Prelude to a Scream (28 page)

And that smokestack next to the tree. The atomized corporealities of how many souls had risen into these breezes, to be sifted through those same branches as their last contact with things of this earth?

Ted?

Are you alive, Ted?

Tree? Have you seen Ted? Touched him?
Sifted
him?

Stanley reached into the daypack and pulled out a thin black pen-light. He held it under the dash to twist it on and off. It worked, and he slipped it into his hip pocket. Then he reached into the daypack and pulled out a blue steel automatic pistol.

It was an old one. The neglected bluing had long since blistered off the muzzle and breech. The sweat of forgotten hands had long since corroded the shellac off its walnut grips.

This was Stanley's secret quality-of-life insurance policy. When the going got too rough, when the pain became unendurable, when he'd become hopelessly incontinent, he'd blow out his brains. Simple as that.

He'd always planned it that way. He'd bought the gun, learned how to shoot it, and filed it away in a drawer.

Just like any other insurance policy.

Better, call it quality-of-death insurance. Or
assurance
, like they say in Canada. Quality-of-death
assurance
.

The assurance that he wouldn't die in a hospital, quilled by needles and tubes, speechless, pissing the rubber sheets, undrinking, a corpse animated by pharmacology and shame and the ability to wiggle its toes in response to yes/no questions.

Forty-five caliber quality-of-death assurance: only $150. Plus tax and bullets. A single-payment policy. A short waiting period, only ten days. No physical examination. No flexible sigmoidoscopy.

Until recently it hadn't occurred to Stanley that this insurance tool, this handgun, might come in handy for anything else.

But now…?

He turned the butt up and looked at it. The clip was still missing, so it hadn't loaded itself in the dark. You laugh. Guns do things like that.

He rummaged in a side pocket of the daypack until he came up with two clips. The dull tips of the fat slugs shone in the gloom like two stacks of inquisitive maggots.

He dropped one clip into the inside breast pocket of his jacket. The other he slid into the butt of the automatic until it locked into place.

He held the pistol down below the steering wheel and jacked a shell into the chamber.

A wave of nausea passed over him. He leaned his head against the rim of the steering wheel, the gun pointed between his feet.

When the nausea passed he gripped the pistol with both hands, its muzzle aimed between the clutch and the brake pedals, and let the cocked hammer gently down onto the firing pin with both thumbs, and set the safety. This operation had always made his hands sweat, and the hammer, though serrated, never seemed properly curved to accept the pad of a single thumb. Not like in the movies, bub. Which was why he always used both thumbs and a neutral target like the floorboard of a pickup truck when he cocked or uncocked the .45.

Though nobody died when it happened, he had learned this bit of gun control the hard way, and blown a great hole in the side of a perfectly good refrigerator in the process.

Gray Eyes found the slug a week later, when she thawed one of her dietary linguini dinners.

They'd shared a bottle of wine over the linguine and stuck the cork in the bullet hole in the side of the freezer, where it stayed until they split up.

Those were the days.

He released the clip and fished an extra cartridge out of the backpack. He thumbed the shell into the clip, replacing the round now advanced to the firing chamber. Ordnance topped off, he fed the clip back into the handle of the pistol until it locked into place with a single, metallic click.

Stanley quietly rolled up the truck window, staring past the edge of glass as it passed between him and the mortuary.

Across the street the Monterey pine swayed in the breeze. The shadows of its limbs played over the linear taper of the smokestack. The heat from the stack would make the air dance above its mouth: the dance of Adios.

It was time to go in.

The Fusion Vipers

Chapter Twenty one

A
T THE NORTH END OF THE BUILDING THE STEEP SLOPE OF THE
hill gave access to the brick perimeter wall, and from there it was an easy scramble onto the roof.

The brick wall stretched away from the building to the east, cornered, and ran south until it encountered the rear access gate. This right angle enclosed a small meditation court, complete with overhanging acacia and a whispering spruce tree, stone benches, and a small pond with scattered lilies. Against the far corner of the court a stand of cattails clicked softly.

Walking the parapet wall, the garden to his left and the gravel roof to his right, Stanley approached a clerestory that rose no more than five feet above the south end of the roof. This would let north light into a room below, perhaps a chapel or reception area.

The six rectangular frosted windows were in a line, and illumined from within. Standing on the parapet, eighteen inches above the first roof, his head was about a foot above the second roof, topping the clerestory. Beyond the skew, dark plane of the upper roof the Monterey pine and the smokestack loomed side by side.

An irregular ticking turned out to be a wire, which the breeze caused to tap the rusted stanchion of an old TV antenna.

He stood there for a while, getting used to it.

Just as he had stepped down to the roof in order to try the nearest window he heard a rustling sound.

