“Unfortunately, that could happen.”
“So I thought. But you’re going to have to trust my driving.”
“I think I’d rather trust Johnson. The end result will be the same, but the bullet will be quicker.”
“Look, I promise you that I’ll try to slow down and all that, since you want me to drive like a sodding—oh, never mind. I’ll try.”
I threw together some clothing and necessities, then retrieved Pat’s journals from the hamper. Nathan took some of his luggage as well, including the sample case that, theoretically, held prayer shawls. Before we left, I started to put up the Shield Persona, then damned the danger and took it down. I needed all of my wits about me, even the weird ones. If the police couldn’t keep Johnson too busy to worry about me, I figured, then why were we paying taxes?
As we hurried downstairs, we met George coming up, wrestling an enormous sheet of plywood. Mrs. Z followed and gabbled instructions while she carried his tool box.
“Will you be back in the morning?” she said to me.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “If not, I’ll call.”
Ambiguity, I thought. That’s what I need to project. As we drove off, I let my mind run through a hundred possibilities for our destination, our direction, and every other factor I could think of. If nothing else, it kept my mind off Nathan’s driving.
On our way to the cemetery in Colma, Nathan had noticed a franchise-type hotel on the frontage road beside the freeway. A tan stucco building with a Spanish Baroque false front, it took up most of a block, the better to confuse a stalker. The young man working the desk seemed indifferent to who we were and whether we had reservations just so long as Nathan had a credit card. The Interpol ID, however, woke him up fast.
“If anyone comes in and wants the room number,” Nathan said, “or phones and wants to be connected, do not do it without checking with me first. Do you understand? That’s very important.”
“Yes sir,” the clerk said. “Understood. I’ll leave a note for the day shift, too.”
I wandered away and stared at a blank spot on the wall while they finished the transaction. I wanted to avoid knowing the room number. When we went upstairs with the luggage, I also avoided looking at the door. I filled my mind with thoughts of a hotel in Lake Tahoe where I’d stayed some years before and visualized the view of the lake at night from its windows. If Johnson was working a Mind Penetration or scan on me, he’d end up thoroughly confused.
The window of the room that I actually stood in looked downhill to the street in back of the hotel. Since the queen sized bed sat near the window, Nathan pulled the drapes shut as soon as we got in. The room as a whole, decorated mostly in golds and browns, contained a sofa as well as the bed, but it looked much too short for Nathan to stretch out on.
“In the morning, we should be able to see the local police station from here,” Nathan said. “Down the hill and over a little.”
“That should give Johnson something interesting to think about.”
“So I thought, yes.”
I was having interesting thoughts of my own. Suppose Johnson had made his shot, I asked myself. In those last few seconds you would have had the conventional regrets about never seeing your family again and dying young, but be honest, O’Grady, one of those regrets would have been that you turned Nathan down.
Johnson, of course, had missed.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched Nathan, who had taken off his jacket and the shoulder holster, while he stowed the luggage out of the way at one end of the narrow room. He put the sample case near the window, then reached inside it. I heard a click as he turned on some device, the interference generator, I assumed. I liked the way he moved, no theatrics, no fuss, just the quiet self-control of a man who knew he was a man. He turned around and gave me a look of the sort that’s usually described as smoldering. I could feel the Qi rising, swirling around us both like a thrown net.
“I’ll sleep on the floor if you’d like,” he said.
“Not necessary.” I smoldered right back at him. “Ari.”
I was expecting him to grin or make some triumphant wisecrack. Instead, he merely walked over and sat down next to me, close enough for me to feel his warmth and to smell him. I’d never realized before that the way a man smelled could be so erotic. His warmth blended with the rising Qi. I felt a trickle of sweat run down between my breasts. He breathed as deeply as if he’d just smelled perfume and leaned closer.
“You don’t feel like you owe me something, do you?” he said.
“Why? Just because you saved my miserable life?”
“Yes, exactly that.”
“No. It’s sheer unbridled lust.”
