was flirting with him. Probably it was just good bartending skills.

  She turned the book around, flipped forward and back. "Okay . . . English, Old German. 'Bright raven.' Wow. 'Bright raven.' That's intense."

  "What's that supposed to imply?" the girl asked.

  "Half of them don't make any sense," the guy told Bert. "We just looked me up, Lincoln, which means something about Romans at a pool or something. I mean, whatever, right?"

  "But it's a wonderful name," the girl told him. "Like Honest Abe. I love the name Lincoln." She gave her man a look so serious and suddenly private that Bert turned away in embarrassment. They kissed again, and then a guy from one of the other tables came up to ask for another round.

  Bert took his glass and dead cigarette back to his booth.

  Bright raven, he thought. An oxymoron. Ravens were black. You didn't think of them as bright in any way. They were dark birds, scavengers, scrappers. Bad luck birds, birds of ill omen.

  He drained his glass, signaled the bartender. After she brought beers to the other table, she swung by with another shot, but she didn't linger or give any indication she'd meant anything by asking his name. Catching sight of his own face in the bar mirror, he could see why not. He looked prehistoric: great big guy, old-fashioned haircut, suspicious face that was leathery and puffy at the same time and now had that slightly cockeyed look of someone who's starting to get a buzz on.

  He wouldn't know what to do if she had been flirting with him. He didn't remember anymore how to talk or act to make a woman feel good. Like tonight, with Cree. He'd barely remembered the basic courtesy of asking about her family. In the house, he'd gotten prickly with her, put off by her probing, and he'd managed to insult her—the "little lady" stuff was not what you'd call cutting-edge, where the hell had that come from? Maybe all the way from thirty-six years ago, when she was knee high and ran around in princess pajamas with feet in them.

  Cree was okay. She wasn't asking him anything unreasonable. He just wasn't ready with the answers yet.

  He'd acted like an asshole, making it so tense that afterward they hadn't known what to talk about. She'd tried all kinds of conversational gambits and he had never once hit the ball back over the net. Part of the problem was her believing in ghosts and so on. If anybody should have seen or "experienced" a ghost, Bert Marchetti should have; he'd spent time at maybe two hundred murder scenes, and all he'd ever felt was sorrow, disgust, disillusionment, and rage. He didn't believe anything survived the wreck of the body. And if people did have anything as noble as a soul, surely it would have more sense than to hang out in the vicinity of the sad, ugly remains of its former vehicle.

  The disparity in outlook made for a problem talking with Cree. What was he going to do, argue with her about her beliefs? People believed what they needed to. No matter how crazy it might be, it got them through the shit parts.

  Then, what was he thinking, he'd taken her to one of his regular places to eat. He'd sat down and looked around and suddenly realized, Jesus, what a dump, Ben Black's daughter comes to town and I don't have the class to take her to a nice place. He'd choked his dinner down, trying to hide his shame.

  The face staring back from the mirror was the sagging mug of an old, lonely fart who'd fucked up his whole life, exactly the kind of soon-to-be-ex cop he swore he'd never become.

  Fuck this, he told himself. This I don't need. He decided to skip the fourth whiskey for now. He put a couple of bills on the table for a tip, slipped his cigarettes and lighter back in his pocket, and went to the register to pay up.

  The bartender gave him his change. She turned back to the other end of the bar without saying anything, until just as he reached the door she called out, "Good-night, Bright Raven!" He glanced back, but she was already serving some other customer.

  Bert's house on Mars Street was set on a nearly vertical slope. It was just a one-story shoebox, but from below, perched on girders at the top of five zigzagging flights of wooden stairs, it looked more impressive than it was. Fifty-eight steps and five landings up, surrounded by trees and bushes. He'd bought it twenty-two years ago, after he'd divorced Fran and they'd sold the other house and divided the money. It had been cheap back then because it was nothing much to begin with, and the stairs made it hard to get to. With the hill so steep, there'd been only three other houses on the whole block, with lots of jungle between them. He'd bought the place because he'd needed the morning light coming in. That and the comparative isolation of it: It had seemed sufficiently far from the years of his marriage and the disasters that ended it. He'd never given the fifty-eight steps a thought. Good cardio conditioning, keep a macho guy in shape forever.

