01 - Goblins (10 page)

Mulder looked at the carpet. “Did you hear what he said?”

She sniffed. “I don’t pay attention to things that don’t concern me. He was
yelling, that’s all. I just kept walking.”

Fingers weaving, then abruptly still.

He watched her left heel rise and fall, silently tapping.

“I looked over. Natural curiosity, to see what a drunk was yelling at in an
alley.”

He watched her hands clasp, in a grip so tight he thought the bones might
snap. He wanted to cover them, calm them, but he didn’t dare move.

“I couldn’t see him, except one leg kind of sticking into the light. I saw
the goblin, though.”

“You did.”

The heel stopped; the fingers unwound.

“You don’t have to humor me, Mr. Mulder. I don’t like being humored. The
goblin stepped out of the wall, kicked that old man’s leg, and ran up the
street.”

“Did you call the police?”

She snorted. “Of course not. I knew what they would say. Don’t need to be
locked up again, not at my age. I’m going to die right here in this house, not
in any damn cell.”

He gave her that smile again. “But you did call later, didn’t you?”

She leaned farther back, all her face now in shadow. “Yes. Yes, I did. Damn
conscience wouldn’t leave me be until I did, even though I knew they wouldn’t do
anything about the goblin.”

“Ms. Lang?” It was Scully.

Mulder sat up carefully.

“Ms. Lang, what did the goblin look like?”

“It was black, child,” Elly said.

“You mean—”

“No, not a Negro, that’s not what I mean. I mean just what I said. It was
black. All black. It had no color at all.”

They stood on the sidewalk outside the building. A handful of children played
noisy baseball in a small park diagonally across the street. The brief rain had stopped, leaving behind the clouds, and the smell of wet
tarmac.

Hawks seemed embarrassed. “She drinks,” he said quietly. “Like a fish. That’s
all she does when she’s not marking her goblins.” The laugh he uttered was
partly embarrassment, partly mirth. “Orange spray paint, if you can believe it.
Most of the time she sits over there in the park, watches the kids play ball.
That bench there on the grass by the third base line, that’s hers. But every so
often she goes off on a tear, I have no idea what triggers it. She starts
walking around town, zapping people with orange spray paint. Then she comes to
the station and tells me to lock the goblins up.”

He waited until they were in the patrol car before he jammed a toothpick into
his mouth and pulled away from the curb. “Just about everyone knows her, see, so
we don’t arrest her or anything. We pay for the clothes or whatever she wrecks,
and that’s usually the end of it. No real harm done.” He grinned around the
toothpick. “What you might call local color.”

“So you don’t think she saw anything?” Mulder asked from the back seat.

“I wish I knew, I really do. We looked, of course, but we didn’t find a
thing. Myself, I think she saw shadows, that’s all. It was raining, there was
wind… that’s all.”

No one spoke as he headed back to the station. “But what,” Scully asked, “if
she did see something?”

The toothpick flipped from one corner of his mouth to the other. “A black
goblin, Agent Scully? What the hell am I supposed to do with that?” He didn’t
wait for an answer. “Like I said, she was drunk, like always, and it was
shadows.”

Maybe, Mulder thought; but wherever there’s a shadow, there’s always
something to make it.

Then Scully said, “Is she the only one, Chief?”

Mulder saw him twitch.

“Only one what?”

“Is she the only one who’s seen the goblin?”

They passed another small park where a pickup baseball game had drawn a small
crowd.

“No,” he admitted quietly. “No, damnit, there’ve been others.”

Major Joseph Tonero loved his sister, even if she did have appalling taste in
men. With their father gone and their mother an invalid, he had automatically
assumed the role of head of the family. He didn’t mind at all. It was not unlike
his role in the service, mediating crises between people who were grown up
enough to know better, issuing orders carefully couched as strong suggestion,
and laying plans for the time when he could trade his uniform for a
well-tailored suit that would fit right in on Capital Hill.

