Dragon Tears (34 page)

Maybe he can just leave now, go back to the alley, see if the fat man left out more food for him.

That would be a cat thing to do. Sneaking away. Running. He is not a cat. He is a dog.

But do cats ever get their noses scratched, cut deep, bleeding, sore for days? Interesting thought. He has never seen a cat with a scratched nose, has never gotten close enough to scratch one.

But he is a dog, not a cat, so he pushes against the door. It eases open wider. He goes into the space beyond.

Young-man-bad-thing lying on black cloths, above the floor, not moving at all, making no sound, eyes closed. Dead? Dead bad thing on the black cloths.

He pads closer, sniffing.

No. Not dead. Sleeping.

The thing-that-will-kill-you eats, and it pees, and now it sleeps, so it is like people in many ways, like dogs, too, even if it isn’t either people or dog.

What now?

He stares at the sleeping bad thing, thinking how he might jump up there with it, bark in its face, wake it up, scare it, so then maybe it won’t come around the woman and boy any more. Maybe even bite it, just a little bite, be a bad dog for once, just to help the woman and the boy, bite its chin. Or its nose.

It doesn’t look so dangerous, sleeping. Doesn’t look so strong or quick. He can’t remember why it was scary before.

He looks around the black room and then up, and light glistens in a lot of eyes floating up there in bottles, people eyes without people, animal eyes without animals. Interesting but not good, not good at all.

Again he wonders what he is doing here. He realizes this place is like a drain pipe where you get stuck, like a hole in the ground where big spiders live that don’t like you sticking your snout in at them. And then he realizes that the young-man-bad-thing on the bed is sort of like those laughing boys, smelling of sand and sun and sea salt, who will pet you and scratch behind your ears and then try to set your fur on fire.

Stupid dog. Stupid for coming here. Good but stupid.

The bad thing mumbles in its sleep.

He backs away from the bed, turns, tucks his tail down, and pads out of the room. He goes down the stairs, getting out of there, not afraid, not afraid, just careful, not afraid, but his heart pounding hard and fast.

Weekdays, Tanya Delaney was the private nurse on the graveyard shift, from midnight until eight o’clock in the morning. Some nights she would rather have worked
in
a graveyard. Jennifer Drackman was spookier than anything Tanya could conceive of encountering in a cemetery.

Tanya sat in an armchair near the blind woman’s bed, silently reading a Mary Higgins Clark novel. She liked to read, and she was a night person by nature, so the wee-hour shift was perfect for her. Some nights she could finish an entire novel and start another one because Jennifer slept straight through.

Other times, Jennifer was unable to sleep, raving incoherently and consumed by terror. On those occasions, Tanya knew the poor woman was irrational and that there was nothing to be afraid of, yet the patient’s angst was so intense that it was communicated to the nurse. Tanya’s own skin would prickle with gooseflesh, the back of her neck would tingle, she would glance uneasily at the darkness beyond the window as if something waited in it, and
would jump at every unexpected noise.

At least the pre-dawn hours of that Wednesday were not filled with shouts and tortured cries and strings of words as meaningless as the manic babble of a religious passionary speaking in tongues. Instead, Jennifer slept but not well, harried by bad dreams. From time to time, without waking, she moaned, grasped with her good hand at the bed rail, and tried without success to pull herself up. With bony white fingers hooked around the steel, atrophied muscles barely defined in her fleshless arms, face gaunt and pale, eyelids sewn shut and concave over empty sockets, she seemed not like a sick woman in bed but like a corpse struggling to rise from a coffin. When she talked in her sleep, she didn’t shout but spoke almost in a whisper, with tremendous urgency; her voice seemed to arise from thin air and float through the room with the eeriness of a spirit speaking at a séance: “
He’ll kill us all…kill…he’ll kill us all….”

Tanya shivered and tried to concentrate on the suspense novel, though she felt guilty about ignoring her patient. At the least she should pry the bony hand off the railing, feel Jennifer’s forehead to be sure she was not feverish, murmur soothingly to her, and attempt to guide her through the stormy dream into calmer shoals of sleep. She was a good nurse, and ordinarily she would rush to comfort a patient in the grip of a nightmare. But she stayed in the armchair with her Clark book because she didn’t want to risk waking Jennifer. Once awakened, the woman might slip from the nightmare into one of those frightening fits of shouting, tearless weeping, wailing, and glossolalic shrieking that made Tanya’s blood turn to ice.

