Ray glanced sideways at her.
“Insurance isn’t going to cover that,” he said with a frown as she stared at the door handle in her hand. “Sorry I woke you. I had to swerve to miss a turtle in the road.”
“Tortoise,” the Angel corrected. It was better to babble nonsense rather than think about the meaning of her dream.
“What?”
“They don’t have turtles in the desert. They have tortoises.”
“Oh. Well. That’s good to know.” Ray drove on while the Angel looked at the door handle in her hand.
“Hang on,” Ray warned her. “I’m going to turn again. Don’t get all scared and rip the door off this time.”
“Sorry,” the Angel said in a small voice.
“Jeez,” Ray said, looking stolidly out the windshield. “Lighten up. I’m just kidding. Wreck the whole frigging car if you want. I put it on Barnett’s card.” He took a sudden turn, swinging onto a dirt road that meandered seemingly off to nowhere. “But wait until we get back to Vegas, okay? I don’t feel like legging it back through the desert.”
He glanced at her. She smiled back, briefly, but said nothing. He must think I’m a hysterical fool, the Angel told herself. And he’d be right.
The dirt road curved like a snake through the desert, leading finally to the mouth of a small canyon set into a meandering line of hills that provided the only topological relief in sight. Ray drove carefully, but they still jounced roughly, Ray swearing at every pothole and washout he hit. Though he didn’t blaspheme, so the Angel cut him some slack.
“I hope that was the right turnoff,” Ray muttered. “These hicks don’t mark their roads very clearly—yeah, there it is, ahead.”
It was a ranch, a hacienda of some kind that looked old to the Angel’s eye, but she was no architecture expert. She couldn’t even see the main house at first, because the grounds were surrounded by an adobe wall that had definitely seen better days. The Angel imagined that it had been built to keep marauding Indians out, but now it couldn’t keep out a herd of marauding cows. Though it was still twelve or fourteen feet high in some places, most of it had fallen to nearly ground level. Repairs were in progress, but although tools and ladders and mud bricks were all over the place, no one was actually currently working.
The gate stood wide open, the cross arm barely hanging by a single hinge. The wooden sign over the entrance was mostly in Arabic, with the English words “The Oasis—Welcome” neatly lettered below.
“Do you think we should just drive in?” the Angel asked.
Ray shrugged. “We’ve come all this way,” he said, and carefully pulled onto the looping dirt driveway that was bounded by a border of whitewashed stones. He stopped after the first curve and they stared out the windshield and then looked at each other. “I’ll be damned,” Ray said.
“Don’t blaspheme,” the Angel said automatically.
Suddenly, they were in paradise. It was as green as Ireland inside the walls of the old ranchero, with plants and flowers of every type and description abloom in vivid color. The grass looked like putting greens. Rows of corn, mostly hidden behind the main building, grew as tall as an elephant’s eye. Tomato vines thick enough to swing on climbed groaning trellises, green beans hung on netting draped between the vines, and squash the size of pumpkins and pumpkins like boulders were scattered among them. A pond of rather larger proportions than you’d expect to see in a desert was tucked into one corner of the grounds, surrounded by reeds and cattails. Lilies and lotus of every conceivable color covered its surface, providing shelter for the exotic waterfowl diving for aquatic bugs along its margins.
“These Living Gods are some gardeners,” Ray understated as he edged the car forward. He went slowly, careful not to squash any of the fancy-feathered chickens pecking among the driveway gravel. The birds squawked indignantly at the car’s approach, loud enough to alert those inside the hacienda. By the time Ray and the Angel had parked and gone up to the front door, a tall, bird-beaked joker opened it before Ray could knock. He looked sad, the Angel thought, though it was difficult to read the expression on his odd features.
“Hello, Thoth,” Ray said.
“Mr. Ray. Miss...?”
“This is Angel,” Ray said, and somehow the Angel suppressed the urge to correct him. “She’s my partner. Listen, I know this is a difficult time—”
The bird-beaker joker stepped aside and opened the door wide. “Come in,” he said.
