In my experience, all homeless develop a streak of conspiracy theory if they’re on the street long enough, whether they start out a little paranoid and freaked out or not. The hard part is figuring out when they’re right and when they’re confabulating. It was entirely possible that Twitcher had been poisoned—and equally possible that he hadn’t. I’d have to check with other sources to find out.
“Has anyone else moved on or died recently? Like, since December?”
“Oh, there’s always a few on the move all the time. As you know. There’s been a few deaths, though. Winter was rough and with the economy so down, it’s been a little harder to stay fed and dry.”
“Who died, aside from Twitcher?”
She kept her eyes moving, watching everyone but me as she answered between sips of tea. “Samuel died a few months back, and Ron—you know, the one with the stick people.”
“Any idea how?”
“Not sure about Samuel, but Ron was hit by a truck in the alley behind the Indian place. Not a great loss. Upset the poor trucker something awful, though. Wasn’t his fault, of course. Ron was lurking around the trash bins, probably planning to rob the cab when the driver got out to make his deliveries—he’d done that before—and stepped out before the guy’d set his brakes. Got crushed into the wall, the fool.”
I made an acknowledging sound. No one had been fond of Ron. He’d been a leering, unpleasant man who made figures out of sticks and scraps and intimidated tourists into buying them so he’d leave them alone. Such a death wasn’t pleasant, but it was hard to feel much sadness for the passing of a man who’d stolen from anyone he could take advantage of and had the habit of groping any woman he could reach. He’d been in and out of jails, just skirting a long sentence several times. He was, as Sandy had said, not a great loss. It appeared I’d get no more from her, though; she was focused on other people and giving me only the selvage of her attention.
“Who is your subject today?” I asked as a polite segue to taking my leave.
She tipped her head very slightly toward the corner of the park, where some crafts booths were being set up. “Fella in the jacket. Dark hair, short, Hispanic.”
I looked and snorted back a laugh. “That’s Rey Solis. You know—Detective Sergeant Solis.”
She nodded. “Yup. Been acting odd lately.”
I’ve known Solis for years, but we’d only recently become friends. He was as far from odd as I could imagine—though I could go for “subtly intriguing.”
“Odd how?” I asked.
“Just out of character. Gotta keep an eye on that.”
I was pretty sure I knew exactly why Solis was acting out of character, but I wasn’t going to say so to Sandy. I gave her a sideways look. “Internal Affairs?”
She nodded again and went back to watching Solis and the people at the booths.
“Well,” I said, “I need to speak to him myself, so if it won’t cause you any trouble, I’ll be on my way now.”
“No problem. Good luck.”
“Thanks. Good luck to you, too.”
Armed with names, I walked across the park toward Solis as a sunbeam cut through the cloud for a moment and blazed a trail along the brick plaza, slicing away the glimmer of silvery mist in my left-side vision. The light passed over the booths with their canvas roofs and cast a softened glow on the people working inside, making them strangely radiant in my overlapped vision. I strolled around a display of paintings on pieces of found wood arranged next to jars of arty hand cream and rounded a corner, nearly running into Rey’s back.
He turned around sharply. “Oh. Why am I not surprised to see you?” he said.
I shrugged. “Not much surprises you?”
“Not much about you surprises me.”
“All right, I’ll buy that.”
“You have business down here this morning, Blaine? Or do you just enjoy the walk?”
“Business. You?”
He pulled at his jacket as if it didn’t fit the way he wanted. “The same.”
“Should I go, then?”
“No, no. We’re canvassing about some thefts in the area. Seems to be a gang of kids causing a disturbance so their friends can take goods off the counters. You have any ideas about that?”
“I haven’t been in the area much the past few days but I’d suggest you hunt down a street rat named Mimms. If he’s not in it, he knows about it.”
“I have been looking for Mimms. So far, no luck.”
