Through the Grey, page 19
As the hammer dropped, the streak of brown and gold rammed into Halprin’s legs and he tripped, tumbling headfirst out the doorway as the soldier’s bullet passed through the air his head had recently occupied.
The soldier cursed, jumped up, and ran for the doorway, stumbling across the bucking floor. Scout darted inside and dragged the soldier out of the building behind Halprin. The soldier tried to shake the mechanical dog away, furious and set on taking his enemy’s life.
Outside Halprin scrambled to his feet and tried to run across the shuddering ground as Scout harried the soldier aside.
A shadow fell on Halprin and he glanced up, then froze at what he saw.
Juggernaut, dripping oil and water, his metal skin torn open and blasted by steam and gunpowder, let out a howl as of a million angry souls shouting for vengeance, and pounced on Halprin with his iron jaw agape.
Halprin shrieked in terror as the giant creature fell upon him and crushed him to the ground. A cloud of dirt and metal flew into the air, knocking the soldier and Scout backward as the massive dog came to rest at last.
His breath heaving in his chest, the soldier pulled himself up by holding onto Scout―filthy, dented, indomitable Scout, the last remaining clockwork dog. He stood there still, his revolver loose in his hand, when Sarah and the citizens of Stone Crossing arrived, by foot, on horseback, or riding on the crawling wagons with their battered engines.
Sarah took in the wreckage all around, the broken dogs, the warehouse as tumbledown as a shanty, and the sickening remains of Halprin. Then she looked to her beloved soldier, sorrowful and unmoving with Scout beside him.
She took his hand and drew him closer to her. “Did you shoot him?” she asked in a soft voice. “I’m sorry if you had to.”
“I didn’t kill him. It was the dogs. Even torn to shreds they did not stop.”
“You told them to protect us and they did.”
The soldier shook his head in wonder and sorrow. “I never ordered them to kill. I never ordered them to protect me. Their duty was to you―to all of you. Hollow hounds they may have been, but they had hearts the size of giants’.”
Sarah took her soldier back to Stone Crossing where they were married at Christmastime. They lived in the town for many years, filling the house with children and dogs, but it was always the one dog, the odd one with the metal hide like dirty pennies, that the soldier kept at his side. Two of a kind: their mechanical hearts wound up by something more than a key.
9
THE THIRD DEATH OF THE LITTLE CLAY DOG
Trouble radiated from the black figurine like some kind of dark neon at the Devil’s own fairground. Not that I could actually see any such thing even in the Grey, but an electric prickling sensation zipped up my arms and down my spine when I touched it and that was close enough; I know human hair can’t literally stand on end like a dog’s, but I would have sworn mine was trying to.
Nanette Grover was still standing at the side of her desk, looking at me and the little statue. Her fanatically neat office flickered silver, smudged with red and orange and sad shades of green she would never see—the emotional and energetic leftovers of her clients still hanging in the Grey like smoke. A ghost or two lingered in the corners with sour, accusing faces and the odor of misery, muttering their cycles of frustration. They weren’t interested in me, so I ignored them and put my attention back on Nan.
She was impeccable as always: her straightened, deep-brown hair was smoothed into a perfect French twist, her stylish tweed skirt suit was unwrinkled even after she’d been behind her desk since five a.m., and her smooth, dark skin was highlighted by delicate makeup that didn’t show a single crease. Even her energy corona was cool and constrained to a narrow bright line, except when she stepped onto the stage of the courtroom floor where it alternated between hypnotic veil and legal scalpel. In spite of her beauty she had all the warmth of a steel pipe in the snow—which was part of her appeal as a litigator, but not as a human being. One of her opponents in court had referred to her as “the Queen of Nubia” and, in spite of the intended insult, it wasn’t hard imagining Nan on a war elephant chasing off Alexander the Great—even her allies found her intimidating. “Well?” she asked, the word leaving amber ripples in the air.