The interior of the old house was cool despite the desert heat. Its floors were tile, the walls adobe brick. There was little furniture in the rooms they went through, but a riot of colorful rugs covered the floors and walls. Thoth led them out the rear entrance, where he stopped and turned to them as they stood on the threshold of the back yard where the other Living Gods were picking flowers from among the riot of blooms that grew there, or just standing talking or sitting silently, comforting each other as best they could.
“We are preparing our brother Sheb for burial,” he explained in a sadly ominous voice punctuated by weird clacking of his long beak. He gestured toward a square, blank-walled shed in the back. Out in the far reaches of the enclosed yard, out beyond that square shed, the Angel could see two of them digging a grave in the soft sand of the desert floor.
“You’re not,” the Angel heard herself blurt out, “mummifying him?”
Ray glanced at her with pursed lips and a frown, but Thoth didn’t seem to mind. “No, Miss Angel,” he said. “I’m afraid that we are a much simpler people than our ancestors were. We have neither the time nor the money to do the job properly, but—”
He fell silent for a moment as one of his comrades came from the shed. Brown and thin and weathered as an old stick, the old man carried four small jars made from white stone. He looked at Thoth, nodded, and took the jars to a woman who had obviously recently been weeping. On a small table before her were a number of small human-like figurines, no more than six inches high, made of clay or stone
“—We do the best we can for our brother. He goes west with his vitals safe in their canopic jars, his ushbati to provide for him in the land of the dead, and our prayers for Anubis to aid him during the time of judgement.”
It didn’t sound all too different to the Angel than a Christian burial. Except that part about the canopic jars. And the ushbati figures. And, actually, Anubis. She felt bad that the poor man would be condemned to Hell because he was a pagan. Anyway, it was all the Allumbrados fault. It was something else that they had to pay for.
“That’s all he could ask,” Ray said.
The Angel stared at him, surprised at his unexpected compassion, as Thoth nodded his bird head. The other Living God—blasphemous as that thought was—gave the jars to the mourning woman and then joined them. He looked normal, if under-nourished and over-tanned by years of exposure to a harsh sun.
“This is my brother, Osiris. He speaks little English, but there is something he would tell you.”
Ray nodded. “His fame is great. I dared to come and interrupt your grief with the hope that he might have news of the boy.”
Osiris spoke rapid Arabic. Ray nodded. The Angel could scarcely believe that he knew what the man was saying.
“Alf shukr,” Ray said. “A thousand thanks for all. Our sorrow for your loss is great.”
“Our strength is spent,” Thoth said. “We are now all old, or weak. We only wish to pass the remainder of our lives peacefully among the oasis we have created in this desert, which reminds us so much of the home we have lost. We can aid you no more.”
“You’ve done enough,” Ray said.
Thoth shook his head. “We wish we could do more. But we have two favors to ask of you.”
“Name them,” Ray said, stepping on the Angel’s foot when she started to interrupt.
“Save the boy. Save the beloved of Ra,” Thoth said. “He is the great light who will illume the world.”
“We will,” Ray said. “And the other thing?”
&nb
sp; “Avenge our brother,” said Osiris in heavily accented English.
Ray smiled. It was not the simple grin the Angel had seen earlier. It was not a reassuring sight to the Angel’s eyes. “That,” Ray said, “I can promise.”
Osiris grinned back, while Thoth grimaced like a vulture.
“No need to disturb you further,” Ray said. “We can see ourselves out.” He made a gesture of farewell to the old men, who bowed as Ray grabbed the Angel’s hand and hustled her back into the house.
“What did he tell you?” the Angel demanded.
“Where the kid is,” Ray said, smiling.
“How’d he know?”
Ray shrugged. “He’s a prophet. He sees things.”
“He’s a pagan!” the Angel said.
Ray shrugged again. “So?”
They went through the house. The Angel shut the front door carefully behind them. “So where is he?” she asked, her concern and aggravation growing.
“Now?” Ray asked.
“OF COURSE NOW.”
