Murder of Angels (37 page)

“Oh, you better believe it’s got fire enough,” he replies. “Don’t you go forgetting Padnée so quickly. Before this shit’s done, you’re gonna wish it was just some big scaly lizard thing.”

“But it’s not?”

Scarborough stops rubbing his temples and peers up at her again. “The Dragon was always here. No one knows what the fuck the Dragon is. Maybe it’s evil. Maybe it’s God. Maybe it’s just a goddamn force of nature or a bad joke the cosmos decided to play on this place, but when the Weaver came, she changed it somehow. Just her being here, or something she brought with her, and that’s when everything started going to hell. But, hey, that was before my time.”

“Spyder brought me here to stop the Dragon,” Niki says. “She said it would destroy this place if I didn’t stop it.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever. But you gotta understand something. You gotta get it straight and
keep
it straight. This thing’s complicated. We’re not playing Dungeons and Dragons here. This isn’t hobbits versus Sauron. If there’s good and evil, black and white, it’s just as hard to see here as it is back home.”

“So, you’re saying the Dragon isn’t bad?”

“
No.
I’m not saying that at all,” Scarborough replies wearily and wipes his face again. “The Dragon’s a bad motherfucker, and you can bet your skinny Asian ass on that and come up flush every time. And he’s got a lot of bad motherfuckers out there to do his dirty work. What I’m
saying
is that you need to see that the Weaver might not be so goddamn different her own self. On a good day, it’s all just goddamn shades of gray, Vietnam. On a
good
day.”

“Then what am I doing here?”

“Near as I can tell, making things worse,” Scarborough tells her, and then he gags and doesn’t say anything else for a while.

Niki lies in her bunk and thinks about the things he’s said, the consequences of the things he’s said, and watches the empty berth across the aisle from her. There are footsteps overhead, the inconstant tattoo of hobnailed boots and bare feet, and she tries to shut out all the sounds and smells of the ship. A runaway train since she stepped off the bridge, however long ago that might have been, no way of reckoning time when she doesn’t have a watch, and the nights here seem to last forever. Back home, maybe Daria’s dead, or maybe she went to Kansas and found the ball bearing, and she’s on her way to Birmingham, or maybe she just went home with Alex Singer and they’ll live happily ever after, freed from the inconvenience of having a crazy girl around.

“I wish you would stop thinking of yourself like that,” Dr. Dalby said, more times than she can recall, but she does, anyway. Niki, the crazy girl hung about Daria’s neck since Boulder, the stone to drag her down. Part of her can’t blame Daria if she’s glad to finally be rid of that weight.

And another part of her aches at the loss.

Maybe it’s already been a month, or a year, or ten years back there, in the San Francisco where she started out. Scarborough’s remarks about Sauron and hobbits has her thinking about time and other books, Narnia and Oz and The Land, and how such a long time where she is could be a very short time in the “real” world. Maybe it’s only been a moment back home, one tick of a second hand, and no one even knows she’s dead yet.

Stop thinking of it as “home,”
she chides herself.
That’s not home anymore, because I can never go back. Spyder said so.

But what if Spyder lied,
another voice inside her whispers.
What if Spyder’s wrong?

“They don’t want me in Auber,” she says. “I heard Esme say that to Spyder.”

“Did you?” Scarborough replies, and he stands up again, propping himself against the edge of her bunk; she can smell him, sweat and sick and body odor, and wonders how she must smell. His lips are badly chapped, and there’s a dab of blood at one corner of his mouth. “Well, I expect she was telling the truth. Anyone who takes you in is asking for what Padnée got, or worse.”

“What if they turn me away? What if they won’t pay Malim?”

“Why don’t we worry about crossing that particular bridge when it pops up and smacks us in the face?”

“Chance favors the prepared.”

“What the hell’s that? Were you some sort of fucking Camp Fire girl or something?”

“I’m just really scared, that’s all. And I wish Spyder had left me alone, like I was. I wish she’d left me
where
I was. At least there, only a few people didn’t want me around.”

“I think I liked you better without the self-pity, Vietnam.”

“That puts you one up on me. I don’t think I like me at all.”

