The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove (21 page)

Val and Gabe entered the bar, then stepped out of the doorway and stood by the blinking pinball machine while their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Val wrinkled her nose at the hangover smell of stale beer and cigarettes; Gabe squinted at the sticky floor, looking for signs of interesting wild life.

Morning was the darkest part of a day at the Head of the Slug Saloon. It was so dark that the dingy confines of the bar seemed to suck light in from the street every time someone opened the door, causing the daytime regulars to cringe and hiss as if a touch of sunshine might vaporize them on their stools. Mavis moved behind the bar with a grim, if wobbly, determination, drinking coffee from a gar-goyle-green mug while a Tarryton extra long dangled from her lips, dropping long ashes down the front of her sweater like the smoking turds of tiny ghost poodles. She went about setting up shots of cheap bourbon at the empty curve of the bar, lining them up like soldiers before a firing squad. Every two or three minutes an old man would enter the bar, bent over and wearing baggy pants—leaning on a four-point cane or the last hope of a painless death—and climb onto one of the empty stools to wrap an arthritic claw around a shot glass and raise it to his lips. The shots were nursed, not tossed back, and by the time Mavis had finished her first cup of coffee, the curve of the bar looked like the queue to hell: crooked, wheezing geezers all in a row.

Refreshments while you wait? The Reaper will see you now
.

Occasionally, one of the shots would sit untouched, the stool empty, and Mavis would let an hour pass before sliding the shot down to the next daytime regular and calling Theo to track down her truant. Most often, the ambulance would slide in and out of town as quiet as a vulture riding a thermal, and Mavis would get the news when Theo cracked the door, shook his head, and moved on.

“Hey, cheer up,” Mavis would say. “You got a free drink out of it, didn't you? That stool won't be empty for long.”

There had always been daytime regulars, there always would be. Her new crop started coming in around 9
A.M.
, younger men who bathed and shaved every third day and spent their days around her snooker table, drinking cheap drafts and keeping a laser focus on the green felt lest they get a glimpse of their lives. Where once were wives and jobs, now were dreams of glorious shots and clever strategies. When their dreams and eyesight faded, they filled the stools at the end of the bar with the day-time regulars.

Ironically, the aura of despair that hung over the day-time regulars gave Mavis the closest thing to a thrill she'd felt since she last whacked a cop with her Louisville Slugger. As she pulled the bottle of Old Tennis Shoes from the well and poured it down the bar to refill their shot glasses, a bolt of electric loathing would shoot up her spine and she would scamper back to the other end of the bar and stand there breathless until her stereo pacemakers brought her heartbeat back down from redline. It was like tweaking death's nose, sticking a
KICK ME
sign on the head of a cobra and getting away with it.

Gabe and Val watched this ritual without moving from their spot by the pinball machine. Val was cautious, just waiting for the right moment to move to the bar and
ask if Theo had called. Gabe was, as usual, just being socially awkward.

Mavis retreated to her spot by the coffeepot, presumably out of death's reach, and called down to the couple. “You two want something to drink, or you just window-shopping?”

Gabe led them down the bar. “Two coffees please.” He looked quickly to Val for her approval, but she was fixated on Catfish, who was seated across from Mavis near the end of the bar. Just beyond him was another man, an incredibly gaunt gentleman whose skin was so white it appeared translucent under the haze of Mavis's cigarette smoke.

“Hello, uh, Mr. Fish,” Val said.

Catfish, who was staring at the bottom of a shot glass, looked up and forced a smile through a face betraying hangdog sorrow. “It's Jefferson,” he said. “Catfish is my first name.”

“Sorry,” Val said.

Mavis made a mental note of the new couple. She recognized Gabe, he'd been in with Theophilus Crowe a number of times, but the woman was a new face to her. She put the two coffees in front of Gabe and Val. “Mavis Sand,” Mavis said, but she didn't offer her hand. For years she'd avoided shaking hands because the grip often hurt her arthritis. Now, with her new titanium joints and levers, she had to be careful not to crush the delicate phalanges of her customers.

“I'm sorry,” Gabe said. “Mavis, this is Dr. Valerie Riordan. She has a psychiatric practice here in town.”