“Try the back door at Cowgirls an hour or so before opening. He had something going with one of the waitresses there a while back. If they’re still together, he may walk her to work, and if they aren’t, he may drop by to flirt with her coworkers just to spite her.”
“Ah. That sounds like his way,” Solis said.
Mimms was one of those good-looking, fast-talking, low-rent troublemakers girls find charming until they get to know them. I’d dated enough of them in my turn to recognize them at a distance now. Mimms was one of the least offensive variety—more charming than vindictive and smarter than his impulses, but still too brass-balls stupid to ignore them. He might clean up all right if he survived.
“I had not heard about the girlfriend. I’ll check on it. Thank you. And you?”
“I heard a couple of homeless from the area died in the past eight months or so. Anything on that?”
He gave a tiny shrug. “A few do in the winter. What aspect of these deaths interests you?”
“I’m just wondering how they died.”
“Nothing as spectacularly disturbing as the last time you pursued that question. I would have to look it up, but I believe it was one vehicular accident, one untreated infection of the lungs, and two starvation. Very upsetting that people can starve to death on the streets of a major American city. . . .” He furrowed his brow, but his eyes were more pensive and sad than angry and his aura shifted slightly to a dark blue-green that seemed to run over him like drips of paint. Then it pulled tighter to him, easing back toward its normal yellow color.
I was startled by the list. “One of the latter wouldn’t be a guy named Twitcher, would it?”
Solis shook his head. “I’m not sure of the nickname.”
I stirred my memory for Twitcher’s real name. “Umm . . . Davis Thompson. Had a neurological disorder that caused him to twitch and gesture compulsively. Forties, brown hair, brown eyes, about six feet.”
Solis listened to my description and considered it, but shook his head. “I cannot be sure. That sounds correct, but you may have to look into the death records to confirm it.”
I didn’t really need to; my heart sank with final certainty. “I’ll do that,” I answered.
Solis peered at my face. “I am sorry. You knew him.”
“Yeah, I did. I thought I saw him recently, but apparently not.”
“Is this . . . one of your particular cases?” He asked. Solis is well aware of the nature of my “particular” cases, but since he wants to keep his job with the Seattle PD, he’s been circumspect about it. Especially since he came along on one of my cases last year. Before that, he was suspicious about the frequency with which I seemed to be in the middle of investigations featuring bizarre and inexplicable circumstances. Not so much anymore.
“Yes,” I said. “Quite the woo-woo creep show, complete with mediums, ghosts, and haunted bars.”
“Can I expect to see any of this cross my desk?”
“I hope not. So far, the worst things have been some on-the-job accidents. Nothing criminal, no suspicious deaths—at least not modern ones.”
“A haunted bar, you said.”
“Kells in the market. Lovely place—too bad about the mortuary.”
His eyes lit with understanding. “Ahhh . . . I see. I’ll look into your homeless reports when I get back to the office. Call me later.”
He didn’t have to do that—probably shouldn’t have offered—but I wasn’t one to say no. I smiled and thanked him. “I’ll keep an eye out for Mi
mms.”
He nodded, a small smile cracking his face. “Thank you.”
I waved and turned away, catching a familiar shape moving at the edge of the crowd. I adjusted my path to keep just behind it and out of sight while I got closer. It was a bit tricky weaving through the vendors and the morning tourists, but while they were an obstacle, they also provided cover. I managed to work my way onto the sidewalk less than half a block behind James Purlis without his seeing me.
FIFTEEN
I’m taller than a lot of people. I’m taller than Quinton and I’m taller than his father, so I could stalk along behind him, able to keep his head in sight at a longer following distance than usual. He must have known I was following him, though I never saw him give any indication. After all, he’d been in the business of following people longer than I had and I would have spotted me by now. Still, he led me up First Street in the thickening crowds of workers and tourists—and then he disappeared.