  Now, though the slope and the green still kept it private, they'd built upscale houses on both sides and all down the street, gentrification putting siege to his little citadel. And the stairs were a pain, especially when you were bringing in groceries or, like tonight, carrying a bunch of case files.

  He left the pool of streetlight and stumped up into deepening darkness. At the top, the motion-detector light came on, blinding him. He set down the bulging briefcase and put one hand on his Beretta before unlocking the door. When it swung open, he stopped dead still and listened to the dark house inside.

  Eleven years ago, a psycho he'd been looking for, wanted in a double murder, had decided to turn the tables on him. John Abel Mayhew had somehow found out where Bert lived and had come in through the bedroom skylight and waited for him. When Bert came home, he leapt out of the shadows inside, slashing with a butcher knife. Bert would never forget the shock of that sudden, unexpected explosion of activity. In the end it was more of a comedy of errors, the guy missing Bert with big swings of the blade, Bert drawing his pistol and shooting in the dark and missing, missing, missing, shooting holes in his walls, ceiling, cabinets, windows. Both of them tumbling over the furniture. He'd seen the guy only in the muzzle flashes, a strobe that froze the image of the lunging screwball in midair. Bert had finally hit him in the ankle and incapacitated him, absolutely blew the ankle to pieces, it was amazing how many bones were in your ankle. Bert called for assistance as the guy flopped around shrieking like a redlined V-8 engine with its main bearing blown. Waiting for help to arrive, Bert had gotten so sick of the noise that he'd knelt on John Abel Mayhew's chest and with the gun shoved up into his nose told him to shut up or he'd shoot him where it would really hurt. A lesson in the art of persuasion: The guy actually had quieted down a bit.

  The place had been shot to hell, but aside from bruises he got from tripping over furniture Bert had ended up without a scratch. The cops and EMTs who had responded bitched about having to run up so many steps. By the end, everybody was chuckling except John Abel Mayhew, whose ankle was all over the place and who ended up getting life without parole for the murders, plus B & E, attempted, lying in wait, assaulting an officer, the whole book.

  Still, it had made its mark on Bert. The firearms incident counselor at Behavioral Sciences told him all about his amygdala, how trauma permanently branded your brain with a fear reflex. Bert could still feel it. The shock of coming home to the supposed security of your castle and getting jumped by somebody. The shaky breathlessness lasted only half a minute, but it happened every time.

  Tonight he flipped on the lights and dropped the briefcase on the coffee table. He quickly checked through the house, then went to the stereo, put on some music—a collection of slower numbers by Count Basie that took the edge off reentry. The sweet blue sound filled the room and made him feel both better and worse. Better because the catch in the beat never failed to give him a boost; worse because, again, he sensed he'd screwed up with Cree, and even with the tension it had been nice to eat dinner with someone. With a good-looking w
oman. She was a good kid, asking the right questions, doing her best to keep an old fart company. She deserved better.

  Tomorrow he'd try to put his thoughts in order, show her some paper. Tell her the rest of it.

  He thought about checking his e-mail and then decided against it; he had a good idea what he'd find and didn't need it tonight. Instead, he went to the kitchen to get the fourth drink he felt he was owed. He poured it into a tall glass so he could mix it with water, but then decided he'd just pour it long. He brought the glass into the living room and stood in the middle, taking the whiskey like medicine.

