Spirit Dances (22 page)

“I’ve got it.” Billy sounded as thick as he’d sounded light before, like a sinus headache had suddenly taken up all the space and comfort in his head. “I can see her trail. Almost. Close enough to follow, anyway.”

Breath whooshed out of me, and the hubbub fell silent as everyone absorbed that. Rebecca sobbed one more time, a short sharp noise, but this time there was relief in it: maybe Naomi’s horrible departure had a purpose. Even I thought that somehow made it better.

I grabbed Billy’s hand, said, “Sorry, I’m stealing him,” to Mel, and started tugging him toward the door. “Where?
Which way? I can’t follow a trail very long and I don’t know how long a ghost trail might last. Where do we need to go?”

“Joanne!” Melinda’s voice cracked across the stage and I turned back, electricity jittering down my spine. She softened a little, though her voice remained serious: “Be careful.”

I gave her a weak smile, nodded and hauled Billy out of the theater. He shook off the deepest part of his malaise as we got outside and cleared his throat. “Keys.”

I dug them out of my pocket as I scurried along, and he thrust his hand at me. I frowned at it. “What?”

“Give me your keys. I’m the one seeing ghost trails.”

A little bubble of astonishment popped at the very bottom of my soul. It gave rise to lots more, like soda fizzing in a glass. The closer they got to the top, the more they exploded with tiny bursts of outrage instead of astonishment. “You want to drive
Petite?
”

“Everybody wants to drive Petite, Joanne. She’s a beautiful car. People who don’t drive want to drive her.”

“And nobody gets to!” One person. One person besides me had driven my baby since I’d rescued her from a North Carolina barn over a decade earlier, and I’d torn into that person with the unholy vengeance of a thousand paper cuts. I had put blood, sweat and soul into my big purple beauty, and
nobody
got to drive her but me.

Billy, with infinite patience, said, “Don’t be an idiot. Give me the keys.”

I clutched them against my chest, eyes wide with indignation. “Do you even know how to drive a stick?”

“Walker!”

Sullen, I said, “You sound like Morrison,” and tried to hand over the keys. I did. I really tried, but my hand
wouldn’t uncurl from my chest, nor would my fingers unclench from around the keychain. “I can’t.”

“You can’t hand over your keys.”

They cut into my fingers, I was holding them so hard. It hurt enough that I was starting to want to let go, but my crimped fingers wouldn’t loosen. “I really don’t think I can.
Nobody
drives Petite, Billy. Nobody but me.”

My partner flung his hands into the air—a remarkably melodramatic and impressive act, in his bright blue zoot suit—and stomped around the car. “Morrison is right. Your relationship with your car is pathological, Walker. If we lose this trail because you miss a turn, I will haunt you for the rest of
eternity.
Do you understand me?”

I said, “Yes,” in a tiny voice, and even believed him, but it was still me who got in the driver’s seat.

Billy alternated between giving directions and cursing me, all the way downtown. I parked Petite at the all-night garage on Pine Street, grumpily aware that I wouldn’t get to write off the parking fee because I wasn’t officially on a case. Billy stopped swearing once we were safely parked, sat silent a minute or two, then started up again. “I can’t see the trail anymore. We need to go south from here.”

“I don’t know if there’s any overnight parking south of here and I’m not leaving Petite on the street.” I got out of the car, locked my door, and waited for Billy, cursing all the while, to do the same.

“Is this what it’s like when you try to track?”

“Yes.”

“No wonder it pisses you off.”

“You got us a hell of a lot farther than I have.” We headed for street level. “I don’t know. Maybe if I shift into a coyote again I could pick up the trail.”

“You’ve been hit by a truck once already tonight. Why
don’t we try something else first? We’re in the right ballpark.

Let’s go talk to your friend Rita Wagner. If I were down town working a major spell, I’d want to be well out of the way. Maybe she’ll have some ideas on where.”

“Why not the Olivian?” I jerked a thumb northeast, toward the high-rise apartment building a block or two away. “I mean, that’d be plenty out of the way, plus a nice penthouse view. There’s no reason to assume a power-stealing madman is hiding in the down-low and dirty parts of town.”

“Except it was a homeless guy who was murdered down town yesterday morning, not a business executive in a high-rise.”

“Yesterday?” I looked at my wrist, where I’d taken to wearing my copper bracelet instead of my watch. The brace let was prettier, but much less good at telling time. But Billy was right: it was probably past midnight, so Lynn Schumacher had died yesterday. “Okay. Yesterday. God. Long day. Okay. You were saying?”

“I was saying, assuming they’re connected—”

“And why would we do that?”