I was a little startled. He was in front of me and then he just wasn’t. I dropped into the Grey, feeling a bit vertiginous as I slammed through the barriers of the ghost world, looking for signs of his unusual aura. I spotted it sinking through what I knew was the street. I flung myself back into the normal, stepping on toes and body-checking a few people as I regained solidity and shoved my way forward to the spot where he must have vanished.
It was an old street-access elevator used by the utilities people to take equipment from the built-up sidewalks down to the original street level, about thirty feet below. Most of the devices weren’t in use anymore, closed up permanently as unsafe or impractical, but one or two lingered. The diamond-patterned steel plates over the lift clattered as I stepped onto them, settling back into position after being disturbed just minutes ago. He was fast; I had to give him that. I looked around, marking the area in my mind, and thought this was far too close to Quinton’s old bunker under the Seneca Street off-ramp. I had the urge to run and see if Quinton was there, but I wasn’t sure that Purlis wasn’t watching to see if I would do just that. From this vantage, I could no longer track his energy with any ease and I wasn’t sure where he was in the storm of mist and colored light that muddled half my vision while I stood amid the moving crowds on the sidewalk. There were plenty of places where he could have come back up to see what I was going to do. I hoped he hadn’t noticed my sudden vanishing act as I’d slipped into the Grey if that was the case.
To chase or not to chase . . . This had to be a feint to draw me into revealing Quinton’s lair. Quinton would have twigged to something like this elevator and its tactical value or vulnerability fairly early on since he had lived under the streets here for years and knew the buried sidewalks and passages better than anyone—including me. He wouldn’t have let his father get this close without having a way out.
If he’d felt threatened, he would have abandoned the tunnel bunker and—I shook my head at my stupidity—he’d been staying with me since his father had shown up in town. Apparently love is blind, because I’d missed the connection until now. While my condo was an obvious place, it was one that was much harder to approach unseen than Quinton’s subterranean hideout. I might have been miffed at his not saying anything about it, but since I’d just made an ass of myself on that point, I had no cause for complaint. He liked to keep his problems to himself, which was a familiar mode of operation for me, too.
I made a show of looking around and concluding I was out of luck before I turned back, retraced my steps half a block to the corner, and crossed the street. I worked my way down toward the waterfront, checking for a tail, but finding none this time. I paused long enough to send Quinton—who still carries a pager in preference to a more easily tracked cell phone—a numeric message with the code for “call me” before I started back up toward the various hidden doorways and utility accesses that led to the tunnels connecting with his hideout.
None of the doors or manholes looked recently opened but I couldn’t get too close without arousing Purlis’s suspicions if he was still watching me covertly. And I supposed he was, since I couldn’t imagine any other reason for his luring me up near Quinton’s lair. I kept looking for any sign of Quinton but I couldn’t find one. While that annoyed and depressed me in some ways, it at least meant that his father hadn’t found him, either.
I made one more round of the locations where I would expect to catch some indication that Quinton had been there and checked my phone again, but there was still no message. I’d walked all the way up to the southern entrance to Post Alley without any glimpse of him or the little markers he sometimes left.
My stomach made a gurgling sound and I felt a bit queasy, remembering that I’d had nothing to eat except coffee at the bakery since the soup I’d had last night. No matter how worried and off-stride I felt, I still needed to eat. But maybe not this close to Pike Place Market. I turned back and took myself out for lunch at a Chinese deli on Western. The food was mediocre, but the staff was nice and I could look out the windows at Western Avenue and the traffic working its way around the snarls of construction under the slowly eroding viaduct.
I’m not a total klutz with chopsticks, but I’ll certainly never be taken for a native user. Still, I should have had less trouble picking up noodles and conveying them to my mouth. After the fourth missed mouthful, I put the chopsticks aside and sat still for a moment, catching my slightly labored breath and trying to steady the growing quiver in my hands. I felt dizzy and hot and too big for my skin—as if another me were writhing around inside it, pushing and shoving to make it bigger. The vision on my left side blazed up too brightly while my right seemed to fade slowly. My flesh felt as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper and soaked in alcohol while my hands ached and trembled. I sat back in my seat, hoping these sensations would pass quickly and that it wasn’t the first wave of another manifestation like last night’s two episodes. I couldn’t take time to be ill, but I’d have much preferred that this was just a sign that I was coming down with something prosaic—like the flu.
