California Bones

by Greg Van Eekhout

  Watanabe caught his breath. He wiped spit from his lips and straightened his tie. “You have until five o’clock to return my hound to the kennels, Inspector Argent. Fail to deliver, and the hound might not be the only thing around here getting a lethal injection.”

  * * *

  Gabriel plotted the Hierarch’s assassination. The first obstacle was determining his location. He maintained multiple residences: Griffith Observatory, his castle in the Hollywood Hills, a penthouse suite in the Jade Tower downtown, not to mention a royal yacht and several bunkers serviced by the civil defense tunnels he’d built during his war with the United States.

  “But assume I could fix him to a single location,” Gabriel said, leaning over the city map spread across his desk. He kept his voice low and his office door locked.

  Max bit into an apple. In the kennels, hounds were fed a nutritionally balanced slurry. He chewed the apple as though it were the best apple ever to fall off a tree. “You’re making a big assumption.”

  “I know, but just go with it. Say a bodyguard or attendant or, I don’t know, a Council member was unhappy enough with his working conditions. Enough to betray his master.”

  “An insider? Why go through the risk and trouble of contracting an assassin? Why not just kill him yourself?”

  “Come on, Max, you know the answer to that.”

  Max chewed. “Because you’d need someone with enough power to face the Hierarch without getting turned inside out.”

  “Exactly. So you’ve got an inside man taking out a contract and giving you necessary intel.”

  Max wiped juice off his chin with the back of his sleeve. Gabriel’s sleeve, actually, since he’d given Max the spare shirt and trousers he kept in his office. Max wore the outfit with no tie and the shirt untucked. He wore it well. Maybe that’s what I’d look like if I wasn’t always such a tight ass, thought Gabriel.

  “You’d still need a different plan for each of his residences,” Max said. “That’s hundreds of obstacles and hundreds of variables.”

  “Then we simplify,” Gabriel said. “Let’s limit the possible sites to one of his bunkers. That’s where he probably spends most of his time anyway.”

  “You’re picking the best-guarded, most difficult option.”

  “Good. If we can work out the most difficult case, then we can certainly work out the easier ones. So, the Hierarch’s underground. He’s got guard units and surveillance, maybe miles of it. But who cares, because you’ve got sint holo and you can slink right past it.”

  Max cocked his head. “I didn’t know you could use sint holo.”

  “Me? Well, I can’t, of course,” Gabriel said, taken aback. “I’m talking about Daniel Blackland. We’re assuming this is what Daniel Blackland might do.”

  “Oh.” Max bit his apple. “Okay. Go on.”

  “Jesus, Max, did you think I was planning to assassinate the Hierarch? Me?”

  “We’re locked in your office, contriving a plan to do just that. So, yes, that’s what I thought you were planning to do.”

  “And you were helping me?”

  “Why not? I’m overdue for my own execution, anyway.”

  Gabriel rubbed the bridge of his nose. Knowing Max would actually assist him in planning the worst crime imaginable was both disturbing and interesting.

  In fact, Gabriel had once planned out the Hierarch’s assassination. He’d done it a lot after his mother’s death. Never with magic. He always imagined rifles, bombs, garrotes. Then he grew out of it and replaced childish revenge fantasies with hard work and study. Government employees usually lived longer than vengeance-obsessed sons. Government employees had a better chance of getting a pension.

  “I’m talking about Daniel Blackland,” he said. “He has sint holo. So he can get past the guards and the eyes, right?”

  “I can’t be the only hound in the kingdom who can nose sint holo. The Hierarch’s got to have others like me.”

  Max was probably right, but Gabriel refused to surrender. “So if you can’t maneuver in a guarded place without being seen, you’d have to maneuver in a place where nobody’s watching.”

  He imagined what the defense tunnels might look like, envisioning a network of passageways below the city. Maps of the tunnels—assuming such things existed—had to be among the kingdom’s most closely guarded secrets. He traced his finger along his own city map. “What if you could dig your own tunnel?”

  “You’d have to do a lot of mining,” Max said. “And not just through earth. There’d be concrete, steel, possibly dragon scale.”