So he wasn’t all that concerned with the fit Rosemary Elkhart threw in his
office in Walson Hospital. He simply sat back, folded his hands in his lap, and
let her rant, pacing the oak-paneled room until she finally dropped into an armchair. Her lab coat fell away when
she crossed her legs, and he made no effort not to stare.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen those thighs before.

“So what you’re saying,” he told her mildly, “is that you’re annoyed.”

She glowered, but couldn’t hold it, finally laughing and shaking her head.
“You amaze me, Joseph. You absolutely amaze me.”

“Why?”

She sputtered, blinked, slapped in frustration at her bangs. “All that’s at
stake, and you, of all people, actually call in the FBI. Leonard’s thinking
about running to Brazil.”

The smile he gave her carried no artifice. It wasn’t necessary here; she knew
all the tricks of his trade, and had taught him a few new ones herself. “I
didn’t exactly call them personally.”

Close enough,
her expression told him.

He waved her objection away “I’m not worried about the feds, Rosie, and
neither should you be. They come in, they read the reports, they look at a crime
scene that’s been cold for a week—”

“And what about Kuyser? She’s a witness.”

“Oh, really?”

Rosemary shrugged a minor concession. “Okay, not much of one, granted.” She
toyed with the edge of her coat, just above the knee. “But what about Leonard?”

His expression hardened. “We need him. I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but the Project needs him.” He rose and walked
around the desk, stood behind her and stared blindly at the wall while he
massaged her shoulders. “Once this little problem—”

She barked a laugh.

“—is settled, once you’re back in the groove, then we’ll see about Dr.
Tymons.”

She tilted her head and kissed his hand. “I can do it, you know, Joseph. It’s
not hopeless.”

“I have every faith in you, Rosie.”

“A small adjustment, that’s all.”

“As I knew it would be.”

She turned to look up at him. “A week, perhaps two.”

His gaze shifted to her face, that back of his left hand to her cheek,
gliding down across her chin. “And… confinement?”

She leaned into the hand, eyes partly closed. If she had been a cat, he
thought, she’d be purring.

“None.”

The hand stopped.

“We can’t, Joseph,” she said, easing out of the chair. “We have to trust
Leonard’s judgment on this.”

“We already have. Twice.”

“If we confine, we lose.”

He sighed without a sound. He knew that, yet it was so untidy, so
uncontrolled. But if the Project was to work, if the Department of Defense was
to be convinced, it wouldn’t do to have a psychotic subject. He had little choice. Tymons would continue to be the control until
perfection was achieved.

Unless…

He took her hand and led her to the door. “Rosie, if there’s another failure,
I don’t think I’ll be able to protect him.”

Her smile was genuine as well, and he suppressed a shudder when he saw it.
“You won’t have to, Joseph.”

She kissed him quickly and left, the smell of her, the taste of her,
lingering in the office. He savored it for a few seconds before striding back to
his desk. The problem with Tymons and the Project was the least of his worries
right now. He didn’t much care if the subject wiped out half the goddamn state;
with the right slant, a well-chosen word, it would only prove the Project’s
ultimate worth. And he had been telling Rosie the truth—his concern over the FBI
was minimal as well.

The real problem was that asshole Carl Barelli. The idiot had already called
him twice this morning, demanding an appointment, and the major knew well that
kind of man—if no appointment was forthcoming, he’d show up on the post anyway
and make enough noise to wake the dead.

Not to mention alerting those whose need to know did not, by any stretch of
the regulations or imagination, extend to the Tymons Project.

You don’t turn on a spotlight when you’re working in the dark.

That was the problem with goddamn reporters these days—they thought they
owned the goddamn Constitution. Barelli would have to be mollified. Having the
FBI around would help. So would assurances that he himself was personally
monitoring the situation, maintaining constant contact with the CID and the
civil authorities. He’d do that anyway; he wasn’t a fool. The fact that he had
thought Ulman was a class-A jerk shouldn’t deter him from extending what comfort
he could to his sister.

Still, if Angie took up with a serviceman again, he would personally see to
it the jerk was transferred to South Korea.

