Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  Pumping these guys for information wasn’t very effective. The Jamaican was only slightly less laconic than Mr. Gestapo, but his answers were just as uninformative. Hiding my amnesia hampered my questioning. Even so, I got a few solid facts.

  It was Saturday the fifteenth, and I’d started this hunt for Sebastian’s daughter on the first. My ex-wife had been killed on the eleventh, and Sebastian’s people lost track of me on the thirteenth—a full day before I’d opened my eyes in a storm sewer.

  I asked them annoying detailed questions about what they were doing when, and most of my solid information I got from the context of their answers. The subtext of their answers, never actually stated, was that I’d been under Sebastian’s surveillance nonstop from the point I took his job....

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked.

  “To Mr. Sebastian. He wishes to hear from you what happened between seven on Thursday and nine this evening.”

  Great. “Why did you take so long to pick me up?”

  “I wasn’t certain about your identity until you met with Detective Samuel Weinbaum.”

  Whatever I had been hired to do, I had to lose my escort and get some help. I felt certain that whatever sickness gripped me was pulling me toward something dark. “I have a meeting,” I told him.

  “What?”

  I removed my sunglasses with a shaking hand. I had been wearing them all night, and removing them flooded the world with light. The Olds seemed to drive through a tunnel of glowing white motes. “I have to meet someone at the Arabica.”

  I saw him glance at me in the rearview mirror. “You were just leaving there with Detective Weinbaum.”

  I smiled a little weakly. “I’m not supposed to meet him until closing. He’s paranoid about cops, I had to talk to Sam first—”

  He kept glancing between the mirror and the road. “I find this sudden revelation somewhat hard to credit, Mr. Tyler.”

  “The van was a sudden revelation. This was just an attempt to get things done with too little time. Or don’t you want me to do my job?”

  “But why did you and Detective Weinbaum leave—”

  “We were going to the hospital to pick up some paperwork.”

  “What kind of paperwork?”

  What kind of paperwork? I was stuck for a moment.

  “Mr. Tyler?”

  “My wife, damn you,” I let my shakiness, frustration, and my anger find my voice. “Blood tests, the contents of her stomach, where they cut into her body....”

  I stared at his eyes, and felt my own begin to blur. The frustration and anger were real. I was lying, but my tears were for my wife, and because it hurt not to remember.

  He looked away from me. “Forgive me, Mr. Tyler. We’ll go to your meeting.”

  I felt some sense of victory. It was muted because I didn’t know what I was going to do when we got there.

  Mr. Gestapo stayed with the Olds, and the Jamaican accompanied me inside. Before we entered, I said, “Take a table near the front. I told you this guy’s paranoid. If he sees you with me, he’s liable to spook.”

  He didn’t look pleased, but he nodded.

  I stepped inside, and the lights were so bright that my eyes watered. I replaced my sunglasses. The smell of coffee made me uncomfortably aware of my stomach. I gave the counter a wide berth.

  No one seemed to go out of their way to notice me. The blond pagan who had given me a tarot reading wasn’t here. The poet and the grad student had abandoned their chess game. There seemed about half the people here that there’d been when I left.

  I had until closing to think of something.

  I kept walking farther into the coffee shop, hunting for some sort of inspiration. As I closed on the smoking section, I began to notice that there was more to this place than was visible from the front. The room curled around the bathrooms like the tail of a snake, and I followed it to a smoky alcove that was almost a separate room from the rest of the coffee shop. There was a whole other section back here, dim and smoke-filled.

  The walls were dotted with fliers back here: a feminist flier announcing a pro-choice rally, some New Age thing about pagan open circles, a Communist tract about the liberation of Peru; but what captured my attention was a poster for a band called “The Ultraviolet Catastrophe” who were playing at the Euclid Tavern.

  The concert poster disturbed me. Most of the 8½ x 11 page was taken up by a black-and-white line drawing. It showed a tanning bed, and on it was a cadaverous man, with smoke rising from his mouth and eyes. In his hand, dangling to the ground, he held a bottle of something that could have been a Molotov cocktail.