The deli was busy enough that no one was paying me any attention, but not so crowded that anyone was hovering over me, hoping to snag my table the moment I was done. I tried to pick up the chopsticks again, but I fumbled them and one clattered to the floor. As I leaned down to retrieve it, the lights went out and I felt the Formica tabletop press against my cheek just before I lost consciousness.
But I wasn’t unconscious, not really. I had been pushed aside, violently, inside my own body and felt cold, weighty things shoving into me. Not like sharp edges or pointy objects tearing the skin, but as if great balloons pressed past my fragile shell without breaking it, pushing in and stuffing me down into a corner I didn’t even know I had—a little dark closet of hell I had lived in once upon a time, when I believed the degrading, thoughtless things other people said about me. I couldn’t break out, even though I struggled, and I experienced sensation at a distance. I felt my hands close and move, felt words express themselves on my skin as if a drypoint pen was pressing from beneath the surface, scribing looping lines of script that my closed eyes couldn’t see. And always the pushing, pressing sensation of weight, moving, squirming inside me.
It felt like I was in this remote, tortured state for hours, unable to cry out, or even to breathe, unable to move or fight back. For a moment I did not fight, but let myself fall away, further into the Grey and the darkness that it had become. Now I saw nothing in my Grey sight but at the deepest level, where the power grid of magic roared in channels of searing, colored light and I could hear the murmur of the Grey talking to itself, of the souls in transition that were neither ghost nor human singing with the music of energy flowing through the world. I tumbled and soared to the grid and looked back, searching for the forms of the presences that had shoved me aside.
Silver and foggy black clouds—the half-life forms of the dispossessed dead—boiled through a wire-frame human form of white light that spun a full spectrum of colored strands in all directions until it look
ed more like a tiny sun than a woman. A rope of twisted colors shrouded in black tied me to the incandescent shape. I stared at it; I’d never seen my own energetic form before, yet this was clearly it. This was what Grey creatures saw, what drew ghosts and trouble to me like moths because I was, to them, as bright as flame and sun, moon and stars in cloudless skies. I’d been told this, but it’s not the same to be told as to see it for yourself.
I wanted it back—wanted my whole self—and I pushed with the only weapon I still controlled. I vaulted back toward the shape of me, thrusting with my mind against temporaclines and shadow shapes of things gone or yet to come, climbing back to it by will to drive the ghost shapes away. I could not grip them, but in this deep plane of the Grey I could exert myself as force, drive them out, thrust against their incorporeal weight with the vigor of being alive. I had so much more to lose than they did and though I was rough with them, I didn’t hesitate any longer. I pulled the burning flow of the grid into my mind, feeling it swell and howl through me, and then propelled it out and up to sweep them away on the gust of power. The ghosts scattered like autumn leaves before wind and I rushed back toward the gleaming shape of my self, passing again into darkness as I went.
I sat up with a gasp, dizzy from the transition back to normal. A young Chinese American woman jumped back from me and I thought she must have been bending over me as I’d lain across the tabletop. She was usually behind the cash register and I hadn’t seen her come over.
“You OK?” she asked, quivering a little from surprise. “I thought you fainted.” She looked frightened.
I shook myself, settling back into the feel of my own body. “I’m fine.”
I’m a good liar, but she wasn’t convinced. She stared at me with wide eyes and raised one hand to her cheek. “Your face . . .”
I touched my own face and recognized the stinging heat I’d felt the night before at Cameron’s house. This time the dermographia had scrolled up my neck and onto the side of my face, just in front of my ear, then vanished again under my hair. I could sense the burning tracery running down my back as well, like a trail of fire ants.
Possession g-8 Page 19
