Game Of Cages (2010) (21 page)

"Okay." Steve rubbed the faint stubble on his chin. "Let's go."

I followed him through town, turning off Littlemont Road onto a winding asphalt street barely wide enough for two cars. He stopped in front of a clapboard, two-story house with a long garage, walked up the front lawn, and opened the garage door. I pulled inside.

"This is my house, if you haven't guessed." The walls were covered with tools on pegboards. There was a thick layer of dust on them. If Steve had been handy at one point in his life, it was long ago.

I followed him through a mudroom into a little kitchen, then a living room. Everything was perfectly clean and neatly arranged, but it was a depressing little house. It seemed to absorb light, but every scuff of our feet echoed as if we were in a drum. He led me to a threadbare couch and offered me tea and sandwiches. I said yes, thank you, and he went into the kitchen.

A four-foot tree stood in the corner. It was undecorated.

Steve returned and set a foldout table in front of me. There were two little plates on it, each with a white-bread sandwich and a handful of corn chips. Beside them were thick white mugs with steaming tea.

I thanked him again and took a bite of the sandwich. It was yellow cheese with mayo and iceberg lettuce. I was hungry enough to enjoy it.

Steve took a bite of his sandwich, more out of politeness than hunger, I could see. When he swallowed, he set it down and settled back in his armchair. It looked too big for him. "I think it's past time you give me the full rundown."

"Okay," I said. I set down my own sandwich and sipped some tea, just to buy time. "Regina Wilbur had this sapphire dog in the little cottage behind her house for decades. It was trapped in there, and she kept it all for herself."

He nodded. We both remembered how the sapphire dog had made us feel. "You said it was a gift?"

"That's what she told me. She was grateful for it, but I don't think the gift giver was doing her any favors."

Steve opened his mouth to respond, then paused. He knew the history of this town and the Wilbur family. "When she was younger, Regina Wilbur was a terror in this part of the county. She had very definite ideas about what had to be done and who should be allowed to do it. Then she simply stopped coming to planning meetings and became a hermit. Lots of folks were relieved."

"But something changed recently, right?"

"Well, her niece had her declared incompetent. There was a videotape of Regina pitching a fit in her drawing room, claiming that they were keeping her dog from her. A dog that died twenty-five years ago."

"Named Armand, right?" Steve nodded. "I thought so. She gave that name to the sapphire dog, too. You can imagine how she'd behave if they kept her from visiting it."

"The niece ... Does she know?"

"She held an auction last night. She sold the sapphire dog to a Chinese guy for nearly a hundred thirty million dollars." It was hard to believe that all this trouble had taken place in less than twenty-four hours.

"Lord help us. I know about the men, of course. Washaway has been full of rumors that he was looking to invest nearby and had come to see the festival. But they were here for this auction?"

"Yeah, but the creature escaped. Now the Chinese guy--and the others who lost the auction--are looking for it. They all have guns, and they aren't squeamish about using them."

Steve winced. I described the groups who had been at the estate in a general way, leaving out the summoning of the floating storm and the spells on Tattoo's body.

"What about you? Did you come for the auction, too?"

"No," I answered. "With me, it's ..." What the hell could I say? I couldn't tell him about the society. "... just bad luck."

He didn't look impressed with that answer. "And what does this have to do with what happened to you in Seattle?"

"Near as I can tell, nothing. It was similar to this, though--weird creature, people going nuts."

"You did solve that problem, though?"

I kept my face carefully neutral. "I did."

"How?"

I thought back to the last moments of that ordeal, when my best and oldest friend had pleaded for me to spare his life. The smells of spoiled blood and field turf came back to me, and so did his voice. The old injury on my left hand throbbed.

I opened my mouth to answer, but the words wouldn't come. I'd only talked about it to one other person, a peer in the society I had never seen before or since. At the time, I was still in shock and I'd expected him to kill me. Since then, I hadn't said a word about it.

And I wasn't going to start with a cop, even a temp cop, no matter how politely he asked.

"Never mind," Steve said with a wave of his hand. "I understand."

