His own eyes flicked self-consciously to the upper observation deck — a small enclosure behind a Plexiglas shield — that allowed the general public to see paleontology in action. Today, they had but one spectator, but he was a regular — a Native American man in a buckskin jacket that he wore no matter what the temperature was.
The tar at first seemed to be fighting him, even more than usual; it was especially thick and sludgy here. But then, as if he’d hit a pocket of gas and looser material, he felt his wrist descend into the mire. Still, he hadn’t encountered anything of any substance. He reached deeper; the farther down he went the warmer the tar became, and as the methane was released, mephitic bubbles speckled the surface and released little exhalations of gas. Miranda giggled and said, “What’d you have for lunch, Carter?”
“Very funny.”
And then he did feel it. Or, to be more accurate, it felt him. His breath caught in his throat, and his arm stopped moving. His own fingers were spread wide, and for all the world it felt as if another hand — someone else’s fingers — had just slipped into his own, the way a drowning man might grasp the hand of his savior. Carter could feel the individual bones, the metacarpus, the phalanges. And, though he could never have even imagined such a thing, it didn’t feel inert. It didn’t feel dead and lost, as if it were lying there, inanimate, and waiting to be lifted from oblivion. To Carter, it felt as if the hand — too large to be a woman’s — had found his own, had sought it out, in order to be raised, after a silent eternity in the earth, from the dead.
CHAPTER FOUR
Greer could hear the TV blasting in the living room — sounded like Conan O’Brien — as he gathered his stuff together for a last check. He had his flashlight, with brand-new batteries, his wallet with complete fake ID (just in case he got pulled over or got into any trouble), a large black Hefty Sak with drawstring top, a pair of surgical gloves, glass cutter, and, finally, his Beretta handgun, loaded.
He was wearing black jeans and a black shirt, under a dark blue windbreaker with a lot of pockets for all his gear. He took one last glance in the mirror on the back of his bedroom door and thought, Jesus, with a mask I’d look like Zorro.
He’d hoped his mother might be asleep when he came out, but she wasn’t. She was propped in her easy chair, with one hand on the cat in her lap and the other in a bag of Trader Joe’s soy chips; since the soy chips were low-cal, she thought that meant you could eat as many bags of them as you wanted. It sure didn’t look that way to Greer. She was getting fatter all the time.
“You’re going out?” she said, without taking her eyes from the big-screen TV.
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
Christ, he felt like he was sixteen again. “What do you care?”
“Derek, why would you say that?” she said, doing a good imitation of sounding hurt.
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” He went to the apartment door, then said, dryly, “Don’t wait up.”
It was a California-style building, with an open courtyard in the middle and open hallways that looked down into it. But the place had been on rent control for years, and everything now was falling apart at the seams. The concrete floors were stained with God knew what, the plants in the courtyard were mostly dead, and the elevator stalled if more than two people had the nerve to get in at the same time. He wondered if his mother could stall it on her own now.
When he’d come back from Iraq, he’d moved into her back bedroom — where she normally kept her “collectibles”—with the full intention of staying just a few weeks, until he could get his act together and find a place of his own. But the weeks had gradually turned into months, and his disability payments sure lasted a lot longer when he only had to split the rent on a cheap apartment. His mother, who’d been a little put out at first, had also come to accept the idea — along with his cash. She lived on disability, too — for a bipolar disorder that made her no longer able to work for the Social Security Administration in Westwood — so between the two of them, they had things pretty much covered.
But not completely.
Greer had picked up some nasty habits — he liked to blame it on Iraq, but it wasn’t as if he’d been clean before going over there — and he could always use more money than he had. But a regular job would mess up his government money, so the way he looked at it, he was driven to this… sideline.
He’d studied his Thomas Guide before leaving the house, just to make sure he had the route down (along with a couple of ways out, if things went wrong), and he’d even checked to see if there was going to be a full moon that night. There was. That wasn’t actually all that bad; you had to use something to see where you were going, and a flashlight beam wasn’t exactly subtle. Besides, he only worked in the best neighborhoods, where most of the houses were pretty well concealed from any neighbors, anyway.
This place — Dr. Hugo’s, as Greer had learned when he told Sadowski he’d do it — was in the middle of a block with wide lots in Brentwood, just north of Sunset. The problem was always where to put the car; you couldn’t exactly leave it in the driveway, but you didn’t want it so far away that you had to run there dragging a Hefty bag full of stuff in your hand. In this case, Greer decided to park the Mustang across the street, a few doors down. He picked a spot under a shady tree and in front of a house under construction, making sure to angle the wheels away from the curb and to leave the doors unlocked.
The street was perfectly quiet, and Dr. Hugo’s house was dark, except for some stair lights in front that nicely illuminated the little sign that said SILVER BEAR SECURITY—24-HOUR PATROL. Greer looked up and down the street, then casually strolled to the side of the house; he’d taken his painkillers and the leg wasn’t bothering him much at all right now. He put on the surgical gloves.
There was a wooden gate, with a Beware of Dogs placard showing a barking German shepherd. Lots of people, he knew, just put out the signs for effect, and Sadowski had assured him there were no guard dogs on the premises — at least according to the file. Still, Greer was going to keep an eye out for any telltale sign like a water bowl, a leash hanging on the back of a door… or a pair of snarling jaws.
The side of the house sported an immense Weber gas grill, and in back, where the addition had been put on, it looked like a lap pool had been added, too. Some people had all the luck. The walls and window frames of the new room were still unpainted, and the whole place, even out here, still smelled of fresh wood and sawdust. The yard, Greer was pleased to see, was surrounded by trees and, in the rear, a high wall. This was going to be a piece of cake.
Just for the hell of it, he gently rattled the doorknobs of the French doors — you never could tell, some people were really asking for it — but they were locked. Taking out the glass cutter, he neatly removed a pane of glass just above the knob (the putty was still damp), placed it on the lawn, then reached in and opened the door. This was the moment when he’d normally have to be worried about an alarm, but he was trusting Sadowski to be right — though how dumb was that, he thought.
Inside, the wooden floor creaked as he made his way, in new black high-top sneakers, across it, and then into a kitchen, where rows of copper pots hung, gleaming in the moonlight, above a center island. There was a hallway off to the left, with a few rooms opening off it. He had his flashlight in one hand, and the Hefty bag, unfurled, in the other. One room was a den, the next a bathroom, and the third looked like a home office; there was a laptop computer, a printer, stuff like that. If he had time, and room in the bag, he’d check it out on the way back out. No reason to carry anything heavy up and down the stairs.