The Oni, page 11
“What exactly do you want?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking questions.”
“Such as?”
“Would you consider her a regular here?”
Jack shrugged. “If I don’t talk to you, someone else will. No secret there. I see her here maybe once every other week. Quiet girl, always alone, usually carrying a book or an envelope stuffed with papers. Vodka martini. Rarely more than one. She’s one of the few customers who actually seems to listen when Rusty plays.”
“Always alone? No friends or acquaintances I could talk to?” Jack’s eyes narrowed. His thick shoulders rose. “If your little girl ran away from home, Francine, she’s old enough to take care of herself. My advice to you is stop looking. She’ll find you when she’s ready. Otherwise, ask the police. Eighty-Eight’s isn’t a missing person’s bureau.”
Cooper grimaced. “In a more flippant mood, I’d argue that last point. No, Jack, the police know where Lynda is. They told me. I saw her this morning.”
“Any place I know?”
“The City Morgue.”
Jack’s mouth filled with cotton. He stared down at the polished wood, ran a hand over his crew cut. He fumbled for the right words.
The pale waitress saved him, sliding Cooper’s hamburgers between them. “I hope medium is okay. You didn’t say how you wanted it, so I figured medium, but, Jeez, you’d be surprised how some customers bitch when …”
“Medium’s fine,” Cooper assured her. “Thank you.”
Jack saw a way to make amends. He crooked a finger at the waitress. “Stop for a moment, Angie, and take a look at this photograph, will you?”
Cooper opened the wallet to the graduation picture again.
“Jeez, I got silverware to put out.” Angie sighed and tilted her head forward. Strands of light brown hair trailed over the bar. “Yeah?”
“You recognize her?” Jack prompted.
“Who wants to know?”
“Her mother.”
Angie looked up at Cooper. She curled a lip thick-caked with carmine lipstick. “Jeez, I got an old lady just like you. Always spying.”
Jack snatched at Angie’s wrist and shook his head. “The girl’s dead, Angie.”
“Oh.” She pulled her wrist free and pushed her hair back behind her ears. “Jeez, Jack, why didn’t you say so? Jeez, I’m sorry, lady.”
“So am I.” Cooper left the wallet on the bar and picked up a hamburger. Hot juice trickled from the bun and down along her thumb. Suddenly Cooper no longer felt hungry, although she didn’t want to put the burger back down, either.
“Fran, here,” Jack continued, “I mean Mrs. Cooper, wanted to talk to her daughter’s friends. Personal stuff, you know. I’m stuck back here most of the night, but you’re on the floor, Angie. Did she hang out with anyone in particular?”
“Her name is Lynda,” Cooper added. “Was.”
“Yeah, she looked like a Lynda. Scorpio, right?”
Cooper inclined her head noncommittally. Lynda had been born in March.
“Jeez, I can’t tell you much. She was pretty strange. Not to be insulting, or anything. A loner, I mean. Sometimes she’d seem to respond to a come-on line, but usually she deliberately scared guys away. Not that I blame her, Jeez, the creeps we get. Couple months back there was this guy, she had to drop an ice cube down his open-front shirt. That’s why last night was so weird.”
Cooper forced herself to take a bite of hamburger. She swallowed the meat without tasting it. Jack, unbidden, refilled the Scotch glass.
“Weird in what way?” Cooper asked.
“That she left with Gary Cross. Jeez, what a scuzzo … !” Angie’s hand flew to her mouth. “My God, did Cross kill her?”
Cooper shook her head. “The police don’t consider it likely. You really didn’t know? There was a headline in the afternoon paper.”
“That rag? Never touch it. Jeez, not that anyone would care if that creep did buy some heavy trouble. I mean Cross. Jeez, I hope you don’t think …”
“I know who you meant, Angie. I also know that Cross was a drug pusher. You don’t have to soft-pedal any details.”
“Mrs. Cooper isn’t interested in scum like Gary Cross,” Jack growled.