  The house was a single floor, anchored on the slope on one side and twenty feet off the ground, on a lattice of girders, on the downhill side. This far up, its windows gave to views of the near rooftops and farther away to the glow of light from Market and Castro, so that after dark Bert had the dubious pleasure of imagining ten thousand queers going about their nightlife. A long living room with a dining alcove separated from the kitchen by a counter, then a hallway leading to the bathroom, a couple of closets, one big bedroom, and a smaller bedroom that Bert used as his office. That was it. No basements, no attics, no secrets, keep it simple. A narrow deck projected out over the slope, where in good weather he could sit and have his morning coffee. It wasn't the house in Pacific Heights by a few million bucks, but you could do worse.

  The whiskey and the music came together in a good feeling in his stomach. He switched on the lamp by the couch, turned off the overhead, and then stood just feeling the music. This was a good collection. Nowadays he was into the slower, spacious numbers, the ones an older guy could move to without making a fool of himself. The Count. You couldn't count on much, but you could count on the Count. The Count said life was okay and kind of graceful, and you could almost believe him. You had less gravity when you moved to the music. Bert took a few steps, found the catch, the slide, the short step. He put his right hand around an invisible partner's waist, his glass in his outstretched left hand, and spun lazily through the room. Muted brass over a solid foundation of saxophones, rhythm section subdued, brushes on the snare, it never failed.

  He closed his eyes and floated and spun for a while, then bumped his thigh on the Barcalounger and realized he was a little dizzy. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was his own reflection in the sliding doors to the deck, with the darkness and lights of the valley shining through.

  A big old guy in a wrinkled suit dancing with an empty whiskey glass and an armful of air.

  Bert poured another splash, took his glass out to the porch, leaned against the railing. A car nosed along the street below, pulled into the curb, went dark. A couple got out and went into their house. The fog made it blurry and soft like a cameo, and the general hubbub of activity all around was going quiet. Inside, the CD had played itself out. He sat on the tube-aluminum lawn chaise, then lay against its angled back and closed his eyes. A little later he heard the clank of his glass hitting the boards, but he didn't let it rouse him. He was concentrating on the sounds of the city, a lullaby hum that floated him gently away.

  6

  THE CHILL AIR and the exertion of climbing eight blocks steeply uphill, fog beading on her face, refreshed Cree and brought her mostly out of the funk she'd been slipping into. On each side the tall, narrow houses angled themselves against the slope, their warm windows revealing glimpses of the lives unfolding inside, people taking the mild domestic comforts of late evening. It felt tranquil and reassuringly mundane.

  The wolfman's house was as lovely in the dark as it was in daylight. Even with the windows so blank and hollow, it didn't look forbidding; it looked like it was just wanting company—a nice house, ready to provide a happy home for somebody. She went in with only a trace of reluctance.

  She left the lights off, as always. Darkness was essential to the job at hand, because it tended to induce the mental state required. She and Edgar had conducted functional microelectroencephalogram tests that verified a neurological explanation: With vision frustrated, the spectrum of other senses, physical and extraphysical, came to the fore; different parts of the brain became active. Plus it was always a good idea to avoid alarming the neighbors with signs of unexplained late-night activity at an empty house.

  The obvious thing to do was to head straight to the basement to seek out perimortem resonances of the wolfman, but the charm of the place beguiled her. She was feeling no whisper, no silent trill of danger or anticipation, so she took her time and wandered for a while through the main floor rooms. She savored the Victorian era's approach to space and proportion, for which she'd always had a weakness. Finally, she got curious and went upstairs.

  It was hard to see in the dim glow of ambient light through the windows, but Bert was right, these rooms were gorgeous. The floors were shiny and smelled new, the walls appeared pristine with fresh paint, the woodwork had been stripped and refinished. A few pieces of furniture stood swaddled in heavy plastic sheeting, shapeless masses in the half-light, but otherwise the rooms were empty, airy. Feeling a little like a burglar, she peered into each doorway as she made her way to the front of the house. In what must have been the master bedroom, she lounged in a broad bay windowseat and just let the house come to her. Beyond the fog-blanked glass, she could sense the steep hill more than see it—a few blurry rectangles of neighbors' windows, warm and yellow, and the sulky hoots of foghorns somewhere out in the Golden Gate.

