But finding the Wendigo would just be the first step. I’d need something to bribe him-he wasn’t going to help us out of the goodness of his heart. If he even had a heart. But I did in fact have something to offer-more of those magically imbued stones. Problem was, if Victor and Eli found out, they’d both be outraged, for different reasons. I’d lied to both of them, telling them I’d handed over all the remaining stones, and I wasn’t eager to come clean about it. But without their expert help, I wasn’t sure I could come up with my own solution for finding the Wendigo again. Catch-22. Whenever you lie to friends, it comes back to bite you on the ass.
I did have Lou, though, with his marvelous tracking ability. It might not work on beings like the Wendigo, but maybe I could isolate his ability and, using the rune stones as enhancers, transfer that ability to Sherwood. I turned my attention back to her and caught the tail end of her sentence.
“… Eli could figure it out,” she was saying.
“Sorry. I was thinking. What?” She looked at me in exasperation.
“I said, ‘I’m sure Eli could figure out a way to use my connection to find it.’ ”
“I’m sure he could. But I’ve got another idea.”
She looked at me suspiciously. Sherwood knew me far too well, knew that taking things into my own hands and cutting Eli out of the loop was not my usual operating procedure. Something was up. But she let it pass.
“What, then?”
“Louie. He’s got that tracking ability, and even though it won’t work with the Wendigo, I’ll bet I could channel it through you. Then, with the connection you already have, you might be able to track him down yourself.”
“You think?”
“Certainly worth a try,” I said. I thought it probably wouldn’t work, not without some extra help-like those stones-but I didn’t mention that.
Halfway back to my flat, Lou reappeared from under a parked car. He must have found something good to eat, because he was holding no grudges. He trotted along happily next to Sherwood and me, taking the occasional side excursion. He’d always liked Sherwood and was happy to see us together again, even if we weren’t really together.
As soon as we got home, I opened the trunk where I kept the rest of the stones and pulled out five of them. The minute Lou saw what I was doing, he jumped up in Sherwood’s lap and turned his back on me. He did not approve of those things. He was probably right.
I stuffed four of them into a pocket and held on to the fifth. Poor Lou. He thought he was showing disapproval by jumping up on Sherwood, but it was exactly where I wanted him to be.
“Concentrate on the Wendigo,” I told her.
I let out a pulse of talent, directing it though the rune stone. Then I bent it and sent the enhanced energy through Lou, who sneezed violently as it coursed through him, then through Sherwood and back through Lou, creating a feedback loop. Sherwood straightened up suddenly, almost throwing Lou off onto the floor.
“I’ll be damned,” she said. “It worked. I can feel him.”
“Can you tell where he is?”
“No, not exactly, but I’ll bet I can find him. It’s like a heat source in a cold room-diffuse, but you can tell what direction it’s coming from. And he’s fairly close by. I can tell that much. Somewhere south, I’d say.”
“Great,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Shouldn’t we let Victor and Eli know?”
“We don’t need to. We’re not going to be doing anything. We’re just going to talk to him.”
Sherwood got that I didn’t want to involve the two of them, although she didn’t know why. The old Sherwood would never have let that pass, but now she just shrugged her acceptance. But when she stood up and Lou hopped off her lap, she stopped.
“It’s gone,” she said.
“Pick Lou up.” Lou submitted with good grace, although of course he didn’t care for it.
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s back. I’ve got to be holding Lou for it to work. Good thing he’s not a Great Dane.”
We climbed into my van, Sherwood in the passenger seat and Lou in her lap. She directed me with hotter and colder, like the children’s game. Finally she got a handle on it; west on Cesar Chavez, then south on San Jose, winding through the city. We passed Geneva, then a couple of blocks later, Sherwood said, “Go back. We passed him.” At the corner of Niagara Street I stopped and looked around. Nothing seemed promising-no parks, no wooded area, just the usual collection of houses, and a Muni yard down the block.
“There,” she said, pointing over to the right. “Somewhere there.”
I could barely see a long low building painted a sickly green, half hidden by some trees. It clicked suddenly and I knew where we were.
“That’s Bluestone Studios over there,” I said. “A couple of floors, lots of little rooms for bands and artists-forty or fifty, as I remember. I was here about five years ago, checking out a friend’s band. What the hell would the Wendigo be doing here?”
“Maybe he likes music,” Sherwood said.
“Or musicians. I’m still not sold on his being harmless.” We got out of the car and walked over toward the building. Sherwood was carrying Lou, who had given up squirming.
“He’s definitely inside,” Sherwood said as we approached the building. The entry door was propped open with a metal folding chair, and musicians carrying instruments were passing in and out.
We walked in and down a long hallway, listening to the muffled sounds of guitars, keyboards, and drums, all behind closed doors. From the hallway, all the sounds blended together like some enormous modern performance piece.
When the corridor crossed another hallway, Sherwood turned left without hesitation, passed a few more doors, and stopped in front of a door painted a bright red. She put Lou down and gestured at the door.
From behind it came the sound of a highly distorted guitar running fast scales and a drummer doing speed rolls. I knocked on the door, loudly enough to be sure I would be heard over the instruments.
The room went instantly silent. We waited a moment, but there was no sound of movement from inside. Sherwood looked at the door, then back at me.
“What’s that about?” she whispered. The silence from behind the door was contagious, as if we had been caught doing something illegal just by knocking at the door.
I shrugged and knocked again, and now that the room was silent, it sounded twice as loud. There was the suggestion of movement inside, then the door opened a crack. I could just see a young stocky guy whose face showed a pitiful attempt at a beard. The faint sweet whiff of high-quality dope wafted out past him.
“Yeah?” he said, suspiciously.
I put my foot over the doorjamb in the best PI movie fashion so he couldn’t slam the door on us. On second thought, he still could, and if the door was heavy enough, it would probably break my foot. I withdrew it as unobtrusively as I could.
“We’re looking for a friend,” I said.
“Who?”
Good question. He saw me hesitate and the suspicion on his face deepened into paranoia.
“Are you guys cops?” he said. Sherwood laughed.
“Are you serious?”
“Hell, yes. If you’re cops, you gotta say so. If I ask you directly, you have to tell me the truth. That’s the law.”
An enduring urban legend. Generations of brain-dead dope dealers believe this as a matter of faith. It never occurs to them that if it were true, there would never be such a thing as a successful undercover operation. But it was a useful misapprehension-for the cops.
“Dude,” I said. “Do we look like cops?”
“Yeah, sorta.” Fair enough. We were cops, sorta, when you came right down to it.