Dragon Tears (10 page)

Out in the street, the whirlwind had gathered more dust and detritus. Earlier the ghost dancer had appeared to be waltzing along the blacktop. Now it was doing a frantic jitterbug. As Harry took a step away from the tree, the column of debris changed course, zigged toward him, and burst upon him with startling power, forcing him to shut his eyes against the abrasive grit.

For one crazy moment he thought he was going to be swept up as Dorothy had been, and spun off to Oz. Tree
limbs rattled and shook overhead, shedding more leaves on him. The huffing and keening of the wind briefly swelled into a shriek, a howl—but in the next instant fell into graveyard stillness.

Someone spoke directly in front of Harry, voice low and raspy and strange: “Ticktock, ticktock.”

Harry opened his eyes and wished he hadn’t.

A hulking denizen of the streets, fully six-feet-five, odious and clad in rags, stood before him, no more than two feet away. His face was grossly disfigured by scars and weeping sores. His eyes were narrowed, little more than slits, and gummy white curds clogged the corners. The breath that came between the hobo’s rotten teeth and across his suppurating lips was so foul that Harry gagged on the stench.

“Ticktock, ticktock,” the vagrant repeated. He spoke quietly, but the effect was like a shout because his voice seemed to be the only sound in the world. A preternatural silence draped the day.

Feeling threatened by the size and by the extravagant filthiness of the stranger, Harry took a step backward. The man’s greasy hair was matted with dirt, bits of grass, and leaf fragments; dried food and worse was crusted in his tangled beard. His hands were dark with grime, and the underside of every ragged, overgrown fingernail was tar-black. He was no doubt a walking petri dish in which thrived every deadly disease known to man, and an incubator of new viral and bacterial horrors.

“Ticktock, ticktock.” The hobo grinned. “You’ll be dead in sixteen hours.”

“Back off,” Harry warned.

“Dead by dawn.”

The hobo opened his squinched eyes. They were crimson from lid to lid and corner to corner, without irises or pupils, as if there were only panes of glass where eyes should have been and only a store of blood within the skull.

“Dead by dawn,” the hobo repeated.

Then he exploded. It wasn’t anything like a grenade blast, no killing Shockwaves or gush of heat, no deafening boom, just a sudden end to the unnatural stillness and a violent influx of wind,
whoosh!
The hobo appeared to disintegrate, not into particles of flesh and gouts of blood but into pebbles and dust and leaves, into twigs and flower petals and dry clods of earth, into pieces of old rags and scraps of yellowed newspapers, bottle caps, glittering specks of glass, torn theater tickets, bird feathers, string, candy wrappers, chewing-gum foil, bent and rusted nails, crumpled paper cups, lost buttons….

The churning column of debris burst over Harry. He was forced to close his eyes again as the mundane remains of the fantastic hobo pummeled him.

When he could open his eyes without risk of injury, he spun around, looking in every direction, but the airborne trash was gone, dispersed to all corners of the day. No whirlwind. No ghost dancer. No hobo: he had vanished.

Harry turned around again in disbelief, gaping.

His heart knocked fiercely.

From another street, a car horn blared. A pickup truck turned the corner, approaching him, engine growling. On the other side of the street, a young couple walked hand in hand, and the woman’s laughter was like the ringing of small silver bells.

Suddenly Harry realized just
how
unnaturally quiet the day had become between the appearance and departure of the rag-clothed giant. Other than the gravelly and malevolent voice and what few sounds of movement the hobo made, the street had been as silent as any place a thousand leagues beneath the sea or in the vacuum of space between galaxies.

Lightning flashed. The shadows of tree limbs twitched on the sidewalk around him.

Thunder drummed the fragile membrane of the sky, drummed harder, the heavens grew blacker as if lightning-burnt, the air temperature seemed to drop ten degrees in an instant, and the laden clouds split. A scattering of
fat raindrops snapped against the leaves,
ponged
off the hoods of parked cars, painted dark blotches on Harry’s clothes, splattered his face, and drove a chill deep into his bones.

The world appeared to be dissolving beyond the windshield of the parked car, as if the clouds had released torrents of a universal solvent. Silver rain sluiced down the glass, and the trees outside seemed to melt as readily as green crayons. Hurrying pedestrians fused with their colorful umbrellas and deliquesced into the gray downpour.

