A Passing Curse (2011) (8 page)

He sobbed once. Decorum was needed in the burying of another human being.

He moved a rock that covered the jaw. Yellow fangs curved into the leathery, flat lower lips. His heart stopped.

There was something else - wood? - protruding from the chest. No. Impossible. He pulled himself out of the ditch. He could not breathe. He loosened the corset, easing the spikes, and ran along the path to the rectory. This was no ancient Indian, he thought, and immediately damned Ajax Rasmussen. He saw a group of tourists watching him. He waved at them and one snapped his picture. He slowed to a walk. He took deep breaths. He prayed for the guidance of God, a thing which he had not done in some time.

6

Rusty Webber trudged through San Francisco’s airport feeling spent. Her right hand grasped the handle of a blue airline bag purchased at Heathrow to carry paperbacks, extra plane food, toothpaste, and deodorant. Her left hand held a small suitcase packed with clothes bought at Harrod’s.

One month ago she’d escaped from Romania with her life, barely. From being nearly executed in the courtyard of a Romanian hospital, to being escorted to the stairs of a waiting Lufthansa 737 had taken five short, head-spinning hours, four of them aboard a Blackhawk helicopter. Another five hours on the 737, with a stop in Hamburg, had put her at Heathrow.

Medics had bandaged Ambassador Harrington’s head, and he’d flown with her on the Blackhawk to Bucharest. On the flight, Harrington had explained through headphones, talking over the whirring turbines was impossible, that the Petazi district police, acting on an anonymous tip, had originally found her underground in an open-stone coffin, lying on her back, bandaged and unconscious.

The police had also found three headless soldiers. When she told him for the tenth time that she hadn’t cut off any heads, that she could recall, Harrington nodded politely, but when she reached over to adjust his bandage, he jumped like she was making for his throat.

For a month now she’d been hiding in London, trying to figure out who’d pulled her out of the freezing snow. Who’d saved her life? Leading suspect - Ajax.

And who’d cut off the heads? No matter how ridiculous a notion, had Ajax been waiting for her inside the casket, carved with a face that could have been his twin? And for what reason?

After landing at Heathrow and taking a cab into London, after withdrawing five thousand dollars on Cirrus Industries’ credit card, she’d spent four weeks in a travelers’ hotel, bathroom down the hall.

Four weeks trying to relax, going to museums and antique shops, jogging along the Thames each morning, trying not to think about Romania or Ajax or Radu or almost getting gang-raped and shot against a lonely hospital wall, but it hadn’t helped.

She’d not called Ajax to tell him how she was or what had happened. That was Harrington’s job. In fact, she didn’t care if she ever spoke to the billionaire again. His inept planning and the slip-shod way he’d prepared the trip had nearly gotten her killed. Radu had been killed, but he was no innocent and might have been letting her walk into a trap of Ajax Rasmussen’s design. The big question remained, What had Rasmussen been up to?

And if he’d been waiting for her, how had he gotten there? Private jet? Maybe. Would there be records of Ajax landing in Bucharest? Probably not. Ajax had the money to buy any amount of discretion, especially in eastern Europe.

She walked past the luggage carousels and outside to the cab rank. She put her bag down while the attendant whistled her up a cab.

She gave the driver her address and settled back as he wheeled out of the terminal and got on 101 heading south. The driver, a Pakistani or Indian, perhaps, looked a lot like the driver who had taken her to Heathrow. It was funny how the cab drivers of the world all looked the same. So did the rich and the poor and the stupid. So did Ajax Rasmussen and a fifteenth-century knight.

Hours earlier, somewhere over the Atlantic on the red-eye flight to New York, she’d woken herself and everyone else on the plane with a long scream. While she’d sat there wondering if she was losing her mind, the stewardesses henned up at the rear of the plane, eyeing her and shaking their heads. One of them later brought her a drink, brightly saying that fear of flying was normal, but she had nothing to worry about, planes were actually safer than cars.

She gave the driver a twenty for the fifteen-fifty fare and walked up the stairs to the studio apartment. She lived on a street of Chinese elms and poplars, a quaint street with bungalows starting at a half-million. She’d paid one year’s rent ten months ago and had spent a total of six weeks living here. Three good weeks living with Clark, three hell weeks after losing Clark in Syria.

