Wilding Nights

by Lee Killough

  “No, unfortunately.” She better head his thought off fast. “It would make this a whole lot simpler if I did. We’re a big family, though. We’ve been here since the War Between the States. That’s six or seven generations of spreading out, and it’s certainly possible some distant relative is involved with Manning.”

  Kerr glanced back toward the jazz club. “Did you set up protection for Tonya Mixon?”

  She nodded. “She’s covered. You take the north side of the street and I’ll take the south.”

  15.

  “Yeah...I’ve seen someone who looks like her in here,” the bartender in the Gila Crossing said, and handed back the Polaroid. Zane had to lean across the bar to hear above the stamping feet in the line dance behind him. “Could she be a guy in drag? Sure. I never paid that close attention.”

  An echo of other bartenders. They all found the composite familiar-looking. So did the waitresses. So had regulars at several bars.

  In Hooters, a waitress looked at the Polaroid and promptly pointed at a table toward the back where two women and a man sat...all Elvishly elegant. Only in appearance, however. When he approached them, they looked him over as if he were something the dog dragged out of the garbage.

  They tossed back the Polaroid and Manning’s fax photo. “She doesn’t look like anyone in particular and he isn’t anyone our household would associate with.”

  When he gave Allison their names, and others of individuals that regulars at other bars thought looked like Blondie, Allison winced at the trio and shook her head over the other names. “I’m sorry about those three. Some members of the family have...an attitude about...outsiders. These others are female cousins. I can’t imagine how they would even know Manning, let alone deliver sacrificial goats to him. But we’ll interview them if necessary.”

  Talking to bar regulars did produce a few names unfamiliar to Allison, but no actual persons that went with the names. Manning’s photo drew blanks everywhere.

  Zane left cards at each bar. “If you think of anything, call me.” And moved on.

  He asked around about Babs, too. The bartender and waitresses at Ice And Ivory were undecided if the composite looked like her. In any case, they had not seen her for weeks.

  The bartender in the Twilight Lounge had not seen her recently, either, but when Zane handed him the Polaroid, he shook his head. “This ain’t Babs. Take a look at those pictures on the wall behind the piano.”

  Zane checked out the photos. Their celebrity wall. The photographs showed minor show business faces smiling from the bar stools and tables, and sometimes from the piano. The piano shots also often included a leggy blonde in various slinky, shimmering dresses. In the photographs Babs looked convincingly female, but too husky to be Blondie.

  By eight-thirty they had covered the whole eight blocks of Avenue A, finishing up at Hog Heaven. There businessmen-by-day hung out in biker leathers and head bandanas, playing outlaw as they downed micro-brews in the comfort of the fans and misters on the side deck overlooking Laguna Drive and the bay. A moon nearly three-quarters full floated overhead. Turning around, Zane found that in the deepening twilight, the yellow lighting, trolley, and French Quarter ironwork on the balconies gave the street a movie set quality. Throw in a little fog, he mused, and you could believe vampires might slink out of the side streets. Even without fog, one monster already had.

  16.

  From the beginning it had been obvious to Allison that people saw just clan faces in the composite. The jazz club appeared to be Blondie’s first and only stop. So Demry must have been her target. But if Manning came along, he waited somewhere completely away from the A. Allison pictured Blondie returning triumphant to present him with Demry’s bloody heart.

  “What now?” Kerr asked.

  She stared back up the A. “Switch sides and walk back...keeping our eyes open. ” And her nose tuned for Blondie’s scent.

  As she walked, she called Honora.

  Her great-aunt Beatrice answered, talking over shrill screaming in the background. “She went for a run. The poor dear’s been working on that new painting all day.”

  “Leaving you to be stalked by the children?”

  Beatrice laughed. “They’re playing Hunt, yes, but I’m refereeing from the patio with a splendid Napoleon brandy.”

  A scream turned angry.

  “Excuse me.” Beatrice raised her voice. “Tara! Sara! Y'all will have to give Dylan a bigger head start than that.”

