Walkers (44 page)

‘You know that’s impossible.’

Salvador folded his arms tightly
across his chest and gave Henry and Gil a brief, resigned smile. ‘John Belli’s
in there, too. We’re doing a complete forensic examination, and trying to come
up with some kind of explanation for this creature’s appearance that will
satisfy the media and the public – and, most of all,
us.’

‘Salvador, I beg you to kill that
creature before nightfall. Do you hear me? I’m begging you. Otherwise, Andrea
will certainly die.’

‘He’s telling the truth,
lieutenant,’ Gil added.

Salvador said, ‘I believe you. Can
you understand that? I
believe you.
I
don’t know why, but I do. But there’s nothing I can do without substantive
evidence. My hands are tied.’

Henry ran his hand through his hair.
‘Is that your last word?’

‘I’m sorry, yes, that’s my last
word. I don’t have any alternative.’

‘All right,’ said Henry, and reached
out for Gil’s arm. ‘Let’s go, Gil. We have other fish to fry.’

Salvador stood watching them as they
left, his arms still folded. ‘I’m sorry, you know?’ he called after them, as
they reached the revolving doors.

Henry nodded, without answering, and
the two of them went back out into the sunlight.

‘What are we going to do now?’ asked
Gil.

‘For the moment, nothing. At least,
not as far as
this
Devil is
concerned.’ He checked his watch. ‘But I want to come back here before they
close at six o’clock. We’re going to destroy this creature tonight, you and I,
and that’s all there is to it.’

‘You’re going to break in to the
laboratory?’

‘If I have to.’

‘Okay, then,’ said Gil. ‘I’m with
you. I may be nuts, but I’m with you.’

‘Let’s drive down to Prospect
Street,’ said Henry. ‘You know that little shell-store down by the cove? I want
to talk to somebody down there.’ They climbed back into the Mustang without
opening the doors, and Gil swerved out of the parking-lot and back toward
Torrey Pines Road. The morning was clear and two students were flying Japanese
fighting-kites. The kites’ tails swirled and corkscrewed in the warm breezy
air; indecipherable messages of oriental peace and contentment.

Henry found the man he was looking
for outside the La Jolla Shellerie, hanging a row of shiny pink conch shells
from the store’s front awning. A carousel of postcards whirled in the wind,
making a clattering noise. The man was thin and rangy, with a bulbous nose and
close-set eyes, and a neck that had as many folds as a matelot’s concertina. He
wore a striped fisherman’s tee-shirt and a shapeless yachting cap.

‘Good morning, Laurence,’ said
“Henry, climbing out of the Mustang.

.’Good morning, Henry,’ said
Laurence, as if Henry visited him every single morning.

He went on twisting wires around his
conch shells.

‘How’s business?’ Henry asked him.
‘So-so,’ replied Laurence. ‘Had a coach-party of Episcopalian ministers here
Thursday, so I sold out of sand-dollars.’ Sand-dollars were white chalky shells
which were supposed to be marked with symbols representing the Apostles and the
life of Christ.

‘Laurence,’ said Henry, ‘I was
thinking
this morning, and I remembered
something you told me about digging up clams.’

Laurence narrowed his eyes and
stared at Henry with some caution. ‘Clams?’ he asked, tying the last of his
conchs, and propping his hands on his bony hips.

‘You said that you could detect
clams under the sand by tapping the beach in a certain way.’

‘That’s right. Clam-drumming, I call
it. But it don’t just apply to clams. Any creature under the sand you can
detect the same way. Clams, crabs, mussels, lugworms, you name it.’ Henry said,
‘How much would you charge me for a day’s detecting?’

Laurence shrugged. ‘Hundred, maybe,
hundred’n fifty.’

‘All right, then,’ said Henry. ‘How
about today?’

‘
Today?
What in hell are you looking for today?’

‘Will you help me?’

Laurence looked at Henry closely,
and then at Gil, and then back again at Henry.

‘What are you trying to dig up,
Henry? Tell me that.’

‘I’ll show you when we dig it up,
Laurence. Otherwise, you won’t believe me.’