Harry Lyon felt as if he would be liquefied as well, rendered into an insensate solution and swiftly washed away. His comfortable world of granite reason and steely logic was eroding around him, and he was powerless to halt the disintegration.

He could not decide whether he had actually seen the burly vagrant or merely hallucinated him.

God knew, an underclass of the dispossessed wandered the American landscape these days. The more money the government spent to reduce their numbers, the more of them there were, until it began to seem as if they were not the result of any public policy or lack of it but a divine scourge. Like so many people, Harry had learned to look away from them or through them because there seemed to be nothing he could do to help them in any significant
way…and because their very existence raised disturbing questions about the stability of his own future. Most were pathetic and harmless. But some were undeniably strange, their faces enlivened by the ticks and twitches of neurotic compulsions, driven by obsessive needs, the gleam of madness in their eyes, the capacity for violence evident in the unremitting coiled tension of their bodies. Even in a town like Laguna Beach—portrayed in travel brochures as a pearl of the Pacific, one more California paradise—Harry could no doubt find at least a few homeless men whose demeanor and appearance were as hostile as that of the man who had seemed to come out of the whirlwind.

He could not, however, expect to find one of them with scarlet eyes lacking irises and pupils. He was not confident, either, about the probability of locating any street person who could manifest himself out of a dust devil, or explode into a collection of mundane debris and fly away on the wind.

Perhaps he had imagined the encounter.

That was a possibility Harry was loath to consider. The pursuit and execution of James Ordegard had been traumatic. But he didn’t believe being caught in Ordegard’s bloody rampage was sufficiently stressful to cause hallucinations replete with dirty fingernails and killer halitosis.

If the filthy giant was real, where had he come from? Where had he gone, who had he been, what disease or birth defect had left him with those terrifying eyes?

Ticktock, ticktock, you’ll be dead by dawn.

He twisted the key in the ignition and started the engine.

Paperwork awaited him, soothingly tedious, with blanks to fill in and boxes to check. A neatly typed file would reduce the messy Ordegard case to crisp paragraphs of words on clean white paper, and then none of it would seem as inexplicable as it did at that moment.

He wouldn’t include the crimson-eyed hobo in his report, of course. That had nothing to do with Ordegard. Besides, he didn’t want to give Connie or anyone else in Special Projects a reason to make jokes at his expense. Dressing
for work unfailingly in a coat and tie, being disdainful of foul language in a profession rife with it, going by the book at all times, and being obsessive about the neatness of his case files already made him a frequent target of their humor. But later, at home, he might type up a report about the hobo, just for himself, as a way of bringing order to the bizarre experience and putting it behind him.

“Lyon,” he said, meeting his own eyes in the rearview mirror, “you
are
a ridiculous specimen.”

He switched on the windshield wipers, and the melting world solidified.

The afternoon sky was so overcast that the streetlamps, which were operated by a solar-sensitive switch, were deceived by the false twilight. The pavement glistened, shiny black. All of the gutters were full of fast-moving, dirty water.

He went south on Pacific Coast Highway, but instead of turning east on Crown Valley Parkway toward Special Projects, he kept going. He passed Ritz Cove, then the turnoff for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and drove all the way into Dana Point.

When he pulled up in front of Enrique Estefan’s house, he was somewhat surprised, although subconsciously he had known where he was headed.

The house was one of those charming bungalows built in the ‘40s or early ‘50s, before soulless stucco tract homes had become
the
architecture of choice. Decoratively carved shutters, scalloped fascia, and a multiple-pitch roof gave it character. Rain drizzled off the fronds of the big date palms in the front yard.

During a brief lull in the downpour, he left the car and ran up the walkway. By the time he climbed the three brick steps onto the porch, the rain was coming down hard again. There was no wind any more, as if the great weight of the rain suppressed it.

Shadows waited like a gathering of old friends on the front porch, among a bench-style swing and white wooden chairs with green canvas cushions. Even on a sunny day
the porch would be comfortably cool, for it was sheltered by densely interwoven, red-flowering bougainvillaea that festooned a trellis and spread across the roof.

He put his thumb on the bell push and, above the drumming of the rain, heard soft chimes inside the house.