Ray grinned. She felt like punching him. “Osiris isn’t sure. He thinks somewhere in New York City. Some kind of jail, or hospital, or something.”
“That’s helpful,” the Angel said as they slid into the front seat of the car.
Ray twisted around and looked at the Angel. “But soon,” he said with a smile that had a tinge of crazy, “he’s going to camp.”
“Camp?” she repeated, as Ray started the car, gunned the engine, and then took off at a sedate pace up the driveway, and the rutted desert road beyond.
New York City: St Dympna’s Home for the Mentally Deficient and Criminally Inclined
Since he had the rank accorded an ace and was also a perfecti in the Allumbrados, Nighthawk had a private room set aside for his use in St. Dympna’s, though he rarely took advantage of that dubious perk.
The place made his skin crawl. Back in the mid-nineteenth century up through the latter part of the twentieth, when Dympna’s was a going concern run by a nursing order of the Church, it had housed hundreds of patients within its grim stone walls. Most were kept in the large dormitory-like rooms on the first floor, segregated by sex, if not always by mental malady. The private rooms on the second floor had been reserved for more affluent patients, while the third floor was for the staff. No one ever said much about the basement and what went on in there, not even now.
Officially, Dympna’s had closed some time in the 1970s and stood empty for over two decades before coming to Contarini’s attention. Interested in strengthening his power base, the Cardinal had secretly activated the decrepit pile of stones for use as a training station for credenti, the lowest rank of the brotherhood. The basement rooms also made a fine storage place for those who angered or inconvenienced the Cardinal.
Cameo currently occupied one of those basement rooms. Or, perhaps more accurately, cells. Nighthawk had hoped to spirit her away almost immediately upon their arrival, but the old horror pit was alive with unexpected activity. Usually staffed by a few sleepy credenti and some new recruits in the dormitory-like rooms on the first floor, now it was swarming with gunmen babbling about the day’s events in Vegas.
No obsequenti were present, but Nighthawk had learned from a couple of credenti that Butcher Dagon and the Witness had actually succeeded in their mission of capturing the Anti-Christ and had bought him back, bound, from Las Vegas. The Witness had gone to the Waldorf to report to the Cardinal (At least Contarini would be somewhat mollified, Nighthawk thought, by the success of the second prong of his master plan.) and Dagon was in the third floor infirmary, along with several injured credenti, recovering from wounds sustained in the boy’s snatch and grab.
The purported Anti-Christ now occupied a cell in the oubliette, probably next to Cameo, under close guard. Security was at an unprecedented peak. The old asylum hadn’t been as tightly locked down since ‘57 when an ace-powered psychopath had escaped the oubliette and slaughtered thirty-seven patients in the dormitory before being over-powered by a mysterious patient from the second floor who’d been catatonic for almost a decade before suddenly waking and stopping the carnage by seemingly draining the psychopath’s mind. The cryptic ace/patient had then escaped St. Dympna’s in a manner unknown to the rumormongers who delighted in telling such horror stories about the history of the old sanitarium.
Nighthawk could well imagine the torments a sensitive like Cameo was suffering while being locked in a cell that had housed generations of drooling psychotics, but there was nothing he could do except bed down in his tiny room on the third floor, wait awhile, and hope that something would break for the better in the coming hours.
He needed the rest, anyway. He wasn’t as young as he once was, though he was younger than he used to be.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Las Vegas: The Mirage
It was late afternoon by the time Ray and Angel got back to Vegas and had dinner at an all you can eat buffet. At first he tried to keep up with her, plate for plate, but gave it up after the fourth helping. She could eat like a bastard. It was a good thing, he thought, that she was so frigging active, otherwise she’d look like a balloon.
After dinner they’d gone down to the police station and tried to get an interview with Dagon, but the local donut chokers went coy on them. They wanted an order from Ray’s superior, and since Ray didn’t particularly want them to know who his current superior actually was, they left the station saying they’d come back. But they didn’t.
They didn’t know where the kid would be for at least a day, so the only constructive thing Ray could think of was to try to get Angel into the sack, but it would have been easier to break into maximum security to interview Dagon.