Mavis stepped back and Val could see the apparatus in the woman's eye focusing—when the light from over the snooker table caught it right, the eye appeared to glow red.

“Pleased,” Mavis said. “You know Howard Phillips?” Mavis nodded to the gaunt man at the end of the bar.

“H.P.,” Gabe added, nodding to Howard. “Of H.P.'s Cafe.”

Howard Phillips might have been forty, or sixty, or seventy, or he might have died young for all the animation in his face. He wore a black suit out of the nineteenth century, right down to the button shoes, and he was nursing a glass of Guinness Stout, although he didn't look as if he'd had any caloric intake for months.

Val said, “We just came from your restaurant. Lovely place.”

Without changing expression, Howard said, “As a psychiatrist, does it bother you that Jung was a Nazi sympathizer?” He had a flat, upper-class British accent, and Val felt vaguely as if she'd just been spat upon.

“Ray of sunshine, Howard is,” Mavis said. “Looks like death, don't he?”

Howard cleared his throat and said, “Mavis has come to mock death, since most of her mortal parts have been replaced with machinery.”

Mavis leaned into Gabe and Val as if guarding a secret, even as she raised her voice to make sure Howard could hear. “He's been cranky for some ten years now—and drunk most of that time.”

“I had hoped to develop a laudanum habit in the tradition of Byron and Shelley,” Howard said, “but procurement of the substance is, to say the least, difficult.”

“Yeah, that month you drank Nyquil on the rocks didn't help either. He'd drop off at the bar stool sittin' straight up, sit there asleep sometimes for four hours, then wake up and finish his drink. I have to say, though, Howard, you never coughed once.” Again Mavis leaned into the bar. “He pretends to have consumption sometimes.”

“I'm sure the good doctor is not interested in the particulars of my substance abuse, Mavis.”

“Actually,” Gabe said, “we're just waiting for a call from Theo.”

“And I think I'd prefer a Bloody Mary to coffee,” Val said.

“Ya'll ain't goin to talk me into chasin no monster, so don't even try,” Catfish said. “I got the Blues on me and I got some drinkin to do.”

“Don't be a wuss, Catfish,” Mavis said as she mixed Val's cocktail. “Monsters are no big deal. Howard and me got one, huh, Howard?”

“Walk in the proverbial park,” Howard said.

Catfish, Val, and Gabe just stared at Howard, waiting.

Mavis said, “Course your drinking started right after the last one, didn't it?”

“Nonstop,” Howard said.

Theo

It occurred to Theo, as he tried to keep a safe distance from the sheriff's Caddy turning into the ranch, that he had never been trained in the proper procedure for tailing someone. He'd never really followed anyone. Well, there was a sixth-month period in the seventies when he had followed the Grateful Dead around the country but with them, you just followed the trail of tie-dye and didn't have to worry about them killing you if they found out you were behind them. He also realized that he had no idea why, exactly, he was following Burton, except that it seemed more aggressive than curling into a ball and dying of worry.

The black Caddy turned through a cattle gate onto the section of the ranch adjacent the ocean. Theo slowed to a stop under a line of eucalyptus trees beside the ranch road, keeping the sheriff in sight between the tree trunks. The grassy marine terrace that dropped to the shoreline was too open to go onto without Burton noticing. He
would have to let the Caddy pass over the next hill, nearly half a mile off the road, before he dared follow. Theo watched the Caddy bump over the deep ruts in the road, the front wheels throwing up mud as it climbed the hill, and suddenly he regretted not having driven the red four-wheel-drive truck. The rear-wheel-drive Mercedes might not be able to follow much farther.

When the Caddy topped the hill, Theo pulled out and gunned the Mercedes through the cattle gate and into the field. Tall grass thrashed at the underside of the big German car as rocks and holes jarred Theo and threw Skinner around like a toy. Momentum carried them up the side of the first hill. As they approached the crest, Theo let off the gas. The Mercedes settled to a stop. When he applied the gas again, the back wheels of the Mercedes dug into the mud, stuck.