  Gabriel sighed. “Yeah. This is starting to look hard.”

  Voices from outside drew Gabriel’s attention. He couldn’t make out words, but one voice rose above the rest, and it sounded angry. Shadowed figures paraded past the frosted glass of his door.

  “Is my time up?” Max asked. “Are they coming for me?” He still didn’t seem to care much if he lived or died.

  “They better not be. I filed all the right paperwork. You just stay here and keep working on our problem while I see what’s going on.”

  Max chewed apple.

  “And if anyone asks, we are doing anything other than contemplating the death of our leader.”

  “What leader?” Max said.

  “Good…”

  Gabriel checked himself. He’d almost said, “Good dog.”

  “Good,” he said again, shutting the office door behind him.

  The flutter of activity was like a henhouse where a fox had come calling. Heads poked from offices and phones rang and people of all ranks bustled through the hall. Gabriel spotted a pool of calm in the storm: Hazel, one of the old hands in the secretarial pool. She observed the chaos from the water cooler.

  He made his way over to her.

  “A god walks among us,” she said, while a deputy minister roared for someone to find soy milk for the visitor.

  “Which one?”

  She fanned herself with her hand. “Wilson Bryant.”

  “The baseball guy?”

  “No, you ignorant boy, Wilson Bryant from The Woodies. Do you even listen to music?”

  Down at the end of the hall, a retinue of attorneys and entertainment industry functionaries and personal assistants and stoner hangers-on escorted the recording giant to Minister Watanabe’s offices. Bryant was a tall man whose hair lacked acquaintance with a comb. His white belly spilled from an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. His beard contained multitudes.

  “What’s his story?”

  “Last night someone pulled a B and E at his beach house. He was home at the time, and now he’s rather agitated.”

  “I imagine so. Any good leads?”

  “No, he was drugged and has little actual memory of the events. He did say the thieves wore wool faces and one of them was made of bad love.”

  “Wool faces? Does he mean ski masks?”

  Hazel poured Gabriel a paper cup of water and handed it to him. She was always concerned that he keep himself hydrated. “Your guess is as good as anyone’s. And I’d say ‘made of bad love’ implicates my ex-husband, only he’s dead.”

  Gabriel hated working celebrity-god cases almost as much as he hated Watanabe, and he feared his boss would pass Bryant down to him.

  “What’d the thieves get?”

  “A snake’s head,” Hazel said. “You know what seps venom is?”

  Gabriel reached back to his early days in the Ministry libraries, pouring over Chinese texts and alchemical grimoires. He had to fight for the privilege of reading those volumes, and his simple presence in the reading rooms was enough to make enemies out of licensed osteomancers who didn’t understand why an unpowered clerk should have access to their secrets. But he withstood their machinations long enough to gain a familiarity with the osteomantic bestiary as comprehensive as that of any state sorcerer.

  “Seps,” he said. “Very rare. The venom is one of the most corrosive substances on earth. It can eat through concrete as though it were cheese. It
can eat through steel, through…”

  Gabriel dropped the cup, splashing water on his shoes, and ran back to his office.

  “Max—”

  The hound was sitting in Gabriel’s desk chair, hunched over the city map. “I think I figured out a way he could get to the Hierarch,” Max said. “Even if he were deep underground.”

  “Seps venom.” Gabriel was breathless.

  Max looked up, pleased and surprised. “That’s what I was going to say. What do we do now?”

  Gabriel thought of his radishlike boss down the hall. He performed some mental calculations. He didn’t mind other people taking credit for his work. But neither did he want to die for the privilege of helping others.

  “I think we need a new boss,” he said.

  TWELVE

  At 12:13 P.M. on a Tuesday lunch hour, Moth peed on a statue. It wasn’t just any statue. This was a statue in Burbank of an anthropomorphic mouse, wearing a belted robe and a tall, pointy hat, commanding an army of brooms with which the mouse was cleaning the tiled floor of a gurgling fountain. Moth’s urine splashed against the smiling wizard mouse and blended into the water.

