Thinking about Shakey brought him back to Harpur Griffin. Angel and Louis had gently suggested that some form of more professional surveillance than a crippled homeless man might have been appropriate, but it wasn’t as if Parker had a huge pool of resources on which to draw. Griffin and his buddies had already seen Angel and Louis, and the Fulcis couldn’t have been more conspicuous if they’d dressed up as brightly colored dinosaurs.
Also, Griffin didn’t strike Parker as particularly bright, but the same couldn’t be said of the men who’d been with him at the bar. They’d have been watching for a tail. Already they knew that they had strayed onto Parker’s radar, and he onto theirs. It was a pity he hadn’t anticipated that Griffin might have been enjoying such interesting company: he could have had Angel tag their car so it could be tracked by GPS.
But Griffin was the weak link, and it was in his own power to save himself, if he chose. To do so, he simply had to share what he knew about Jerome Burnel; about the men who Parker was now certain had played some part in Burnel’s disappearance …
And about the Dead King.
There was no moon tonight, but he could still make out the gleam of the water on the marshes. He felt the urge to call Rachel. Sam might be up late, and he could talk with her before she went to bed. He missed her always, even though he could not think of her without being troubled.
He had visited her in Vermont at the end of the previous month. She had chatted unselfconsciously with him over ice cream, and they’d gone to see a movie, Rachel joining them, so that they were almost a family once again. At no point did Sam give any indication that she was other than what she appeared to be: a slightly precocious little girl, happy in her own skin.
But Parker could not help but look at her and recall seeing another Sam, one who had stood in judgment over a dying man, and might even have willed his death; one who had whispered urgently to her father, warning him not to question her or speak of that which he thought he might have seen, for fear of what he might bring down upon both of them. That Sam spoke with the voice of a child, but she was something stranger, something older …
He pushed these concerns away. They would do him no good. He understood now that his purpose on this earth, just like the purpose of any father, was to protect his child.
But this child was special. This child, he believed, could change worlds.
40
It was a miracle that Harpur Griffin even managed to find his car at the end of the night. If he hadn’t been intoxicated when he left his apartment, he certainly was by the time one a.m. came. He’d drifted around some of Portland’s less salubrious drinking establishments until he found a man named Benny Tosca smearing his face with chicken wing sauce at a bar out by Deering Junction.
Tosca had been bounced from one of the state’s more rural police departments for something to do with hookers, parking violations, a rat-infested condo that he owned, and an attempt to drown a candidate for mayor, the details of which remained unclear since the mayoral candidate chose not to press any charges, and the chief of police had given Tosca the option of going quietly and saving the department some embarrassment, or going noisily and almost assuredly ending up in jail, with Benny sensibly taking the former course. He had ended up working as a PI until that career path also terminated in the weeds of illegality, and now he mostly chased down bad debts for a payday loan company that operated out of a former Armenian restaurant off Forest Avenue, and on weekends he occasionally manned the door at strip joints. Benny Tosca disliked everyone, but he reserved a particular hatred for those who had succeeded where he had not, which meant cops and PIs, along with fathers, husbands, dog owners, slum landlords, pimps, and regular human beings.
Not that he had any fondness for ex-cons either, but Griffin smoothed over Tosca’s residual objections to convicted wrongdoers by offering to pay for a couple of rounds, and pretty soon Tosca was giving him a whole lot of information on Charlie Parker, some of which might actually have been true. Even allowing for exaggeration and bile, Tosca’s description of Parker confirmed what Griffin had already suspected: he was principled, dangerous, and more than capable of taking on the Cut.
Tosca left the bar to return to his task of watching out for undesirables at the entrance to whatever show club was paying him that evening, while Griffin wandered off to retrieve his car, once he remembered where he’d left it. He’d parked behind an old brownstone that had been converted to commercial use, and was now probably locked up for the weekend. He struggled to open the driver’s door, and then found himself unable to fit the key in the ignition. Griffin took this as a sign that it might be inadvisable to drive in his present condition. He was unlikely to attract the attention of any passing cops where he was parked, so he put the seat back to grab a nap in order to straighten himself out, and was unconscious within seconds.
Griffin woke when the tape was placed over his mouth. More of it was wound around his head, securing him to the headrest. He tried to struggle, but two nylon straps had been passed over the seat and around his body, both of which were now instantly tightened. The first loop encircled his chest, efficiently restricting the movement of his arms. The second was around his throat.
Jabal appeared before him, staring at him through the windshield. Griffin heard the back door open and close, and then Lucius joined Jabal. Lucius had something in his hand, but in the darkness Griffin couldn’t make out what it was.
Finally, the front passenger door opened, and a third man took the seat beside Griffin, who could just about turn his head to look at him. Griffin recognized the new arrival immediately from the last time he’d seen him, which was when he was lying on the floor of Oakey’s men’s room with a fractured skull.