“Because you’re at the center of it all.”

I shut my mouth so hard my ears popped. Billy waited for me to come up with an argument, but all I could manage was a silent, not especially creative litany of bad words.

There was a non-zero probability that he was wrong. It was possible Rita Wagner had come back into my life simply to pass on her gratitude for us saving her life. It was possible someone within her sphere of influence had died horribly out of pure random hideous circumstance, shortly after she re-entered my orbit. And it was possible there was no connection at all between that death’s physical location and the
generalized area Melinda had been able to point us at for our magic-stealing-murderer’s location. It was
possible.

It was also
possible
that a wendigo had just happened to take up hunting in my neighborhood, or that the right pieces to shatter an ancient, powerful death cauldron had come into play around me coincidentally. It was possible. It just wasn’t very damned likely.

“I’m like that woman,” I said after a long time. “Angela Lansbury in that TV show. No one in their right mind would be friends with her. No one in their right mind would be in the same
town
as her. No one should ever, ever go to a cocktail party with me. Or on a road trip. Or—”

“So we’ll go see Rita.” Billy gestured me out of the garage, and I shuffled toward Pioneer Square, wondering how the hell to escape being a danger to my friends and coworkers.

The soup kitchen was closed by the time we got there—the Pine Street parking garage was a mile away—but a few stragglers were still making their way out the door. Billy caught the door behind one of them and I ducked under his arm into a long pale-floored room that reminded me of a school cafeteria, right down to the narrow brown tables with built-in colored benches. Rita hauled pans from the food service area, showing more strength in her small form than I’d have expected. The door creaked as it shut behind us, and she, along with another half-dozen volunteers, called out variations on, “Sorry, we’re closed, come back at seven tomorrow morning!”

My conditioned response was, “We’re the police,” except I thought that would get entirely the wrong reaction, so I said, “Actually it’s Joanne Walker,” as if my very name was excuse enough to barge in after hours.

Fortunately I was right. Rita put her pans down with a bang and turned to gape like she’d never expected to see me again. I was equal parts pleased to confound her and guilty that it had taken Billy’s reminder to get me back to Rita and her case. Guilt beat pleasure and I mumbled, “Could you use a hand cleaning up?” which made Billy shoot me a look suggesting I would die slowly and painfully, later, for having volunteered.

Rita, though, exchanged glances with another one of the women, then pulled her apron off and came around the counter. “It’s okay. You came back. Did you find out anything about Lynn? I think the detective this morning just wants to write it off as a dog attack. I heard on the radio tonight people had seen a wolf. Can you imagine? A wolf? In Seattle? It must’ve gotten loose from the zoo.”

My heart did a sick lunge into my stomach and churned it up. “What else did the radio say?”

“Just to call it in if anybody saw it, that Animal Control and the police were tracking it. They didn’t say anything about Lynn. Do you think it was a wolf attack?”

I bit back a bile-filled burp and very carefully didn’t look at my partner. “No. The wolf only…got loose…around nine o’clock tonight. Did they say where they’d seen it last?”

“On the West Seattle Bridge, heading for the viaduct.”

“The we—what the hell’s he—” I broke off, looked at Billy this time and said, “That’s northeast of where it was last sighted,” as carefully as I could. “Why would he head downtown?”

Billy, aggrieved, demanded, “You’re asking me?”

“Well, who else am I supposed to ask?” If I were a sensible shapechanged human, I would slink home and wait for somebody to come rescue me. That would be easier, in theory, for Morrison than it would be for me, as he owned
a three-bedroom house with its own small plot of land, whereas I was still renting the fifth-floor apartment I’d moved into my sophomore year of college. At either location, the doors would be a problem, though Morrison might be able to manage the garage door at his house. I really wanted him to be holed up there, gnashing his teeth over the situation I’d gotten him into.

But all of that assumed some level of human intellect and not just a panicked animal running down whatever streets looked least threatening. Not that the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which was also Highway 99, was exactly non-threatening, even at midnight on a Saturday.

I put my head in my hands, trying to press my thoughts back into a more useful order. “One crisis at a time, Joanne. Take it one crisis at a time. All right. Rita.” I looked up, and she came to attention like I was a drill sergeant. “My partner here thinks a bunch of unrelated things are actually related. I’m going to go out on a limb and say your missing friends are related, too.”

“Why?”

I flexed my jaw, making cords stand out in my throat. “I don’t suppose you’d just take it on faith.”

