Valknut: The Binding (15 page)

Mollified, Bones’s grumbling faltered. He
dropped down on the other end of Lennie’s log and nearly jolted her
from her seat. Crossing his arms over his belly, he stared at her
as if she were a vegetable too rotten to add to his stew. Hotshot
sat on a cement block near the fire and draped the red blanket over
his shoulders. He sat motionless, staring at his feet.

“I think they’re ready to hear your story,”
Junkyard said. Soo nodded and settled cross-legged on the ground
next to the guitar.

“Oh. Right.” Lennie dug the photograph from
her pocket. Her throat tightened a little, as it always did when
she looked at the photo. Her father grinned toothily, holding that
little walleye out like it was the biggest fish in the world. The
picture had been taken just one month before he left.

She passed the photo to Soo and folded her
arms to hide her tattooed hand. It might be best to concentrate on
her missing father and leave out the more…fantastic events.

“My father disappeared ten years ago,” she
began, and she told them the barest facts. They didn’t need to know
about the whiskey her mother added to her morning coffee and the
half-pint of gin that finished her day, or the repo man and the
unpaid medical bills. They certainly didn’t need to know about the
hours Lennie had spent in front of her bedroom mirror, thinking
that, if she had been a boy, had straighter teeth, been taller, or
maybe cleaned her room more often, her father would have
stayed.

No, the facts were all they needed. As she
talked, she watched her audience for signs of recognition. Soo
studied the picture and listened with interest and sympathy. Bones
was harder to read. His beard covered his face like a mask, from
his throat almost to his eyes. His only response to the photo was a
shrug, though some of the hostility faded from his eyes.

Hotshot’s reaction was different. He almost
dropped the picture after barely a glance. For the first time, he
lifted his head and looked directly into Lennie’s face. Fear
screamed from his eyes. Whatever he knew couldn’t be good.

“So here I am,” Lennie concluded. “I know
it’s an old picture, but I was hoping someone would recognize him
and tell me where he might be.” She looked directly at Hotshot, but
he had gone back to staring at his feet.

“Sorry, honey,” Soo said. “Ah’d like to help,
but cain’t say Ah recognize your daddy. Bones and Hotshot, though,
they been traveling longer and harder’n me. What about it,
boys?”

“Can’t say I’ve seen him,” Bones said. “Can’t
say I haven’t, either. Nice fish, though. You take the fillets and
cook them up in tinfoil with some butter, fresh lemon, salt, maybe
some basil or marjoram, and you got a tasty dinner. Or fish stew. I
made a fish stew once that—”

Junkyard nudged him with his foot and the big
man broke off, muttering to himself. Lennie never took her eyes off
Hotshot. Tension had drawn his shoulders high, and he kept
swallowing as though he had a fish bone stuck in his throat.

“What about you?” she said softly.

He didn’t answer right away. Lennie waited,
driving her nails into her palms to keep from yelling at him.
Blinking rapidly, he glanced up without meeting her eyes. “Can’t
say I’ve ever seen him before, either.”

“Oh, come on!” Lennie shot to her feet.
Hotshot cringed under his blanket, looking miserable and more
frightened than before, but she didn’t care. “You know something.
Something bad. You’ve got to tell me—it’s my father!”

Hotshot only hunched lower, as if he were
trying to hide behind the fire. “Don’t know nothin’.”

His lips clamped together as though he
planned never to open his mouth again. Lennie took a step toward
him, fists clenched. She opened her mouth, ready to start yelling.
Junkyard put up a hand to stop her. “Mood you’re in, you’ll just
scare him more.”

He squatted next to Hotshot. “It’s okay, Bob.
Nothing can hurt you, here.”

The bald man snorted.
“Lot you know. I’m not sticking my neck out to tell you
anything.”

He pivoted on his seat, putting his back to
Junkyard. His reaction hit Lennie like ice water. She forgot her
anger and watched numbly while Junkyard rested a hand on Hotshot’s
shoulder.

“Come on, Bob. Help the lady out. Tell her
what you know.”

Hotshot gave a short shake of his head and
rose from the cement block. He shuffled across the jungle and
crawled back into his box, pulling the cardboard flap closed behind
him.

Bones whistled low. “Check his seat for a
puddle, Junkyard. I think Hotshot peed his pants.”