Came the ghostly voice out of sleep: “…
the world’s on fire…tides of blood…fire and blood…I’m the mother of Hell…God help me, I’m the mother of Hell….”

Tanya wanted to turn the thermostat higher, but she knew the room was already a bit too warm. The chill she felt was within her, not without.

“…
such a cold mind…dead heart…beating but dead…”

Tanya wondered what the poor woman had endured that had left her in such a dismal state. What had she seen? What had she suffered? What memories haunted her?

The Green House on Pacific Coast Highway included a large and typical California-style restaurant filled with too many ferns and pothos even for Harry’s taste, and a sizable barroom where fern-weary patrons had long ago learned to keep the greenery under control by poisoning the potting soil with a dribble of whiskey every now and then. The restaurant side was closed at that hour.

The popular bar was open until two o’clock. It had been remodeled in a black-silver-green Art Deco style that was nothing like the adjacent restaurant, a strained attempt to be chic. But they served sandwiches along with the booze.

Midst stunted and yellowing plants, about thirty customers drank, talked, and listened to jazz played by a four-man combo. The musicians were performing quirky semi-progressive arrangements of famous numbers from the big-band era. Two couples, who didn’t realize the music was better for listening, were gamely dancing to quasi-melodic tunes marked by constant tempo changes and looping extemporaneous passages that would have thwarted Fred Astaire or Baryshnikov.

When Harry and Connie entered, the thirtyish manager-host met them with a dubious look. He was wearing an Armani suit, a hand-painted silk necktie, and beautiful shoes so soft-looking that they might have been made out of a calf fetus. His fingernails were manicured, his teeth perfectly capped, his hair permed. He subtly signaled one of the bartenders, no doubt to help give them the bum’s rush back into the street.

Aside from the dried blood at the corner of her mouth and the bruise only beginning to darken one whole side of her face, Connie was reasonably presentable, if slightly rumpled, but Harry was a spectacle. His clothes, baggy and misshapen from having been rain-soaked, were more wrinkled than an ancient mummy’s shroud. Formerly crisp and white, his shirt was now mottled gray, smelling of smoke from the house fire he’d barely escaped. His shoes were scuffed, scraped, muddy. A moist bloody abrasion as big as a quarter marred his forehead. He had heavy beard stubble because he hadn’t shaved in eighteen hours, and his hands were grimy from pawing through the pile of dirt on Ordegard’s lawn. He realized he must appear to be only a treacherous step up the ladder from the hobo outside the bar to whom Connie had just delivered a warning about forced detoxification, even now socially devolving before the scowling host’s eyes.

Only yesterday, Harry would have been mortified to appear in public in such a state of dishevelment. Now he didn’t particularly care. He was too worried about survival to fret about good grooming and sartorial standards.

Before they could be ejected from The Green House, they both flashed their Special Projects ID.

“Police,” Harry said.

No master key, no password, no blue-blood social register, no royal lineage opened doors as effectively as a badge. Opened them grudgingly, more often than not, but opened them nonetheless.

It also helped that Connie was Connie:

“Not just police,” she said, “but pissed-off police, having a bad day, in no mood to be refused service by some prissy sonofabitch who thinks we might offend his effete clientele.”

They were graciously shown to a corner table that just happened to be in the shadows and away from most of the other customers.

A cocktail waitress arrived at once, said her name was Bambi, crinkled her nose, smiled, and took their orders.
Harry asked for coffee and a hamburger medium-well with cheddar.

Connie wanted her burger rare with blue cheese and plenty of raw onions. “Coffee for me, too, and bring both of us double shots of cognac, Rémy Martin.” To Harry she said, “Technically, we’re not on-duty any more. And if you feel as crappy as I feel, you need more of a jolt to the system than you’re going to get from coffee or a burger.”

While the waitress filled their orders, Harry went to the men’s room to wash his grubby hands. He felt as crappy as Connie suspected, and the restroom mirror confirmed that he looked even worse than he felt. He could hardly believe that the grainy-skinned, hollow-eyed, desperation-lined face before him was
his
face.