‘You’re not looking for buried
treasure? I only do living creatures. You need a metal-detector for buried
treasure.’

Henry said, ‘We’re looking for
living creatures, Laurence. Hundred and fifty. And I’ll throw in two bottles of
Chivas Regal.’

Laurence took a long, deep,
thoughtful breath, and then at last he nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let me go get
my stuff. Janie can take care of the store for today. She always makes more
money than I do, anyway. She’s hard bit. She won’t never give no tender-hearted
discounts to small kids with not enough pennies for a seahorse.’

Laurence collected a heavy shapeless
kitbag from somewhere at the back of the store, as well as a six-pack of
Michelob with one can already missing, and a thin salami sausage. ‘Rations,’ he
remarked, laconically. He sprawled himself out on the Mustang’s rear seats as
Gil turned out of Prospect Street and back towards Del Mar.

‘You and me haven’t been fishing in
a while,’ Laurence remarked to Henry, as they roared down the long hill towards
the beach.

‘Been busy,’ said Henry.

Laurence made a face. He knew what
Henry meant by ‘busy’. ‘Drunk’, that’s what he meant by ‘busy’. With his hand
keeping his nautical hat on, Laurence leaned forward and said, ‘Fishing in a
small boat in a good strong surf is the world’s A-number one cure for a
hangover.’

They reached the beach where they
had found Sylvia Stoner’s body, and parked. It had been almost a week now, and
no further eels had been discovered in the ocean, so the police barriers had
been taken away. There were one or two joggers around, and a small gang of
dedicated surfers, but as yet it was too early for the mother-and-baby crowd,
and very much too early for the school lunch break brigade.

They walked across the beach leaving
imprints on its immaculately smooth surface.

The tide was well out, and still
retreating. The clouds were reflected in the wet sand, like fragments of
jigsaw.

‘It would help to know what kind of
a creature you’re looking for,’ said Laurence. ‘Is it big, or small? A
shellfish, or a worm?’

Henry shielded his eyes against the
wind and the sun and looked around the beach, trying to remember where it was
that the writhing eels had buried themselves.

‘It’s big,’ he said. ‘More like a
kind of a lizard, I guess you could say.’

Laurence wrinkled up his nose.
‘You’re wasting your time, in that case. Ain’t no lizards on these beaches.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ said Gil.

‘Lizards?’
Laurence
demanded. ‘You’re putting me on.’

Henry pointed to the sand in front
of him, and said, ‘Try rousting them out here.’

Laurence lifted his kitbag off his
shoulder. ‘If you say so. You’re paying the money.

But I can promise you one thing. If
it’s lizards you’re after, you’re going to be real disappointed. I never did
see no lizards on these beaches, not once in forty years.’

He hunkered down on the sand, and
began drumming on the beach with the palms of his hands. Gil looked across at
Henry and raised one questioning eyebrow, but Henry gave him a look which
meant, this may seem ridiculous, but bide your time, and watch.

‘Rousted some clams there already,’
remarked Laurence, nodding towards a slight patterned disturbance in the
surface of the sand. ‘See, what this drumming does is simulate the sound of the
sea coming in, and the clams get themselves all excited and prepare to come up.
Least, that’s the theory. Some people say that it don’t do nothing but irritate
them, like a snake-charmer tapping his foot irritates the snake, and makes it
come out of the basket. Snakes is stone-deaf, same as clams. Never saw a clam
with ears, anyhow.’

He kept up this long bantering
commentary as he moved around in a wide semi-circle, crabwise, his left leg
leading the way, his hands pattering on the sand in a light, insistent rhythm.

‘Not everybody can do this. It’s
what you call an acquired skill. You remember Gene Krupa, the famous drummer?
Well, he came down to San Diego once, and he wanted to know how to do it, but
he couldn’t work up that rhythm for anything.’

Gil suddenly touched Henry’s arm.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Over there.’

Only twenty feet away, right in the
centre of the sloping beach, the sand was beginning to shiver and crack.
Whatever was causing the vibration, it was at least three feet long, maybe
longer, and it was moving deep beneath the sand with a restless, spasmodic
jerking.