Theo left Skinner and the keys in the car and ran to the top of the hill. He could see more than a mile in every direction, east to some rock outcroppings by the tree line, west to the ocean, and across the marine terrace to the north, which curved around the coastline and out of sight. South, well, he'd come from the south. Nothing there but his cabin and beyond that the crank lab. What he could not see was the black Cadillac.

He checked the battery in his cell phone and both pistols to see that they were loaded, then he set out on foot toward the rocks. It was the only place the Caddy could have gotten out of sight. Burton had to be there.

Twenty minutes later he stood at the base of the rock outcroppings, sweating and trying to catch his breath. At least maybe he'd get some lung capacity back, now that he wasn't smoking pot anymore. He bent over with his hands on his knees and scanned the rocks for any movement. These were no gentle sedimentary rocks formed over centuries of settling seas. These craggy bastards looked like gray teeth that had been thrust up through
the earth's crust by the violent burp of a volcano and the rasping shift of a fault line. Lichen and seagull crap covered their surfaces and here and there a creosote bush or cypress tried to gain a foothold in the cracks.

There was supposed to be a cave around here somewhere, but Theo had never seen it, and he doubted that it was big enough to park a Cadillac in. He stayed low, moving around the edge of the rocks, expecting to see the flash of a black fender at every turn. He drew his service revolver and led around each turn with the barrel of the gun, then changed his strategy. That was like broadcasting a warning. He bent over double before peeking around the next corner, figuring that if Burton heard him or was waiting, he would be aiming high. The vastness of what Theo didn't know about surveillance and combat techniques seemed to be expanding with every step. He just wasn't a sneaky guy.

He skirted a narrow path between two fanglike towers of rock. As he prepared to take a quick peek around the next turn, his foot slipped, sending a pile of rocks skittering down the hill like broken glass. He stopped and held his breath, listening for the sound of a reaction somewhere in the rocks. There was only the crashing surf in the distance and a low whistle of coastal wind. He ventured a quick glance around the rock and before he could pull back, the metallic click of a gun cocking behind his head sounded like icicles being driven into his spine.

Molly

Molly was sorting through the piles of clothing the pilgrims had left by the cave entrance. She had come up with two hundred and fifty-eight dollars in cash, a stack
of Gold Cards, and more than a dozen vials of antidepressants.

A voice in her head said, “You haven't seen this many meds since you were on the lock-down ward. They have a lot of gall calling you crazy.” The narrator was back, and Molly wasn't at all happy about it. For the last few days, her thinking had been incredibly clear.

“Yeah, you're helping a lot with my mental health self-image,” she said to the narrator. “I liked it better when it was just me and Steve.”

None of the pilgrims seemed to notice that Molly was talking to herself. They were all in some trancelike state, stark naked, seated in a semicircle around Steve, who lay in the back of the cave, where it was dark, with his head tucked under his forelegs, flashing sullen colors across his flanks: olive drab, rust, and blue so dark that it appeared more like an afterimage on the back of the eyelid than an actual color.

“Oh yeah, you and Steve,” the narrator said snidely. “There's a healthy couple—the two greatest has-beens of all time. He's sulking, and you're robbing people who are even nuttier than you are. Now you're going to feed them to old lizard lick over there.”

“Am not.”

“Looks like none of these people has had any sun or exercise since high school gym class. Except for that guy who came in Birkenstocks, and he has that Gandhi-tan vegetarian starvation stare that looks like he'd slaughter a whole kindergarten for a Pink's foot-long with sauer-kraut. You feel okay about making them strip and prostrate themselves before the big guy?”

“I thought it would make them go away.”

“The lizard is using you.”

“We care about each other. Now just shut up. I'm trying to think.”

“Oh, like you've been thinking so far.”

Molly shook her head violently to try and dislodge the narrator from her mind. Her hair whipped about her face and shoulders and stood out in a wild mess. The narrator was quiet. Molly pulled a compact out of one of the pilgrims' purses and looked at herself in the mirror. She certainly couldn't have looked much crazier. She braced for the narrator's comment, but it didn't come.

She tried to get in touch with the warm feeling that had been running through her since Steve had appeared, but it just wasn't there. Maybe the pilgrims were using up his energy. Maybe the magic had just passed.