Ray lay in his bed in the Mirage alone, trying hard not to think of Angel on the other side of the connecting door. It had been a long, not very productive couple of days. Sure, he’d gotten to kick some ass, but those frigging Allumbrados had managed to get away with the kid, Peregrine was laying in a hospital somewhere with tubes stuck into her arms, and as yet he hadn’t even managed to get a chuckle out of Angel, let alone a civil word.
That Witness, though...
Ray added his name to the list of jerks whose ass he’d like to kick. He didn’t like the way Angel had looked at him when they’d first come face to face. He especially didn’t like the way the pretty boy had treated her. It’s one thing to best someone in combat. It’s another thing to humiliate them. Ray hated bullies, and it was clear that this Witness was one.
But maybe Angel had learned a lesson. She’d done okay after initially putting herself in a hole by letting the Witness get the upper hand. Ray had thought about stepping in to even things up a bit, but he knew how he’d feel if someone had done that to him. It wouldn’t have made him happy.
And speaking of being not happy, Ray thought. He leaned over to the phone, suppressing a groan as his still unknit ribs scraped against each other, and got an outside line. He dialed a number he knew well, and it was picked up on the second ring.
“President Leo Barnett’s office.”
“Alejandro?” Ray asked. Of course it was the kid. Who else would answer in that irritatingly perky manner? “Gimme Barnett.”
There was a brief silence. “Uh, sorry, mis—uh, Billy. No can do. He’s in closed conference with Sally Lou.”
Ray was about to ask, At this time of night? but instead grinned sourly at the phone. “Is that what they’re calling it now?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“Never mind,” Ray said. “Listen, you been following events here?”
“Yes, sir,” the kid said. “President Barnett’s not real happy.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve smiled more in my life,” Ray said. “What’s the latest news?”
“There’s not much in the way of recent developments. It’s not general knowledge, but we found out that Peregrine’s husband had her flown out of Vegas on a medivac Lear, back to New York. Thought they could do a better job for her at the Jokertow
n Clinic than in the Vegas hospital. John Fortune’s still missing. So’s his bodyguard.”
“His bodyguard’s a shapeshifter,” Ray informed the kid. At least, it seemed likely from the info he’d gleaned from Osiris’s tale. “So I figure he impersonated Butcher Dagon—who’s in a Vegas lockup —and took off with the kid.” Ray frowned into the phone. He had to keep his kids straight.
“Well, that’s something,” his kid said. “What happened to Dagon?”
“I kicked his hairy ass,” Ray said. “Angel helped,” he added, to be fair.
“Boy, she’s something,” the kid said.
“You got that. Listen. Tell Barnett that me and Angel are taking the first flight tomorrow morning to Tomlin.”
“How come?” the kid asked.
“We have a line on Fortune,” Ray said. “Something that weird old fart Osiris told me. He’s not sure where Fortune is right now. He thinks he may be in New York City—which at least narrows it down a little. But soon the kid—Fortune, that is, is gonna show up in some summer camp in a whistle-stop called New Hampton, just north of the city. Angel and I will be there to meet him.”
“Okay,” the kid said. “You got it, Billy. Gee, I wish I could be with you and the Angel doing something useful instead of sitting around here in the office while President Barnett takes meetings.”
Ray shook his head. “No you don’t, kid,” he said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. Besides, I’m not really sure we could use your talents. Yet.”
“Ah, it’ll all work out fine, Billy. You’ll see.”
“Yeah.”
“But you and the Angel be careful, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Say Hello to the Angel for me?”
“Yeah.”
“Good ni—”
“Good night, kid,” Ray said, and hung up. He still had things to do, and he didn’t want to spend twenty minutes getting off the phone. He called the airport and got reservations for two on the first plane in the morning headed east. It was an early flight which didn’t leave much time for sleep. He sighed, called the desk for a five o’clock wake up call for him and Angel both, and settled back down on the bed. He wasted most of the night thinking about Angel in the room next to his, while his body went about the business of repairing itself, muscle, bone, sinew, and nerve.