End Time (18 page)

“Careful!” Bhakti hissed. The lady cop was in a hurry. Taking chances. The climbing, making her go faster and faster.

“Careful yourself!” Cheryl hissed back.

The skylight at the top of the stairwell was growing lighter, and the sound of pigeons in their roosts cooing seemed to ruffle the air around them. The smell: old, musty, deserted. When they reached the top, several flustered pigeons flapped and fluttered. Then quieted down. Cheryl touched the half-open door to the top floor of the warehouse. With just a light finger tap it yawned open. Their saber lights showed just a clean, swept wooden floor. Large planks extending the length of the building.

“You think this is the place?” Bhakti's whisper cut the air.

“Yes, Bhakti.” A pause. “But I don't think you should have come. Maybe me either.”

Bhakti had taken a dozen steps in one direction, Cheryl in the other. When he turned to look at her she was standing over a metal cot, just the plain metal frame of a camp cot with its spring meshing. Cut cords hung at the four corners. On a low table some empty plastic bottles, dirty gauze, long tweezers, medical clamps. On the floor, a large pair of garden pruning clippers with two-foot handles, used for pruning the thicker branches of a shrub.

And in a sudden blow to his mind, Bhakti realized this is where it happened to Janet. He was standing where the monster stood who took his baby. “Stand back,” Cheryl warned him. And he could see why: a large pool of dried blood around the metal cot.

He felt the urge to tear his hair, to howl; the flashlight began to tremble in his hand. There wasn't even any sign of the one they were looking for. No Lila Chen, no hair, no clothes; if he didn't pull himself together in a second he was going to drop the flashlight in a fit of tremors; the beam danced across the dark cavernous space.

“But—but,” he stammered, “the guy at the precinct said he didn't find anything.” Then in a slow, measured tone: “He said he didn't find
anything
.”

He felt Cheryl thinking in a long, following silence.

A new voice came out of the empty corner of the warehouse room; a dry and heartless voice seemed to hang in the air like a nasty smell: “Maybe that's because your guy in the precinct went to another warehouse.”

Bhakti's guts ran cold, and it took all his will not to drop his flashlight. Cheryl's body snapped to the sound of the newcomer; her flashlight lanced into the dark. A figure emerged from the blacker shadows of the cavernous room. Cheryl recognized him at once. Inspector Frederick of Internal Affairs from her departmental hearing. What the hell was he doing here? Working overtime on his own dime? Tailing them?

Bad either way.

The ferret-like man picked his way across the floor, stopping a few paces off. His own flashlight glanced across his pockmarked face. Then flashed across the yawning room. No cat graffiti. But the flashlight stopped when it caught some large spray paint on a long expanse of wall. Silver and red, striking large letters:
ROGUE HOUSE MENU.
Then underneath:
Today's Specials: Your Choice of White Meat, Dark Meat, Mush Puppies, and Kitty Fried Kiddies.
The cop with the pockmarked face coughed darkly at the droll perversion of it.

A sicko's idea of humor. But still no smiling Felix Face.

“Did you see our happy cat on the way in?” Inspector Frederick asked. “No. Or on the stairs? Or downstairs? No. You just used the Kitty Litter Map you saw in the precinct toilet.”

Cheryl felt a twinge. She hadn't even been looking for the smiling cat. Hell, maybe somebody had gotten the little sticker on the bathroom map wrong. With a touch of grit she asked him, “I thought you were with Internal Affairs.”

The ferret-faced man shrugged. “I was transferred.”

His flashlight touched the metal cot, the dark stained floor, the handles of the pruning clippers. “I suppose I should call in a Forensics team just to be thorough. For all the good it will do. But I think we all know whose blood that is.” He paused for a moment to see if his remark had any effect on the Indian man in dirty khakis holding a flashlight. He found his cell phone and tapped it.

“Are
you
the Magician?” Bhakti asked him slowly.

The ferret-faced man snorted. Then wagged his head at the simp.

“Whattaya thinking, Mr. Krishna? There's some guy out there in black tails and spats pulling strings, pulling rabbits out of hats, kidnapping chicks for fun and profit? There is no magician, Mr. Singh. He's the boogeyman—just a bedtime story drug dealers tell themselves at night. Mostly it makes them think they're not the worst guys in town. See, I'm not so bad … there's the Magician.
That man is much worse
.”