Junkyard ignored him and spoke to Lennie in a
low voice. “I’d sure as hell like to know what your father was
into, to get a reaction like that.”

“Me, too.” Lennie rubbed the tattoo
surreptitiously. She laughed bitterly. “I suppose we’ll try to talk
with Hotshot later—right after we talk to Bill.”

“Maybe so. There’s always the poetry reading.
There’ll be a lot more ’bos there, tonight. If you can get any of
’em to talk.”

***

Soo watched Lennie and Junkyard cross the
parking lot, hands on her hips, her concern apparent in the s-shape
of her brows. When they turned a corner, she strode back to her
truck to unload supplies.

Bones O’Riley hoisted himself up from the log
and leaned over the pot to check the stew. He dipped a finger and
stuck it in his mouth. His face twisted in disgust.

“Shit soup.”

He pulled a box from his breast pocket,
extracted a large pinch of dried leaves and crumbled them into the
pot. He gave the stew a stir and leaned over the steam for a sniff.
Shrugging, he dumped in the remaining contents of the box.

“Shit soup with flavor.”

Nodding in grim satisfaction, he stumped back
to the wooden crate and crawled inside.

Flies buzzed around the empty jungle. A
breeze sent a napkin tumbling into the fire for a brief, bright
ending. Nothing else moved.

Then there was a scrape of denim across
pavement and a grunt. The Ragman squeezed out of the space between
battered garbage cans. He peered around. If anyone was looking,
they might have puzzled over the yellow glint in his eyes. But no
one was looking. He sneered and strutted away from the jungle, a
paint-stained bandana trailing from his back pocket. When he
reached empty pavement, he hesitated, glanced around, and
disappeared into shadow.

Fenrir waited in the smoky darkness. The
hollow old man stood behind him, ignored. Fenrir had no need to
hear the Ragman’s report. He had watched One-Eye’s pawn through the
Ragman’s eyes and listened to her story with the Ragman’s ears.

A cruel grin twisted the gangbanger’s mouth.
“Do you want me to kill her?”

Fenrir considered. It might be prudent.
Unlike her father, a nervous, weak-willed man who had fallen to
Fenrir ten years before, the daughter had proven herself
surprisingly resistant to his control. She could pose a substantial
nuisance. And he would not need to touch the Ragman’s mind to push
his hatred of the woman into murder.

But the Ragman was not a fit executioner for
this subject. He would kill her by ordinary means. A waste. It
would be more useful for her to be bound in the remnants of
Fenrir’s own bindings, with a bronze blade thrust through her
palate, as One-Eye had done to him millennia before. It appealed to
Fenrir to use One-Eye’s own tool as another gauntlet thrown at his
feet. Would the coward face him then, when the last of his
champions was dead?

But Fenrir felt an odd, almost instinctive
reluctance to order her execution. She could become dangerous, yes,
but the depth of her emotions made her both valuable and
vulnerable. Surely he could make better use of her alive.

“No,” he replied. “Do not harm her.”

“But she—”

Fenrir growled and felt the Wolf rise into
his eyes. “I said 
no
.”

The Ragman flinched and fell silent. His
expression remained hard and uncaring, but Fenrir sensed the fear
crawling across the surface of the gangbanger’s mind. Satisfied,
Fenrir forced the Wolf to recede.

“Find Monte.” The growl in Fenrir’s voice was
as smooth as a purr. “Tell him to meet me at the warehouse at seven
o’clock tonight. I have a job for him.”

Then, seeing through the Ragman’s eyes,
Fenrir watched himself vanish. His tailored suit and pressed shirt
collapsed, disappearing before they hit the pavement. He felt the
Ragman’s astonishment, for a falcon sat on the ground where Fenrir
had been. It fixed the Ragman with yellow eyes and opened its
hooked beak. Then it stretched its wings and took flight.

The shadow dissipated with Fenrir’s
departure.

“What the fuck?” The Ragman had seen a lot,
working for El Lobo, but this shit was the craziest, yet. Feeling
exposed and uneasy, he eyed the hollow man, whose face shone with
snot from nose to chin. All the stupid burro did was stare off into
space. His brain had done a ghost long before the Ragman had ever
seen him. In some ways, the sight of him put more fear into the
gangbanger than El Lobo himself.

“What the hell you do to make El Lobo hate
you so bad?”

The hollow man only blinked. One eyelid
stuck, opening a few seconds after the other.

