The Bone Triangle (12 page)

“This is silly,” Jacqueline said several minutes later. “I’m going outside.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“It can’t touch me. It won’t even know I’m there.”

“We can’t be sure of that.”

Cartoon ignored us. He continued staring outside.

“What am I supposed to do then? I brought you here to show you my collection.”

“The shoes? I’m suitably impressed.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. But your cats—I think they’re hungry.”

“They’re always hungry,” she complained, then she went to feed them anyway.

“You’ve got weird taste in women, man,” Cartoon said to me quietly as she spooned food into dishes.

“I can’t argue about that.”

“There!” Cartoon said, suddenly leaning forward and tensing. His eyes stared out at the street. “Kill the lights.”

We did so and gathered around the window. We stood quietly in the darkness. The road outside was lit by streetlights. All I saw was a tall, thin man walking along down the center of the road.

“He knows, see? He’s looking behind him. Wrong way, fool.”

I glanced at Cartoon, then back at the man outside. He walked by Jacqueline’s property, until we had to crane our necks to see him.

Then I saw it. A flare of light, like a puff of flame. It came up from below him.

Cartoon sucked in his breath and cursed unintelligibly. A second later, he ducked.

“Splatter comin’!” he said.

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I ducked as well. Something big and wet whirled out of the dark and thumped against the house.

“Sometimes, when they are too big, the Beast can’t take them all in one bite, see.”

“What was that?” Jacqueline demanded.

“Go out and look,” he told her. “It’s safe now. It’s eaten twice in a few hours. Everything should be cool at least until tomorrow night.”

She refused, shaking her head violently. Instead, she walked into the living room and vanished among her shoe collection. I couldn’t blame her. If I could go invisible right now, I would probably do the same.

I walked out the front door and flipped on the porch lights. It didn’t take me long to find what had hit the house. A dark stain ran down the side of the stucco walls into a dead bush out front. I followed the stain down to the ground. There was a head lying there in the flowerbed—or most of one. It had been shorn off, as if hit by an ax. Half the jaw was still visible, and one ear. Teeth glistened with spittle and gore. The eyes stared at nothing.

“I don’t know him,” Cartoon said, standing nearby.

“Neither do I.”

“He was too big, see,” Cartoon said in a hushed tone. “Too tall. The Beast’s mouth is only so big. When it can’t swallow a person in one gulp, sometimes this happens. Parts get cut off and tossed.”

I nodded.

He looked at me. “You’re not screaming or nothing. You are one chill mofo,” he said. He put his hand out to me.

I took his hand and we shook.

“About that fight we had in the street…” I said.

“Forget about it. There wasn’t any fight. We were just meeting up for the first time. It’s only natural.”

I reflected that monsters could make the worst of enemies appreciate one another.

“Okay,” I said. “What do we do about him?”

“I don’t know. Call the cops. I’m moving on. The sun will be up soon, and we’ve only got so many hours before it goes down again.”

“This sort of thing happens only at night?”

“Usually. The most important thing is it
just
happened. That means we have some time. I’m going to use it.”

He left, and I went inside to talk to Jacqueline.

“That was totally awful,” she said. “I don’t really like your friend. He doesn’t think he can come in here whenever he wants, does he?”

“I think he’s just happy to be alive. You should be all right.”

She looked upset. “I can’t sleep here now. Not after this.”

“Okay. We can go back to my motel. I’ll rent it for another night and we can sleep in.”

She eyed me warily. “There’s only one bed.”

“Do you want to show me your shoe collection now? Or did you bring me here for something else?”

“My buzz is gone, and there’s a chunk of dead guy in my front yard. I’d feel like an idiot going on about shoes at this point. You have to tell me what the hell is going on.”

I filled her in as best I could, but I really didn’t know much yet. I told her about the Gray Men I’d battled with some months ago, and how they’d come out of rips in space to kill and kidnap people. She was alarmed by this story, as anyone would be.

“You think this is a similar thing? You think this is some kind of invasion?”

“I don’t really know.”

“I’ve got to get out of the Triangle,” she said.

“You could go home.”

“I’m not living with my mom again. Do you have a place?”

I told her about my house in Henderson. I said it was big, but I didn’t describe it as a mansion. I’d learned over
time that it was best to let people get their own impression of it when they arrived. It had a more positive impact that way, and seemed less like I was bragging.

“Sounds like you have some space out there. Maybe room enough for a lot of shoes—and some cats? It would only be temporary, until I can find another place.”

Jacqueline gave me a sweet smile. I bet that had worked for her all her life. Unfortunately, it worked on me as well.

It was dawn when we left the house. We went out the back door, loaded with some of Jacqueline’s sacred stuff. This amounted to two unhappy cats in a single carrying case and a lumpy duffel bag. I suspected it contained her clothing and her favorite stolen shoes.

As we stepped outside we looked in every direction furtively, like two escapees on the run. We supposedly didn’t have anything to fear, at least not according to Cartoon, but after what we’d witnessed the night before, it was hard to feel secure. Besides, my instincts were tingling—and not in a good way.

The first indication something was wrong was a rattle at the gate in the side yard. I was jumpy, so I pulled Jacqueline up against the stucco wall of her house and dug in my pocket for my .32.

“What’s wrong?” she asked in a whisper. Her cat carrier thumped and scraped against the wall.

I put my finger to my lips and looked around the corner with one eye. There was someone there, dressed in a navy blue blazer and slacks. He had the look of a middle-aged salesman with a paunchy gut. He had a pistol in his hand that looked to me like a Beretta .40. It was a standard weapon for police officers.

All thoughts of this guy being a cop evaporated, however, when he saw me peeking at him and he raised the gun. He took several popping shots at me. Chunks of stucco flew, blowing sand-colored chips off the corner of the house and showing the gray underneath.