  After a few minutes, she went through her sensitization ritual: lotus position, hands laid in the dhyana mudra, breathing slow and deep. An inventory of her sensory and affective state didn't reveal any hidden energies or subconscious disturbances. Her pulse was steady and moderate; behind her eyelids, the phosphene field appeared as a uniform galaxy of tiny lights, and in her ears the sound current maintained a steady, silvery hiss. Her skin sensitivity registered as normal, no wandering cold spots; her emotional landscape seemed devoid of inexplicable dissonances.

  Mainly what she felt was a sense of privilege, being for the moment the sole occupant and mistress of this fine place. She savored that for a while, and then it occurred to her maybe it was time to look for a new, nicer place when she got back to Seattle.

  She thought she had shed her earlier droop on the brisk walk uphill, but in fact it had tagged behind like a blue balloon, wafting along in her back draft, and now it caught up: Lovely place, she thought, / want this; maybe it's time to look for a new apartment; can't afford anything this nice, but could come closer if there were two incomes paying for it; what will happen with Paul, how long do I hold on to expectations there, why does it always have to be complicated; what am I doing with my life, why am I not connected with a man; why can't I be normal; what's the matter with me?

  From balloon to avalanche, starting slow but gathering speed and weight until she unlocked her legs and fled the upstairs.

  She'd always been uncomfortable with close, dark, underground places. It was a natural reflex: the instinctive fear of limited mobility, of being trapped or suffocated, of being far away from other human beings, where visibility is poor and where dangerous things can easily hide. But knowing its origins didn't help contain the discomfort; being in the basement put her senses on high alert.

  She used her penlight to make her way to the end room, panned the beam just once to orient herself, then cut the light and headed to the wolfman's chamber. She felt her way inside and sat on the floor in a silence that was absolute, black darkness that fizzed with phosphene sparks.

  The smell of earth and stone. The faintest of movements in the chill air, invisible currents shifting. And what else? she asked the darkness.

  She groped her way through the layered subjective impressions of the space. She felt the weight of the house above and the walls all around, fought off the fear of enclosure and suffocation, formed her mind into a empty place occupied only by a gentle question: Hello?

  Silence and darkness and the formless passage of time.

  Two hours later, she finally
gave up. As far as she could tell, no revenants had made themselves apparent. Her problem was similar to Skobold's challenge with reconstruction: She lacked any precedent to draw from. Given the extent of the wolfman's deformities, she couldn't be sure what kind of mind he had. She needed to "get into the head" of the wolfman, but she wasn't sure what that head might feel like, how she would even recognize it as distinct from her own thoughts, fears, or half-dreaming imaginings. For all she knew, the deviations in his cranium had been accompanied by extreme retardation, or behavioral pathologies and affective disorders.

  She stood stiffly, groped her way into the larger basement room, then paused to ask the darkness one more time, Who are you? But if any trace of the wolfman remained here, it gave no answer.

  7

  CAMERA ON RAY, bird's-eye view, Ray thinks. A naked man, running, a tiny pale shape against the broad dark flank of the hill. Three dogs ranging in wide patrol, a shifting triangle in the knee-deep grass. Sun sunk behind the ocean fog bank, murky darkness stealing over the coastal range from the east.

  Camera on Ray: Cameron Raymond puzzles at his hawk's-eye perspective, seeing himself as a scissoring figure bounding upward. He wonders whether it's some new neuropathology or some kind of inspiration—the vertigo scares him, but the freedom is worth it. For a time he wheels above, then stoops in a steep dive and drops to himself again. Close is better. He is the hill's lover, the night's secret paramour. He runs uphill tirelessly, racing the clouds to the ridge, certain tonight will be a good night.

  Take off your clothes, Ray exults. Leave the face behind, the scarred scary stranger face, a ghost face that hangs in midair and then blows away on the breeze. Drop all the masks. Underneath is raw you.