Dragon Tears

  messier relationship. He hated messiness. Often it was wise to avoid familiarity in a professional association, keep a comfortable distance, a buffer zone—especially when you were both carrying firearms.

  In the distance, thunder rolled.

  A cool draft slipped across the jagged edges of the big broken window and all the way to the back of the restaurant. Discarded paper napkins fluttered on the floor.

  The prospect of rain pleased Harry. The world needed to be cleansed, freshened.

  Connie said, “You going to check in for a mind massage?”

  Following a shooting, they were encouraged to take a few sessions of counseling.

  “No,” Harry said. “I’m fine.”

  “Why don’t you knock off, go home?”

  “Can’t leave you with everything.”

  “I can handle it here.”

  “What about all the paperwork?”

  “I can do that, too.”

  “Yeah, but your reports are always full of typos.”

  She shook her head. “Your clock’s wound too tight, Harry.”

  “It’s all computers, but you don’t even bother to run the spell-check program.”

  “I just had grenades thrown at me. Fuck spell-check.”

  He nodded and got up from the table. “I’ll go back to the office and start writing up the report.”

  Accompanied by another long, low rumble of thunder, a couple of morgue attendants in white jackets approached the dead woman. Under the supervision of an assistant coroner, they prepared to remove the victim from the scene.

  Connie handed her notebook to Harry. For his report, he would need some of the facts she had collected.

  “See you later,” she said.

  “Later.”

  One of the attendants unfolded an opaque body bag. It had been doubled so tightly upon itself that the layers of plastic separated with a sticky, crackling, unpleasantly organic noise.

  Harry was surprised by a wave of nausea.

  The dead woman had been facedown with her head turned away from him. He had heard another detective say that she had been shot in the chest and face. He didn’t want to see her when they rolled her over to put her into the bag.

  Quelling his nausea with an effort of will, he turned away and headed for the front door.

  Connie said, “Harry?”

  Reluctantly he looked back.

  She said, “Thanks.”

  “You, too.”

  That was probably the only reference they would ever make to the fact that their survival had depended on being a good team.

  He continued toward the front door, dreading the crowd of onlookers.

  From behind him came a wet, suction-breaking sound as they lifted the woman out of the congealing blood that half glued her to the floor.

  Sometimes he could not remember why he had become a cop. It seemed not a career choice but an act of madness.

  He wondered what he might have become if he had never entered police work, but as always his mind blanked on that one. Perhaps there was such a thing as destiny, a power infinitely greater than the force which drove the earth around the sun and kept the planets in alignment, moving men and women through life as if they were only pieces on a game board. Perhaps free will was nothing more than a desperate illusion.

  The uniformed officer at the front door stepped aside to let him out. “It’s a zoo,” he said.

  Harry wasn’t sure if the cop was referring to life in general or just to the mob of onlookers.

  Outside, the day was considerably cooler than when Harry and Connie had gone into the restaurant for lunch. Above the screen of trees, the sky was as gray as cemetery granite.

  Beyond police sawhorses and a barrier of taut yellow crime-scene tape, sixty or eighty people jostled one another and craned their necks for a better view of the carnage. Young people with new-wave haircuts stood shoulder to shoulder with senior citizens, businessmen in suits next to beachboys in cutoffs and Hawaiian shirts. A few were eating huge chocolate-chip cookies bought at a nearby bakery, and they were generally festive, as if none of them would ever die.

  Harry was uncomfortably aware that the crowd took an interest in him when he stepped out of the restaurant. He avoided meeting anyone’s gaze. He didn’t want to see what emptiness their eyes might reveal.

  He turned right and moved past the first of the large windows, which was still intact. Ahead was the broken pane where only a few toothlike shards still bristled from the frame. Glass littered the concrete.

  The sidewalk was empty between the police barriers and the front of the building—and then a young man of about twenty slipped under the yellow tape where it bridged the gap between two curbside trees. He crossed the sidewalk as if unaware that Harry was approaching, his eyes and attention fixed intently on something inside the restaurant.

  “Please stay behind the barrier,” Harry said.

  The man—more accurately a kid in well-worn tennis shoes, jeans, and a Tecate beer T-shirt—stopped at the shattered window, giving no indication that he had heard the warning. He leaned through the frame, fiercely focused on something inside.

  Harry glanced into the restaurant and saw the body of the woman being maneuvered into a morgue bag.

  “I told you to stay behind the barrier.”

