Murder Of Angels Part 8

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"I know that, and maybe that other girl, maybe she never saw any wolves either, but that's not the point. She believed she saw wolves, Niki, and in the end that's all that mattered."

"Yeah, I know," Niki says, thinking of the things Spyder thought she saw, not wanting to see him cry, and he squeezes her hands tighter. It hurts, but she doesn't say so; she squeezes back instead, gazes past Marvin at Danny Boudreaux staring at them from his corner. Some wild expression stretched like a latex Halloween mask across his cold and irrefutable ghost's face, jealousy or hope or a wicked, secretive smile, no way for her to be sure, and then he's gone and there's nothing but a smudgy bit of shadow left behind.

"I can't believe what you told me, Niki, so I'm just gonna have to take your word for it. If I can't see what you see, then I can at least trust you. I'm not going to let you do this alone."

And when he finally lets go of her hands, releasing them slowly like he's afraid she's going to run, all the dark blood that's leaked through Niki's torn st.i.tches and raveling bandages spills out between their fingers and trickles onto the bed. Marvin's face goes slack, then taut and sick, realizing what he's done to her, horror vying with apology for control, and he opens his mouth to say something, but "No," she says, places her good hand over his lips and smiles a smile she doesn't have to fake. "I'm okay. It doesn't hurt all that bad. I think I'm going to be okay now."

While Marvin packs and calls the airline, Niki goes back to the upstairs bathroom to look at her hand. Down the hall, past the room where Daria keeps her record collection and her guitars, and the bathroom is big and white and smells faintly of Dow Scrubbing Bubbles and strongly of the bowl of lavender potpourri on the back of the com-mode. Clean smells, and Niki wonders how the bathroom would smell if Daria hadn't hired Marvin. The lion-footed, cast-iron tub and all those little hexagonal tiles on the 70 floor, a narrow, stained-gla.s.s window above the tub so she can see the last of the day, and she sits down on the toilet seat and begins unwrapping the gauze. Marvin wanted to do it, but she refused, so he fussed with the b.l.o.o.d.y bedclothes instead, carting them off to the laundry hamper and apologizing over and over even though she asked him not to; the st.i.tches torn before he squeezed her hand, anyway, and it's something she wants to do herself.

The entire palm side of the dressing is stained, some of the blood already gone dry and stiff, and she unwinds it slowly, winces when she gets near the end and some of the gauze has stuck to her skin, stuck to the crusty edges of the hole in her hand. Niki lets the bandage fall to the floor, a sloppy pile of crimson and maroon and white at her feet.

The st.i.tches have come loose, all eight of them, and she knows that Marvin's probably going to insist she see a doctor again before they leave town. Niki stares at her hand, trying to remember exactly what did and didn't happen in the restroom at Cafe Alhazred: the swelling and whatever grew inside it, the thing that had burrowed into her flesh, Danny, and then someone shouting and pounding angrily on the door.

Niki reaches for a coral pink washcloth hanging on a rack near the tub and wraps it around her hand, squeezes it and grits her teeth against the pain.

Was any of it real, the squirming, transparent child of her infection, something she saw or only something that she thought she saw?

Do you really think there's any difference? and she hopes that voice is only hers, her own voice from her own sick head, because she honestly isn't in the mood for Danny Boudreaux right now. No time for anything that might slow her down, no hope but movement, and she stands up and goes to the sink, twists one of the bra.s.s k.n.o.bs, and in a moment hot water is gurgling into the porcelain basin.

"You wanted her, and now she has you, forever," exactly what Danny said at Alhazred, and that's what the face in the mirror says when she looks up from the sink. But it

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isn't her face in the gla.s.s, and it isn't Danny's either, this haggard young man with eyes like stolen fire, eyes like the last breath rattling out of a dying man's chest, but then he's gone, and she's staring into her own dark and frightened eyes.

Niki raises her left hand and cautiously places her fingertips against the mirror, half expecting her hand to pa.s.s straight through, nothing solid there to stop her. But it's just a mirror, and the silvered gla.s.s is smooth and cold and reflects nothing but the lost girl she's become, the lost woman, and she looks back down at the water filling the sink.

"All I have do is make it to the airport," she says, wis.h.i.+ng she were already in Boulder, and so many opportunities to back out had come and pa.s.sed her by; over the Rocky Mountains and safe for a while with Mort and Theo before she has to see this s.h.i.+t through to the end. Niki shuts off the tap and lowers her right hand slowly into the clear, steaming water; it doesn't hurt half so much as she expected, and she wonders whether that's good or bad, watches with more curiosity than concern as her blood starts to turn the water red. Just like Moses, she thinks, and it annoys her that she can't remember which number plague that was.