He strained his ears until all he could hear was the ringing induced by the drugs he had taken.

Something was unmeditatively making its way through the cattails, diagonally across the garden from him.

He stood with his head four feet above the parapet, an excellent and disconcerting silhouette to anyone who might look up from the courtyard below.

The rustling abruptly ceased.

He collapsed onto his haunches, one hand on the scored grip of the .45 in his belt. But for the codeine he'd taken, the pain of his incision would have made this position untenable.

A minute passed, then another.

The cattails rustled. He strained to locate the source of the noise in the darkness. Then he saw two bright yellow eyes, looking right at him.

His mind nearly stalled, then raced. It was way too soon to pull out his cannon and blast the neighborhood, but he was tempted.

Framed by the gently waving cattails, as if peering out from under a giant fright-wig, the eyes blinked.

Raccoon.

Stanley exhaled a puff of air and sat down. After a dazed moment he leaned back against the wall. Despite the dose of speed in him, he was thoroughly fatigued. He unclenched his hand from the butt of the .45 and stared at the fingers. They quivered.

Chickenshit.

If a fellow were to set himself up in the business of stealing human body parts, wouldn't a funeral home provide a perfect cover? He wondered if Corrigan had thought of it. Even if he had, there must be a couple of mortuaries for every, what, 50,000 people? Which would net, let's see, long division in the middle of the yellow-eyed night on several drugs and a rooftop with a gun in your hand, carry the two, 120 of them in the Bay Area alone. It seemed perfect. For one thing you, like Death, having no documented respect for Time, could keep weird hours. For another, a fully equipped operating theater might not look at all out of place in a funeral home. Don't morticians remove organs and pump fluids with the best of them? And who would willingly snoop around a funeral home? Anybody would assume that, behind any given door, corpses slept. What snoop needs to see that?

The grounds around him backed up this supposition. At first, Stanley had been surprised by the evident lack of security surrounding them. That bench on the south side of the building, for example, underneath a cypress tree. A perfect place to sit and smoke a joint — right? But no. The place was too creepy. Sooner than later, the awareness of what was going on immediately around him would leak into the pothead's little mind. Very quickly, the stoned party wouldn't be having fun anymore, would instead find his thoughts adrift along dark and maudlin shoals, his lee shore eerily lit by funeral pyres and obscured by an acrid smoke that hung close to the dark waters, an atmosphere difficult to breathe… The stoned party would shove off to vistas less moody.

No. Nobody would visit this place unless they had business here.

So, what's with Yellow Eyes?

Stanley peered over the parapet.

Yellow Eyes had disappeared. Maybe with good reason? Stanley slowly trained the automatic over the cattails.

Nothing. The eyes were gone.

Then he heard a splash.

He looked straight down.

A very large raccoon stood on its hind legs, waist-deep in the lily pond, looking directly up at Stanley. It was as if the creature had been waiting for him to look over the wall. Its front paws were dripping, and a gleaming orange fish writhed futilely in their grasp.

Now, both Stanley and the raccoon waited.

If Stanley was afraid of the least noise, the raccoon seemed afraid of nothing. The raccoon after all was minding its own business. It had come for a nice, fat carp.

Depleted, Stanley leaned back against the vertex of the parapet and clerestory walls and sighed as raggedly as the necessity for absolute silence would allow. His shoulders shed tension like a steeple its bats at dusk. But for the codeine every joint would have ached. Sweat gleamed on his face. He clutched the checkered butt of the pistol between his sweating palms, its barrel between his drawn-up knees.

He sat for a long moment, watching the stars to the north and breathing the cool night air. Sapped by his nerves, his strength was waning. If he didn't move soon he wouldn't move at all. What the hell was he doing on the roof of a funeral home at two o'clock in the morning with a gun in his hand?

The water thrashed in the pond beyond the wall, and the raccoon blundered hastily into the cattails.

“You see?” said a voice. “I told you. It's that old bull coon.”

Stanley froze.
I know that voice
.

“I guess it was,” said a second voice.

A beam of light swiveled through the lower branches of the acacia and played along the clerestory wall, just above Stanley's head.

“How'd he get down from the roof so fast?”

“Same way we got out here so slow. Put that heater away.”

“Man,” said the first voice, “I don't care how much money I make here. I don't care how much time I spend here. This place gives me the willies like a airborne ball of snakes.”

“What's your problem? It's just a raccoon. I thought you grew up in the country.”

“I did grow up in the country. The
wine
country.”

They shared a knowing laugh.

“Lettin' a old bull coon throw a scare into you.”

“It ain't the coon. It's this goddamn funeral home, and that goddamn Djell. The man's nuttier than Telegraph Avenue.”

“His money spends just like anybody else's, don't it?”