She and Clark had picked Burlingame because of its closeness to Stanford where Clark, an English citizen and Oxford graduate, had been awarded an archeology fellowship.

She remembered the death call she’d made to Clark’s mother, her screaming and dropping the phone, more screaming and furniture falling. His father picking up the phone, finally, and saying philosophically, sounding eerily like Clark, “I’ve been expecting this call for some time, dear.”

In London, she’d thought about taking the train to Cornwall, their house on the coast, but she’d never found the guts or the energy. What would she have said to them? Could she have handled Clark’s father, the future version of Clark. Similar gestures and voice. And would they have blamed her for Clark’s death? Like everyone else?

Some days she blamed herself.

She sat on the couch, suddenly very tired, weeks of dust collecting on the wood floors and furniture. Home, and if she owned a hat this is where she’d hang it.

She stripped off her London clothes and showered until the water turned cold.

She toweled her hair and combed it straight back. A dozen bruises, now turning yellow, striped her legs and arms. Several elliptical welts, faint gray, lingered on her breasts from the chain links.

She put on loose-fitting cotton pants and an oversize Stanford sweatshirt, house clothes. She called a chicken joint that delivered, ordered half a rotisserie chicken, plus potatoes and gravy, corn on the cob and cornbread.

She emptied the nylon pockets of the blue parka. She had 950 dollars left from Ajax’s Visa card. Added to that she had maybe two thousand in savings and still two months rent pre-paid. She had a five year old Nissan pick-up in the carport with ten thousand miles on it that she could get four thousand for if she had to. Not much cushion, but she was not worried. She had twenty different resumes circling to various private schools where she could teach anything from French, German, or Latin to World History, though she preferred archeology if they had it. She’d started sending the resume’s the day she returned from Syria.

The deal with Ajax had been five hundred dollars a day plus expenses. Would Ajax pay for her time in the coma? And the month recuperating in London? Plus expenses? You bet your ass he would. About twenty thousand, she figured. She’d get her money and that would be the last of Mister Ajax Rasmussen.

She noticed the answering machine blinking and hit the play button. Ajax’s voice came at her in a series of short messages. “I deeply apologize for any inconvenience.” Inconvenience? That was a good way to put it. In the last messages, his voice sounded formal and urgent. “Please, please, please call me.” Like a demented suitor.

If you overlooked the soldiers almost raping her and Bugazi, that son of a bitch, trying to execute her, Ajax was a plum of a sponsor. He had more money than sense, and he didn’t mind spending it. But working for Ajax was now history.

Tomorrow she would continue sending out resumes. Twenty might not be enough. If she had a hundred circulating, she might get a hit, a nibble at least. She’d get a job. She’d stay afloat until she could get out in the field again.

After she paid the chicken guy and ate one leg and half the cornbread, someone knocked. The mailman stood there, his sun hat too big for him, hiding his eyes. “Your box is full,” he said.

It took her a second to understand what he was saying. He thrust forward a wad of mail. She took it in both hands and dumped the letters, mostly advertisements, onto the kitchen table. When she turned around, the mailman held out a single letter. “You got registered mail,” he said.

“From?”

“You gotta sign for it,” he said, ignoring the question. She did, closed the door, and took the scarlet business letter inside and opened it.

“Dear Miss Webber, I was sorry to hear about your recent difficulties.” She stopped reading and looked at the cashier’s check. The twenty-five thousand dollar cashier’s check. “Please accept this as a bonus above and beyond all your expenses and your agreed-upon salary, plus one month salary for your recuperation, which I will be sending shortly.”

She thought it damned strange that Ajax had perfectly timed the arrival of the check with her own arrival and wondered if the mailman, who she’d never seen before, was working for Ajax. Since when did the mailman care if her mail box was full? They usually stuffed it until the seams broke. It didn’t matter. If Ajax wanted to play games, she’d take his money as fast as he could send it. She threw the check on the table. She’d deposit it tomorrow before Ajax changed his mind. She was flush.

Ajax gazed at the ocean through a long brass telescope. The night had not gone well for him. He had not slept. He had not slept, really, in fifty years. His position in time was not immortal, as the writers through the years had thought, but, rather, slowed down. His existence was finite, now becoming inexorable. His nights, once spent amidst fresh horror, were now a boring jumble of past experiences. Night dreams. Night sweats. Nights running together like a black train.