Laurence peered at the movement, and
said, ‘Now that’s something. I never saw nothing like that before.’

He walked over to the patch of
disturbed sand, and prodded at it with the toe of his sneaker. ‘Now that’s
really something.’

Out of his kitbag, he took a small
metal shovel, which he usually used for digging up clams. He began quickly and
methodically to dig a narrow, deep trench.

‘What did you say this was? Some
kind of lizard? It’s sure buried itself way down deep.’

Henry and Gil waited by the side of
Laurence’s excavation, both of them shivering slightly in the sea-breeze. Their
bodies may have been sleeping peacefully during their exploits in North Africa
last night, but their minds were tired; and Gil would have done anything to go
back to his own bed and sack out for the rest of the afternoon.

But he was determined to stay by
Henry. Between them, they were the core of the Night Warriors, and if they
didn’t hold together, then they might as well give up their fight against
Yaomauitl, and his buried offspring.

After twenty minutes, Laurence
suddenly said, ‘I got something. There’s something down here all right.’

‘Laurence, be careful,’ warned
Henry.

‘Feels like something
knobby,’
said Laurence. ‘That’s right,
Jesus, you’re right. It’s like the back of some kind of a lizard or something.’

He swung himself out of the hole in
the sand and then stared back down inside it.

‘Jesus, you see that? Well, you
can’t see too much of it, but that mother’s
big.
What is it, Henry? Jesus, that gave me a scare, when I realised the size of
it.’

Henry said, diffidently, ‘It’s a
kind of a lizard, that’s all. Now, do you want to fill that hole in again? I
just wanted to make sure that it was down there.’

Gil stared at Henry in surprise, but
Henry lifted his hand to indicate that he knew what he was doing. Laurence
sniffed, and wiped his nose with the back of his arm, and said, ‘You want to
fill it in again? What in hell for? That must be some kind of rarity, that
lizard. Must be worth something. They pay good money for specimens at Scripps,
and at the San Diego Zoo, too.’

‘Laurence,’ Henry insisted, ‘I want
you to bury it.’

‘Could be a thousand dollars in a
rare specimen like that,’ Laurence protested.

‘Bury it,’
Henry
repeated. Laurence huffed, but picked up his shovel and reluctantly obeyed.

Gil took Henry aside. ‘Why are we
covering it up again? I thought you wanted to dig them up and kill them.’

Henry nodded. ‘I
do
want to kill them, but I’ve had a
better idea than digging them all up. You stay here; I’m going to see a friend
of mine in the chemistry department at the University. You don’t mind if I
borrow your Mustang, do you?’

Gil looked doubtful, but Henry said,
‘Have you seen me take one single drink this morning?’

‘No, I guess not,’ said Gil, and
handed him the keys.

‘Keep an eye on our friend Laurence
here,’ Henry told him. ‘As soon as he’s finished covering this Devil up, get him
to drum up some more. Cover the whole beach as far as the cliffs. When you find
one of the Devils, mark it with stones or something. I’ll be back well before
the tide starts coming in again. You should be able to locate at least ten.
That’s about as many as I can remember, and it tallies with what Susan said
about the creatures in her dream.’

Henry jogged off up the beach. Gil
thrust his hands into his pockets and turned back to Laurence.

‘You have any idea what the hell
these critchers are?’ asked Laurence.

‘Search me,’ said Gil. ‘I’m only the
chauffeur.’

‘Strange guy, that Henry Watkins,’
Laurence observed. ‘Good fishing partner, because he fishes and drinks and
keeps his mouth shut. Last thing I like is a gabby fishing partner. But very
brainy. I mean, at least as brainy as somebody like Einstein, if you ask me. I
reckon if he didn’t drink, he could’ve been famous. Could have won a Nobel
prize, or something like that.’

He finished filling up the
excavation, dropped his shovel on to the sand, and went across to his kitbag to
twist out a can of beer. He made no attempt to offer one to Gil.