“‘My soul is crushed, my spirits sore; I do not like me any more.’”

“Dorothy Parker,” Niki whispers, half to herself, and smiles, a familiar line or two of poetry almost enough to lift her spirits. “Daria always hated Dorothy Parker because sometimes the press would get her name wrong and print it ‘Dorothy Parker.’ Sometimes people writing fan letters even did it. I always told her she ought to be flattered.”

“Who’s Daria?” Scarborough asks.

“Never mind,” she says, because she doesn’t want to get started trying to explain Daria, what she did and didn’t mean, and for all Niki knows, Scarborough Pentecost hates dykes. “I’ll tell you about Daria some other time.”

“Fair enough.”

Overhead, there’s a crackling thunder-and-lightning sort of noise, noise like the sky cracking open, so loud that Niki covers her ears.

“Just what I fucking need,” Scarborough frowns, glaring up at the place where the sky would be, if all that wood weren’t in the way. “A goddamn storm. The only thing worse than being on a boat is being on a boat in a goddamn storm. With my luck, it’ll be a hurricane. It’s that time of year.”

“We used to have big storms in New Orleans,” Niki says, thinking of the rain beating hard against her and Danny’s windows in the French Quarter, remembering the night her mother came into her room and talked about fire falling from the sky. “I’ve been through a couple of hurricanes. Never on a boat, though.”

“It’s all kinds of fun, let me tell you.”

“And you think Spyder’s just as bad as the Dragon,” Niki says, not asking, a statement to change the subject because even her doubts about herself and Spyder are better than imagining the little ship caught at sea in a hurricane.

“That’s not what I said. I didn’t say that because I don’t know that. I just don’t know otherwise.”

“But you’re trying to make me doubt her.”

“I’m trying to make you
think
.”

And then the thunder sound again, so loud that Niki can feel it passing through the ship, through the wood of her berth, through the fillings in her teeth.

“There are factions,” Scarborough says, looking directly at her now and speaking deliberately, parceling out his words like he’s trying to ignore the thunder and what it means. “The Weaver isn’t the only one who wants to get rid of the Dragon, but she’s the only one cracked enough to actually try to fucking
do
it.”

“Does that make her crazy, or does that make her brave?”

“You got spirit, Vietnam. I gotta give you that. Look, like I said, it’s complicated. We’ve got this Madame Tirzah bitch and her ghouls over in Auber, right, and we’ve got the fucking red witches down in Nesmia and Sarvéynor, and
then,
like we need more troublemakers, we’ve got Esme and the Weaver. And it’s not just that the right hand doesn’t know what the left is up to. Most of the time, the right hand’s just sitting around hoping and praying the left hand makes a wrong move and winds up on the Dragon’s fuck-you-hard-right-now list, because every one of these bozos thinks they’re the ones with the solution, and everyone else can go straight to hell.”

“But the Dragon wasn’t a problem before Spyder came?”

“I said she changed him. I didn’t say he wasn’t already a problem. Esme told me that when the Weaver came across, the Dragon took something from her, from inside her head,” and Scarborough thumps himself smartly on the forehead. “Something that the Weaver believed, and it drove him insane, believing it, too.”

And then the thunder again, and as it rolls away across and through the sea, one of Malim’s crew pulls open the trapdoor to the hold and shouts down at them.

“The captain wants you both topside, and he don’t mean tomorrow.”

Niki glances upwards, towards the anxious, commanding voice, and there’s clean white sunlight streaming in around the vague silhouette of the sailor’s head and shoulders, illuminating the rungs of the tall ladder leading down to the floor.

“What the hell for?” Scarborough calls back.

“That weren’t
my
business, and I ain’t gonna go making it that way,” and then the sailor’s gone again, but he’s left the trapdoor open, and Niki marvels at the light spilling into the squalid compartment with them.

“Thank goodness,” she says, even though the light hurts her eyes. “I was beginning to think the night was never going to end.”

Scarborough curses and spits on the floor again.

“Grab your gear,” he tells her. “I got a feeling, whatever we’ve been hearing, it’s not a storm after all.”