  Workers on their lunch breaks gaped. A few children giggled. And three cops swarmed on Moth with their cleaver-clubs at the ready. Moth surrendered without resistance and allowed his hands to be cuffed behind his back. He was loaded into a van and taken away.

  Daniel, watching from a nearby bench, dropped a decitusk into a pay phone. Cassandra picked up on the other end.

  “It’s on,” Daniel said, and hung up.

  By 4:41 P.M. that afternoon, Moth had been booked, charged, and sentenced. At some point a public defender might have been involved. Moth was taken to Century City Plaza, where a permanent scaffold abutted a twenty-five-foot-high wall of yellow limestone and steel-reinforced concrete. This was the Golden Wall, the western border of Beverly Hills. As office workers in suits and ties and skirts streamed from the glass and steel towers to claim their boats from the dockhouses and catch gondola-buses and taxis, Daniel watched marshals lead Moth and two other criminals from a police wagon in chains. The marshals wore the special black uniforms of Justice Dispensation, which came with visored helmets to protect their anonymity.

  The prisoners were herded up the scaffold steps and arranged shoulder to shoulder in a line facing the crowd. The scaffold was equipped with a whipping post. There was also a set of iron rings bracketed to the wall, where sometimes prisoners’ hands were bound for garroting. A set of nooses dangled from a crossbar.

  A marshal with a bullhorn addressed the crowd. She called out the names of the prisoners, as well as their offenses and punishments.

  Raul Ortega. Armed robbery. Death by hanging.

  Patrice Beaufort. Grand theft larceny. Death by hanging.

  Thomas Frasier. Desecration of the people’s interest. Death by hanging.

  Thomas Frasier was the name on the identification papers Moth carried at the time of his arrest.

  Down below, shoes clopped on the pavement as people crossed the plaza, heading home, heading to dinner or to the bars. Some bought empanadas from a cart and went on their way. Some paid attention to what was going on up on the scaffold. One elderly couple held hands and wept. They bore a family resemblance to Raul Ortega, Daniel thought.

  The condemned weren’t given hoods. There was no priest to hear a confession or give a last rite. The marshals laid the nooses around their necks like garlands and jerked the knots tighter. For Moth, the marshal had to stand on a box.

  Daniel liked to think the men and women who performed this task suffered hauntings by merciless ghosts. He liked to think of them screaming from nightmares, or developing habitual tremors and perforated ulcers. He liked to think of them sinking over the course of long lives into miserable graves. He wondered what became of the men who’d dissected his father right before his eyes. He often looked into the ruined faces sleeping in alleys, or under trees in the park. He looked into their sick, undernourished eyes and hoped to recognize one of his father’s murderers. And if he did, would he kill that man? Would he torture him? Or would he be satisfied that their entire life was punishment enough?

  He never did recognize one of those wings-and-tusks knife men. He feared they lived out quiet lives, seldom thinking about that day.

  The drum of heels on the plaza quieted. At the empanada cart, the vendor clutched a customer’s change and stared at the scaffold. The weeping couple held each other. With no more ceremony than flushing a toilet, a marshal pulled a lever, and the trapdoors beneath the prisoners’ feet swung open, and the prisoners dropped.

  The fall was not long enough to break their necks. Instead, they strangled, jerking like landed fish. Moth broke the zip-tie binding his ankles and danced.

  Daniel had intended to time the entire hanging, but he’d forgotten to start his watch. He clamped his jaw tight and forced himself to keep watching. When Moth finally grew still, Daniel unclenched his hands. Half-moon cuts in his palms seeped blood.

  The bodies were left to custodial staff. They snipped the prisoners’ zip-ties and with ropes and pulleys, hoisted the dead to the top of the Golden Wall. There they hung, upside-down from the ankles, like holiday ornaments.

  Daniel walked two blocks to a side canal, where Cassandra and Jo waited in a plain white van. Cassandra raised her eyebrows in question, but he just shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about it. He settled in the back of the van, leaned against the side panel, and closed his eyes. Images of his father being cut open and Moth jigging on the end of his rope blended in a fevered loop.