“Oh, well, then.” He grinned at me. “I can do something about that.”
And he did. Oh, my God, did he ever. For half the night.
CHAPTER 9
SINCE ARI WANTED TO KEEP MOVING, he kissed me awake at eleven A.M., an hour before the hotel’s checkout time. I finished waking up in the shower, then dried off and got dressed in jeans and the rose print blouse again. He’d already packed everything else. When I glanced out of the window, I felt all my senses come on-line for the first time in days. The return gave me an energy rush that made me feel profoundly alive. Because I wanted to stay that way, I risked deploying Search Mode: General. A danger warning touched my mind, but softly. I placed the threat some ten miles away to the north and west.
“I don’t suppose you’ll want breakfast,” Ari said.
“This morning I do. I’m starving.”
“Good.” He grinned at me. “Well, now I know what to do when you need to eat a proper meal.”
I puffed up with false dignity and turned my back on him, but I could hear him laughing.
For breakfast we went to the Cafe Boulevard over on John Daly, which is as close to a main street as the “other D.C.” has, as my sister Kathleen used to call this oddly disjointed small town when we were teenagers. I figured Ari would enjoy a real American breakfast in an American restaurant that’s a kind of upscale tribute to the Fifties. We sat in a maroon vinyl booth, where he proceeded to order an amazing amount of food. I asked the waitress if I could have a single scrambled egg and a half-order of hash browns. I was waiting for Ari to tell me to eat more, but he merely smiled.
I found out why when the food arrived. He began piling stuff from his plate onto mine—a chunk of an omelet stuffed with cheese and mushrooms and a piece of toast with butter, for starters.
“You’re going to eat that,” he said. “No more of those walking trances.”
“Well, I ordered a perfectly adequate breakfast.”
“No, you didn’t.” He glowered at me. “Last night I was half-afraid I’d break your sodding ribs. I could have counted them in pitch darkness.”
I glowered right back and picked up my fork. I was planning on eating only a few bites of everything, but after all the exercise of the past night, I succumbed. For some minutes neither of us spoke.
“A question,” Ari said eventually. “The members of your family each have individual odd talents, but you’ve got quite a range of them. Is that unusual?”
“We vary, yeah, but most of us who have any gifts at all have more than one. It’s just that I’ve undergone training with mine, so I can use them more efficiently. If you’ve got a proclivity, the right kind of training can expand it.”
“That makes sense.”
“And some of our talents overlap within the family, too. Mostly among the O’Gradys, though.”
“Overlap?”
“Some of us have a small gift for something that someone else has in spades. Like Kathleen and Pat—she has a really deep empathy with animals, but she could never assume the wolf-form, not that she’d want to. And like them, I’ve got a sharp sense of smell.”
“Somewhat wolflike?”
“Only somewhat, though Pat used to tease me about it. But that’s probably why I could feel the little bit of energy left in th
e portal, but I couldn’t really do anything with it. Michael and I must overlap, too.”
Ari nodded and put a chicken-apple sausage on my plate.
“I’ve had enough,” I snapped.
“No, you haven’t. Eat it, and here’s another slice of toast, too. You don’t have to have jam on it.”
“Gee, thanks! You’re just lucky we’re in public at the moment, or you’d be wearing the jam.”
He laughed at me.
“But this is all,” I went on. “Enough. Basta. The end.”
“Yes, you mustn’t eat too much at once after a long period of starvation.”
“I wasn’t starving.”
“Those ribs of yours, and then your hip bones—I rest my case.”
I snarled but let the subject drop. If the food hadn’t been so damned good, especially the hash browns, I would have continued refusing to eat it, just on general principle, but as it was I finished everything. I had to admit, though only to myself, that the sensation of having eaten as much as my body demanded felt wonderful.
When we finished eating, I phoned Lawrence Grampian, who had followed my advice and stayed holed up in the apartment he shared with three of the other Hounds. We could come over any time, he told me. The roommates had all gone to work or class.