“Actually, I am, Jack. The police think Lynda was simply in the way at a bad time. They don’t care whether she was involved in drugs or not, or how deeply. I do. There are many things a mother might not know about her child—certainly there are things I don’t know about Lynda—but I can’t persuade myself she used anything stronger than alcohol, and that only in moderation.”
A strand of hair had crawled back in front of Angie’s face. She tugged it into place. “Jeez, no. She looked super-straight to me.”
Cooper smiled. “I appreciate that, whether you mean it or not. Tell me about Cross. Did he have a regular job, or did his entire income come from drugs?”
The waitress made a dent in her chin with an uneven fingernail. “Every couple of months he’d brag about some steady job. It always turned out less impressive after he was sacked. Jeez, let me think. He was doorman at that new apartment building on Seventieth around March … busboy at McDonald’s for about two hours … spent half the summer as janitor at the museum …
Cooper realized with a sudden, mild shock that her hands were empty. Apparently some part of her was ravenously hungry. She reached for the second hamburger.
“Which museum? New York has hundreds.”
“The big one across from the park. With the dinosaurs and stuff.”
“Natural History,” Jack translated.
Cooper chewed on that along with her ground beef. One piece of information Amos Foster had grudgingly allowed her was that certain curios found at the murder scene had been turned over to certain officials at a certain museum for identification. He hadn’t said which museum, and she hadn’t cared … then. After all, it was only after her trance in Lynda’s former room that Cooper was inspired to check out those details the police weren’t interested in. So. Suppose Cross picked up a patina of arcane knowledge from his brief museum tenure. That might have been enough to intrigue her daughter. Cooper could more readily believe Lynda’s suffering a lapse of discretion than a sudden craving for drugs.
Yet belief was not proof. The doubt that Foster’s assured attitude had planted in her mind remained. Before she could fit Cross into the picture she was building, she had to learn more about him. No point seeking the man in person; Foster was doing that. Nor did she need to. As a professional researcher, Cooper often assembled profiles from several sources—such as Cross’s former employers.
While Cooper reasoned this out, Angie slipped off to wait on a newly-arrived couple. When the Bostonian looked down, her plate held only crumbs and red juice. She wiped her greasy fingers with a paper napkin.
“I must have been hungrier than I thought.”
“Looks that way,” Jack replied.
Cooper hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud. She flashed a smile to cover her embarrassment. “Excuse it, Jack. I wasn’t thinking. Rather, I was thinking of something else.”
“Natural enough.”
She reached for the wallet, still on the counter. “I need some sleep. Can I get the check?”
Jack signaled Angie across the dim dining area, then turned back to Cooper. “It’ll be here in a minute.”
“You’ve been a big help, Jack.”
“Sure. Any time. I suppose Mr. Cooper is checking out Lynda’s other haunts?”
Cooper was tempted to let Jack’s assumption stand, but that seemed unfair. It wasn’t just a matter of forgoing a pointless argument over astrological superstitions. “Mr. Cooper died seventeen years ago, Jack, in a war no one wants to be reminded of.”
“Put my foot in it again. Sorry.”
The hell you are, Cooper thought, seeing the glint return to his eyes. But she kept silent. Why deflate the poor guy’s balloon?
“If there’s anything else I can do for you,” Jack went on confidently, “you know where to find me.”
“I’ll let you know,” she promised.
Angie dropped the check beside the empty Scotch glass and vanished before Cooper had a chance to thank her, too. Instead, she over-tipped. She felt much better as she slid from the bar stool, and not merely because of booze and food. She’d collected some bits of information that hadn’t been sifted through Lieutenant Foster’s overdeveloped sense of discretion, and was already forming a plan of attack. She knew exactly where to start tomorrow.
CHAPTER 21
Gary Cross lay in the same unnatural alignment that, two hours earlier, the orderly assigned to preserve Cross’s body from bed-rash had left him in: on his back, legs together, feet pointing straight up, top sheet drawn to his armpits, arms straight along his sides, head centered on the pillow. Cross looked depleted, like a rag doll with the stuffing removed so recently it had not yet lost its shape.