“What else could it be?”

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but, as they say in the movies, you’ve got a lot to learn, kiddo,” and then he rubs his stubbled cheeks and smoothes back his stringy brown hair with both hands before helping her out of the berth. Niki slips her pack and boots on, no time to bother with the laces, and lets Scarborough lead her up the ladder and into the warm maritime sun.

Daria sits alone on the hood of the rented Honda Accord, shiny new car the color of an eggplant, and watches the old house at the end of Cullom Street. Alex is still talking with the two Birmingham cops, the ones she begged him not to call, the ones he called anyway. They’ve been through the whole place, top to bottom, and didn’t find anything but graffiti on the walls, trash and a few empty crack vials on the floor, a corner in one of the bedrooms that someone had been using as a toilet. Nothing much at all in the basement. No one’s lived here for more than two years, they said, after a call to the owner, who said she was thinking about selling the dump and wanted to know if Daria was interested in buying it.

Only if I could burn it to the fucking ground,
she thinks again.
Burn it down and sow the ground with salt and holy water.
She imagines herself marking the scorched and smoldering ground with a cross of white stones laid end to end, muttering prayers to a god she has no faith in.

One of the cops, a stocky, short woman with a mullet—and Daria clocked her right off—shakes Alex’s hand again and then turns and waves enthusiastically at Daria, who pretends to smile and waves back. She asked for an autograph, when they were done with the house, and Daria gave it to her, scribbled on the back of an Alagasco envelope the cop had retrieved from her squad car.

“Just someone with nothing better to do, messing with your head,” the other cop told Alex, even though whoever it was had obviously been trying to fuck with
her
head, not Alex’s. All four of them standing out on the front porch because Daria wouldn’t go inside, before she signed the back of the gas bill and then said good-bye and went to sit on the hood of the Honda.

“But how did she even know I was in the airport?” Daria asked him, the tall policeman with thick glasses and the beginnings of a pot belly, and he shrugged and shook his head.

“Who knows. The goddamn internet, maybe. Maybe someone hacked the airline’s records and—”

“That’s fucking ridiculous—” Daria began, but Alex was there to interrupt, there to say that they hadn’t thought of that and shut her up.

She lights another cigarette and watches Alex watching the cops getting back into their car. She exhales, and her smoke hangs a moment in the late autumn air, withering smoke ghost slowly carried away by the cold breeze slipping silently between the tall trees. Daria shivers and pulls her leather jacket tighter, wishing that she had a coat, and as the police car pulls away from the house, Alex turns and walks towards her, crunching through the carpet of dead leaves.

“They’re so full of shit,” she says and taps ash to the ground. “Do you think she’d still have wanted my autograph if she’d known I was fucking you?”

“There’s nothing in there,” Alex replies. “
Nothing.
It was some sort of fucked-up prank, that’s all. You’re going to have to accept that.”

“No one knew we were on that flight. No one knew I was sitting there across from that row of pay phones.”

“Dar, you don’t know what people know, not these days. Not when you’re on bleedin’ MTV and in all those goddamn magazines, you don’t have any idea what people know.”

Daria smokes her cigarette and stares at the house, trying not to remember the last time she was here and remembering it anyway. The night she and Mort and Theo came up here to find Niki, the night she went in there to bring Niki out. The white thing hanging head down from the ceiling of Spyder Baxter’s bedroom.

“It might have been someone right there in the airport with us,” Alex says, and then he takes the cigarette away from her, drops it to the ground and crushes it out with the toe of his shoe. “There’s just no telling, not with something like this.”

“You didn’t hear her voice,” Daria says, but she thinks she’s past trying to convince anyone of anything. After the plane and the hospital, the white bird and the ball bearing and the old coot at the gas station with his fossils and Senior El Camino the jackalope.

“Daria, I’m sorry as hell about all this, but there’s no one in the house. We need to get you home. You’re sick, and we need to get you home—”

“So I can deal with Niki.”

“Yes, so you can deal with Niki, and a whole lot of other shite you been trying to avoid ever since I met you. I followed you here because I knew if I didn’t you’d never stop wishing you’d come.”