“Well what?” I responded, shrugging off the commanding effect of her voice.
“You’re supposed to accept or reject the conditions.”
“What happens if I say no?”
Her energy closed back down to an icy line. “Then I have instructions regarding the disposition of the item.”
“What are those?”
“Not your business. Yes, or no, Harper.”
“What was it the client wants done with this, again?”
Nan sat down on the other side of the desk, the mistiness of the settling Grey giving her a deceptively soft appearance, and blinked once, long and slow—like some kind of reset—and explained again, with no heat or change of inflection from the first time. “A colleague of mine in Mexico City forwarded this item to me upon the death of his client. His client, Maria-Luz Arbildo, had left you a bequest in her will, with conditions. Namely, to personally hand-carry the statuette—this little dog figurine—to Oaxaca City in Oaxaca state in Mexico, and place it on the grave of Hector Purecete on the night of November First and attend the grave as local tradition dictates until daybreak of November Second. Additional specific instructions for the preparation of the grave will be provided. All this to be done in the first occurrence of November First following his client’s death. Ms. Arbildo died earlier this month.”
“The twentieth of October,” I added. “A week ago.”
Nan nodded.
“November First is the day after Halloween. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?” I asked.
Nan’s ice-smooth expression didn’t change. “No.”
“And I never met this woman, never heard of her, but she sends this thing all the way to Seattle so I can take it all the way back to Mexico—the far end of Mexico I might add. Still not sounding kind of weird?”
“I don’t question the conditions of clients.”
“Is this sort of thing even legal?”
“Perfectly. If it flew in the face of public interest, then it would be illegal, but this does not. The condition also does not require you to do anything illegal either here or there, nor to violate your professional ethics, nor take on unreasonable expenses—everything will be paid for by Ms. Arbildo’s estate. If you choose to follow the conditions of Ms. Arbildo’s bequest, you will receive the thirty thousand dollars, once the condition has been completely and correctly met. Sum to be paid through this office.”
I was raised in Los Angeles County California, so I’m not totally ignorant of Mexican culture—just mostly. I knew the First of November was the Mexican equivalent of Halloween, but I didn’t know the details. My experience as a Greywalker, however, makes me wary of any date on which the dead are said to go abroad among the living. I know that ghosts—and plenty of other creepy things—are around us all the time, it’s just that most people don’t see them. I do more than just see them; I live with them and I’ve discovered that days associated with the dead are usually worse than most people imagine—they’re veritable Carnivales of the incorporeal, boiling pools of magical potential. So being asked to take a folk sculpture to a Mexican graveyard on the Day of the Dead sounded like a dangerous idea to me. Especially when the client is deceased.
On the other hand, I can at least see what’s going on. As someone who lives half in and half out of the realm of ghosts, monsters, and magic, I stand a chance against whatever strange thing may rear its head in such a situation. And the money was attractive. The work I regularly did for Nan—investigating witnesses and filling in the details of her cases prior to trial—paid the majority of my bills, but it wasn’t an extravagant living. Even with all the rest of my work added in, thirty thousand dollars was a major chunk of what I usually made in a year and it would only take about four days.
I looked back down at the statuette. It was a hollow clay figure of a dog, about a foot tall and long, give or take, and about four inches wide. The shape was simplified, not realistic, with stumpy legs and tail, a cone-shaped muzzle, and a couple of pinched clay points for ears. It had been painted with a gritty black paint and decorated with dots and lines of red and white that made rings around the limbs and a lightning bolt on the dog’s side. It also had two white dots for eyes, but no sign of a mouth.
Peering at it, I could see the little clay dog had been cracked and repaired at some point, the casting hole in its belly covered up with an extra bit of clay and painted over with more of the black paint. A hint of Grey energy gleamed around the repair seam, but beyond that, I couldn’t tell anything about what might be inside the dog. The statue itself had only a thin sheen of Grey clinging to its surface like old dirt, as if whatever magical thing it came from had withered long ago. There wasn’t any indicative cloud of color or angry sparks around it as I’d seen with other magical objects, yet I was sure there was something more to it than met the eye.
