Then there are the few men and women with true power and influence who know us. These are the ones to be feared. These are the ones the Coalition deals with and the Society hopes to sway. But the Society's goals will never be realized. We will never live in the open unless it is as freaks or prey. The people who might guide us out of obscure myth will never risk their positions and reputations to say to the world, Hey, look, vampires are real!
And Marilee is one of them, a person who knows, and knows I know she knows. And so on. And here she is in the Cole having a drink with me in public. And if I had any doubts before, I now know for certain that if I ever have the opportunity to drag Dexter Predo into the sun, I will do so gleefully.
She fishes an ice cube out of her drink, pops it in her mouth and crunches it.
– You see, Joseph, I know what you are, but I'm still not certain what it is you do. Are you a detective of some kind?
I'm still the deer in the headlights, just staring at her as she chews on ice.
– Joseph?
I blink once, slowly.
– I'm a man, does things, gets things done. I'm a handyman. Someone has a problem they maybe call me and I maybe help to take care of the problem. Sometimes that means I'm a detective, I guess, but I don't have a license or an office or anything.
She nods.
– What about a gun, do you carry a gun?
– Sometimes.
– Now?
– No.
– And what about the other things you do? I know about them in theory, but details are hard to come by. Mr. Predo and the few other Coalition members we have met are so circumspect. I stare at her.
– What about those other things, Joseph?
– We can't talk about that here.
She inhales deeply, exhales.
– It's just that one hears the most fascinating stories. Is it true for instance about your sense of smell? Is it as acute as a dog's? Can you, for instance, tell what scent I used this morning?
– I can smell it.
– Do you know the brand?
– No. But it's lavender oil.
– You'd recognize it if you smelled it again?
– Yeah.
– Hmm.
– If you don't mind, Ms. Horde, I'm not very good at parlor tricks.
– We should talk about these things sometime, we really should.
– Ms. Horde.
– Yes?
– Your daughter?
– What about her?
– She's missing.
– Yes, she is.
– What did you mean that she is fascinated with the undead?
She takes another cube of ice from her drink, just sucking it this time.
– Just that. She is somewhat fascinated by the undead, and the dead for that matter. You have eyes, she's a goth. She and her friends, they are all interested in anything macabre.
– But when you say undead, do you mean in the abstract or in a literal sense? What I mean is…
– How much does she know?
– -Yes.
– Nothing. I don't know what you're accustomed to, Joseph, but it's not as if I make a habit of meeting with… your people. This is an aberration. Dale and I and some others in our circle know, but we would hardly go about sharing that information. It would tend to brand us as something rather more than eccentric.
She smiles and licks the ice in her fingers. I can't quite get her. She's no Van Helsing, definitely not a Renfield, and lacks the proper sluttishness to be a Lucy. But she's something, she is definitely something. I slug down the last of my drink.
– Two more things.
– Of course.
– The name of the PI that found her last time?
– Chester Dobbs.
– Huh.
– You know him?
– Of him. Why didn't you call him again?
– To be honest, we did. He said he would look into it, but then called back the next evening and told us that his caseload was simply too great.
I try to feature a PI turning down a case from a cash cow as fat as the Hordes. I fail.
She's watching me.
– And the other?
– Hmm?
– The other of the two things?
– Oh, where did he find her the first time?
She finally bites down on the cube she's been sucking.
– Some abandoned building, a school I think it was, around Avenue B and Ninth Street. She was squatting in the basement with some other kids.
She looks at my face, which I'm sure looks like I just got kicked in the gut.
– Are you all right, Joseph? Is there something wrong?
I don't shake hands. I don't say goodbye. I take a pass on all the social niceties and get the hell out of there and into a downtown cab.
It's not her. I take a closer look at the picture while I ride the cab downtown, and I'm sure Amanda Horde is not the shambler chick I took care of the other night. Thanks for small blessings.
The school is as it was last night. Cop car parked out front on freak watch, police barricade across the entrance. I go in the same way as before. The wall is a little tougher this time with my ribs still healing from Hurley's beating. The roof door I left open last night is still ajar. I go in. Same graffiti, same rats, same breeze, same smells. I reach the ground floor and go to the killing room.
The scents are slightly faded, but essentially unchanged except for the additions of Hurley's and Tom's. The absences I had been so focused on when I got coldcocked have been lost as the other odors have drifted and diffused within the room. But the musk is still there, that disturbing sweaty aroma with its hint of sex and desiccation. But I'm not here for that. I'm here for the girl.
I leave the room and hunt around until I find a door leading down to the basement. It's black down there. I close my eyes tight and feel my pupils expand in response to the lack of light. I open my eyes and walk down the stairs into the complicated shadows below.
The smells are different here. Dust and damp concrete dominate with an undertone of heating oil, and rank human sweat laced throughout. A thin stream of light trickles in from the door above. Rough shapes emerge from the gloom. I skirt a pile of rotting cardboard boxes stuffed with molding textbooks, turn a corner and pass the open door of what was once the boiler room from which the oil smell creeps out. There are human smells here in thick, stale profusion. Some may be recent, but the chaos of odor keeps me from sorting them. The sweat stink I smelled on the stairs intensifies as I open a door into what used to be the boys' locker room. Most of the lockers have been removed, but in a corner I make out a dingy pile of what smells like cast-off jockstraps.
I would prefer not to announce myself to anyone lurking down here, but I'm going to have to use some light or this will take all night. From my pocket I pull a tiny Maglite. I close my eyes and switch the flashlight on, twisting the barrel until I know the light has reached its softest focus, and then opening my eyes to little slits. The illumination is sparse and gloomy at best, but to me it might as well be a flood lamp. I hold the light out away from my body so that anyone who might want to take a shot at me will blow my hand off instead of putting one in my belly.
With some visual cues to attach the smells to, it becomes easier to sort the old ones from the new. The gym smells of the boys' locker room get parsed from newer odors. I follow those fresher traces and find an abandoned shooting gallery in a storage room half-filled with broken desks.
The floor is scattered with used needles, candy bar wrappers, empty crack vials and sheets of flattened cardboard that have been used for mattresses. The scents here are fresher than those in the locker room. Chemical tang of heroin and crack, piss and crap in a corner, cheap tobacco from generic brand cigarettes, and dry blood. It's spattered on the floor in a couple spots, but that's not too unusual in a shooting gallery. The cop smells are here as well. They must have been down here when they searched the building. But something else. Hell, it's in here, too. I trace it to one of the cardboard mattresses: that rotting sex-musk from the goth shambler. Stronger here, as if some of the stains on the cardboard might be sexual in origin. As if this was the place where the living fucked the dead.