He started to tap his smartphone.

“How about I send you the report, Officer Gibson?” He caught himself, glanced at his watch, then the clock on his cell phone to confirm. “Sorry, should I say, the
former
Officer Gibson. You officially retired thirty-five minutes ago. Better get out of those blues. You wouldn't want to be pulled over for impersonating a police officer, now would you?”

Cheryl took a ragged breath and almost smiled a little. “No, definitely not.” The light was coming in stronger through the warehouse windows. They didn't seem to need the flashlights anymore. She snapped hers off.

She walked toward the stairwell door, Bhakti silently following.

“Nice to see you again, Officer Gibson. I'll get you a copy of my report anyway.”

As they passed into the stairwell and down the stairs a flock of pigeons flapped violently, a flurry of beating wings; a dozen or so zoomed off their roosts in every direction.

Shafts of sunlight lanced through the stairwell's dirty windows. The trip down seemed longer than the way up. The door at the bottom landing was still wedged with the broken screwdriver. He couldn't get Janet's blood on the floor out of his mind; and for a moment he almost ran back upstairs to mop it clean, somehow fix it. But instead he took a deep, shaky breath and plodded after Cheryl.

The cavernous ground level didn't seem particularly creepy anymore and the urge to walk softly or talk in whispers vanished. Bhakti's BlackBerry hummed, then vibrated in his shirt pocket. Eleanor texting him. They'd stuck her in a sanitarium and some patients were allowed BlackBerry privileges at the sanitarium—sure, why not, there were rooms with phones. The place wasn't a lockdown. But the text message didn't make him feel any better. Maybe even worse.
They're watching. Always watching. And the ants go marching west to east. Hurrah.

More rantings. He showed Cheryl the back-lit text, explaining, “Eleanor. She sent me something similar when we found the girls' clothes on the tracks.”

“You told me.”

And Bhakti shook his head: right, remembering now. It was getting hard to remember what he'd done or said or explained. Too much to explain.

And he'd have to do something soon about Eleanor. After two weeks of searching for Lila Chen, Bhakti still had to come to grips with things back home. No, not back home—in Fairfield. With Eleanor. And Guy and Lauren. Head for Connecticut, straighten things out, somehow. The hospital bills, the sanitarium bills … His brother-in-law was starting to text in capital letters. HEY! BHAKTI! Followed by the growls of desperation.

Under the partially open roll-gate, the scientist and the ex-copper slid off the trailer bay and stretched. The rising sun hit them full in the face. Blinding orange. The great flock of pigeons from the top floor escaped out a hole in the warehouse roof and wheeled in a magnificent arc, hurling off toward the sun.

Tired, worn out, and flat as old soda, the two searchers shuffled toward Mrs. Herman's MINI. But Bhakti halted for a moment. A line of little insects moved on the ground, undulating like a snake.

Ants.

Black ants, this time; and there didn't seem anything evil or ugly about them, as if these were the
good
ants who meant no one harm. The good, black ants marched out of a small hole in the concrete, snaking on for a dozen feet and vanishing into the hill of a colony. What made it stranger was the ants marched over a tablet of laminated paper: sun-bleached, but wide as a newspaper.

Bhakti picked it up and gently shook the ants away. The thing was a menu from a place called the Road Island Diner in Oakley, Utah. The menu read
JUSTLY FAMOUS SINCE 1939.

A typical diner bill of fare: burgers and shakes, illustrations of generic 1950s faces in the margins, smiling 1950s clean-cut Mom with bacon and eggs. Clean-cut chef in a chef's hat. A welcoming soda-jerk mixing the malts—all in American heyday nostalgia style. But what caught Bhakti's eye was on the left side of the page, the Kiddie's Korner. A smiling young lad's freckled face in eager anticipation beside the caption
LITTLE BANDITS MENU
and the offerings: Hush Puppies and Kitty Fries. Kitty Fries?

Cheryl spotted it too. And looking at each other, man and woman could feel the gears working. Rogue House Menu. Mush Puppies. Kitty Fried Kiddies. Road Island Diner. Hush Puppies. Kitty Fries. Too unlikely. Slim? Too cool for school.