Grampian lived not all that far from Aunt Eileen, it turned out, in a bleak modern apartment building close to McLaren Park, a convenient location for full moon nights. Unlike the much-tended Golden Gate Park in its middle class neighborhood, McLaren contains one children’s playground and a lot of unkempt grass and trees still in the natural state of a California hilltop. Though the neglect does benefit the local werewolves, the working-class people who live nearby rightfully complain about the lack of money spent on their green space.
When he answered the door, Frater LG stared at us as if he’d forgotten who we were. His face was unshaven, his eyes still red and swollen, his pale hair filthy. His cheeks were so chapped from tears that they appeared sunburned. He wore a white T-shirt and a pair of plaid flannel pants that resembled pajamas but did mercifully zip up at the front. He showed us into a living room containing one sagging couch, two old armchairs, and an enormous TV, bigger even than the one my aunt and uncle had lost to the fake burglary, flanked by wall-mounted speakers. In one corner a wastepaper basket overflowed with crushed beer cans.
“Want something to drink?” he said. “We’ve got some beer in the fridge.”
“No, thanks,” Ari said. “Did Nola tell you who I am?”
“A cop—I mean police officer, right?”
“Yes, but I’m one who understands your condition.”
Grampian started to speak, then wept, just a scatter of tears that he wiped off with the hem of his shirt. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m way broken up. Every damn thing makes me cry.” He snuffled loudly. “But it’s a relief, hearing you say that.”
“I can well imagine,” Ari said. “Look, I’m operating on the assumption that you had nothing to do with your fiancée’s death. What I need is information so we—the San Francisco police and I—can find the actual killer.”
I thought Grampian might cry again, but he gulped for breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and forestalled another breakdown. “Let me get a roll of TP,” he said. “I’ve used up all the Kleenex we had.”
As well as fetching a toilet roll, Grampian combed his hair in the bathroom. He returned looking a little more kempt and flopped down on the battered brown sofa, leaving the chairs for us. Ari got out the envelope of Johnson photos and handed them over.
“This man is wanted for two similar murders in Israel,” Ari said. “He’s the prime suspect in the Romero killing. Have you seen him before?”
Lawrence studied each one, then shook his head and handed them back. “No, never,” he said. “He’s a Dodger fan, huh? Figures.”
“Do you know or have you ever met a man named Arnold Jacoby?”
“Yeah.” Lawrence abruptly looked away. “He was killed, too, wasn’t he?”
“In Israel, yes. We already know that he suffered from lycanthropy.”
“Okay.” Lawrence looked at Ari again and tried to smile. “I don’t have to protect his rep anymore, then.”
“No, you don’t. Was he a friend of yours?”
“A good friend, yeah. He’s the one who made me see you could be half wolf and still be a decent human being. I visited him when I went to Israel. I never thought it’d be the last time I’d see him.”
“I’m sorry you’ve lost him.” Ari turned slightly and nodded at me to take over.
“I’ve been reading Pat’s journals,” I said. “He talks about a guy he calls DD. Do you know who that is?”
“David Doyle, but I bet that’s not his real name. That’s what he called himself when he came sniffing around our—” he hesitated briefly “—pack. We all started saying that DD stood for Devil’s Disciple after a while. He thought that was way cool.”
“Did he? Pat thought he was a member of a Satanic cult.”
“That’s right, yeah. Pat told me it came from somewhere really weird, like the Middle East.”
Ari raised an eyebrow at that but said nothing. “Did Pat tell you anything more about it?” I continued.
“No.” Grampian thought for a moment. “Pat wouldn’t listen when Doyle tried to tell him more. I do remember that. It was Satanic, and that was all he needed to know.”
Yeah, that’s Pat, all right, I thought. Aloud, I said, “What does Doyle look like?”
“He’s a little older than me, dark hair, kind of good-looking, I guess. Soror JE called him cute, anyway. He must have money from somewhere, because he always had flashy clothes, name labels, that kind of shit.”
Ari and I exchanged significant looks.