I looked back up at Nan, who hadn’t moved so much as an eyebrow. The silence in her office would have unnerved some people, but I found it pleasant as contrast to the incessant mutter and hum of the living Grey and its ghosts.
“What about the lawyer?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“Is he legit?”
Nan didn’t crack either a smile or a frown. “Yes. His name is Guillermo Banda. He does a lot of maritime and international work.”
I admit I had some reservations but I was also a little intrigued by the mystery of it—I’m a sucker for mysteries—and the money was pretty good, so I shrugged and said, “All right, I’ll take the thing to Mexico.”
Nan waved to the small shipping carton from which she’d originally removed the dog at the start of our conversation. “You can put it back in its box while I get the papers ready. I’ll need your signature on a receipt to prove that you picked it up and I have a copy of the instructions for you as well.”
I nodded and wiggled the little clay dog back into the snowstorm of paper shred that had sprung from the box when Nan had opened it. We finished up quickly and I left with the papers in my pocket and the box full of probable trouble under my arm.
The aluminum and glass tower that houses Nan’s office has lousy cell reception, so I had to wait until I was just outside the lobby doors to make a call.
“King County Medical Examiner’s office. May I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Reuben Fishkiller, please,” I replied.
I was put on hold for a few moments while someone located the forensic lab technician for me. I’d met him during an investigation into the deaths of homeless people in Pioneer Square and Fish’s connections to the local Salish Indians had certainly come in handy. But he’d been a bit upset when one of his ancestral legends tried to kill us, and I hoped he wasn’t still too freaked out to talk to me.
“This is Fish, what can I do for you?”
“Hi, Fish, it’s Harper Blaine.”
He paused. “Oh. Hi, Harper. You, uh…need something?”
“I do, if you’re willing to do it for me.”
“Does it have anything to do with monsters in the sewer this time? Or Salish holy ground? Because I really didn’t enjoy the last time.”
“No monsters, no Salish, no sewers. I promise. I just need an x-ray.”
“We only x-ray the dead.”
“This thing is inanimate, is that close enough?”
“What is it?” he asked. I could almost see him narrowing his eyes with suspicion.
“It’s a clay statue of a dog.”
“You’re sure it’s inanimate? Things act weird around you…”
“I promise it’s just a hollow lump of baked clay, totally incapable of movement or pretty much anything else. I just want to know if there’s anything inside it.”
Fish sighed. “Okay. I can take a look, but it’ll have to be quick. Get here at lunch time and I’ll see what I can do.”
I agreed to come while most of the staff was occupied with food, and thanked Fish before hanging up.
It would be just my luck to spark off an international incident and get arrested for smuggling if the dog had anything significant in its hollow innards. I hoped Fish and his x-ray machine would tell me if there was anything to fear. The easy-money aspect of the situation bothered me; I don’t believe in harmless, eccentric benefactors. There was a sting of some kind in the little dog’s tail—or belly—and I wanted to figure it out before I got hit by it.
I killed some time at the library before heading down to Pill Hill, where the major hospitals cluster like trees in a concrete forest. Fish met me at the front desk of the morgue and we walked back through the chilly chambers in the basement of Harborview to the x-ray room. His shaggy dark hair with premature streaks of white, hanging over his square face, still reminded me of a badger, but a more wary and grumpy badger than he’d been before. He’d become a bit nervous since our run-in with living myths, as if he, too, could now see the steam-billow shapes of the dead that wandered through the old hospital, or sense the tingling power that thrummed in the neon-bright lines of magical power that shot through the Grey.
“What have you got?” he asked as we pushed through the door to the x-ray machine and other lab paraphernalia.
I put the white cardboard box down on the machine’s table and carefully removed the little dog statue. He started to reach for it, then stopped.