“Don't it,” the other sighed. “Don't it.”

The light left the corner where the parapet met the clerestory and swept through empty space.

“Vince,” said the second voice, “that old coon's got these carps about thinned out.”

Vince chuckled. “Have to get him some more. Kinda fond of that old coon.”

After another moment the light went out, and the two men walked around the side of the building, talking as they went, until their voices faded.

“Bet he'd like trout better.”

“Or perch.”

“Okay. Perch.”

“Where in hell you get perch…?”

A door slammed directly behind the wall against which Stanley had flattened himself, and he realized that the two men had entered the room onto which the clerestory allowed daylight. Beyond the glass, a chair scraped on a tile floor.

Paydirt. He recognized both those voices.

When they weren't feeding raccoons they delivered rugs.

Vince and his buddy.

He'd found the right funeral home.

This would be an excellent opportunity to telephone Inspector Corrigan. Never better. If it hadn't been for that raccoon Stanley would have opened the clerestory window practically on top of the two thugs, and Stanley would have found the end of his trail. Next time there might not be a raccoon hanging around to save him.

What would the end of the trail mean around here?

He needn't speculate. All he had to do was recall those photographs of Giles MacIntosh. Or what was left of him.

They should change the name of this joint, from Chippendale O'Hare to Trail's End.

Or Chippendale O'Negative.

Har de har.

Guy could just laugh himself to death around here.

Stanley stood on the parapet wall and tiptoed back the way he had come. He took the long step down to the brick perimeter wall. He shot a glance across the street, where he could see his truck. He should get out while he could still walk. He should call Corrigan. He knew it.

He could read the name of Hop Toy's business on the door of the truck. Even though it was in Chinese.

Then he saw a green butane lighter and a pack of cigarettes hit a polished bartop, and before the memory could roll its first reel his face burned with shame.

He turned his back on the truck and headed for the cattails.

Where the brick wall cornered, the cattails were very high. He crouched behind them and listened. Nothing. Just the wind passing through conifer boughs.

Stanley gently parted the cattails, and obtained a line of sight past the chapel building, straight across the driveway, to a sunken loading dock.

The brown van was parked there, backed up to the loading dock with its back door open. If he had seen it earlier, he would have been as certain about the true business of Chippendale O'Hare as he was when he heard Vince's voice.

He ran along the crown of the brick wall like a rat, keeping as much of the landscaping between himself and the compound as possible.

The wall ended in a brick pilaster at the rear gate. The gate was closed and the ground outside the wall, to his left, fell away sharply to the street. If he chose to use the cover of the outside slope to cross the mouth of the drive it was doubtful he would be able to climb back inside.

A pool of light flooded the asphalt between Stanley and the loading dock. To his right and slightly behind him stood the building behind whose clerestory roof he had just been cowering. In its lower corner stood a gray metal fire door, through which Vince and his partner must have passed. The door was closed. Twenty yards in front of him, just inside the wall, the big Monterey pine swayed, creaking gently. Little else stirred. Stanley waited, breathing deeply. The cool air had a salty tang to it. He, Stanley Ahearn, about as introspective as a claw hammer, now discovered within his soul a sudden nostalgia for sea air, cool and damp and salty. He should have taken more walks on the beach, when he had the leisure.

He touched the extra clip in the lining of his jacket and thought,
Fine, motherfucker; let it be the last time I taste salt air
.

When the breeze picked up and the big pine began to creak and sigh he dropped off the wall, stood up, and walked across the pool of light, as casually as a man making certain his golf clubs were in the trunk of his Mercedes, ready for tomorrow's early tee-off. When he reached the pine he stood in its shadow, its rough bark under the heel of his gun hand, the right front door of the van not ten feet away. Still he saw no one. A magnetic sign on the door panel said,

CHIPPENDALE O'HARE

Your Complete Funeral Service

Genteel & Dignified

Funerary Articles

Transport & Display

Refrigeration

Cemetery & Interment

Crematorium

Columbarium

Music & Oration

Memory Garden

** Free Estimates **

24 Hours

34 Avenida Del Fumador

Oakland

510-836-4796

‘Since 1941'

He stepped to the passenger side of the panel truck and had a look in the window. On the seat lay a second magnetic sign.

Stanley knew what it said, but he turned his head to read it anyway.

CABRINI CARPET

Sales

Installation

Service

1338 Mission St

San Francisco

415-864-2825.

The thing about magnetic signs is, they're cheap. Why get just one?

A large garage door at the back of the loading dock was closed. A trash can stood to its left. The van was headed out, its back door stood open. Beyond the garage door was another, smaller door. Closer to Stanley, five or six narrow concrete steps led up from the asphalt to the loading dock.