A perspiration drop beaded on Cross’s forehead, a finger’s width over the templemost end of his exposed eyebrow. When it grew too heavy to cling there any longer, it dipped toward the hollow around his eye, then swung away sharply, leaving a faint moist trail on the side of his face and skimming the top of his ear. It was soaked up by a thatch of black, matted hair. A second drop formed, in the center of the forehead. It touched an edge of stiff gauze bandage and was absorbed.
A shred at a time, the stuffing seemed to be put back.
Cross felt himself float in a gray, featureless world—floating because there was no place to stand. Lighting was diffuse; it had no particular source. He accepted this passively. He did not bother to look around. One patch of gray was like another.
Almost.
Something moved. Cross neither saw nor felt nor heard it. He perceived it. The wind that was not a wind. An ethereal force that nonetheless had carried him off the docks of the boat basin and out of the twisting asphalt paths in Riverside Park, along West Seventy-Second Street and down Amsterdam Avenue. Weakened by shock, half paralyzed from trauma, Cross could not resist, although the intangible touch revolted him and it seemed that his own two legs were doing all the work. Once, for a brief moment, their grip loosened …
(They?)
… and he collapsed against the long, high concrete wall that backed Lincoln Center. Something flashed. A knife. Rough hands tore at his pockets. Then the mugger was gone, and Cross was on his feet again, walking jerkily on to Ninth Avenue and Fifty-Eighth Street and up the ramp to the brick-faced emergency entrance to Roosevelt Hospital.
Cross whimpered as the black tide of sedation receded. An image coalesced: that brunette with the nice tits. Lynn something. He’d seen her in Eighty-Eight’s before, but never been able to catch her eye. Last night, though, he saw her with a paperback on Incan culture, and he reeled her in with a hint about his collection of ancient pottery. Actually, he had only one piece among a motley of artifacts assembled over a brief period, opportunely. Furthermore, the piece was Mayan, not Incan, and the girl let him know it at once. He didn’t see that it made much difference.
The look on her face when she realized she’d been conned on board his houseboat! If Cross didn’t know women so well, he’d have thought she really was surprised. That was part of the game, of course, as was the struggle she put up. When she tried to brain him with that chunk of iron, though, and he had to take it away and toss it across the cabin, Cross began having second thoughts.
His hand got under her plaid shirt.
And the thing attacked him.
Cross’s skin glinted with a coating of sweat. It drenched the bandages and diluted the clots that criss-crossed the right side of his face. His breathing grew rapid and shallow. More air. More!
Relax, something told him. That was past. He was safe now.
The panting eased, but the mind became wary. That soothing interior voice was not his. He did not think in those terms.
The bloodshot, pale blue eyes snapped open. A nightlight near the head of his bed cast long shadows in the hospital room. Antiseptic odors stung his nostrils-. Circulating air dried his exposed flesh, cooling it. His fingers twitched along his thighs. There was a window to his left, beyond which the lights of New York City glowed and winked.
He must rest. He must heal. He was not of the blood but he had, unknowingly, been for a time a conservator of the relic. If he let them, they would help.
His cracked lips tightened. Fear angered him. These were not his thoughts. They had put them in his mind.
They were in this room. They. It. The force that brought him here. The force he would have resisted last night, out of horror, had he had will and consciousness then to do so.
They communicated in images, not words, so Cross could understand them. But he did not understand them. He’d been uneasy with the police detective who’d questioned him that afternoon, but at least Amos Foster was a comprehensible part of Cross’s world. This was not. It terrified him.
“Leave me alone!” he shouted. The bottles to which he was attached by plastic tubes rattled in their racks.
Be calm. You don’t know what you ask.
“No! Get out of my head!” His hand bunched into white-knuckled fists. “I don’t want you! Go away!”
The soft-heeled tread of the night nurse echoed in the hall. The door to Cross’s room swung wide. The woman in white crossed the threshold. As she did, Cross felt the others, the force, whatever they or it might be, withdraw. He smiled stiffly. He’d achieved a pyrrhic victory of will. His single good eye drooped shut, for the last time. Only his anguish remained, joining that of other victims.
