FORMAT.CMD
STAT.CMD
OPER.CMD
JME.OPE
USER NUMBER?
He shrugged. "I see you still haven't opened it." A pause. "You want my advice, Irene? Give it up. If there are no hard copies available anywhere, it's clearly something of no interest to the Buffalo Police Department."
She sighed. "We won't know that until we get a look at it, will we, Glen?"
Another shrug. "Okay, so don't take my advice."
"Gladly. I only wanted you to know that I think I remember someone named Curtis."
"So do I," Glen offered. "She was my kindergarten teacher. Miss Curtis. Great big fat woman; she had a mustache and smelled like sour cream."
Irene sighed again. "Can you be serious for just half a minute, Glen?"
"Sure." He checked his watch. "Starting now."
“Thanks."
"So?" he coaxed.
"So, I was only saying that I remember someone named Curtis. I remember it was a case from outside Buffalo, outside New York, in fact, if I'm not mistaken." She paused.
"And?"
"And that's about it. It was a murder case, I think. A murder/suicide-"
Glen was nodding.
"Why are you nodding?" Irene asked.
"I remember it, too. Her name was Lilian or Lily-something. But her last name was Curtis, and you're right, it was a murder/ suicide; I remember reading about it in the Evening News, maybe four, five months ago. It was a story out of Pennsylvania, I think."
Irene stood. "I'll be back in a while."
"Where you going?"
"To the Evening News. I'm going to check their morgue."
Glen looked at his watch again. "Irene, it's ten-thirty; their morgue's not open now."
She started for the door. "It is for people whose boyfriends are city editors."
"Oh," he nodded. "Yes, I see."
~ * ~
Detective Spurling and Captain Lucas booked Ryerson as a material witness in a case of attempted murder. It landed him in the Buffalo jail for the night, sans Creosote, who was given over to a police matron. "I hate these snotty little dogs," she explained, but agreed to keep him until morning when, Ryerson presumed, he'd be able to post bail.
He was in something of a blue funk, because while he hated jails, as everyone did, added to the usual reasons (they were places where people were locked up; they smelled bad; the people in them were almost universally unpleasant) was the fact that the psychic input here was not only dizzying and overwhelming, as it was in shopping malls and post offices, it was depressing as hell, too. It was sepia-toned, dead-ended, and desperate in a futile and resigned way. In his head it looked the way it smelled-of urine, sweat, and stale cigarette smoke.
So, the blue funk persisted.
It wasn't the first time he'd been in jail. During his junior year at Duke University he'd gotten rip-roaring drunk with several other juniors and they had collectively mooned the sorority house where Coreen lived. They were caught, as the cop who arrested them said, "with their pants down," charged with "lewd and lascivious behavior" and put in the drunk tank for the night.
It wasn't the last time Ryerson got drunk. For five years after that he consistently worked himself into a stupor, consistently made a fool of himself in public places, and consistently got arrested. At last, he realized that he was sliding into alcoholism, and that if he didn't quit drinking, he'd slowly kill himself. A year later, after several failed attempts at putting booze behind him, he was offered a drink and said no. On the night that he sat in a blue funk in the Buffalo holding cell, he hadn't had a drink in nearly fifteen years.
~ * ~
In "The District"
"Power!" the woman breathed. She had power. Power to be, to have, to control, power to change! It made up for the darkness, made up for the pain, made up for her time here in this damp and stinking place.
Because another damp and stinking place was where she had sprung up and had begun to visit herself upon the earth.
Power! Control! Change!
And what had that last poor fool called her-werewolf? That was for others to imagine, only one of the evil fantasies her beautiful living children could indulge in and so, through it, take power for themselves.
And so give power to her.
Werewolf indeed! The fool. That was for that other creature. The creature she had sprung from. The creature whose flesh hung now like paper on its bones and whose eyes mingled with the liquid that its brain had become.
~ * ~
Captain Lucas came to Ryerson's cell at 9:30 that morning. He had a sheet from a computer printout in his hand, and as the guard opened the cell door for him, he smiled gloatingly.
He sat on the bed next to Ryerson and held up the sheet of paper as if holding up a picture of one of his kids; "You know what this is, Dr. Biergarten?"
Ryerson glanced disinterestedly at him, and looked away. "I don't like to be called doctor."
"Shit," Lucas cried, "I would if I were you. If I had a fucking doctorate in parapsychology, I'd sure as hell want to be called fucking doctor."
Ryerson shrugged. "Call me what you wish to call me."
Lucas guffawed. "Call you anything but sober, isn't that right?" He guffawed again, immensely pleased with his joke.
Ryerson chose to ignore the remark; he nodded at the computer printout. "What you have there, Captain Lucas, is a litany of past mistakes. I paid for those mistakes, and I can't see that what happened a decade and a half ago has any bearing at all on what you're investigating now."
It was Lucas's turn to shrug. "What we have here, Dr. Biergarten, is the record of a loser. Once an alky, always an alky, that's what I say."
"You're a real phrasemaker, aren't you, Captain?"
Lucas quickly grew angry. He waved the computer printout so it flapped in the air. "Whether this has anything to do with Laurie Drake and Detective Newman is something we have yet to determine-"
Ryerson cut in, sighing. "You called Tom McCabe, didn't you?" Tom McCabe was Chief of Detectives in Rochester, New York, where Ryerson had worked on what had become known as "the park werewolf." He and McCabe had grown close during his investigation, and Ryerson assumed he'd be an excellent character reference.
Lucas said, "Yeah. Sure. I called him. How'd you know?"
Ryerson answered simply, "I know a lot of things, Captain." He paused. "I assume that Tom vouched for me?"
"He said you worked with him and he said he was sorry to hear you were in trouble. That's about it."
"You're lying."
Captain Lucas grinned. "Whatever your friend said, Mr. Biergarten, doesn't make a bit of difference here. I don't care if you're the fucking queen of France, you're trying to play footsy with us and I don't like it one damn bit."
Ryerson leveled a withering gaze at him; he wished mightily that his gifts included telekinesis as well, so he could mentally untie the man's shoelaces or make his cigar fall into his lap. Instead, he said, "Tell me, Captain Lucas-just how much do you value your credibility here at the Buffalo Police Department?"
Lucas looked confused, a little apprehensive. "What are you talking about?"
Ryerson shrugged; he hated doing this, he thought a person's private life should indeed remain private, but for some reason this man bore him a lot of animosity, and if the man had his way, Ryerson would probably sit in the holding cell until Christmas. He said, "What I'm talking about, Captain, is what you do at night. At"-he paused, probed about in the psychic atmosphere-"at Ed's Place."
Lucas grinned broadly. "Ain't no Ed's Place in Buffalo, my friend." He put his hands palm down on the bed, as if preparing to stand.