The popular bar was open until two o’clock. It had been remodeled in a black-silver-green Art Deco style that was nothing like the adjacent restaurant, a strained attempt to be chic. But they served sandwiches along with the booze.
Midst stunted and yellowing plants, about thirty customers drank, talked, and listened to jazz played by a four-man combo. The musicians were performing quirky semi-progressive arrangements of famous numbers from the big-band era. Two couples, who didn’t realize the music was better for listening, were gamely dancing to quasi-melodic tunes marked by constant tempo changes and looping extemporaneous passages that would have thwarted Fred Astaire or Baryshnikov.
When Harry and Connie entered, the thirtyish manager-host met them with a dubious look. He was wearing an Armani suit, a hand-painted silk necktie, and beautiful shoes so soft-looking that they might have been made out of a calf fetus. His fingernails were manicured, his teeth perfectly capped, his hair permed. He subtly signaled one of the bartenders, no doubt to help give them the bum’s rush back into the street.
Aside from the dried blood at the corner of her mouth and the bruise only beginning to darken one whole side of her face, Connie was reasonably presentable, if slightly rumpled, but Harry was a spectacle. His clothes, baggy and misshapen from having been rain-soaked, were more wrinkled than an ancient mummy’s shroud. Formerly crisp and white, his shirt was now mottled gray, smelling of smoke from the house fire he’d barely escaped. His shoes were scuffed, scraped, muddy. A moist bloody abrasion as big as a quarter marred his forehead. He had heavy beard stubble because he hadn’t shaved in eighteen hours, and his hands were grimy from pawing through the pile of dirt on Ordegard’s lawn. He realized he must appear to be only a treacherous step up the ladder from the hobo outside the bar to whom Connie had just delivered a warning about forced detoxification, even now socially devolving before the scowling host’s eyes.
Only yesterday, Harry would have been mortified to appear in public in such a state of dishevelment. Now he didn’t particularly care. He was too worried about survival to fret about good grooming and sartorial standards.
Before they could be ejected from The Green House, they both flashed their Special Projects ID.
“Police,” Harry said.
No master key, no password, no blue-blood social register, no royal lineage opened doors as effectively as a badge. Opened them grudgingly, more often than not, but opened them nonetheless.
It also helped that Connie was Connie:
“Not just police,” she said, “but pissed-off police, having a bad day, in no mood to be refused service by some prissy sonofabitch who thinks we might offend his effete clientele.”
They were graciously shown to a corner table that just happened to be in the shadows and away from most of the other customers.
A cocktail waitress arrived at once, said her name was Bambi, crinkled her nose, smiled, and took their orders. Harry asked for coffee and a hamburger medium-well with cheddar.
Connie wanted her burger rare with blue cheese and plenty of raw onions. “Coffee for me, too, and bring both of us double shots of cognac, Rémy Martin.” To Harry she said, “Technically, we’re not on-duty any more. And if you feel as crappy as I feel, you need more of a jolt to the system than you’re going to get from coffee or a burger.”
While the waitress filled their orders, Harry went to the men’s room to wash his grubby hands. He felt as crappy as Connie suspected, and the restroom mirror confirmed that he looked even worse than he felt. He could hardly believe that the grainy-skinned, hollow-eyed, desperation-lined face before him was his face.
He vigorously scrubbed his hands, but a little dirt stubbornly remained under his fingernails and in some knuckle creases. His hands resembled those of a car mechanic.
He splashed cold water in his face, but that didn’t make him look fresher — or less distraught. The day had taken a toll from him that might forever leave its mark. The loss of his house and all his possessions, Ricky’s gruesome death, and the bizarre chain of supernatural events had rattled his faith in reason and order. His current haunted expression might be with him for a long time — assuming he was going to live beyond a few more hours.
Disoriented by the strangeness of his reflection, he almost expected the mirror to prove magical, as mirrors so often were in fairy tales — a doorway to another land, a window on the past or future, the prison in which an evil queen’s soul was trapped, a magic talking mirror like the one from which Snow White’s wicked stepmother learned that she was no longer the fairest of them all. He put one hand to the glass, warm fingers met cold, but nothing supernatural happened.
Still, considering the events of the past twelve hours, it was not madness to expect sorcery. He seemed to be trapped in a fairy tale of some kind, one of the darker variety like The Red Shoes, in which the characters suffer terrible physical tortures and mental anguish, die horribly, and then are finally rewarded with happiness not in this world but in Heaven. It was an unsatisfying plot pattern if you were not entirely sure that Heaven was, in fact, up there and waiting for you.
The only indication that he hadn’t become imprisoned in a children’s fantasy was the absence of a talking animal. Talking animals populated fairy tales even more reliably than psychotic killers populated modern American films.
Fairy tales. Sorcery. Monsters. Psychosis. Children.
Suddenly Harry felt he was teetering on the edge of an insight that would reveal an important fact about Ticktock.
Sorcery. Psychosis. Children. Monsters. Fairy tales.
Revelation eluded him.
He strained for it. No good.
He realized he was no longer lightly touching his fingertips to their reflection, but was pressing his hand against the mirror hard enough to crack the glass. When he took his hand away, a vague moist imprint remained for a moment, then swiftly evaporated.
Everything fades. Including Harry Lyon. Maybe by dawn.
He left the restroom and walked back to the table in the bar where Connie was waiting.
Monsters. Sorcery. Psychosis. Fairy tales. Children.
The band was playing a Duke Ellington medley with a modern jazz interpretation. The music was crap. Ellington simply didn’t need improvement.
On the table stood two steaming coffee cups and two brandy snifters with Rémy glowing like liquid gold.
“The burgers’ll be a few minutes,” Connie said as he pulled out one of the black wooden chairs and sat down.
Psychosis. Children. Sorcery.
Nothing.
He decided to stop thinking about Ticktock for a while. Give the subconscious a chance to work without pressure.
“I Gotta Know,” he said, giving Connie the title of a Presley song.
“Know what?”
“Tell Me Why.”
“Huh?”
“It’s Now or Never.”
She caught on, smiled. “I’m a fanatical Presley fan.”
“So I gathered.”
“Came in handy.”
“Probably kept Ordegard from throwing another grenade at us, saved our lives.”
“To the king of rock-‘n’-roll,” she said, raising her brandy snifter.
The band stopped torturing the Ellington tunes and took a break, so maybe there was a God in Heaven after all, and blessed order in the universe.
Harry and Connie clinked glasses, sipped. He said, “Why Elvis?”