Bones of the Barbary Coast (Cree Black Thrillers)
Page 6
Everything registers. He scours his skin on branches and thorns, the night air strokes him with caresses alternately cold and warm. The mountain looms ahead, approaching clouds still far to the west. Behind, the valley lights make a galaxy of sparks caught in the bright webbed strands of highways. When the half-moon nudges above the eastern horizon, he sees his own limbs flashing pale against the grass, then mottled into shifting camo by trees overhead: long muscle bands standing out on the pumping thighs, fisted hands punching, arms corded with effort. Shock of feet hitting the ground, the inburn and outburn of every breath, the syncopated heart battering in the chest. All the parts doing their job to their utmost.
Ray thinks joyously: What are you, really? This.
In the scrub woods and fields, it was less a run than an obstacle course, where he dodged boulders and trees, swung under branches, leapt bushes and rocks. Sometimes where the slope steepened, he scrambled on all fours.
Ray ran near his limit, but the dogs roved and probed at an easy trot. He knew they felt what he did: that fierce electric life, expressed in the will to run and to hunt. Joyously honing the blade of self against darkness, sky, earth.
He wasn't in the condition he'd been in last year, but on a good night like this he knew he could still run as much as five miles, uphill and over the roughest terrain, and after some rest could easily do the downhill return. He'd once tried to do the same on a quarter-mile track and found himself exhausted after only four miles. The difference being the magic of the night, the scent of mystery, the allure of danger. Those things gave you power. Round and round the track, that was the treadmill of the ordinary, destination preordained. No mystery Of course your fire dimmed, will faltered. But out here you never knew where you'd end up. Where the night would take you.
Ray knew of a dozen good places to run within an hour of San Francisco. He preferred to head north to Mount Tamalpais or Point Reyes, but when time was limited he'd stay close. Tonight he'd chosen the Fish and Game Refuge, just twenty miles south of the city. The eastern slopes of the Santa Cruz mountains rose above the densely populated valley, where the streets of San Carlos and Redwood City made a webbed orange glow in the night. But this was protected land and mostly roadless and nobody came to places like this at night. Except Ray.
People didn't come because there was danger in being alone, outside, at night. Every sense shrieked a warning. Darkness and solitude conjured images from the primal imagination, the womb from which fear and religion were born. Ray felt it and it was one of the energies that propelled him, but he also knew that he and the dogs were part of that danger—they constituted danger, too.
And that was fitting. The epiphany had come to him during another night, a few years ago: Only when you are dangerous are you truly equal to the world.
He had chosen the Refuge tonight because the sky had been clear at sunset yet the weather report was predicting heavy clouds later. Fog often embraced San Francisco, but this weather pattern sometimes created an opportunity for a certain kind of connoisseur. A massive cloud bank would shove in off the Pacific, a sky-borne herd of aqueous, gaseous bison. Shoulder to shoulder, blunt heads lowered, they'd roll over the lowland coast, push up the steepening slopes, and then grind to a halt against the spine of the coastal range. For an hour or two the clouds would build against the dam, piling higher and higher until the mountains could no longer contain them. First a few tendrils of fog scouted through saddles in the ridge, and soon a smothering cascade rolled over and down and blotted out the eastern slopes.
If he was lucky and arrived at the summit at just the right time, he'd find himself simultaneously at the top of the ridge of earth and at the bottom of a cliff of boiling cloud. He'd feel the pressure mount as hundreds of miles of weather pressed against the last few feet of earth. Then he'd see it break and pour, and he could join it, become it: He'd run down with the wall of mist at his heels, the clear night ahead.
If he was very lucky, he could stay on the edge. That was best. Always it was the edge of things, the brink of transformation, that was most ecstatic.
It all constituted a thrill so deep and strong it seemed to change him at a molecular level, promising all good things: power, healing, endless vigor, perpetual life. Sky, water, and earth met the fire in his head, lived on inside, remade him into an elemental being.