“
Chingao
!” The Ragman shuddered.
“
Vato loco
.”

He set off at a fast walk to do as Fenrir
ordered. He had no wish to earn himself the same fate.

A moment later, the hollow man’s limbs came
to a stilted, haphazard form of life. Face slack, eyes unfocused,
he shuffled after the Ragman, moving as if powered by cogs and
levers.

Chapter 9

Briggs hung up the phone. Adrenaline slogged
through his sleepy veins like an infusion of amphetamine. He had a
name.

The Des Moines police had fumed a clean
partial off the knife that killed Peter Olson. They’d found a match
on AFIS. No guarantee that it belonged to the killer, but at least
he had a name: James Tuttle. After almost a year of doing little
but counting bodies, it was a start.

James Tuttle. The name nagged at Briggs’s
memory, but he couldn’t place it without more information. He
checked his e-mail impatiently. Nothing yet. He thumped the screen,
willing a message to appear. The police were supposed to send him
whatever NCIC had on the guy. He hated being at the mercy of other
people’s priorities, but his caboose office wasn’t considered
secure enough to house its own NCIC terminal. He’d have to
wait.

He took a swig of coffee and reached for the
nearest stack of files, thinking he might as well catch up on some
paperwork. His cell phone rang before he could get started.

“Briggs here.”

“This case has just gotten a whole lot
weirder.”

“Parker?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” The FBI agent sounded
agitated. “I checked into that Butterfly Killer case you told me
about. It’s real, all right. Unsolved, too. The killer didn’t leave
any more evidence back in ‘42 than the Hobo Spider gives us
now.”

“Damn.” As if this case wasn’t slippery
enough. “It can’t be the same guy. An old geezer might have been
able to catch one person by surprise, but we’ve got fourteen
victims, here. Some of them are young guys.”

“Yeah, well that’s not all. That article you
found didn’t tell you everything. Guess what kind of knife the
Butterfly Killer used.”

Briggs blinked away images of a black handle
protruding from Peter Olson’s bloody face. He grimaced. “You gonna
make me say it?”

“Black-handled, bronze blade, just like our
friendly, neighborhood Hobo Spider. I put in a request for evidence
on the Butterfly Killer case. If they kept any of that cord around,
I’ll get it tested.”

Something thumped on the roof of the caboose.
Briggs started and looked at the ceiling. Idiot squirrels. “What if
it comes out the same? It’s going to be hell cross-referencing our
case against events that happened seventy years ago.”

“Yeah, I might wish you’d never made the
connection, but it’s not like we have so many leads.”

“There’s that. But we do have one other. AFIS
came back with a name on that latent.”

Whatever had landed on the roof seemed to be
hopping around, scratching at the metal. It left the roof with a
scrape and something black fluttered past the window. A bird, then.
A big one. He returned his gaze to the computer screen. An e-mail
had arrived from the DMPD. “I’m about to check his criminal
records. I’ll let you know where they take me.”

“Somewhere better than this, I hope.”

“No shit.”

Briggs hung up and leaned close to the
screen. “Okay, Mr. Tuttle—let’s see what kind of history you
have.”

Tuttle was in the system, but barely. No
outstanding warrants, no convictions, not even a parking ticket.
But his sister had reported him missing and mentally handicapped
two days ago.

And there was a photograph.

Briggs sat back and whistled. He did know the
guy. He called himself “Jungle Jim.” A gentle fellow, though a bit
goofy and definitely on the slow side. The expression “toys in the
attic” might have been invented just for him. But Briggs had liked
him. No way in hell could he be the killer. It just didn’t fit. And
yet…

This was the second time Jungle Jim Tuttle
had been at the crime scene of a Hobo Spider murder. What were the
odds of that, if he wasn’t connected in some way?

Briggs remembered the day he had met Jungle
Jim. It was early last fall. Summer had made a comeback, and the
sun beat down on the Des Moines yards with enough heat to grill a
hotdog on a rail. A foreman had called Briggs at the end of a long
shift. He had found a body. From the sound of it, another victim of
the Hobo Spider. Briggs was the first lawman on scene.

A slaughterhouse smell met him before he
reached the boxcar. He gagged and held his handkerchief over his
mouth and nose after he climbed on board. He stayed just inside the
door and studied the scene, taking care not to move his feet or
touch anything.