He vigorously scrubbed his hands, but a little dirt stubbornly remained under his fingernails and in some knuckle creases. His hands resembled those of a car mechanic.

He splashed cold water in his face, but that didn’t make him look fresher—or less distraught. The day had taken a toll from him that might forever leave its mark. The loss of his house and all his possessions, Ricky’s gruesome death, and the bizarre chain of supernatural events had rattled his faith in reason and order. His current haunted expression might be with him for a long time—assuming he was going to live beyond a few more hours.

Disoriented by the strangeness of his reflection, he almost expected the mirror to prove magical, as mirrors so often were in fairy tales—a doorway to another land, a window on the past or future, the prison in which an evil queen’s soul was trapped, a magic talking mirror like the one from which Snow White’s wicked stepmother learned that she was no longer the fairest of them all. He put one hand to the glass, warm fingers met cold, but nothing supernatural happened.

Still, considering the events of the past twelve hours, it was not madness to expect sorcery. He seemed to be trapped in a fairy tale of some kind, one of the darker
variety like
The Red Shoes
, in which the characters suffer terrible physical tortures and mental anguish, die horribly, and then are finally rewarded with happiness not in this world but in Heaven. It was an unsatisfying plot pattern if you were not entirely sure that Heaven was, in fact, up there and waiting for you.

The only indication that he
hadn’t
become imprisoned in a children’s fantasy was the absence of a talking animal. Talking animals populated fairy tales even more reliably than psychotic killers populated modern American films.

Fairy tales. Sorcery. Monsters. Psychosis. Children.

Suddenly Harry felt he was teetering on the edge of an insight that would reveal an important fact about Ticktock.

Sorcery. Psychosis. Children. Monsters. Fairy tales.

Revelation eluded him.

He strained for it. No good.

He realized he was no longer lightly touching his fingertips to their reflection, but was pressing his hand against the mirror hard enough to crack the glass. When he took his hand away, a vague moist imprint remained for a moment, then swiftly evaporated.

Everything fades. Including Harry Lyon. Maybe by dawn.

He left the restroom and walked back to the table in the bar where Connie was waiting.

Monsters. Sorcery. Psychosis. Fairy tales. Children.

The band was playing a Duke Ellington medley with a modern jazz interpretation. The music was crap. Ellington simply didn’t need improvement.

On the table stood two steaming coffee cups and two brandy snifters with Rémy glowing like liquid gold.

“The burgers’ll be a few minutes,” Connie said as he pulled out one of the black wooden chairs and sat down.

Psychosis. Children. Sorcery.

Nothing.

He decided to stop thinking about Ticktock for a while. Give the subconscious a chance to work without pressure.

“I Gotta Know,” he said, giving Connie the title of a Presley song.

“Know what?”

“Tell Me Why.”

“Huh?”

“It’s Now or Never.”

She caught on, smiled. “I’m a fanatical Presley fan.”

“So I gathered.”

“Came in handy.”

“Probably kept Ordegard from throwing another grenade at us, saved our lives.”

“To the king of rock-’n’-roll,” she said, raising her brandy snifter.

The band stopped torturing the Ellington tunes and took a break, so maybe there was a God in Heaven after all, and blessed order in the universe.

Harry and Connie clinked glasses, sipped. He said, “Why Elvis?”

She sighed. “Early Elvis—he was something. He was all about freedom, about being what you want to be, about not being pushed around just because you’re different. ‘Don’t step on my blue suede shoes.’ Songs from his first ten years were already golden oldies when I was just seven or eight, but they spoke to me. You know?”

“Seven or eight? Heavy stuff for a little kid. I mean, a lot of those songs were about loneliness, heartbreak.”

“Sure. He was that dream figure—a sensitive rebel, polite but not willing to take any shit, romantic and cynical at the same time. I was raised in orphanages, foster homes, so I knew what loneliness was all about, and my heart had some cracks of its own.”

The waitress brought their burgers, and the busboy refreshed their coffee.

Harry was beginning to feel like a human being again. A dirty, rumpled, aching, weary, frightened human being, but a human being nonetheless.