‘Remember me?’ asked Marius, and Griffin nodded. Even though his nostrils were not constricted, he was struggling to breathe. He needed to take a leak so badly. He knew that, right now, he had bigger troubles, but it was the immediacy of his aching bladder that most concerned him. Had he been a more philosophical man, and a less inebriated one, Griffin might have recognized it as the same impulse that causes a man on the gallows to fixate on a splinter, a hat, a face, anything but the enormity of his own imminent extinction.
‘You owe a debt to me,’ said Marius. Against the gag, Griffin tried to tell him that he’d done all he had been asked to do, that he was sorry, that he’d been dumb and drunk back at Oakey’s, just as he was dumb and drunk now.
‘Hush,’ said Marius. ‘It’ll all be over soon.’
Griffin needed to pee: he needed to pee so badly that he started to cry. He thought of his mother. He tried to keep the image of her in his head. He hadn’t spoken to her in a long time. He wasn’t even sure that she knew he was out of jail.
Marius slipped something over the knuckles of his right hand, then showed it to Griffin, turning his fist in front of his face: it was a knuckleduster, an old wooden one. Then Marius drew his hand back, striking Griffin just below the ear, and Griffin felt his jaw dislocate. He screamed against the gag as Marius climbed from the car, leaving Lucius to open the driver’s door and begin dousing Griffin in gasoline.
Griffin closed his eyes and imagined his mother’s hand stroking his hair as the gasoline poured down his face. The stink of the fumes burned his nostrils and stung his eyes, but he kept them shut even as he heard the striking of a match, followed by a surprised, angry hiss as the rest of the book burst into flame.
Then Harpur Griffin ignited too, burning a path into the next life.
41
Comes the child through the marshes.
Comes the child, comes the child …
Jennifer Parker had a memory of the moment of her dying. She experienced it as an instant of incandescence, of pain turned to light and heat, and so profound was it that it seemed the agony must last for eternity. She was trapped in it, and had always been and would always be, for she could no longer remember how it had begun.
And then—
Nothing.
She thought that she might have slept, except how could one sleep and wake into a dream? The world was changed, and she was changed. She was at one and the same time the ‘was’, the ‘is’, and the ‘might-have-been’ of herself. She looked like a child, and spoke and thought like a child, but behind it all hovered another consciousness experiencing the world in ways she could not express. She was alone, but she was not afraid. She sat on a rock by the shore of a lake and watched the dead stream by to be absorbed into the bloody redness of the sky and the deep, dark blue of the sea. Sometimes they stopped and asked her to join them. Mothers reached out a hand to her, for reminding them of their own lost children. Fathers sought to protect her, no longer having children of their own to shield. But she did not respond, and eventually they continued on their way, and were at last lost to sight. Only to the children did she consent to speak, because they were often frightened and confused, and so she would talk with them, and reassure them that all would be well, even though she did not know if this was true, and in time they too rejoined the great mass, and vanished into the distant sea.
She did not count the days, because they were all the same. She had no concept of the passage of time, because the flow of people remained constant, only the faces changing, and soon she stopped noticing even these differences, and they became as one to her.
She thought of her father and mother, and felt herself as the last point of connection between them, as though they stood at opposite sides of a deep yet narrow chasm, with a stone stack between them, and on that stack she sat, one arm extended toward her father, the other toward her mother. She sensed her father as a cloud of red, and black, and fiery orange, but she could not touch him. Her mother she felt simultaneously as both an absence and a presence: near her father lurked something that had the form of her mother, but was not her mother entire. It was sad and angry, and so much of that sorrow and rage was directed at her father. But the best of her mother, the part that loved and was loved in turn, was elsewhere.
Then – and it might have been after an hour, or a month, or a year – that better part of her mother approached along the shore of the lake. The child watched her come, dressed in her favorite summer dress, but she did not rush to meet her. She remained seated on her rock, her knees drawn up beneath her chin, and felt the warmth of the passing dead.
And after a day, or an hour, or a moment, her mother was beside her, but she too was a being transformed. The child felt her mother’s distraction, an irritation at being called from a higher realm to deal with this girl she had once known, seated on a rock by the paths of the dead.
‘Hello, daughter.’
‘Hello, mother.’
Her mother – no, her Almost-Mother – stood behind her, watching the dead.
‘They are so many,’ said the Almost-Mother.
‘I used to try to count them, but then I gave up. Now I just see lights.’
The Almost-Mother sat down beside her.
‘How long have you been here?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘How long will you stay?’
‘I haven’t decided.’
‘You can come with me, if you choose. You don’t have to remain all alone.’
And the child inhaled her father’s pain, carried on a wind between worlds. It smelled of copper and dead flowers.
‘And if I do, what will become of him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t you care?’
The landscape flickered, and the Almost-Mother and the Mother of Sorrow and Rage briefly became one, and somewhere in their conjoined hearts was a kind of love.
‘I can’t help him.’
‘Can I?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I want to go back.’
‘Then go.’
And she did.