He knew of no one who had done this except himself. He knew of no one who hungered for it as much or had the vigor for it. Maybe no one but him knew why this was necessary, how it made you whole.
Maybe no one else in the world knew. Maybe you had to be an angel. Or maybe you had to be a werewolf.
Tonight the right conditions didn't materialize. Ray straddled the crest only to find that the clouds had stalled a few miles offshore, arrested by some dynamic of air pressure and wind. He was disappointed, but still took savor in being here, especially with his thoughts so clear, his senses refreshingly free of distortion. Anyway, there was so much to think about. Ever since the discovery of the wolfman's bones, he'd sensed some extraordinary convergence occurring, lines and forces and ideas coming together, deeply meaningful in ways he had not quite determined. These runs, the night, the moon's serene face, were also crucial parts of the ingenious riddle.
He sat at the ridge top until he got too cold. The moon had passed the zenith by the time he stood and whistled to conjure the dogs from the dark. Then they were all running downhill in long, loping bounds, gravity now an ally to flight.
The terrain was mixed here, thickets of manzanitas and junipers casting blots of shadow into clear patches of long grass made pearly by moonlight. They had barely started before the dogs began sending little signals to each other, yelps triggered by something in the scent landscape. A half mile below the ridge, running at a long diagonal, Ray saw a faint flash in the darkness a hundred yards ahead. Fritz's voice rang in a series of urgent yelps, and suddenly there was Basil, angling out of the brush on the right. An instant later Sadie burst from shadows on the left, farther back.
They'd flushed something. That was the flash he'd seen: a deer. It had been grazing at the edge of tree shadows and flicked its white tail as it fled.
Ray broke through a thicket of slashing branches to see Fritz and Sadie veer hard to the left, Basil to the right. Ray followed up the middle as they drove the deer in a long curve back toward the heights.
A hundred yards farther on, he caught sight of the semaphore tail, seesawing through the darkness ahead, then vanishing to the right. He followed the dog's voices in the dark. He hurtled through a patch of chest-high scrub, and when he emerged onto the lighter slope of grass he could see the deer ahead, just flicker and moonshadow.
The land rose hard on their left, a dark wall of bare rock and loose earth that reared on the uphill side. The deer had made a mistake coming this way. It bounded along the base of the cliff with Fritz and Sadie closing from behind, two shadows slicing low through the grass. Then Basil burst from the trees at the far end. The deer turned downhill but sensed Ray pounding up from below. Confused, it turned back toward Fritz, shied, then shied again from Sadie. At last it cut hard left and flung itself at the cliff. It clung to the slope, fell, leapt, slid down again. Basil closed in. Another terrific leap, a desperate struggle of spindle legs for purchase, a rattle of pebbles as it slid down.
Ray stopped forty feet away. He was breathless with exertion and stunned by awe. Flis brain Was a fire, and in the fire was a blot and in the blot another kind of fire. He could see everything clearly. The slant of moonlight and the shape of land made a perfect theater, animated with a performance acted for him alone. So this would be tonight's gift: a stark truth five hundred million years old.
The deer leapt again, slid, and Fritz made the first lunge. The deer dodged and tried to leap over Basil, but the big shepherd reared and caught a haunch and they went down together. Fritz and Sadie were on it instantly, shadows converging close to the ground, humping and flailing. The kill became a single shadow animal in mortal bat
tle with itself, a many-legged, convulsing thing. Ray watched, stunned, transfixed, for only a moment.
"Off!" he barked. "Get off!"
He ran to the wall and shouted again as he came among them. This close, the night air was spiced with blood, charged with terror and the killing urge. It seared him. When he pulled at Sadie's stub tail, the Rottweiler slashed at him with a snarl but then moved away as she saw who it was. He yelled another command as he put a foot against Basil's heaving chest and pushed the shepherd away.
Ray cuffed Fritz from the throat and growled at Basil when he started to move in again. In their frenzy, they were at the very limit of their capacity to obey, but they stood back as Ray knelt to the deer. They were ceding the kill to the pack leader.