  They were close now. The kid was an inch or two shorter than Harry’s six feet, lean, with thick black hair. He stared at the corpse, at the morgue attendants’ glistening latex gloves which grew redder by the moment. He seemed unaware that Harry was at his side, looming over him.

  “Did you hear me?”

  The kid was unresponsive. His lips were parted slightly in breathless anticipation. His eyes were glazed, as though he’d been hypnotized.

  Harry put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  Slowly the kid turned from the slaughter, but he still had a faraway look, staring through Harry. His eyes were the gray of lightly tarnished silver. His pink tongue slowly licked his lower lip, as if he had just taken a bite of something tasty.

  Neither the punk’s failure to obey nor the arrogance of his blank stare was what set Harry off. Irrationally, perhaps, it was that tongue, the obscene pink tip leaving a wet trail on lips that were too full. Suddenly Harry wanted to hammer his face, split his lips, break out his teeth, drive him to his knees, shatter his insolence, and teach him something about the value of life and respect for the dead.

  He grabbed the kid, and before he quite knew what was happening, he was half shoving and half carrying him away from the window, back across the sidewalk. Maybe he hit the creep, maybe not, he didn’t think so, but he manhandled him as roughly as if he had caught him in the act of mugging or molesting someone, wrenched and jerked him around, bent him double, and forced him under the crime-scene tape.

  The punk went down hard on his hands and knees, and the crowd moved back to give him a little room. Gasping for breath, he rolled onto his side and glared up at Harry. His hair had fallen across his face. His T-shirt was torn. Now his eyes were in focus and his attention won.

  The onlookers murmured excitedly. The scene in the restaurant was passive entertainment, the killer dead by the time they arrived, but this was real action right in front of their eyes. It was as if a television screen had expanded to allow them to step through the glass, and now they were part of a real cop drama, right in the middle of the thrills and chills; and when he looked at their faces, Harry saw that they were hoping the script was colorful and violent, a story worth recounting to their families and friends over dinner.

  Abruptly he was sickened by his own behavior, and he turned from the kid. He walked fast to the end of the building, which extended to the end of the block, and slipped under the yellow tape at a spot where no crowd was gathered.

  The department car was parked around the corner, two-thirds of the way along the next tree-lined block. With the onlookers behind him and out of sight, Harry began to tremble. The trembling escalated into violent shivering.


  Halfway to the car he stopped and leaned one hand against the rough trunk of a tree. He took slow deep breaths.

  A peal of thunder shook the sky above the canopy of trees.

  A phantom dancer, made of dead leaves and litter, spun down the center of the street in the embrace of a whirlwind.

  He had dealt much too harshly with the kid. He’d been reacting not to what the kid had done but to everything that had happened in the restaurant and the attic. Delayed-stress syndrome.

  But more than that: he had needed to strike out at something, someone, God or man, in frustration over the stupidity of it all, the injustice, the pure blind cruelty of fate. Like some grim bird of despair, his mind kept circling back to the two dead people in the restaurant, the wounded, the cop clinging to a thread of life at Hoag Hospital, their tortured husbands and wives and parents, bereaved children, mourning friends, the many links in the terrible chain of grief that was forged by each death.

  The kid had just been a convenient target.

  Harry knew he ought to go back and apologize, but couldn’t. It was not the kid he dreaded facing as much as that ghoulish crowd.

  “The little creep needed a lesson anyway,” he said, justifying his actions to himself.

  He had treated the kid more like Connie might have done. Now he even sounded like Connie.

  … you gotta be in sync with the rhythms of destruction…civilization is coming down around our ears… gotta know when to break a rule to save the system… surf on every random wave of madness that comes along….

  Harry loathed that attitude.

  Violence, madness, envy, and hatred would not consume them all. Compassion, reason, and understanding would inevitably prevail. Bad times? Sure, the world had known plenty of bad times, hundreds of millions dead in wars and pogroms, the official murderous lunacies of fascism and communism, but there had been a few precious eras of peace, too, and societies that worked at least for a while, so there was always hope.

  He stopped leaning on the tree. He stretched, trying to loosen his cramped muscles.

  The day had started out so well, but it sure had gone to hell in a hurry.

  He was determined to get it back on track. Paperwork would help. Nothing like official reports and forms in triplicate to make the world seem ordered and rational.

  Out in the street, the whirlwind had gathered more dust and detritus. Earlier the ghost dancer had appeared to be waltzing along the blacktop. Now it was doing a frantic jitterbug. As Harry took a step away from the tree, the column of debris changed course, zigged toward him, and burst upon him with startling power, forcing him to shut his eyes against the abrasive grit.

