Game of Cages Page 5

  His mouth worked while he decided whether to take her advice. “You’re wrong and you’re right. I would have bought the creature if the price hadn’t been so high, just like you. I’m also planning to make a record of everything I’ve seen, Professor Solorov, also just like you.” Kripke had an edge of contempt in his voice, as though he didn’t think they had the guts to kill him.

  Biker looked uncomfortable and edged away from Kripke. I could tell he took the threat seriously, and so did I.

  The ghost knife was still in my pocket, but I couldn’t use it. Both Mustaches had their backs to me, and I couldn’t see their guns. My spell would pretty much hit whatever I wanted it to, but I couldn’t hit what I couldn’t see. I also expected them to have backup weapons. Horace did.

  I could have targeted the men rather than the weapons, of course, but I couldn’t hit all of them together. Someone would have time to squeeze a trigger, and I wasn’t protected well enough to survive a shotgun blast.

  “Perhaps we will,” Solorov answered. I wondered if she said we when her gunmen weren’t around. “But there are crucial differences. First, we know everyone we will share this information with personally. Second, we brought more guns. You.” She spoke to Biker for the first time. “You’re his friend, correct? He didn’t hire you as a bodyguard; he asked you to come along, right?”

  “Right,” Biker answered. His voice was hoarse.

  “We thought so,” she said. “We’re going to split you up, but we’re willing to spare your lives if you both cooperate.”

  Kripke let out a dismissive puff of air. “I wouldn’t join your group if you—”

  “I didn’t say you could join us,” Solorov said sharply. “You can work for us. I know someone has been feeding you information—recent information. If you share it with us—all of it—and if you report to your group in exactly the manner I indicate, you and your friend may survive.”

  Kripke looked over at Biker. The look on his friend’s face drained all the insolence out of him. He nodded.

  “You’re lucky, Mr. Kripke, although I doubt you have the wit to see it. If Mr. Yin had been asked to get rid of you, two of his men would have walked in here, shot you both, and left you dead on the floor. And that crotchety German bastard would have cut you open and eaten you. At least I—and the rest of the Fellows, of course—have given you a chance to live and be useful.”

  Stork Neck and Skinny Mustache waved at Biker. He stood. They were leaving.

  I slid away from the door as quietly as I could. There was one other door in the hall, but it was locked. The rattle of the latch sounded as loud as an alarm bell. I hustled away, holding the tray in my left hand.

  The corridor ended at a door with a dead bolt. I didn’t bother to rattle the knob. To my right was another mudroom and a door into the backyard. To my left was a flight of stairs. I walked up the steps.

  The library door clicked shut. At the top of the first landing, I heard Biker’s hoarse voice say: “You guys don’t have to kill me, you know.”

  “We know.” I didn’t recognize that voice.

  “You … you wouldn’t really do it, though, right?” I could hear the question in Biker’s voice: Are these guys really killers? “Have you ever done this before?”

  “I wanted a monster,” a new voice said. It sounded high and thin, as though the speaker was under terrible strain. “I came here to get a monster, but we weren’t fucking rich enough. Do you know how long I …” He let that sentence trail off as though he was swallowing all his disappointment and resentment. I wouldn’t want to be on the ugly end of his gun.

  “We won’t do anything we don’t have to do,” the first man said calmly.

  They went outside. I climbed the second flight and came to a huge back window. Through the drapes, I saw Stork Neck and Skinny Mustache lead Biker toward the woods, away from the garage.

  According to Horace, the guesthouse was where the predator had been kept. That was my next stop.

  There was a muffled chunk of a slamming car door. I crossed toward the front of the house. The nearest door was unlocked and the room inside was filled with furniture covered with white sheets, just like in the movies. The musty smell made me wrinkle my nose.

  More heavy drapes hung over the windows at the front of the house. Each window was taller than my apartment. I pulled the drape open a crack. The X6 backed up, trying to make its way through the crowded lot. When it was as close to the door as it was going to get, the guy in the furry Russian hat climbed out of the driver’s seat and hustled around the front. He opened the back door like a chauffeur.

  A small woman slipped into the backseat. From above I didn’t have the best view of her, but I saw that her very dark hair was parted severely down the middle and curled into a librarian’s bun. She had a dark complexion and wore a gray suit.