A six-inch lizard skittered across the porch floor to the steps, and out into the storm.

Harry waited patiently. Enrique Estefan—Ricky to his friends—did not move very fast these days.

When the inner door swung open, Ricky squinted out through the screen door, clearly not happy to be disturbed. Then he grinned and said, “Harry, good to see you.” He opened the screen door, stepped aside. “
Really
good to see you.”

“I’m dripping,” Harry said, pulling off his shoes and leaving them on the porch.

“That’s not necessary,” Ricky said.

Harry entered the house in his stocking feet.

“Still the most considerate man I ever met,” Ricky said.

“That’s me. Ms. Manners of the gun-and-handcuff set.”

They shook hands. Enrique Estefan’s grip was firm, although his hand was hot, dry, leathery, padded with too little flesh, almost withered, all knuckles and metacarpals and phalanges. It was almost like exchanging greetings with a skeleton.

“Come on in the kitchen,” Ricky said.

Harry followed him across the polished-oak floor. Ricky shuffled, never entirely lifting either foot.

The short hallway was illumined only by the light spilling in from the kitchen at the end and by a votive candle flickering in a ruby glass. The candle was part of a shrine to the Holy Mother that was set up on a narrow table against one wall. Behind it was a mirror in a silver-leafed frame. Reflections of the small flame glimmered in the silver leaf and danced in the looking glass.

“How’ve you been, Ricky?”

“Pretty good. You?”

“I’ve had better days,” Harry admitted.

Although he was Harry’s height, Ricky seemed several inches shorter because he leaned forward as if progressing against a wind, his back rounded, the sharp lines of his shoulder blades poking up prominently against his pale-yellow shirt. From behind, his neck looked scrawny. The back of his skull appeared as fragile as that of an infant.

The kitchen was bigger than expected in a bungalow and a lot cheerier than the hallway: Mexican-tile floor, knotty-pine cabinetry, a large window looking onto a spacious backyard. A Kenny G number was on the radio. The air was heavy with the rich aroma of coffee.

“Like a cup?” Ricky asked.

“If it’s not any trouble.”

“No trouble at all. Just made a fresh pot.”

While Ricky got a cup and saucer from one of the cabinets and poured coffee, Harry studied him. He was worried by what he saw.

Ricky’s face was too thin, drawn with deeply carved lines at the corners of his eyes and framing his mouth. His skin sagged as if it had lost nearly all elasticity. His eyes were rheumy. Maybe it was only a backsplash of color from his shirt, but his white hair had an unhealthy yellow tint, and both his face and the whites of his eyes exhibited a hint of jaundice.

He had lost more weight. His clothes hung loosely on him. His belt was cinched to the last hole, and the seat of his pants drooped like an empty sack.

Enrique Estefan was an old man. He was only thirty-six, one year younger than Harry, but he was an old man just the same.

Much of the time, the blind woman lived not merely in darkness but in another world quite apart from the one
into which she had been born. Sometimes that inner realm was a kingdom of brightest fantasy with pink and amber castles, palaces of jade, luxury high-rise apartments, Bel Air estates with vast verdant lawns. In these settings she was the queen and ultimate ruler—or a famous actress, fashion model, acclaimed novelist, ballerina. Her adventures were exciting, romantic, inspiring. At other times, however, it was an evil empire, all shadowy dungeons, dank and dripping catacombs full of decomposing corpses, blasted landscapes as gray and bleak as the craters of the moon, populated by monstrous and malevolent creatures, where she was always on the run, hiding and afraid, neither powerful nor famous, often cold and naked.

Occasionally her interior world lacked concreteness, was only a domain of colors and sounds and aromas, without form or texture, and she drifted through it, wondering and amazed. Often there was music—Elton John, Three Dog Night, Nilsson, Marvin Gaye, Jim Croce, the voices of her time—and the colors swirled and exploded to accompany the songs, a light show so dazzling that the real world could never produce its equal.

Even during one of those amorphous phases, the magic country within her head could darken and become a fearful place. The colors grew clotted and somber; the music discordant, ominous. She felt that she was being swept away by an icy and turbulent river, choking on its bitter waters, struggling for breath but finding none, then breaking the surface and gasping in lungsful of sour air, frantic, weeping, praying for delivery to a warm dry shore.