  For one crazy moment he thought he was going to be swept up as Dorothy had been, and spun off to Oz. Tree limbs rattled and shook overhead, shedding more leaves on him. The huffing and keening of the wind briefly swelled into a shriek, a howl—but in the next instant fell into graveyard stillness.

  Someone spoke directly in front of Harry, voice low and raspy and strange: “Ticktock, ticktock.”

  Harry opened his eyes and wished he hadn’t.

  A hulking denizen of the streets, fully six-feet-five, odious and clad in rags, stood before him, no more than two feet away. His face was grossly disfigured by scars and weeping sores. His eyes were narrowed, little more than slits, and gummy white curds clogged the corners. The breath that came between the hobo’s rotten teeth and across his suppurating lips was so foul that Harry gagged on the stench.

  “Ticktock, ticktock,” the vagrant repeated. He spoke quietly, but the effect was like a shout because his voice seemed to be the only sound in the world. A preternatural silence draped the day.

  Feeling threatened by the size and by the extravagant filthiness of the stranger, Harry took a step backward. The man’s greasy hair was matted with dirt, bits of grass, and leaf fragments; dried food and worse was crusted in his tangled beard. His hands were dark with grime, and the underside of every ragged, overgrown fingernail was tar-black. He was no doubt a walking petri dish in which thrived every deadly disease known to man, and an incubator of new viral and bacterial horrors.

  “Ticktock, ticktock.” The hobo grinned. “You’ll be dead in sixteen hours.”

  “Back off,” Harry warned.

  “Dead by dawn.”

  The hobo opened his squinched eyes. They were crimson from lid to lid and corner to corner, without irises or pupils, as if there were only panes of glass where eyes should have been and only a store of blood within the skull.

  “Dead by dawn,” the hobo repeated.

  Then he exploded. It wasn’t anything like a grenade blast, no killing shockwaves or gush of heat, no deafening boom, just a sudden end to the unnatural stillness and a violent influx of wind, whoosh! The hobo appeared to disintegrate, not into particles of flesh and gouts of blood but into pebbles and dust and leaves, into twigs and flower petals and dry clods of earth, into pieces of old rags and scraps of yellowed newspapers, bottle caps, glittering specks of glass, torn theater tickets, bird feathers, string, candy wrappers, chewing-gum foil, bent and rusted nails, crumpled paper cups, lost buttons….

  The churning column of debris burst over Harry. He was forced to close his eyes again as the mundane remains of the fantastic hobo pummeled him.

  When he could open his eyes without risk of injury, he spun around, looking in every direction, but the airborne trash was gone, dispersed to all corners of the day. No whirlwind. No ghost dancer. No hobo: he had vanished.

  Harry turned around again in disbelief, gaping.

  His heart knocked fiercely.

  From another street, a car horn blared. A pickup truck turned the corner, approaching him, engine growling. On the other side of the street, a young couple walked hand in hand, and the woman’s laughter was like the ringing of small silver bells.

  Suddenly Harry realized just how unnaturally quiet the day had become between the appearance and departure of the rag-clothed giant. Other than the gravelly and malevolent voice and what few sounds of movement the hobo made, the street had been as silent as any place a thousand leagues beneath the sea or in the vacuum of space between galaxies.

  Lightning flashed. The shadows of tree limbs twitched on the sidewalk around him.

  Thunder drummed the fragile membrane of the sky, drummed harder, the heavens grew blacker as if lightning-burnt, the air temperature seemed to drop ten degrees in an instant, and the laden clouds split. A scattering of fat raindrops snapped against the leaves, ponged off the hoods of parked cars, painted dark blotches on Harry’s clothes, splattered his face, and drove a chill deep into his bones.

  1

  The world appeared to be dissolving beyond the windshield of the parked car, as if the clouds had released torrents of a universal solvent. Silver rain sluiced down the glass, and the trees outside seemed to melt as readily as green crayons. Hurrying pedestrians fused with their colorful umbrellas and deliquesced into the gray downpour.

  Harry Lyon felt as if he would be liquefied as well, rendered into an insensate solution and swiftly washed away. His comfortable world of granite reason and steely logic was eroding around him, and he was powerless to halt the disintegration.

  He could not decide whether he had actually seen the burly vagrant or merely hallucinated him.