“In the journals,” I continued, “Pat hinted that Doyle was engaged in some kind of illegal activity. Did Pat ever tell you what it was?”
“Drugs, yeah,” Grampian said. “Hard drugs, too, like heroin.”
Ari smiled in satisfaction. “Good,” he said. “That confirms what we suspected. The police are going to be very interested in your evidence. They now have every right to issue a warrant for Doyle’s arrest.”
Even though I kept priming Grampian with questions, he would have talked without them, unburdening himself of over a year of pent-up guilt and secrets. One thing became immediately clear: he blamed himself for Pat’s death.
“I never should have let your brother try to get information out of that rotten son of a bitch,” Grampian said at one point. “I’m sorry, Nola. I can’t tell you how bad I feel that I didn’t just tell Pat to leave trouble alone.”
“Would he have obeyed you?” I said.
“Sure.” He spoke with an innocent certainty. “I’m the alpha in our pack.”
When the family realized that Pat suffered from lycanthropy, we’d all read up on wolf behavior. The knowledge came in handy now. “Tell me something,” I said, “do you think Doyle was an aggressive beta male?”
“Damn right he was! He ran with us a couple of times, and I could tell right away what was on his mind.” He made a noise uncomfortably close to growling. “Join up and get the other betas on his side and then challenge me.”
“More likely,” Ari broke in, “he would have just had you shot outright. The man whose pictures I showed you? We think he’s working with this Doyle.”
Grampian went white around the mouth, but not from fear. “Like he did with Mary Rose, you mean. He was sniffing around her. That’s the first step, get the alpha female interested.” He smiled but his ice-blue eyes stayed cold. “She bit him. I thought it was great when she did it, but now I wish she never had.”
“Why?” I said.
“She kept at it and made him roll over and piss on his stomach. It made him furious. She’d humiliated him in front of the whole pack.”
“Furious enough to want her dead?”
I waited, sure he was going to weep again, but he collected himself wit
h a couple of deep breaths.
“Yeah,” Grampian said. “It was the full moon, or I’d think he was the one who shot her. He was always bragging about how good he was with guns. He was good at everything, if you believed him, anyway.”
“Not good enough to shoot a gun with paws,” I said.
Grampian nodded his agreement.
“We have a fingerprint, anyway,” Ari said. “It was Johnson, not Doyle.”
Grampian thought this over, then shrugged. “But I bet that fucking swine put him up to it. I want to tell the cops, but how? I don’t know his real name, I don’t know where he lived.”
“Hold on a sec,” I put in. “You don’t know where he lived?”
“No. I asked a couple of times, but he was always real vague. In the old Haight, he’d say, or near the park.” He paused briefly, then continued. “He wouldn’t tell us anything about himself, and there’s another big problem. Suppose I did go to the police. God help me, how can I get into it without ratting out our pack?”
Ari took the recorder out of his jacket pocket.
“Here’s how,” Ari said. “Tell me everything you can about Doyle without mentioning the wolves. The smallest detail might be important, even down to his brand of wristwatch, did he wash his car or leave it dirty. Everything you can think of, but especially Pat’s testimony about the drug dealing. Just remember, this will all be on the record.”
Grampian talked for a good fifteen minutes. He rambled around, backtracked, paused at times when he’d been about to slip up and mention the wolf pack, which he instead referred to simply as “our Bible club.” We had a lot of solid information by the time he finished. Ari clicked off the recorder and pocketed it.
“One more thing,” I said. “Why didn’t you go running with Mary Rose that night?”
“I did.” His voice trembled as he held up a shaking hand. A fresh pink scar slashed across the middle of his palm. “I stepped on a piece of broken glass. So she went on ahead while I tried to chew it out. I heard the shot. I ran on three legs, but the killer was already gone.” His entire body began to shake as badly as his voice. “She was already dead. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t call the police. I couldn’t do anything.” Tears began to run down his face again. “Can’t you see what that’s like? I couldn’t do one goddamn thing.” He threw back his head and howled.