  “But he’s older and faster than we are,” one of the twins whined.

  “Then you’ll have to use teamwork and strategy, won’t you, darlin’.” She came back on the line. “Shall I have Honora call you when she’s back?”

  Allison debated a moment. “Just tell her nothing’s happened so far.”

  Next she called Drew. “No sign of Blondie here.”

  “We’re set for her in the West Bay,” he said. “Everyone has radios set to Tac Six, if you want to listen in.”

  Seeing the area in her mind, part of her wanted to be there now. The vehicle and foot traffic along the waterfront quickly diminished away from the bay, until within a couple of blocks the streets became those of a ghost town. The street lights seemed dimmer than elsewhere. Warehouses and other buildings occupied during the day showed lights on the lower floors, but like the street lights, the illumination seemed feeble...as though they teetered on the edge of going derelict themselves. Only the scent and the sound of movement indicated human presences under loading docks or in alleys and derelict buildings. The night air also sometimes brought cloyingly pungent whiffs of marijuana. Parking lots sat almost empty. A few of the remaining vehicles belonged to employees working late. Others, moved daily to avoid being ticketed, were homes to the not-totally-destitute.

  Allison always felt sorry for them as individuals, but part of her could not help wondering if the growing group of homeless in Arenosa heralded the long anticipated social collapse and crash of the human population that would leave her people, so much better equipped for survival, the dominant intelligent life on the planet.

  Letting nature take its course was a whole different thing than slaughter.

  Patrolling on foot there, Allison had always preferred the alleys to the street. The long dark stretches invited Shifting. Around her, small feet scrabbled in deep shadow. Scent identified them...rats, feral dogs and cats.

  Allison slung her coat over her shoulder and strode down her side of the A, pitying the humans she passed. How terrible to live as they did, with the senses half numb, never experiencing the full sensory richness of the world around them. Which made it all the more unforgivable for Blondie to rob Demry of the little that life gave him.

  17.

  After ten o’clock Allison kept them close to the jazz club, watching for either Manning or Blondie.

  Kerr pulled out his cell phone and notebook. “I should have thought of this earlier for checking on Manning.” He punched in Manning’s number.

  Allison waited. “Well?”

  He grimaced. “The answering machine is picking up.”

  So he could be here in Arenosa. “Let’s see if we can make certain I’ll catch him in tomorrow. Leave a message. According to the APD records, he’s a web site designer. Make an appointment to discuss designing a web site.”

  Kerr said promptly, “Mr. Manning, this is Dr. Charles Kerr. Bonnie Mae Shelton suggested I call you. I’m interested in putting up a website with consumer-oriented information about orthopedic medicine. I’m free of both surgery and appointments to drop by your office at...” He raised his brows at Allison.

  She calculated quickly. Michelle and Heather were home on leave for the Gathering. One of them could fly her up to Austin, though Honora’s Aircoupe was a big comedown from a Tomcat. “Eleven.” That should keep him home without making him refuse to talk to her because he wanted to be free when his client arrived.

  “...eleven o’clock. If that isn’t convenient, please call me back.” He left his c
ell phone number.

  “Dr. Charles Kerr?” Allison said.

  He shrugged. “My father. I thought a doctor might make Manning smell money and really want the business.”

  Probably right. “And who’s Bonnie Shelton?”

  Kerr grinned. “Made up...but saying someone referred you makes it sound more legitimate, don’t you think?”

  A bright boy, as Drew said, thinking on his feet. Now if only he didn’t outsmart himself.

  At one o’clock she called Drew. “No sign at all of her,” she told him.

  “None here, either,” he said.

  Her cousin Regan found a vagrant dead with no signs of violence and Mike Fairchild stumbled across a break-in. She heard the traffic about that on the radio, listening enviously. He and Tom Sweet both enjoyed a piece of the action along with the Watch One officers.

  “How late do you want us to stay?”

  “I’ll leave here at two. Why don’t you give it another fifteen minutes, then fold up. I’m ordering pizza and beer for everyone on the operation. How many am I feeding?”