“You—um… it’s OK to touch it without gloves, isn’t it?”
“I think so. I’ve been handling it bare-handed all morning.” I had supposed I’d know if there was anything toxic on the figure’s surface, but there really wasn’t any way that I would. I looked at the small black dog as I clutched it by its middle and hoped it wasn’t dusted with anthrax or the like.
Fish paused to pull on a pair of purple gloves before he took the figurine from me. Then he scraped a bit of the black paint into a glass tube and repeated the scraping on the bottom of the dog’s foot, where the mellow orange clay was bare of glaze or paint. The sheen of Grey on the sculpture’s surface rippled and squirmed as he scraped, but it didn’t flare or change color—either of which would have been bad signs. He added some chemicals to the tubes and put them aside in a large, white machine.
“I’ll run a couple of tests on those while we’re at it,” he said. He poked some buttons on the machine. Then he turned back to the x-ray table. “Now, let’s look at this little guy…”
Altogether, Fish took three views of the dog. Since the morgue had updated to digital x-ray, we didn’t have to wait for the pictures to be developed, but just viewed them on the computer screen behind the radiation barrier.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a bundle of faint lines that showed on every picture. It was in a different spot each time.
“Something loose in the hollow interior. Let’s crank up the resolution.”
Fish poked a few keys and the image of the bundle got larger and more clear.
“Looks like hair or threads knotted together. Whatever it is, there’s not much of it,” Fish observed. “I could pull it out and examine it if you didn’t mind reopening that hole in the dog’s belly.”
The condition of the bequest was that the dog statue be put on the grave intact by me and only me. I didn’t think it would qualify as “intact” if part of its secret bundle were missing, not to mention the plug of clay in the figure’s belly. And I didn’t have much time to sit around in Seattle: it was already October twenty-eighth, the trip was going to be a long one, even by air, and I didn’t know where in Oaxaca City Hector Purecete was buried. I wasn’t fool enough to think there was only one cemetery in town, so I’d have to do some investigating in Oaxaca before I could complete the conditions of the bequest, as Nan insisted on calling them.
“I don’t think it should be removed, unless you suppose it’s something illegal,” I said frowning at the picture.
“That small? Nah, not likely to be anything drug-related, or human remains. Unless it’s hair, like I said, in which case it probably got in there while the dog was being painted. It’s too fine to be plant matter and there’s not enough of it to be worth much if it’s any other fiber. It’s not dense enough to be metal strands, either. Without actually seeing it with my own eyes and running tests, my best guess is still human hair.” Then he shrugged and added, “Or a few strands of some really long-haired animal’s fur or tail. Maybe horse tail…”
Noises in the hallway and a sudden agitation among the ghosts indicated the post-lunch return of Fish’s coworkers. We packed up the figurine and Fish led me back out, promising to call when he had the result of the tests on the clay and paint. I headed back to my office to clear off my schedule and check on the flights Nan had promised to book for me on behalf of the estate.
Only Nan’s work had any specific deadlines on it, so it wasn’t difficult to rearrange my meetings and appointments—I don’t make that many anyhow. The biggest hurdle was finding someone to look after my pet ferret while I was gone, and that was taken care of by tracking down Quinton and depositing the tube rat with him. I suspect Chaos prefers him over me, since he will happily carry her around with him all day in one deep pocket or another while I usually have to leave her at home. Anyhow, she didn’t look grieved to see me go, even if Quinton did.
We sat in the glass picnic shelter beside Ivar’s Acres of Clams on the waterfront and talked while we ate our fish and chips. Chaos helped us with the chips and ignored the gulls screaming outside, even in the late-October chill, for their tithe of greasy fast food. Ivar Haglund may have loved those damned birds but to me they were a nuisance worse than persistent haunts: ghosts don’t poop on you.
“Oaxaca?” Quinton questioned. “Why?”