Resignation deepened lines around her eyes. She would take it on faith, obviously, but I got the feeling it made her a little bit less of a person, somehow. I said, “Okay,” very softly. “It’s just usually easier for people to not really pay attention to what’s going on around me, but you might be an exception. You know how you said you being alive was a miracle?”

“I said you saving me was a miracle,” she corrected. “Me being alive, that’s a gift I don’t want to screw up.”

I couldn’t help smiling. I’d screwed up so much myself it was nice to come across somebody else trying not to blow
it, too. Kindred spirits, we, not that I’d have ever imagined such a thing. “Ever heard of shamans?”

“Like medicine men, right? Indian medicine men?”

“Native American, yeah, although a lot of cultures had, or have, shamans. Anyway, they’re healers. We might call them magic-users.”

“And you are one, and that’s how you saw me get attacked and called it in before I died?”

My jaw flapped open and Rita shrugged. “What else were you gonna say, with that kind of lead-in? What’s the difference between magic and a miracle, Detective?”

Billy came to my rescue while I continued to wave my jaw in the wind: “From the outside, probably not much. From the inside, I don’t know that I want to get into the theology of it.”

Rita smiled. “I don’t think it matters. So there’s something magic going on?”

“How is it that everybody else is much calmer about that idea than I’ve ever been? I mean, doesn’t it seem incredibly unlikely? Like, totally preposterous?” My voice rose, and Billy very sensibly herded us out of the soup kitchen as I said, “I mean,
magic.
People don’t believe in
magic.
It’s like believing in fairies and unicorns and, and, and—”

“And other magical things,” Billy finished. I gave him a dark look, but nodded.

Rita folded her arms around herself and peered up at me. “If you’d asked me three months ago I’d have said you were hitting the bottle too hard. But then I got stabbed and should have died, but instead a bunch of cops and ambulance people showed up because somebody who wasn’t even there sent them on ahead to save my life. If something like that happens to someone like me, you start to have a little faith in something bigger. I don’t know if I believe in magic or
miracles all the time. But I believe in you, Detective Walker. I believe in you.”

Jeez. I felt like Tinkerbell. My nose stuffed up and my vision got all bleary and for some reason I snuffled a couple times as I patted Rita’s shoulder. “Okay. Okay, fine, I guess you told me. All you people are just a lot cooler than I am.

So anyway, basically Billy thinks I’m being pulled where I need to go.” The very phrase made fishhooks sink into my belly, insistent tug that felt, somehow, like it came from a long way off. I rubbed my stomach and went on. “If he’s right, then a murder Friday night and Lynn’s death Saturday morning are related, and your missing friends might be, too.”

Hope lit Rita’s lined features. “So you’ll help me look?

Even if it’s not your case or your jurisdiction?”

I smiled feebly. “No reason to get hung up on technicalities at this late stage of the game.” Besides, though I didn’t want to say it aloud, exploring the possibility that I was a nexus of some kind was probably kind of important. It might mean those retirement plans to the top of a remote mountain would get moved to sooner rather than later, but it also seemed like if it was an unpleasant reality I was
aware
of, I might be able to mitigate the fallout somehow. “Maybe you could take us down below and we could…”

So we could start hunting for someones or somethings we knew nothing about. That didn’t sound like my brightest idea, but Rita clasped her hands together like a kid given a gift, and struck off down the street at a healthy clip. “There are sections of the Underground nobody goes because—”

“They’re haunted?” I guessed when she hesitated, and she nodded with embarrassment. “At this point in my life I can safely say less likely things have happened. All right. I’m
game for exploring the haunted Underground if you are. Billy?”

“I’m starting to like the idea that your bad guy is in a high-rise instead of mine about him being down in the—”

“Slums,” Rita supplied when he broke off, and it was his turn to look abashed. Rita, though, shrugged it off. “It’s not like we don’t know we’re on the fringe, Detective. And I’m sorry about your suit. Most of where we live isn’t very clean.”

Billy looked down at himself, dismayed. “Maybe I can write off the drycleaning bill.”

“Maybe I’ll pay for it, in thanks for you trudging around on one of my weird cases.”

“I’d be trudging around on it anyway, if it was in our jurisdiction. I’ll take you up on that anyway.” He followed Rita into an alley where the overwhelming scent of soy sauce and old rice informed us the neighboring building housed a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. My stomach rumbled despite the hint of decay, but I wasn’t quite desperate enough to go Dumpster-diving. Then I wondered if Rita ever had to, and got caught up in a whirlwind of first-world entitlement and guilt that lasted down the length of the alley all the way into a tiny concrete back lot. Boards and fencing made an unfriendly barricade between it and another brick building, but Rita walked up to the fence, twitched aside a section of chain-link laced with green fencing stuff—I didn’t know what it was called—and revealed a hole almost big enough to let a rabbit through. “This way.”