  The chauffeur closed her door, got behind the wheel, and sped off. If she was leaving before the others, she worked for Mr. Yin, which meant she was the Well-Spoken Woman who was so casual about asking other people to kill for her. I hoped Catherine was in position to snap a photo.

  I mentally ran through the list of bidders Horace had given us: Yin’s people were all out on the hillside hunting for the predator. I hadn’t seen Yin himself, only his gunman and Well-Spoken Woman, who was his representative. Kripke and his biker bodyguard were accounted for and not doing very well. I’d seen Professor Solorov and about half of her mismatched, badly dressed Fellows; on their own, they didn’t impress, but their guns were dangerous enough.

  And there was Tattoo, who had to be the German with the harsh voice. I didn’t like the look of him, especially since Horace had said he was one of the “old man’s” people. The professor had said the old man would have eaten Kripke, and based on previous experience, I knew there was a good chance she meant it literally. I didn’t want to meet that old man.

  That meant I’d had at least a glimpse of each of the four groups of bidders. Hopefully, what I’d learned would be useful to the society.

  I went back into the hall and heard the faint jabbering of a radio. I peered into the darkness and noticed a tiny sliver of light shining from under a door. I had a hunch I knew who was behind that door, and if I was right, the guesthouse could wait.

  “I can hear you out there!” Regina shouted. “You can’t fool these old ears.”

  Fair enough. I opened the door and went inside.

  The bright light hit half a second before the smell. Who ever brought Regina up here hadn’t expected her to sleep. Maybe they didn’t care. Three halogen lamps filled the room with an acid-yellow light—there was no way to nod off in here without a blindfold.

  The room also stank of unwashed bedpans, sweat, and neglect. My initial impulse was to flee back into the musty shadows of the hall.

  “I know,” Regina said. I guess I wouldn’t have made much of a poker player in that moment. She switched off a small transistor radio on the bed beside her. Her niece had buckled her left wrist to a bolt in the frame. She was still wearing the dirty nightgown, and I wished she would pull it down over the black-and-blue patches on her legs. They gave me goose bumps. “It sickens me, too. Just be glad you don’t have to live this way.”

  “I am. My name is Ray.”

  “I’m Regina Wilbur. When I was a girl, my father would have had you thrown out of this house for introducing yourself to me. You’d have left with a muddy boot print on your derrière.”

  “Things have changed,” I said, for lack of anything more profound to offer.

  She rattled the short chain on her restraint. “So they have. What have you done with Armand?”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know who that is,” I said, hoping it would prompt her to explain.

  Instead, she sighed bitterly and looked around the room. “This house was mine once. My father built it with timber money. My husband built four more just like it all over the country, and one in the Italian Alps, too. He took my father’s fortune and doubled it five t
imes. Trucking lines, at the beginning, then tires and road building. He was a bastard, but most are. At least he had the decency to die young.

  “But now Stephanie has taken it all, and the little bitch didn’t even have the good manners to wait until I had dirt over my face. She’s going to sell it, just like the ones in Carolina and Maine, so she can live in California.” She said that word with special distaste. “All auctioned off! All the history here. All the gifts from politicians and people desperate to do business. Even from enemies who wanted my blessing …”

  Her voice trailed off and she stared across the room. Her eyes were like dark river stones. The whole situation made me uneasy.

  She seemed to have forgotten me. To prompt her, I said: “Was Armand one of those gifts?”

  “Yes,” she said, savoring the word like it was candy. “He was a gift from one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world, Nelson Taber Stroud. Dead now, of course. He and I clashed over all sorts of garbage over the years, especially mining rights, but that changed once Armand arrived. Nothing else mattered after that. Armand was everything.”

  What is he? I wanted to ask. That seemed too direct. Regina may have been in a bad spot, but she was still sharp. And she hadn’t asked for my help, hadn’t even hinted that she wanted it. She was either tough as hell or completely crazy.

  “It sounds like you loved him very much.”

  “You bet I did. I made sure Ursula kept his cage clean and stayed with him in his house. He was loved, and I made sure he knew it.”

  She looked at a nightstand loaded with pictures in silver frames. I circled the bed toward it. I had to move in front of a window, but the glass was so dirty that I wasn’t worried about being spotted. The closest picture, though still out of her reach, was of a much younger Regina holding a Scottish terrier to her face. The dog wore a diamond necklace. “Is this Armand?”

  She twisted her mouth in disgust. “That’s the first Armand. Give me that.”