He took his chair and reached for the telephone, his free hand drumming
thoughtfully on the desk. He would get hold of Carl, meet him for a late lunch,
take him on the two-bit tour, pat him on the back, shed a tear with him for the
loss of Angie’s love, and get the sonofabitch the hell off his post. Let him go
back to writing about hockey or basketball or whatever the hell it was he wrote
about in April.

Hell’s bells, he was only a cousin, for Christ’s sake.

It wasn’t like he was real family.

Goblins, Elly thought nervously; the goblins are back.

She stood in the kitchenette, squinting myopically at a calendar hanging on the refrigerator door. She knew those
government people hadn’t believed her, nobody did, but tomorrow was Saturday
again, and the goblins would be back.

She was tired of being the only one who saw them.

That young man, though, he might be persuaded. He had the look about him. The
believing look. The wanting look. All she had to do was mark one and show it to
him.

That’s all it would take.

Once he knew, the others would come around.

She licked her lips and turned to the cupboard under a rust-stained sink.
From it she pulled a brand new can of marking magic, shook it, took off the
rounded top, and tested it in the sink.

It worked.

She cackled.

Her pale eyes hardened to steel gray.

“So when he took off for California,” said Babs Radnor, a distinct Tennessee
drawl in her voice, “I got a lawyer, emptied the bank account, took over the
motel, and have become, as you can see, a lady of leisure.”

She sat in her king-size four-poster, two pillows fluffed behind her back.
She bordered on the painfully thin, with short black hair brushed behind her ears, hard black eyes, and a voice that husked with too much
liquor, too many cigarettes. Her right hand held a floral sheet modestly over
her breasts, while her left hand held a tumbler of bourbon and ice.

“I am not a lush, though,” she insisted, waving the glass from side to side.
“Like the French, I always have a little something with every meal. It’s
supposed to be good for the heart and circulation.”

Carl stood at the low, twelve-drawer dresser and watched his reflection
trying to make sense of his tie. “That’s wine, Babs. Wine.”

She shrugged. “Who gives a damn. It’s working, right? So who cares?”

He didn’t argue. Not even twenty-four hours, and he already knew she did not
take lightly to contradiction or correction. Nor did she exaggerate when she had
suggested without being coy or cute that he would have a much more pleasant
evening in her company than the company of a TV, even if it did have free HBO.

It beat all to hell paying for a room.

It also afforded him a way to keep tabs on Mulder and his team. Babs, as she
had already proven, knew everything about every blessed person who stayed in her
motel. And if she didn’t know, she found out. There wasn’t, she had confessed, a
whole lot else to do around here.

“So anyway, I’m figuring one more year, maybe two, sell out and get my buns
to someplace like Phoenix, Tucson, someplace like that. Have you ever been to
Arizona, sugar?”

He shook his head, damned his tie and yanked it off. He didn’t figure the
major would take him anyplace fancy anyway. There was, as the saying goes, no
love lost between them, and it didn’t bother him a bit. Tonero was an ambitious
little toad, and Carl’s skin crawled each time they met. He didn’t know how
Angie could be from the same mother. Still, the guy had been sincere enough when
they finally connected, and this lunch thing would give him a chance to see
where Frankie had died.

Once he had done that, gotten the lay of the land, he could take the next
step.

Whatever that might be.

“On the other hand, San Diego is supposed to have perfect weather, you know?”
She laughed hoarsely “The trouble is, it’s in California. They hate it when you
drink, smoke, and eat a decent meal, a steak and all. I don’t know if I could
stand it. I’m not too thrilled about those earthquakes, either.”

He turned and spread his arms. “So? Do I look good enough to see a major?”

She waggled her heavy eyebrows. “Good enough to eat, if you ask me.”

He laughed and sat on the edge of the bed, taking the hand that held the
sheet in both of his. The sheet began to slide. “When I’m done, how about I take
you out to dinner?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Really, Babs, I’d like to. Is there a place around here, someplace nice?”

She looked at him carefully.

The sheet made it to her waist.

“If you don’t mind driving a little… ?”

His eyes widened comically, showing her his struggle not to look at her
chest. “A little?”

“An hour?”