  God knew, an underclass of the dispossessed wandered the American landscape these days. The more money the government spent to reduce their numbers, the more of them there were, until it began to seem as if they were not the result of any public policy or lack of it but a divine scourge. Like so many people, Harry had learned to look away from them or through them because there seemed to be nothing he could do to help them in any significant way… and because their very existence raised disturbing questions about the stability of his own future. Most were pathetic and harmless. But some were undeniably strange, their faces enlivened by the ticks and twitches of neurotic compulsions, driven by obsessive needs, the gleam of madness in their eyes, t
he capacity for violence evident in the unremitting coiled tension of their bodies. Even in a town like Laguna Beach—portrayed in travel brochures as a pearl of the Pacific, one more California paradise—Harry could no doubt find at least a few homeless men whose demeanor and appearance were as hostile as that of the man who had seemed to come out of the whirlwind.

  He could not, however, expect to find one of them with scarlet eyes lacking irises and pupils. He was not confident, either, about the probability of locating any street person who could manifest himself out of a dust devil, or explode into a collection of mundane debris and fly away on the wind.

  Perhaps he had imagined the encounter.

  That was a possibility Harry was loath to consider. The pursuit and execution of James Ordegard had been traumatic. But he didn’t believe being caught in Ordegard’s bloody rampage was sufficiently stressful to cause hallucinations replete with dirty fingernails and killer halitosis.

  If the filthy giant was real, where had he come from? Where had he gone, who had he been, what disease or birth defect had left him with those terrifying eyes?

  Ticktock, ticktock, you’ll be dead by dawn.

  He twisted the key in the ignition and started the engine.

  Paperwork awaited him, soothingly tedious, with blanks to fill in and boxes to check. A neatly typed file would reduce the messy Ordegard case to crisp paragraphs of words on clean white paper, and then none of it would seem as inexplicable as it did at that moment.

  He wouldn’t include the crimson-eyed hobo in his report, of course. That had nothing to do with Ordegard. Besides, he didn’t want to give Connie or anyone else in Special Projects a reason to make jokes at his expense. Dressing for work unfailingly in a coat and tie, being disdainful of foul language in a profession rife with it, going by the book at all times, and being obsessive about the neatness of his case files already made him a frequent target of their humor. But later, at home, he might type up a report about the hobo, just for himself, as a way of bringing order to the bizarre experience and putting it behind him.

  “Lyon,” he said, meeting his own eyes in the rearview mirror, “you are a ridiculous specimen.”

  He switched on the windshield wipers, and the melting world solidified.

  The afternoon sky was so overcast that the streetlamps, which were operated by a solar-sensitive switch, were deceived by the false twilight. The pavement glistened, shiny black. All of the gutters were full of fast-moving, dirty water.

  He went south on Pacific Coast Highway, but instead of turning east on Crown Valley Parkway toward Special Projects, he kept going. He passed Ritz Cove, then the turnoff for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and drove all the way into Dana Point.

  When he pulled up in front of Enrique Estefan’s house, he was somewhat surprised, although subconsciously he had known where he was headed.

  The house was one of those charming bungalows built in the ‘40s or early ‘50s, before soulless stucco tract homes had become the architecture of choice. Decoratively carved shutters, scalloped fascia, and a multiple-pitch roof gave it character. Rain drizzled off the fronds of the big date palms in the front yard.

  During a brief lull in the downpour, he left the car and ran up the walkway. By the time he climbed the three brick steps onto the porch, the rain was coming down hard again. There was no wind any more, as if the great weight of the rain suppressed it.

  Shadows waited like a gathering of old friends on the front porch, among a bench-style swing and white wooden chairs with green canvas cushions. Even on a sunny day the porch would be comfortably cool, for it was sheltered by densely interwoven, red-flowering bougainvillaea that festooned a trellis and spread across the roof.

  He put his thumb on the bell push and, above the drumming of the rain, heard soft chimes inside the house.

  A six-inch lizard skittered across the porch floor to the steps, and out into the storm.

  Harry waited patiently. Enrique Estefan—Ricky to his friends— did not move very fast these days.

  When the inner door swung open, Ricky squinted out through the screen door, clearly not happy to be disturbed. Then he grinned and said, “Harry, good to see you.” He opened the screen door, stepped aside. “Really good to see you.”

  “I’m dripping,” Harry said, pulling off his shoes and leaving them on the porch.

  “That’s not necessary,” Ricky said.

  Harry entered the house in his stocking feet.

  “Still the most considerate man I ever met,” Ricky said.

  “That’s me. Ms. Manners of the gun-and-handcuff set.”