If this new signpost was meant to lead them on, how had it gotten all the way from Utah to a concrete apron in lost-in-time industrial LA? Dropped by a passing stork? Had it fluttered out of a freight car ten years ago? Or had someone on their way to Utah left it behind like bread crumbs in the forest? Calling it unlikely was being generous. Calling it improbable, wildly magnanimous. A clue to nowhere.

Bhakti dropped it back to the ground, defeated. They climbed into the borrowed MINI Cooper and began to roll.

Wisps of an ocean breeze picked up spirals of dust at different corners of the rail yard. The gust picked up the menu from the ground and slapped it onto the car's windshield, jolting Cheryl and Bhakti behind the glass. He hit the brakes, then flipped on the windshield wipers to swipe the menu away. The menu caught under the wiper blade and stuck where it landed. Bhakti killed the wipers, grunted, and reached out his driver's window, bringing the laminated lost artifact inside with them.

“Want me to take out Lila's hematite earring, see if it draws?” Bhakti asked.

The two of them considered that for a moment. Would a jumping jelly bean hematite earring make their choice any easier? Whether to go forward in search of a lost little lamb—or just give up?

Cheryl gingerly took the menu from him, almost reverentially. Smoothed it out, then put it on the dashboard. She looked at Bhakti, measuring the weight of slim to none, and tasting a bit of hope. Like the service station displays that said
LAST CHANCE GAS 400 MILES
before a vanishing point on an empty blacktop.

“No, don't bother,” Cheryl finally answered. “I wouldn't trust my eyes anyway.” She sighed long and deeply. An old, discarded menu pointing the way to a kidnapped kid. Hush Puppies and Kitty Fries. What do you say to that?

The diner made me do it?

But that didn't change the fact that Lila Chen was still out there somewhere, alive for all they knew. Out there and alive. Could the girl be headed into Utah too? Was that the menu's message?

“Let's grab a couple of hours' sleep,” Bhakti suggested. “Then I'll go to Utah if you will.”

Cheryl scrunched around in
Mrs.
Herman's cramped MINI Cooper, thoroughly uncomfortable.

“Not in this thing you won't.”

 

10

Skin Walker

Van Horn, Texas. 9 a.m., Sunday.

Billy Shadow's look-see for Boss Lattimore made him wonder about people's sanity. These walkabouts always seemed the best part of his job—part cavalry scout, part licensed troubleshooter—but not this time. He'd seen some desolate places in his life—the deserts of Iraq for one. Burnt tanks, burnt bodies, and melted sand—a sober kind of loneliness. Desolation that left you empty.

Or the Badlands of South Dakota, the sighing prairie grass under an endless sky while white clouds in the shape of eagles wheeled silently overhead—a peaceful kind of desolation that refreshed your soul.

Billy remembered Old Grandma Sparrow as she sat on the wooden steps of her trailer at the reservation holding out her soft, wrinkled hands and examining the discarded bits of junk he brought her as a boy, her sharp black eyes sparkling at everything he showed her. Little trinkets found lying on the side of the road or beside an abandoned trailer: a tin siren ring that whooped like a wolf whistle, a half-dozen red aluminum jacks from some child's game fallen from the pouch. Trinkets for some, treasures for him.

Grandma Sparrow had the quirky trick of telling him where they came from, her lined faced wrinkling in a thousand smiles: “Lucy's jacks. She married Lone Crow. And that silly wolf whistle fell out of a Cracker Jack box Laughing Horse was eating four years ago—it's yours if you want.” Whether great insight or mere memory Billy never found out; God, she had to be 110 by now.

But the absence of living, breathing human beings in a place where people once lived and worked and played made for a kind of cold, fearful desolation.

The ghost town dreads.

And the subdivision in Van Horn, Texas, that Lattimore built for Bhakti Singh and the other Escape Velocity employees had a very bad case of the creeps.

*   *   *

The door to the Punjabi scientist's house stood open as if the man left in a hurry. In the few days since Bhakti and Eleanor Singh had vanished some wasps had taken up residence, building the beginnings of a paper nest half in the vestibule, half on the door lintel. The wasps flew in and out of the house like a winged, thrumming orchestra.

Inside, Billy went from room to room. Master bedroom, bed unmade. Master bathroom, light on, toilet seat down. He paused over the graffiti scrawled on the wall by the potty.
Here I sit, muscles flexin'.…
In the kitchen he looked in the refrigerator; amazing how much you could tell about people by looking in the fridge.