  The artist’s interpretation of the band’s name, I supposed. It made me uneasy. It made me feel that Death had walked from his tarot card to sit back here with me.

  I turned away from the poster to focus on something more relevant. There was a fire exit all the way to the rear. Dull gray metal with a crash bar labeled “for emergency only.” It was obviously wired to an alarm, so my escort would know as soon as I ran for it.

  But I walked to the door and considered whether or not I could outrun him. I figured that he wasn’t going to give me more than half a minute to think about it before he walked back here to check on me. If I was going to do it, I should do it now.

  I put a hand on the crash bar—

  “Kane? Is that you?”

  I turned, surprised. Two people were sitting at a table next to the fire door, a man and a woman. Somehow I hadn’t even noticed them when I’d turned the corner. I was farther gone than I thought.

  The man spoke again. “Kane? Christ, what happened to you, man?”

  I recognized the voice from the phone. “Bowie?”

  He nodded. He was tall, thin, and wore a long black ponytail that hung to the small of his back. He wore a black motorcycle jacket and blue jeans. His only concession to the weather outside was a pair of gray wool gloves, under the fingerless black leather ones that covered his palms.

  I looked at him and felt familiarity. Not the sense of trust I’d felt with Sam, but I knew that I had dealt a lot with this person recently.

  The woman, a redhead who was between seventeen and twenty-one, brought me no sense of recognition whatsoever. She was looking at me, as if she wasn’t quite sure of who I was.

  Makes two of us, I thought.

  “That is you, Kane?” Bowie asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You look dead,” he said.

  “Thanks, that makes me feel better.” I took the conversation as a cue to sit. The smoke, and the scent of heavy perfume underneath it, made me feel a little dizzy. I wondered when it would stop being disorienting simply having people recognize me. I glanced around, and, as I expected, my shadow had moved to another table, one in view of the alcove I’d retreated to.

  “Let me introduce you,” Bowie said. “Kane, this is Leia, Leia this is Kane Tyler.”

  “Oh, the gentleman who finds missing children.” She had a high, slightly breathy voice, with a very distinct English accent. She had a habit of touching the collar of her turtleneck when she spoke. “An admirable pursuit.” She held out her hand and I shook it absently. It wasn’t until I saw a quarter smile cock her lips that I realized she had meant me to kiss it.

  I looked back to the Jamaican. He was still there, pretending to read a newspaper. At least if nothing else, I have met with someone.

  “So how’s it going? Haven’t seen you in days.” He looked at Leia, and they exchanged an unreadable glance. “And what’s with the sunglasses?”

  I rubbed my temples. “Light hurts my eyes. Lights and mirrors.” I glanced up and both of them were staring at me. “I know how it sounds.” It sounded like any number of things, the most probable being that I was stoned out of my mind. I was getting to the point where I was going to start to search my own arms for needle tracks. “I need a doctor,” I whispered.

  Bowie and Leia exchanged glances again, and Bowie asked me, “Why don’t you get one?”
>
  I looked at him and then at the Jamaican. This was a noisy place, and I was certain that he was out of earshot. “I need to get away from a friend of mine.”

  Bowie looked off in the direction of the Jamaican. “What, you need some help?” Bowie laughed, and he leaned in conspiratorially and whispered, “Why sure, man.”

  He was grinning and I felt compelled to say, “This isn’t a game, Bowie.”

  I felt a light touch on my hand. I looked up at Leia. She stared at me in a way that made me realize just how attractive she was. She had a very seductive whisper. “Mr. Tyler, I am certain that Bowie realizes what is a game and what is a not. You need to seek medical attention.” She patted my hand. “We will get you to a doctor.”

  I felt a slight unease in trusting these strangers, but when it came down to it, everyone was a stranger to me. I looked at her and said, “How?” I had the feeling that if I did make it to an emergency room, the police would become involved.

  “We know a doctor who can help you.” Bowie was still smiling. “Don’t we, Leia?”