  At 11:17 P.M., he took up a pair of binoculars and peered out the back window of the van. He watched Moth reach up over his feet and grasp the rope he was dangling from. He climbed hand-over-hand until he was upright and without resting, continued to climb until he reached the wall’s summit. He unfastened the loop around his ankles, tossed the rope over the wall, and climbed down the other side. He was now inside Beverly Hills, the Golden City.

  Daniel lowered his binoculars.

  “We’re in.”

  * * *

  Daniel led Jo and Cassandra into “Little” Santa Monica, a decommissioned canal that wasn’t much more than a muddy trench. Under cover of overgrown willow arroyo, they tromped through mud to a steel door set into the limestone face of the Golden Wall. The door stood twelve feet high and eight feet wide. There was no keyhole, no combo pad, no visible latching mechanism. It could only be opened from the inside, and it had been at least twelve years since anyone had reason to do it. Neglected infrastructure could be a thief’s best friend.

  A rusty screech set the neighborhood coyotes off into a cascade of howls. With a swirling cloud of desiccated plant particulates and cobwebs, the great door cracked open just enough to allow Daniel and crew to slip through. Once they were in among a nest of high weeds, the door shut, and Jo threw herself on Moth.

  “Be professional and curb the goopiness,” he rasped. “I’m okay.”

  A ghastly welt ringed Moth’s throat. Daniel raised his eyebrows at him.

  “I want another ten percent of the cut,” Moth said.

  “You can have mine. You got balls of steel, buddy.”

  “Then they should have hung me by my balls.”

  Yeah, Moth was okay. Daniel handed him a Department of Water and Power tool bag. Rolled up inside was an XXXL-sized version of the blue-and-gray DWP coveralls Daniel and Cassandra were wearing. Moth nodded his thanks, and fresh guilt lanced Daniel.

  Moth had died for him. And now he was saying thanks for being handed something to wear other than the clothes he’d died in.

  A light pressure squeezed his arm. Cassandra’s touch was so brief he thought he might have imagined it, but then she said, “Any one of us can bail on this job. There’s still time to say fuck it.”

  Her message wasn’t for Jo or Moth. It was for Daniel. They were with him because they chose to be. Every risk, every sacrifice, was by choice. Nobody bailed. They gave t
his to Daniel freely. It’d never really bothered him before.

  “Six hours till sunrise,” he said. “Time to hunker down. I’ll take first watch.”

  * * *

  Los Angeles Police sergeant Hank “Ballpeen” Hammer was a man of habits.

  He began his every morning by parking his black-and-white police stiletto in the valet spot in front of Esclusivo on Rodeo. The day manager would come out with a smile glued to her face and hand him a complimentary cappuccino, and Ballpeen would add a slug of something from a steel flask while frisking her with his eyes. He’d haul his lumbering bulk from his boat, and commence his beat on foot, oblivious to the Esclusivo manager’s daggerlike glares.

  Emma Walker had observed this routine for three consecutive weekdays before fishing his coffee cup from the trash and identifying the contents of his flask: tequila.

  Who the hell put tequila in their coffee? It was disgusting and obscene, and it made everyone on the crew feel better about what they were going to do to Sergeant Ballpeen.

  Ballpeen maintained his uniform nicely and afforded himself good haircuts. Still, he stood out among the posh like ketchup on a pearl necklace. He enjoyed being conspicuous, blustering down the sidewalks, making solicitous noises at the wealthy patrons and flashing his bully’s smile at the shop clerks and prep cooks and janitors.

  On Thursday, after the Esclusivo manager handed Ballpeen his cup and smiled her way back into the restaurant, Jo Alverado used a sphinx-key and slipped into the passenger seat of the police boat. Before Ballpeen could react, she blew a strawful of hypnalis dust in his face. She took the cup from his hand before he could drop it and dumped tequila from his own flask all over his sleeping form. She reclined his seat and covered him with his jacket, then stripped off her own overcoat to reveal a loose, black LAPD uniform, identical to Ballpeen’s, right down to the badge number.

  The uniform inflated as Jo assumed Ballpeen’s form. After a quick check of herself in the rearview mirror, she was walking down the sidewalk with Ballpeen’s customarily jaunty gait.