The young buck had been badly wounded. Its chest heaved and its breath raged in its throat. Its heart thrummed a muffled drum roll in its chest. Freed of the dogs, it tried to right itself in a convulsion of flailing legs, raised its head, dropped it, tried again. Each time, a flash of moon from one wild eye. Ray felt the spray from its nostrils on his bare skin. Calm, he willed it. Accept. Show me it can be done with grace. He put a hand on the straining neck and felt the heat, the wet, the quiver and throb. Musty wet fur and the copper smell of blood.
The dogs' hunger for the kill was a dark blade of yearning. The deer's terror and its will for life was another, keen and pure.
Ray was both. And Ray was the eye of knowing.
Camera on Ray as he sits and lifts the quaking head to his lap: In the dark, he strokes the slimed fur, feels the hot spraying breath. He wills the deer to calm, but it twitches away from his touch. For a moment he can find no serious injury, and he wonders if maybe the buck has burst its very heart, its will to live that strong. The thought makes him weep. But as his hand moves along the muscle of the neck he feels a tear in the pelt and a hot pulsing flow. He tries to look into the deer's eye, to stare into its transformation, to meet the animal self in that instant. But the deer no longer sees anything. The eye is a black glistening orb, without mind, angled up at the sky. The thick pulse ebbs and soon stops. Ray waits for something to pass out of the deer. He wants to see it. He tries to feel what is in himself that is the same.
A final exhalation and then all that's left are random quivers. The tension goes out of the night and the aftermath washes in, sadness and wonder. Ray knows the dogs' hunger to kill is what makes them dogs. The deer's desire to run and to live is what makes it a deer. Ray's ability to feel both, his yearning to understand both, is what makes him human.
What are you really? This. The truth is rapturous and so hard.
"I'm sorry," Ray whispers. "My beauty," he says. "Thank you," he says.
For a while he strokes the deer's body and weeps for it and then he gives it up to the dogs.
8
DR. SKOBOLD HAD kindly agreed to meet with her during his one o'clock lunch hour, with the understanding that his time was very limited. Figuring in drive times, that meant Cree had three hours for a visit to the New Main Library; if the San Francisco History Room there didn't have what she needed, it could refer her to other libraries, private collections, or museum archives. She parked in a pay lot and walked across the plaza between the ornate Edwardian dome of City Hall and the white art deco facade of the library
The fog was gone and San Francisco's pastels and whites were crisp against a blue sky. Despite only six hours of sleep, she felt energized by the morning sunshine, and dealing with Bert didn't seem such an imposing problem. The guy was closed off, but she'd work on him, spend some off-duty time with him. Encourage him to call Mom, too, get reconnected there; maybe help him think more positively about life after retirement. She'd figure out who his wolfman was and clear up that one little piece for him.
Today, the first step would be the house itself. Somebody had built it, owned it, lived in it; somebody had knowingly or unknowingly hosted the wolfman, knowingly or unknowingly repaired the floor above his crypt.
The History Room was on the sixth floor, a huge square space filled with rows of counters, tables, and computers, with a few microfilm cartels set up along the left side. The archivist gave Cree an overview of resources and steered her toward a likely starting point, the indexes to the Sanborn Insurance Company maps. The hand-inked neighborhood maps showed every street and structure and had been redrawn often enough that she could determine within a year or two when the house had been built. She compared her city map with the old index maps to find the right blocks, then filled out a requisition form and took several microfilm reels back to a viewer.
She scanned through the sliding frames until she found the right cross streets, and soon located the footprint of the house, just as it was today: a rectangle with its narrow end facing the street, long side stretching back into the lot, a short L wing at the rear. The most interesting feature of the 1905 map was that it showed another house immediately adjacent on the downhill side, where the terrace garden was now. She made a photocopy of the frame, then rewound and worked her way backward in time through the other spools. Both houses were represented on the earliest Sanborn map, 1886.