  She looked at him and shook her head. “My grandfather is a physician.” She pulled something out of her purse and slid it to Bowie. “I’ll page you when my grandfather’s ready and I can pick you up.”

  She stood up to leave and I whispered, “Wait, what about him?” I cocked my head slightly in the direction of the Jamaican. He was still pretending to read the paper.

  “I’ll take care of him,” she said. “Just, whatever you do, stay with Bowie.” Leia walked away from the table.

  “What is she going to do?”

  Bowie chuckled and said, “You see the same ass I do and you can ask that question?”

  She walked past the Jamaican’s table, leaned over, and whispered something. I had no idea what she said, but in a matter of a few moments, the Jamaican wasn’t paying much attention to our table.

  Bowie backed out along the wall, toward the fire door. I saw where he was headed. “What about the alarm?”

  He grinned broadly and slipped a tiny pry bar from inside his jacket. “The alarm is set when you push the bar—” He slid up to the door, and I didn’t know how the Jamaican could miss him. “—not when you jimmy the latch.” He put the pry bar between the door and the jamb and said, “That’s the theory anyway.”

  I watched my shadow, back by the entrance to the smoking section. He wasn’t looking our way.

  There was a small creak as Bowie levered the bar, but no alarm. The door swung out, and I felt a chill wind hit my face. “Come on,” Bowie urged.

  I didn’t need to be told again.

  6

  We ran, and for once I was happy for the snow. In the whited-out landscape, we were out of sight of the rear of the coffee shop before we had gone two hundred feet. Even if the Jamaican had come after us the instant we’d left, Leia had bought us enough time to get out the door and lose ourselves in the blizzard.

  We ran behind buildings, across side streets and through parking lots, until we came to the intersection of Coventry and Mayfield, a couple of blocks north of where we started. We emerged in the parking lot of a Dairy Mart after jumping a chain-link fence.

  Bowie led me across the street and away from the intersection, away from the Dairy Mart, away from all the businesses. Coventry Road on the other side of Mayfield was a residential accumulation of apartment buildings. It was also less well lit, cutting down visibility even more.

  “Follow me,” Bowie said, darting toward a brick apartment building with me following. Once inside, he opened the door to the basement with the explanation, “Lock’s broken.”

  In a few moments it was obvious that this building wasn’t our final destination. We passed a pair of apartments, a laundry room, wove our way through ranks of storage lockers, and came out of a door to the rear of the apartment.

  Bowie darted across the asphalt behind the apartment, straight for the garage in back. I followed him out a small door in the rear of the garage.

  We walked along an unlit path, calf-deep in snow. To our right were garages facing away from us, to our left was an old chain-link fence. After we’d walked passed two or three garages, I finally spoke, “I think we lost him. Where’re we going?”

  “I know this chick in East Cleveland, she owes me money. We can crash there till Leia calls and picks us up.”

  “Uh-huh.” I assented without letting any of my reservations show. I needed that doctor. I felt a pain in my gut that never quite went away, combined with a hunger bad enough to make me giddy. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was starving to death.

  I don’t know any better, do I?

  “What’s over there?” I asked, waving my hand toward the chain-link. It was impossible to see a few feet beyond the fence; whatever was beyond was unlit.

  “Lakeview, I think. We passed the rear of the Jewish place a bit back.”

  Neither explanation helped me, and I kept glancing off to the left. Golf Course? Country Club? City Park? Of course, none of those explained having a separate entity for Jews. It stumped me until I caught sight of a shadow on a hill just beyond the fence. An obelisk stood, a darker shadow against the blowing snow.

  “A cemetery,” I whispered.

  “What?” Bowie asked over his shoulder. He was busy navigating himself over a pile of snow covered garbage someone had dumped back here.

  “Nothing,” I said as he gave me a hand over a dead refrigerator.

  “Bowie, you acidhead!” The “chick” Bowie knew was a little upset with him.