Doctor Asprin would not be operating again on him.
The kami could not aid those who denied them.
CHAPTER 22
Richard Alexander Jones was pissed off.
Ask him why. If he felt like answering—he probably wouldn’t—he might mention the dirty look he got for smoking in a crowded subway car. The sister who slapped his face after a friendly little feel. The lousy rain that forced him to dodge from doorway to doorway. The two hundred dollars of prime weed he’d had to dump in the river last night, less than twenty minutes after scoring it off his connection at the Seventy-Third Street baseball field, because half a dozen cop cars suddenly tore along the paths of Riverside Park. And they weren’t even after him, not then. Word on the street, though, was that a pair of pigs had nosed around his tenement apartment that afternoon. Good thing his momma didn’t know shit.
Richard Alexander Jones could always find reasons to be pissed off. He never realized that most of his anger was directed at himself, for letting the outside world get to him. In the lower reaches of his mind, where he rarely looked, Jones pictured himself as the ineffectual, much-abused David Roberts, alter ego of Jones’s favorite comic book character, the Thrasher. Unlike Jones, Roberts didn’t have to take shit off of anyone for long. Pushed too far, Roberts metamorphosed into a blue-skinned giant who existed only to destroy. Somehow, only bad guys bought it in the comics, but the implication was that the Thrasher didn’t care who he wasted.
That was why Jones liked the Thrasher. That was why, at the age of twenty-three, Jones still had not outgrown spray painting the initials R A J on subway cars, inside and out, whenever he had a chance. That was why he ignored “No Smoking” signs, and why he shouldered a Sony stereo tape deck twice the size of his head, with its speakers blasting at full volume as he bounced along Broadway or West End Avenue or Riverside Drive. He didn’t care, and he damned well wanted to let the world know it!
Tonight, in particular, those cocksuckers with their houseboats moored off Seventy-Ninth Street were going to hear that Jones didn’t care. He didn’t know what they’d done to bring so many cops into the park late last night, but it had cost him good grass and some credibility with certain steady customers. The boat people didn’t worry about what changes Jones had had to go through, but they would tonight. He would take over the wooden bench in front of the wire gate that led to the docks, with his speakers pointed at the Hudson River. A fresh package of batteries nestled in a pocket of his down jacket, just to be sure. Those fuckers would watch their step next time. Believe it.
He patted another pocket, which bulged with a trio of disco tape cassettes. Richard Alexander Jones did not fuss with the AM/FM radio built into his Sony. Too much talk. He never listened to news, and so knew nothing of the murder. Even if he had, it wouldn’t occur to him that the killing might explain why Riverside Park was nowhere near as crowded this evening as it usually was. Consumed by his anger, Jones did not notice the emptiness. He stalked the asphalt paths on long legs, glaring sullenly at the sharp shadows cast by the vapor streetlamps. He was a man with a mission.
Before him yawned the pedestrian passage beneath the Henry Hudson Parkway. Beyond lay the river, and the boat basin. Peering through the tunnel, Jones could see houseboats bobbing on the choppy, ill-smelling waters. Three electric light sockets were set in the roof of the underpass. None of them held functioning bulbs. That didn’t bother Richard Alexander Jones. It didn’t even surprise him. He’d broken those bulbs himself two nights earlier. More proof that he didn’t care.
He stepped into the murky tunnel.
Stubby fingers dug ant-sized indentations in the stone of the recess. Razor-sharp teeth ground together. Pointed ears and, yes, even the skull-horns throbbed with pain.
The first distant sound could have been of a battle, perhaps between warriors and beasts. Then it came nearer, growing more senseless even as it gained definition. At last, the unholy cacophony echoed through the underpass. This was the music of the Egg of Chaos itself! The hell of the Buddhists could not have included such torment. As a creature dedicated to despoiling, he ought to have found it a welcome, comforting sound … but even pure evil demands some semblance of order.
No mortal would create that clamorous horror. Of that, he was certain. Perhaps he’d set a precedent, those many years before, and one of his demon-kin already ruled this village. That might explain the decadence of its inhabitants.