Next she moved to the records of the Spring Valley Water Company, which supplied water to San Francisco from 1861 to 1915. Their ledgers recorded when a tap was first turned on at a given address and who paid for it, so by going back and forth between water records and the Sanborn maps, she was able to piece together a rough history of the two properties. The house where the bones were found was built in 1881 by a James Marcus, then sold to a Hans Schweitzer in 1882. Schweitzer was still listed as owner on the 1905 Sanborn map and received water there until 1914, when someone named O'Brien took over the water account. The house next door had been built by somebody named Jackson around 1880, but the house had disappeared from the first map drawn after the quake, and Schweitzer's name appeared in that lot's empty rectangle.
Probable sequence of events, she figured: The Jackson house had suffered quake damage, part of it toppling into the Schweitzer house, killing and burying the wolfman; the Jacksons had not rebuilt but had sold the lot to their neighbor, Schweitzer, who had opted to leave it empty and create the garden terrace. Schweitzer had sold both properties to O'Brien in 1914, and the open space had been preserved by every owner since.
She left the library at twelve thirty, pleased with her progress. Even Joyce would be impressed—after only three hours into her first research day, she had the owner's name for the property during the period in question, plus a general history of the house and the lot next door.
The feeling didn't last. The plaza was a gathering place for homeless people, who huddled among the trees with shopping carts and bags, eating scavenged lunches. Crossing the square again, she passed close to a huge man with long hair matted into dreds and a beard full of food debris, dressed in layers of tattered clothing that made him bulky as a bear. When he saw her, he sort of reared, swinging toward her and baring rotten teeth. Cree quelled the startle reflex, kept a neutral face, avoided eye contact, and swept quickly past. Her chest panged in sympathy but, like anyone who had lived in big cities, she knew it was best to slip through these encounters. Joyce called it the metropolitan glide.
Afterward it occurred to her that maybe the wolfman had been in a similar situation. Maybe he'd been one of those Barbary Coast derelicts that Bert had talked about. She could easily imagine the scenario: Shunned because of his deformities, homeless, scrounging a living, he'd secretly camped out in the gangway between the Schweitzer and Jackson houses, or had found his way into Schweitzer's basement. He'd set up his nest of rags, like the homeless people here, on the night before the quake. He might have been still asleep when the world fell on him at five thirteen the next morning. The wolfman might have no connection whatever to the Schweitzers or their house, to anyone or anything. Maybe no record of his life or death existed anywhere.
She felt her mood sag, but then reminded herself it was still very early in the game. And there were always the bones.
Skobold swallowed. "Ah. Ms. Black, meet Cameron Raymond. Ray, Cree Black."
" 'Ray'?"
"Because of the last name and because I'm a radiologist. It was inevitable." Ray's grin moved further up the side of his face.
He wore jeans and a white shirt and had the rangy, trim build of a very fit man. A nice face, Cree thought, handsome yet strangely shy or self-effacing. He shook her hand with a short, firm squeeze.
"Ray works at Temple Microimage, the lab that's doing the imaging work on our . . . um, newest guest. He's the man I turn to when I need the kind of advanced analysis we'll be doing in this case. He's just brought some new films, which I'm very much looking forward to seeing."
"And I should be getting back," Ray said. "But give me a call, Horace; we'll talk when you've had a chance to look them over."
As he turned toward the door, Cree was startled to see the scarring that distorted the left side of his face. A weal of swollen tissue like a braid stretched from the corner of his lip to just in front of his ear, pulling the skin of his face and tugging down the corner of his eye. She almost gasped from a mix of sympathy and shock, and from the way he averted his eyes as he left, he clearly noticed her reaction.
Skobold stared after him with a mournful, troubled expression, then raised a forefinger to request patience as he returned to his lunch.
Cree sat on a plastic chair and waited, feeling bad about the way she'd reacted to the radiologist's scarring. She considered asking Skobold about him, but decided it would seem rude. Through the door to the lab, she could see several people clustered around Karen Chang and her partially completed reconstruction. The pallet had been removed from the back of the room, and she thought about asking Skobold where the wolfman had gone, but then worried he'd see it as her rushing him.