“Are you serious?” It wasn’t even that I objected to crawling into the backsides of buildings. It just didn’t look big enough for anybody to fit in. Rita, however, gave me a sour look and crawled into it backward. I exchanged glances with Billy, shrugged, and followed her.

It was bigger than it looked, chain-links willing to flex and let me through. There was maybe four inches’ clearance between the fence and the building I clambered into. An enterprising kid might find the hole from the building side, but anybody short of a contortionist would have to come the long way around, down the alley and into the back lot, to actually gain entrance to the Underground. It wasn’t bad, as far as secret hideaway doors went. I’d have never noticed it, had Rita not shown me the way.

I backed through a couple feet of wall space before my feet hit dead air. Rita reported, “Ladder,” from below me, and I lay on my stomach to kick my feet and find the rungs. The iron gleamed from years of use, reminding me of how many homeless my city held, before I emerged into an unexpectedly well-kept stretch of Underground.

Amber streetlights shone through glass blocks above my head, making streaky shadows on old brick walls. Pipes ran below the blocks, supporting their own miniature ecosystems of moss and rust, and even with amber lights, I could see that stretches of the brick ceiling were greened-over with algae or moss, too. The air was fresh, though, the occasional broken block letting in a breeze.

Someone—not the City of Seattle, I was pretty sure— had filled a ten-foot stretch of floor with an elaborate tile mosaic of Persephone entering the underworld. Billy and I both hopped across it, trying not to put our feet down, and Rita took a stiff-brushed broom from the shadows and gave the mosaic a few brisk, efficient sweeps once we’d all moved away.

“There are things like this all over the place down here,” she said before I asked. She sounded proprietary and proud, which seemed totally appropriate, and tucked the broom back into its shadowy space while she lectured us. “Artists
come down and make them off the tour path. The more fragile ones get destroyed fast, but this and some of the others are really sturdy. The floor’s sunk a little, so it’s cracked, but we try to keep it clean.”

“It’s amazing.” I studied the mural in its soft light a few more seconds, then looked both ways down the bricked-off city tunnel. It plummeted to my left, eventually heading north toward Pike Place Market, which I thought of as the most visible part of the Underground. It wasn’t exactly, but its multiple crooked levels certainly reflected how the city had been rebuilt. I edged that direction.

Rita pointed the other. “There’s a lot more Underground this way. Down there is the tourist area, off the Square.”

“Oh. Sure.” I wrote off trying to be clever and followed the expert. She gave Billy and his suit another apologetic look when she led us through a three-foot-high section of tunnel, but said nothing. We crawled through on hands-and-knees tracks visibly worn into the grime, and came out on the other side with stains I didn’t want to think too deeply about.

“Some people are too itchy about tight spaces to go through there,” Rita reported when we’d gotten back on our feet. “Makes this a good place to sleep and camp out.”

“This” was a stretch of tall walls with distant overhead light grottos, and of broken-into rooms which had once upon a time been storefronts and alleyways. It didn’t smell as good here. In fact, it verged on stinking, but it wasn’t nice to go into someone’s home and comment on the stench, so I kept my mouth shut. Water dripped from an ancient wooden water main, and as Rita led us down the narrow old street, I saw one or two places where somebody had hauled wiring down into the Underground. There might be enough elec
tricity to boil water, and it wasn’t cold, which made the stretch of lost city seem pretty habitable.

Most of the people we slipped past were sleeping, though one group was gathered around a small barrel fire set up beneath broken-out glass cubes twenty feet above them. I’d seen steam rising up from grates and manholes dozens of times. It’d never occurred to me that once in a while that steam might be smoke from a fire keeping people warm thirty feet below me. That revelation made the under-city streets seem just a little more lonesome and dangerous.

The suspicious looks we garnered didn’t alleviate that feeling, either. Rita’s presence kept anybody from getting in our faces, but as we approached the barrel fire, a couple of big guys stood up, bristling with caution. Rita reassured them with conciliatory gestures. “They’re friends. They’re going to help me look for Rick and Gonzo and the others. Can we borrow a couple flashlights?”

Exasperation slid across one of the men’s face, though he dug into his bulky coat and came out with one of the requested lights, then snapped his fingers for somebody else to ante up, too. “Better bring these back. What are you, a goddamned den mother, Rita? Nobody’s missing, they just took off…’sides, how’re they gonna find somebody you can’t? Not like topsiders know the tunnels better than you do.”