  We were a few blocks into East Cleveland, and this building was still on the border of Lakeview Cemetery. We had gone up to the third floor, Bowie’s friend had opened the door, looked at both of us, and pulled Bowie into the apartment. I had enough of a glimpse to see short black hair, a tank top, and a livid red skull tattooed on her bicep, before she slammed the door in my face, leaving me alone in the hallway.

  I was left to listen to their argument through the closed door, feeling less inconspicuous by the moment.

  “Christ, Billi, he’s my friend—he’s in trouble.”

  “Do I come to your place so my drugged-out friends can crash?”

  “He isn’t—”

  “Have you looked at him? It’s almost midnight, in a snowstorm, and he’s wearing sunglasses?”

  The only bright spot was the fact that this was only one of two raging arguments going on in this building, and covering the noise of both was a loud party downstairs. I was the only person in the hall, and I did my best not to look like I belonged to Bowie’s argument.

  “You can’t do this to me, Billi. I need to—”

  “I don’t.”

  “You owe me, Billi.”

  Any sane person would have made a graceful retreat by now. But I was feeling worse by the minute. The blizzard outside was rattling the windows loud enough to be heard over the chaos in the apartments, and I did not want to go out there again. The cold felt as if it was sucking the marrow out of my bones.

  On top of everything else—

  I leaned against the wall and stared at the ceiling. If someone showed for me—police, Sebastian, or Childe—I wouldn’t put up much of a fight. It was hard for me to believe that when I had gotten out of that bathtub I had felt fine.

  What the hell was wrong with me?

  “No, Bowie, you’re not holding that over me.”

  “Billi, if it wasn’t for me, you’d be out on the street.”

  “You know I’m going to pay you back—”

  “Yeah, right now.”

  “Bastard.”

  My view of the rust-spotted ceiling was blurred through the condensation fogging my sunglasses. A bead of melted snow slid across my field of vision as the door to the apartment opened.

  I took off the sunglasses to get my first good look at Bowie’s friend, Billi. She was as tall as I was, almost as tall as Bowie. But where Bowie was stick-thin, she had an athlete’s body. She was wearing sweatpants and black tank top that m
ight have been sexy if she didn’t look so pissed.

  “Come in,” she said.

  I stepped through the door, and she quickly slammed it shut behind me. She turned, as if to launch into another high-volume argument. More raised voices I didn’t need; my luck was pushed as it was.

  “I’m sorry to put you through this,” I said. I did my best to sound conciliatory.

  She looked at me as if she was about to say something, then shook her head. “Yeah, whatever.” She ran both hands through her hair, a gesture of frustration.

  We stood there, paused, in the entryway to her apartment. Neither of us wanted me to be here. “All I need is to rest a moment, talk to Bowie—When our ride calls, I’ll be out of your hair.”

  She looked at me with an unbelieving expression. “Don’t even talk to me. I’m doing this for your bastard friend.”

  I nodded and rubbed my temples. On top of everything else, I was beginning to feel feverish. I tried to tell myself that the apartment was just too hot.

  I stumbled inside.

  I am going to get some medical attention. I’ll be fine once I see this doctor. That was becoming as difficult to believe as everything else.

  Our hostess left us in the living room. The place was sparsely furnished, a sagging sofa surrounded by shelves made with cinder blocks and milk crates. Spiral notebooks and loose-leaf paper covered every available surface. I took it all in with a glance, then I collapsed on the side of the evil green sofa that wasn’t in line with the windows. The cushion sagged halfway to the ground.

  Bowie sat on the arm opposite me. He was perched so close to the edge it looked like he was levitating. I closed my eyes, because without the sunglasses the light in here was giving me a headache.

  It was hard not to give in to the feeling of helplessness.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  Bowie shook his head nervously. “Yeah, yeah—You gotta tell me what happened to you.” He took a pause, and, very uncertainly, he said, “Was it Childe?”

  The pause in his speech made me feel a little sicker. “Damn it, I don’t know! I’m barely keeping what’s left of my head together. If you’re supposed to be my friend, you tell me about this Childe guy.”