We didn't say anything for a while, and my eyelids began to droop. He noticed. "Let me set you up for some shut-eye. Any fool can see you need it, even this one."

The pillows and blankets he brought were pink and flowery. I stretched out on the couch, feeling awkward and vulnerable, but when I closed my eyes, I dropped into a deep, dreamless sleep.

"Get up."

I came awake suddenly, thinking that Yin's men had found me again, but it was Catherine.

"I mean it," she said again. Her tone was sharp. "Nap time is over."

I sat up and rubbed the bleariness out of my eyes. The VCR clock said it was almost ten, but was that the evening of the same day, or had I slept all the way into the morning? "It's nice to see you, too. Is it early or late?"

"It's still the same day, if that's what you mean. And I'm hungry again. Those bastards took my emergency food with the jump bag. Come on! Up!"

As a rule, I don't like being snapped at, but I was too damn tired to care. Maybe I was just glad to see that she was okay. "Don't talk to me that way," I said out of habit. "How did you find me?"

"Goddammit, Ray." She sat down on the edge of the couch and folded her arms across her breasts. "I saw you go into the motel to meet Yin. What kind of game are you playing?"

"I'm not playing any kind of game. Do you think he turned me? Do you think he bought me off?"

"It wouldn't be the first time."

"That's bullshit," I said with more anger than I'd expected. "He sent me your cellphone and told me he'd kidnapped you. I went there to free you."

She sighed and set her hands on her knees. "And I watched you go in, thinking you were collecting a payoff."

"He nearly killed me, but the fire made him back off."

"That was lucky."

"Not really."

She smiled and I smiled back. We had a moment. Then she looked away and her smile vanished. She held up her hands. They trembled slightly.

"I'm forty-five years old, you know. I'll be forty-six in August, if I live that long. This job isn't as exciting as it was when I was twenty-five. I'm better at it now, but ..." She rubbed her hands together and leaned back. "They did get me, you know. They stopped my car and dragged me out onto the asphalt. It seemed like a dozen of them, all smiling shit-eating smiles and holding their guns against my body. All over my body."

She was silent for a moment. I waited for her, and eventually she said: "They couldn't keep me, though. They underestimated me, and when I saw my chance I took it."

"I'm glad." It was a stupid thing to say, but I couldn't think of anything better.

Catherine just nodded. "How did you get into this? How did you get sucked into this life?"

Maybe she didn't know my history. Or maybe she was testing me to see if I shared information. I didn't care. "My best friend ... my best friend had a predator in him. Annalise was there to kill him, but I tried to save him. I took his side against her, but he was past saving."

She nodded. "With me it was my nephew. He was a little wild and very funny, but one summer day he could suddenly do things. When the society came hunting for him, the whole family hid him away. They protected him. Except me. I knew he was killing people, and I decided to turn him in. I had to do the right damn thing, no matter what it cost. My family ... isn't my family anymore. I'm married now, with two girls, but they've never met my mother or sisters. I don't want them to hear the things my family says to me--what they call me now. I got this damn job out of it, though."

I couldn't imagine how hard it was to do society work as a parent, and I said so.

She pulled away from me and let her body language become neutral. "I have ways of dealing. There are ways of doing this job that help keep a little distance. I don't do any of the violence, and I'm never around when it happens. There's no need for me to see that and carry it around with me, bring it home to my family. Not after what happened to my nephew. I take care of my own people and let these people take care of themselves."

That last bit was a little cold. I don't rescue people. I kill predators. But I did my best not to react. People have to cope the best they can.

She continued. "But ... maybe it's just that I know more now. Maybe I just know more about the danger and the ... the suddenness. It can be so quick. One minute everything is just fine, and the next you've lost all power and control. They only had me for about twenty minutes, okay? That's how long it took me to get away, but ... When they have you, they can do anything to you. Kill you, rape you, torture you ..." She paused while she ran through the possibilities in her mind.

I couldn't ask what Yin had done. I didn't have any real need to know except self-indulgent curiosity. What I needed to do was make her feel better. "Want to go kill them?" I asked.