Nothing worked. Reading bored him. The television was vile.

His body was deteriorating. He’d wrapped his right arm in flesh-toned acrylic to keep the skin from flaking. At least he did not smell. Of course, his sense of smell, once able to detect blood at a mile, was nearly gone, so how would he know if he did smell? At least no one had mentioned it. But since everyone he knew was on his payroll, who would say anything? He could walk around naked and no one would dare mention that the Emperor had no clothes.

He could barely see. For a man who had once been able to count the hairs on a fly’s leg at one hundred paces, even 20/20 vision was abysmal. His hearing, too, was not much better than the average house cat’s. He remembered when he could hear canvas snapping in the wind before a ship even broke the horizon.

Still, he was not decrepit, not yet, but he hungered for the days when life meant something, when he wasn’t merely undead. The days in Hollywood. His days as Raul Pavoni. Days when he was cheered. Days when he was wanted. Nights among the beautiful people. They had been silly and vain and easy prey but he had been alive and involved. Magical days. Glorious days. Days ruined by time.

Well, enough of that, enough of the past. The virus was ready for the postman. The murder rate in Los Angeles would rise a hundred-fold the first week. No guns would be used. Death would travel the old paths. The true paths. He laughed. People would die the old fashioned way.

He would start his fires in other places, too. In a few days the governor would stop by with his entourage of assorted money men and political players. The governor would get much more than the money he was seeking. It paid, sometimes, to start at the top and work your way down. He had his pieces in place, he had his plan in order, now all he needed was luck. He stopped the telescope and smiled. The van pulled up to Reese Tarrant’s apartment and Ajax hoped that God was not laughing.

Reese Tarrant woke up sweating. The room was dimly lit by the afternoon sun, but in his near wakeful state he thought he’d slept through the night and it was early morning. He’d had the same dream again: Homer Wermels walking away with a heart in his teeth and himself standing there stupefied, feeling very light, and putting his hand through the brand new hole in his chest.

What was the matter with him? Hannah Everett was a little old lady, slightly odd, a small-town gossip hung up on Rasmussen, world destruction, and vampires. So what if ten people were missing in the past few years? About average. Maybe a little high for a small town. Crazy old thing. No wonder her husband left. He rubbed his eyes. And if she wasn’t crazy?

He showered and put on fresh underwear. He did push-ups and sit-ups. He did jumping jacks until he couldn’t stand. The push-ups stretched the torn chest muscles. He was sore afterward but it was good pain, healing pain. The doctor had cautioned him against not exercising. “Ignore the initial discomfort. You’ll know when you’ve gone too far.”

He wondered if anyone else in the small complex, twelve units, knew that the infamous Anaheim Vampire had once lived in 3-C.

The Palms apartments were dowdy without being squalid. Two stories of six apartments faced each other over a dirt-filled swimming pool, sprouting pampas grass through a layer of beer cans and paper. He’d seen nothing of the other tenants and guessed they all worked days.

By three-thirty, his heartbeat had slowed and he was sitting on the couch drinking beer and cleaning his pistol. The pistol sat on the coffee table in front of him.

News flash: Why go to the trouble of killing women for blood when your employer and possible mentor owns most of the world’s fresh blood? Was it possible that Homer Wermels had somehow gotten his taste for blood while working for Ajax Rasmussen? Had Ajax sent Homer to LA on a little blood-collecting excursion? If so, Why? And, the real kicker, could he prove it? But then, according to Hannah Everret, he didn’t need proof. Just line Ajax up in his sights and start blasting.

He pulled an oil covered patch through the two inch barrel and looked through the muzzle, shining like a spiraling mirror, to infinity, just like this case.

He swabbed the cylinder chambers out until they also shined, then slowly loaded each chamber with the new bullets.

He’d been out of the hospital one week when it began. Cop humor: Reynolds had started it by hanging garlic on his desk and around his own neck. Then a crucifix and a pair of plastic fangs and a doll that looked like Dracula. It progressed to shrunken heads and then a Vampire blood drive. Several wooden stakes dipped in red paint were left on his desk. He’d been a good sport, the squad room antics had not really bothered him. At least no one came out and said what they were thinking, that he had killed a handcuffed prisoner. At least no one said it to his face.