Time passed. She walked in shadows. Once, maybe twice, the Almost-Mother joined her in the world of her father, and brought a child from the confusion of death to follow the water, but mostly she was alone, or drifted with the Mother of Sorrow and Rage, and watched her father from afar. She willed him to see her, and sometimes he almost did. She glimpsed as he came close to falling, felt him nearly touch damnation before drawing back. She—
She was on the rock again, and the dead flowed around her, and the Almost-Mother was seated beside her. But the air was different, and the sky had changed, and when Jennifer raised her hand blue light arced across her fingers.
‘Listen to me,’ said the Almost-Mother. The child heard the fear and awe in her voice, and she listened. ‘That which once slept is awaking.’
Jennifer felt it – a consciousness returning, exploring – and the ranks of the dead shivered. A few paused in uncertainty, and a man and woman drifted away hand in hand to wander among low hills, and the child could not tell what might befall them now that they turned their backs on the distant sea.
‘What must I do?’
‘Hold close. Listen. Listen hard.’
She heard it – the crying of an infant: a girl, a new daughter. For the first time since the Traveling Man had come and cut her from her old life, she wept.
‘He will forget me,’ she said. ‘I want to leave. I want to go with you. He doesn’t need me anymore.’
‘No,’ said the Almost-Mother. ‘He will need you more than ever.’
And in the darkness of the depths between worlds, something stirred.
42
Parker’s phone rang shortly after seven a.m. No good could ever come of a phone call at such a time on a Sunday.
It was Moxie Castin.
‘Turn on Channel Six,’ he said. ‘It looks like someone burned Harpur Griffin alive …’
Parker watched the news while he dressed, then drove over to Forest Avenue, parked a couple of blocks from the scene, and walked as far as the police cordon. Behind it was a mass of cars, both marked and unmarked, and a crime scene van. Over to the right, he saw the medical examiner’s vehicle, and a pair of figures dressed in overalls. Screens had been placed around Griffin’s car to protect it from curious onlookers, of which there were already a few. A breeze blew the stink of the burnt-out car at them. Up close, the police would be able to smell Griffin as well.
His cell phone rang: Castin again.
‘I’ve been asking around,’ he said. ‘There’s no positive ID, not yet, but it’s definitely Griffin’s car, and they found nylon and buckles fused to the victim’s chest and neck. Looks like he was strapped to his seat and left to burn. Do you want me to arrange the sit-down with Portland PD? The sooner we tell them some of what we know, the better.’
‘No, I’ll make the call. If you do it, we’ll look adversarial from the start.’
‘You have friends in the department?’
Parker watched as a female detective appeared from behind the screen. Her face was concealed by a mask, and she was wearing blue plastic gloves. She tore off the gloves and dropped them in a waste bag before removing the mask, but Parker had recognized her the moment he saw her.
Sharon Macy. They’d dated, and it didn’t take, but at least he hadn’t left scorched earth in his wake.
‘Kind of,’ he said.
‘Since it’s you, “kind of” is the best that can be expected under the circumstances. Let me know the time, and I’ll join you.’
‘Sure,’ said Parker.
‘You told me it might go south,’ said Castin. ‘At least you didn’t lie.’
Parker hung up as Angel and Louis appeared. He’d called them from the house.
Louis stared at the screens, and sniffed the air.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that didn’t work out so good.’
Angel and Louis headed over to the Big Sky Bread Company to get coffee and breakfast, leaving Parker to attract Macy’s attention. He skirted the cordon until he came into her line of sight. He didn’t need to wave, or even whistle; she noticed him quickly enough. Anyway, if he’d tried whistling at Sharon Macy he might have ended up eating thro
ugh a straw. He saw her say something to the other detective from the Criminal Investigation Division who was with her – Parker thought his name might be Farrow or Farnham, something like that, and he was enrolled in the Criminal Justice program at one of the local colleges, taking advantage of the department’s fifty percent discount on tuition fees. That meant he was ambitious, and was probably secretly pleased that someone had set Harpur Griffin alight. Homicides were good for those hoping to gain a foothold on the career ladder. Farlow or Frobisher seemed inclined to follow Macy, but she waved a hand at him and he hung back, watching her depart with an abandoned expression, like a dog left behind when its owner has gone into a store.
Macy looked good, but then she always looked good. She was small, dark, and pretty. Parker had missed his chance with her, but he had no regrets. Well, few regrets. Local gossip claimed that she was seeing Cliff Sanders, one of the city’s new tribe of restaurateurs. Sanders had already opened two Portland restaurants in which the size of the portions was inversely proportional to the prices, and was planning to add two more to his roster before the next tourist season kicked in. It confirmed Parker’s suspicion that pretty soon anyone on the state’s average wage would be able to dine out in the greater Portland area only if they stuck to happy hours and buffets.
‘Rubbernecking?’ asked Macy, when she reached where Parker was waiting. ‘It’s not really your style.’