He emptied his gun one shot at a time, advancing. After ducking, I put my gun around the corner and returned fire. I popped off two shots, then three more. My aim was better than his. I heard him fall in the gravel-filled side yard. He didn’t speak or cry out.

I turned to check on Jacqueline, but she was gone. I suspected she was standing nearby or had fled into the house. I wasn’t sure which, but she was probably invisible anyway, and I figured she could take care of herself for now.

I chanced a look around the corner. The guy had sagged down onto his belly but was trying to crawl toward his gun, which he’d dropped. His lips worked, and his eyes bulged. He left a dark streak on the rocks as he crawled over them.

“Give it up, man,” I said, moving forward quickly and kicking his Beretta out of reach.

He looked up at me with vacant blue eyes, but it was as if he didn’t really see me at all. Then he began crawling after his weapon again. I put a foot on his wrist to stop him and aimed the gun at him.

“You are the worst assassin I’ve met up with yet,” I told him. “Let me call you an ambulance. You might pull through.”

He tried to bite my ankle. I yanked my foot up, but he caught the heel and sank his teeth into my Nikes. I cursed and struggled. I’d expected him to maybe pull another weapon—but not to bite.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked a familiar voice.

I turned, but of course Jacqueline was nowhere to be seen. “Call an ambulance,” I said.

I heard her open her phone and tap at the screen. Her voice was shaky as she talked to the emergency operator and phoned in her own address.

I turned back to watch the crawling man. “I’ve seen something like this before,” I said.

On a hunch, I dug out the talisman I kept under my shirt. My talisman was the severed finger of a Gray Man I kept in a small vial. I lifted the thong from around my neck and placed it on the crawling businessman’s back.

The effect was immediate and horrible. He howled and rasped. He shivered in agony, which I suspected he hadn’t felt up until that moment. Whatever power had gripped his mind had been broken. Now, he was just a guy with several bullets in him. He forgot all about trying to crawl after his gun. Instead, he turned terrified eyes up toward me.

“I’m hurt,” the assassin said, as if he’d just made a surprising discovery.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry about that. You tried to kill me.”

“I did? Why?”

“I was going to ask you that question. What’s your name?”

“William.”

“What’s the last thing you remember, William?”

“I was—I was going to visit my uncle. He’s been sick.”

“At the Sunset Sanatorium?” I said, catching on. Sunset was the place where this insanity had begun for me. I’d been caught there, like this man. I’d been sent out on a mission
by the Community member who ran the place, the lovely Dr. Meng. She was like a spider, and seeing this poor victim at my feet made me wish again that I’d killed her when I’d had the chance.

“Yeah, that’s the place,” he wheezed. He had a faraway look in his eye, as if he couldn’t quite believe he was in this situation.

“William? How did you find me?” I asked. “Did the doctor give you some way to track me?”

“I—I don’t know,” he said. At this point, the conversation triggered a coughing fit. The poor guy shook and gasped. Blood bubbled. I winced, feeling bad. This man had tried to kill me, but he hadn’t done it of his own free will. If I’d realized that, I would have run instead of shooting him.

“My uncle’s crazy, they told me,” he said. He rolled onto his back and looked up at the sky. “Not just Alzheimer’s—real crazy. I must have it, too.”

“No, you don’t,” I assured him. “Sunset is a bad place. You need to get your uncle out of there. Remember that, William.”

I took back my talisman and hung it around my neck. I watched his face, but the mental control Meng had over him seemed to be broken. He was free of her influence, at least for now. I walked toward the front, kicking open the gate and nudging the pistol farther from the dying assassin in the side yard.

“Should we take his gun?” whispered a voice.

I startled. I hadn’t realized Jacqueline was right behind me.

“No. His prints are on it, and he fired it. This might all end with my butt in a court someday, and it’s best there is some evidence supporting my side of the story.”

I heard sirens then, and reached toward her voice. “Take my hand, please.”

She did, and my vision dimmed. I knew I’d just gone invisible.

“Where’d you go?” croaked the man on the gravel.

“Hang on for the ambulance. Stay down and wait for them. You’ll be okay.”

“I can’t see you. Tell me what’s happening.”

“We have to wait until help comes,” Jacqueline told me.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. I didn’t like waiting, but she was right. We couldn’t leave this poor guy dying alone.

It felt a little weird, standing there near a man who’d tried to kill me, keeping him alive. It was even stranger that we were invisible, holding hands and lugging a cat carrier. The whole thing was bizarre, and sad.

More than remorse, I felt anger. Meng was behind all this. She’d nearly gotten me killed on numerous occasions, and now she’d resorted to sending amateur assassins after me. We talked to him, keeping him calm and breathing until cop cars encircled the place. After that, we slipped away.

As we left, I nearly brushed against officers who’d drawn their guns. They seemed to sense our passing and looked around in confusion. One cop waved at his head, as if chasing off invisible flies.

I heard the businessman named William talking to the cops. He said he’d shot at invisible people, and they’d shot back. I wondered if he was covering for me, or simply in shock. I suspected the latter.

I led the way out onto the sidewalk, but Jacqueline tugged at my hand. I stopped and let her whisper in my ear.

“Stay on the street,” she said. “It’s harder to see our shadows on asphalt. Besides, people will walk right into you on the sidewalk.”

There was clearly wisdom in her words, so I let her lead. We did things her way and hurried out of the neighborhood.
I counted three cop cars, and there had to be a couple more out in the alley. The ambulance came last and rushed in when the police gave them the all clear. I put away my weapon and took a bag from Jacqueline, which allowed us to move faster. She was overloaded. The bag banged into the backs of my legs, and I had to suppress the urge to curse. If the girl was going to live a life of crime, I figured she could at least learn to pack light.