"Yes!" she answered, but she didn't jump up and rush for the door. "But I'm not the type. And it wouldn't get me anything. I'm going to have nightmares about this, I think. I'm going to have nightmares for a long time about this. Christ, I'm collecting them like scars." After a moment, she added: "Do you really think we should kill Mr. Yin?"

I spread my hands. "Catherine, I bought him off with a fake spell. Someone is going to have to kill him."

We had a little discussion about that, where I explained what I did and how I did it. Catherine didn't like the idea on general principle but couldn't think of a specific reason to object. She even admitted that the society publishes fake spell books to discourage wannabes. Then she explained that Steve Cardinal had told her where to find me. It seemed that most of the town was looking for us, with instructions to call him if we were spotted.

"He seems to know more than he should," she said. She watched my response carefully, as if trying to decide whether I was sharing information I should have kept to myself.

"He saw the sapphire dog," I said. "In fact, it nearly fed on him. So yeah, he knows more than he should." I told her about the predator, how it looked and what it could do. She was motionless while I spoke, staring at me intently.

Then I told her about my visit with Pratt. She seemed to recognize the name.

"Did he give you his number?" she asked.

"He wasn't that into me. Actually, he was a complete asshole. He told me to go home, and he wouldn't help deal with Yin."

Wouldn't help rescue you was what I should have said. Catherine seemed to understand anyway.

She rubbed her face. "Well, we can't leave," she said. "It wouldn't make sense to leave Washaway now."

My head felt foggy and sore for a moment, probably from the effects of sleep. "Right, that doesn't make sense."

After that, she set up the police scanner. Steve was out, so I went into his kitchen. I couldn't find any coffee. We had to settle for black tea and sugar. His fridge contained nothing but condiments, Wonder bread, white cheese, and hamburger buns, and his freezer was packed with microwavable meat patties. I felt a little awkward raiding the man's kitchen, and the dismal selection made it easy to leave it all untouched. Maybe we should order out.

We listened to the scanner for the better part of an hour. It was extremely dull, but Catherine had an amazing capacity to focus on something that might become useful at any moment. I got up and moved around the room, swinging my arms and trying to keep loose. My face felt stiff, and when I checked a mirror I saw that my eye was not swollen anymore but was an ugly dark color. The spot where Bushy Bill had hit me was slightly red but not too bad. No wonder the women in Washaway weren't tearing their clothes off when I walked into the room.

There was squawking on the scanner when I came back. It barely sounded like human speech. "Do you understand any of that?"

"Fire at the motel is out," she said. "The whole thing is a loss. The neighborhood watch is supposed to find locals who can put the firefighters up for the night."

I wasn't sure why they weren't going home, but that didn't seem important. What was important was Steve's house; I didn't want to be there when he got home. I didn't like that clean, quiet, depressing little place.

"I want to get out of here," I said. "Do you want to stay and man the scanner?"

"No," she said quickly. "I'll come along."

That surprised me. "Are you sure?" I didn't say This is a safe place or We might run into bad guys. I didn't have to.

"They know about me, so there really isn't a safe place anymore. And I'm not the stay-at-home type."

She took the keys to the Neon and carried the scanner into the garage. While she fiddled with the wires under the dash, I went into the kitchen, boiled water, and poured it into a thermos. Then I added a tea bag and the last of Steve's sugar.

Back in the garage, I found Catherine sitting behind the wheel, the engine running and the scanner hissing. I opened the garage door and she pulled out. I closed the door and climbed inside.

The scanner sat on the floor mat beside my feet. I didn't dare move for fear of pulling out a wire. "I'm the one who rented this car, you know."

"Maybe, but I'm a better driver."

Fair enough. We drove back and forth through town, waiting for something to happen. At one point, a black Yukon passed us going the other way. The bidders had the same idea. After almost an hour, a thin fog billowed in, but nothing else came up. Finally, Catherine said what I'd been afraid to say. "Could it already be gone? Things wouldn't be this quiet if it was still in town, right?"