  “Thirty counting you and me.”

  “I’ll order twenty-five large deluxes from Jorge’s and another twenty-five from Maximo’s.” Which ought to piss off their clerks, having that much work at this time of night. “If you’ll have someone do the pickup, I’ll take care of the keg. Meet in the park?”

  “10-4.”

  At one-thirty Kerr pointed out the flutist and Del Kindly pulling out of the alley behind the jazz club in his car.

  Allison said, “If she’s a target, we won’t find our killer hanging around here any longer. Why don’t you pack it in? I’m going to visit a couple of informants then go home. I’ll write up reports in the morning.”

  18.

  A sign at the park entrance stated that it closed at midnight. Allison ignored it, following the drive in and along the river to a shelter house in a grove of palms. Most of the others had arrived ahead her. Open pizza boxes covered all the tables and benches, with yet unopened boxes stacked on the floor.

  Seeing her pull up, Drew lounged against a pillar supporting the roof and shook his head. “I can never decide if you’re so crazy about looking like a detective or just too lazy to buy a different kind of car.”

  She circled the front of her Camaro to the passenger door. “Don’t badger the broad with the booze. Unless you’re not interested in my passenger?”

  “If he isn’t, we’re dying of thirst,” Drew’s nephew Peter said, and rushed out with Jeremy Sweet, still in his deputy sheriff’s uniform, to carry the keg and package of cups into the shelter house.

  Allison followed, through a gauntlet of high-fives, hugs, slaps, and punches, to draw a beer and start on one of the pizzas.

  The post-mortem on the operation was already under way. Was the lack of action encouraging or a bad sign? Had they not been covert enough? Had they spooked the hunter into going elsewhere?

  Her great-niece Selena said, “If she didn’t show up to go after the flutist, then maybe the lawyer was her only target and it’s over. We don’t have to worry about her anymore.”

  “We still have to find her.” Allison refilled her cup. “She could develop a taste for killing like this, if she hasn’t already. She has to learn we don’t slaughter innocents!”

  “If you want to call any human innocent,” Tom Sweet said. “I trust you’re running Kerr in circles making a monkey out of him.”

  Sometimes the hardliners irritated her. She frowned at him. “I’m not doing anything obstructive except encouraging him to think Blondie is male.”

  Gary Golden said, “Why take a chance by letting him that close? I’ve seen books in his locker about aliens and stuff. If he finds out she’s female, he could guess the truth about her... and then us. It’d be easy enough to make him forget Blondie as a suspect by pushing this Manning as the killer. He probably put her up to it anyway.”

  Allison sighed. “I can’t do that, if for no other reason than there’s no evidence of Manning in town last night. Let me run the investigation my way. I’ll handle Kerr.” Maybe. She hoped. But she wanted to avoid complicating things with any more falsified evidence. “Peter...any interesting repos recently?”

  A guaranteed way to change the topic. Beyond Gary, Drew winked at her. Peter always had interesting repo jobs...or at least stories to tell about them that everyone loved hearing. With the enthusiasm of youth, he called himself the most inventive repo man in the state, and continually tried to demonstrate that, always ready with a strategy or disguise to help him retrieve the items designated for repossession.

  While he launched into a series of stories, Allison finished off her pizza and part of another, then found herself staring longingly out at the park and moonlight. It called to her. Handing Selena her car keys, she whispered, “I’m going to run home,” and with a wave at Drew, slipped away.

  She used a footbridge to cross the river, and broke into a jog to stretch. Then she took several breaths, each deeper than the last...feeling as though she shifted gears in a car. Power surged around and through her...searing ice, fiery cold...and with one last intake of breath, triggered an inner explosion. The constrictive human shell shattered. Freed, power surging, she came truly alive. Senses sharpened, sounds and smells turning into an even richer swirl of sensation...the scents of plant life, the sound of wind in the trees and bamboo stands, the groaning roar of a lion off west in the zoo, the whisper of owl wings and the death squeak of its prey, the scents of the owl and rodents, of its blood, of her clan mates and pizza behind her. She leaped forward through the moonlight, the ground steaming away beneath her...reveling in the ripple of sinew and muscle, in the sensation of boundless strength and infinite energy.