"How are you doing in here?" Marvin asks, and she turns her head towards the bathroom door, making sure he's really there and really him before she answers.

"I think I'll live," and he comes closer, then, scowls down at her hand, and by now the water looks more like cherry Kool-Aid.

"d.a.m.n. You realize we're going to have to get that st.i.tched closed again before we leave."

"That's what I thought you'd say," and she lifts her hand out of the water so he can look at it more closely.

"Yeah, well, bleeding to death would probably be a lot more inconvenient. G.o.d, Niki, how did you even do this?"

"I already told you that," and she did, but Marvin shakes his head anyway.

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"Well, at least it doesn't look as if there's any infection setting in," and he opens the medicine cabinet, his own little ER stashed away in there, and takes out a sterile gauze pad and a roll of surgical tape, a plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. "This will probably do until we can get you to a doctor, if you'll go easy on this hand."

"The flight's at nine," she reminds him.

"We're not going to miss the flight, and if we do, we'll get another one."

"I want to ask you something," but then he pours the peroxide over her hand and it stings, foams the ugly color of funeral-parlor carnations. "s.h.i.+t, Marvin," she hisses and tries to pull her hand away.

"Don't be a p.u.s.s.y. What do you want to ask me?"

Niki waits until the stinging starts to fade, until he's rinsed her hand and dabbed it dry with a fresh washcloth and has started bandaging it again.

"It's kind of personal," but he only shrugs.

"s.e.x, drugs, or politics?" he asks, and "Neither," she says, and he glances up at her.

"Then it has to be religion, right?" and Niki nods. "I was Catholic," he continues, "once upon a time. Ancient history."

"So you don't believe in G.o.d anymore?"

"I believe we'll find out when the time comes," he says and takes a small pair of scissors from the medicine cabinet to snip the sticky white surgical tape. "Whether we want to or not."

She doesn't say anything for a moment, watches him working on her hand while she weighs words in her head, words and their consequences, and she can tell it makes Marvin feel better that there's finally something he can do for her.

"What if you're wrong, and we never get to find out? It's kind of presumptuous, isn't it, a.s.suming that dead people get all the answers? Maybe they don't know any more than we do."

"My, but we're in an existential mood today, aren't we?"

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"It's just something I was thinking about yesterday morning, that's all. How terrible it would be to be dead, to be a ghost and know that you're dead, and still not know if there's a G.o.d."

"Is that how you think it works?"

"I don't know what I think anymore," Niki says, and then Marvin's finished, has started putting everything back into the medicine cabinet, and the b.l.o.o.d.y water is swirling away down the drain. "But I've seen ghosts, and they don't seem very happy about it. Being dead, I mean."

"Are you afraid of them?" he asks, not exactly changing the subject, and he closes the medicine cabinet; Niki looks at the mirror, but the only reflections she can see there are hers and Marvin's.

"There are worse things than ghosts," she replies.

"Like wolves?" he asks her, and Niki doesn't answer, glances down at the floor, instead. There's a single red drop of her blood spattering the tiles.

"We should hurry," she says, and Marvin doesn't reply, and she waits impatiently while he takes time to wipe the floor clean again.

Thirty-five thousand feet above the mesas and b.u.t.tes of Monument Valley and Daria stares through the tiny window in the 767's fuselage, watching the sunset turning the tops of the clouds all the brilliant colors of the desert below. Flying into night, deep indigo sky ahead and fire behind them, and soon there will be stars. A cramped seat in coach because she's too worried about money these days to spring for first-cla.s.s tickets when this will get her to Atlanta just as fast. She has her headphones on, an old Belly alb.u.m in her Discman, Tanya Donelly singing "Untogether" to simple acoustic guitar, and it makes her miss Niki that much worse. Music from the year they met, though not exactly the sort of thing she would have listened to back then. Too busy trying to keep up with the boys to suffer anything so pretty or vulnerable, too busy learning to be harder than she already was, and for a moment Daria thinks about digging a 74 different CD out of the backpack at her feet. But the song ends, and the next track is faster and edgier and a little easier to take.

She closes her eyes, so far beyond sleepy, but it's a nice thought, anyway, dozing off to the soothing thrum of jet engines, and then the man sitting in the seat next to her touches her lightly on the shoulder.

"You're Daria Parker, aren't you? The singer," he asks, only a very faint hint of hesitation in his voice, and she almost says No, I'm not. No, but people are always telling me how much I look like her. She's done it plenty enough times before, and it usually works.

Instead, she opens her eyes, the sky outside the window a shade or two darker than before, and "Yeah," she says, and the man shakes her hand. Nothing remarkable about him, but nothing unremarkable, either, and she wonders how anyone could look that perfectly average. He introduces himself, perfectly average name she'll forget as soon as he stops bothering her and goes back to the computer magazine lying open in his lap.