  Not really boundless and infinite, of course. Along with the replaceable caloric energy, each Shift burned a little irreplaceable life force.

  Allison had been just five when Jerusha Makepeace felt depletion and announced her Liberation, but the night glowed vividly in memory. The alphas from every household in the clan gathered along with Jerusha somewhere up-river after midnight. Everyone else who wanted to be there with her waited at the lowest section of the park where clan estates still bordered both sides. Under the light of a half moon, Allison huddled against Aunt Isabell along with her cousin Christian, not sure what to expect, but simultaneously frightened and excited by the energy and air of expectation that pulsed around her.

  “Here they come,” someone called, and down along the river swept the whole pack, heat and energy rippling the night over them, giant wolves, black and silver and grey, tails like flags, fangs gleaming, tongues lolling. Except for Jerusha. In the middle of them all, she ran in human form...her energy field no longer strong enough to register as Big Powerful Dangerous Life-form. But what remained left her incandescent with inner light. As they reached the gathered clan, they halted. Jerusha held out her arms to everyone, her face suffused with fierce joy. Then as everyone wished her goodbye, she collapsed.

  What landed in the grass bore no resemblance to Jerusha and terrified Allison...a pile of clothes and withered, grey sticks. Isabell patted her head. “It’s just an empty shell...ashes. We’ll finish burning it later. Jerusha is there.” She pointed north, where everyone else had turned to look. “She’s making the Northern Lights one color richer.”

  Allison had heard speculation that life could be extended by not Shifting...but how could anyone live without Shifting? That would be death by suffocation.

  The walls of the clan estates appeared ahead, rising on both sides of the park, then their own adobe wall with the tall wooden gate in the center. Allison gathered herself, leaped, soared over it. On the other side she landed in the pasture of coastal prairie grass that served as their lawn. Ahead lay the pueblo sprawl of the house with its verandas and terraces facing the pasture, and the long breezeway extending from Honora’s suite on this wing of the house to her studio here at the wall.

  The ten-foot tall doors on this side
of the studio had been slid open, spilling light across the grass. Allison dropped out of Shift...pulled in upon herself, forced the shell closed around her again. After a few moments to readjust to feeling stifled, she walked into the studio. Big canvases stood stacked against the far wall of the barn-like space, with canvas rolled like carpet leaning against one adjoining wall and bins of stretcher parts and racks of paint tubes along another. In the center of the studio stood a blank canvas Allison judged to be ten feet high and fifteen wide. Her grandmother leaned against a tall step ladder, studying it.

  As always, Allison admired how youthful Honora appeared and how she glowed with power and authority even in paint-stained jeans and a threadbare Brooklyn Dodgers uniform shirt. But she radiated warmth, too. So often as a child Allison had cuddled up with her to be enveloped by it. She slipped her arms around the slim waist from the rear and rubbed her cheek across the buzz cut hair, still enjoying that warmth. “No luck anywhere tonight.”

  “Damn!” Honora squeezed one encircling arm. “Help yourself to the wine.”

  The bottle and two glasses sat on a small café table. Allison filled the empty glass. Screwing the top back on the bottle, she smiled. Whatever caught her fancy, Honora drank, no matter how Beatrice shuddered at “soda pop” wines among her meticulous choices for the wine cellar. Which Allison had always found amusing after hearing Honora talk about both of them drinking anything available in their youth and bathtub gin by the gallon during Prohibition.

  Allison sat in one chair at the table and propped her feet up on another. “I thought Beatrice said you’d been working on that painting all day.”

  Honora smiled. “I have. Nothing’s on canvas, is all. Austin called back. Candace Flowers doesn’t know of any liaison between a clan girl and this Manning, but since theirs is a bigger clan than ours, she’ll keep asking around. Have you decided the hunter comes from there?”