"Wow. I knew it was you," he says. "I never would have recognized you, but my daughter has a poster of your band on her bedroom door. She'll die when I tell her about this."

Daria slips her headphones off and tries to remember all the polite things to say to an inquisitive stranger on an airplane, the careful, practiced words and phrases that neither insult nor encourage, but she's drawing a blank, and he still hasn't stopped shaking her hand.

"What's her name?"

"Alma. It's a family name. Well, my mother's middle name, anyway," and he finally lets go of her hand, has to so he can dig out his wallet to show her a picture of his daughter.

"How old is she?" Daria asks as the man flips hastily past his driver's license, a library card, and at least a dozen credit cards.

"Fourteen. Fifteen next month," and then he pa.s.ses the wallet to Daria and the girl in the photograph stares back at her through the not-quite-transparent plastic of a pro-

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tective sleeve. The sort of picture they take once a year at school, yearbook-bland sort of photograph your parents have to buy, and aside from one very large pimple, Alma looks almost as average as her father.

"She has every one of your records. Even an old ca.s.sette tape she bought off eBay, from when you were in that other band, the Dead Kittens."

"Stiff Kitten," Daria says, correcting him even though she probably shouldn't, probably rude, but he just nods his head agreeably and takes the wallet when Daria hands it back to him.

"Right, yeah. Stiff Kitten. Anyway, she paid seventy-three dollars for that old tape, if you can believe it."

"I don't even have a copy of that myself," which is true, her last copy of the demo she recorded with Mort and Keith lost before she and Niki moved to San Francisco. "I haven't heard it in years."

"Well, let me tell you, I sure have. She plays it constantly.

I keep telling her she's going to wear it out. Personally, I prefer your newer stuff."

"Me, too," she says, and the man laughs.

"Would you mind signing something for her? I hate to bother you, but she'd kill me-"

"No, it's okay, really," relieved that they've gotten around to the inevitable and he'll probably stop talking soon, hoping that she doesn't look relieved, but running out of chit-chat and patience. Just wanting to shut her eyes again, put the headphones back on, and with any luck she can sleep the rest of the way to Atlanta.

The man tears a subscription card out of the computer magazine and Daria signs one side of it with a ballpoint pen from his s.h.i.+rt pocket. "To Alma, be true," and "That's nice," the man says when he reads it. "That's very nice.

Thank you. She'll be tickled pink."

Daria almost laughs, the very last thing in the world she would have expected him to say, tickled pink, and then she sees the tattoo on the back of his right hand. Fading blue-black-green ink scar worked deep into his skin, concentric 76 and radial lines connecting to form a spider's web, and he sees that she's staring at it.

"Stupid, isn't it? Had that done when I was in college.

My wife says I should have it removed, but I don't know. It reminds me of things I might forget, otherwise."

And Daria doesn't reply, gives the man's pen back to him, and he asks her a couple more questions-what's it like, all the travel, the fans, has she ever met one of the Beatles-and she answers each question with the first thing that comes into her head. Forcing herself not to look at the tattoo again, and then the stewardess comes trundling down the narrow aisle with the beverage cart.

The man asks for a beer, a lite beer, and Daria takes the opportunity to turn away and put the headphones over her ears again. Outside, it's almost dark, a handful of stars twinkling high and cold and white, and she stares at them through her ghost-dim reflection until she falls asleep.

C H A P T E R T H R E E.

Ghosts and Angels Niki wanted to call a taxi, but they took Marvin's car, instead. A very small concession, she thought, give and take, only something to make her seem a little more rea-sonable. On the outside, the old VW Beetle looks like someone's been at it with a sledgehammer and a crowbar; inside, it smells like mold and the ancient, duct-taped up-holstery, the fainter, sweeter scents of his cologne and something she thinks might be peppermint Altoids. A puttering, noisy punch line of a car and "How much does Daria pay you?" she asks him, though How much doesn't she pay you? seems more to the point.

"Enough," he says, turning off Steiner onto Fell, the streetlights much, much brighter than his wavering low beams.

"Obviously not enough to buy a new car," she mutters, thinking that Marvin won't hear her over the Volkswagen's clattering engine, but he does.

"Yes. Enough to buy a new car, if I wanted a new car. I've had Mariah here since I started college. She gets me everywhere I need to go. How's the hand feeling?"

"It hurts."

"More or less than before?" and Niki thinks about that for a few seconds before answering, staring down at the bandage, thinking about Cafe Alhazred and the old man at the museum who wasn't Dr. Dalby.

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"Just about the same," she says, finally.

"Well, then. It could be worse."

"I don't need to see a doctor," she whispers emphatically.