  I handed the picture to her. She snatched it with her free hand and flung it across the room. It smashed against a radiator with a noise I thought the whole house could hear.

  Damn. Now I understood why it had been out of her reach. I slid my hand into my pocket next to my ghost knife, just in case someone came to investigate.

  “That’s what I think of that,” she said with finality. She turned back to the other pictures.

  Regina was much older in these. Every picture showed her crouching beside an empty Plexiglas cage similar to the one in the wrecked truck, only much larger. Flood lamps lit the interior, and the cage was spiderwebbed with electrical wiring.

  But all I could see inside the cage was a blurry blue smear. Whatever it was, I couldn’t make it out.

  I looked at the other pictures. There were at least a dozen, all showing Regina posing with the empty cage. Her hair was longer in some pictures than in others, but she had the same creepy, ecstatic smile in each. Something about them bothered me, though. The smile was the same, but the expression was not. It seemed that the longer her hair was, the more ferocious her eyes became.

  I studied the background of the images. They had been taken indoors; there was a couch, a ski jacket, and skis against the wall in one photo, a tiny stove in another. The space looked pretty cramped, and I guessed it was the guesthouse out back.

  One picture showed a different woman who didn’t smile at all, but her face glowed with smug contentment. She was younger than Regina—maybe in her early fifties—with a pale, stolid look about her. Her eyes had the same fierce glint as Regina’s.

  “I can’t see Armand. Was he in the cage when this was taken?”

  “We didn’t cage him,” she snapped, forgetting that she’d already told me she kept his cage clean. “We kept him safe. But yes, he was there when we took those. He doesn’t turn up on film. He isn’t a regular animal, you know. He’s special.”

  Now we were getting to it. “How is he special?”

  “He is beautiful!” she cried. “He’s the most beautiful thing on God’s green earth. His eyes are like the stars of the Milky Way, and he’s as delicate as thistledown. He’s the only dog of his kind in the world. A sapphire dog, Stroud called him. He’s as beautiful as a dream at twilight. Like holding the sky in your arms.”

  I wondered how she could hold the sky in her arms while it was inside a plastic cage, but it didn’t seem polite to argue. “That’s a pretty way to describe him.”

  She waved my comment away. “I didn’t write it. Some college professor did. I held a poetry contest years back to find someone to capture Armand’s essence, if you know what I mean. The winner had retired up here from some southern university to start a winery, and he won the cash prize hands down. Then I invited him to the house.

  “He didn’t think much of writing a poem about some rich broad’s dog until he met Armand, of course. Then he fell in love, just like anyone would. He spent six months here, sleeping on a cot, watching Armand—staring at him. What I said before is all I remember of the poem he wrote. You’d think it was sap if you’d never seen.”

  Her tone had changed. Something told me I should probe further. “What happened?”

  “He refused to leave,” she answered, her mouth twisting with anger. “He even told me that he loved Armand more than I did. That I wasn’t ‘sensitive’ enough to appreciate him. Ursula had to taser him to keep him from breaching the cage. Hah! I appreciated Armand enough to take care of that old fool.”

  The way she said that gave me a chill. “What did you do?”

  She bared her teeth. “I …” Then she stopped. It was pretty clear that she’d been about to confess to a crime. “Well, I paid him off,” she said, in the least convincing way possible. “Also, I had the sheriff run him out of town. Out of the country, actually. He’d committed a crime against me, stolen books out of my library, if you have to pry. I warned him that I was going to call the police the next day, and he was gone before morning. To Canada, maybe. Or Fiji. That’s all and nothing more.”

  She lifted her nose and looked away from me. Most people are terrible liars, but she was the worst I’d ever met. She could contradict herself all in one breath. “I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m not going to arrest you. You killed him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling at me with open contempt. “Yes, of course I did. I knifed him and pulled him out into the woods on a big old sled all by myself.” She looked at me as if she might like to cut me open and gulp down my heart. “And I’ll do the same to anyone who tries to come between me and my Armand.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It is. It’s very right. And don’t lie to me—I’m not fooled by that big silver tray and that tiny jacket. I know you’re one of the people that bitch brought here to buy him. Stephanie doesn’t understand. She’s never been close enough to really see, to really feel it. But if I thought you had my Armand, I’d cut your pathetic little johnny off and stuff it down your throat until you choked on it!”

  I nodded. I had gotten the message. Of course, if she found out what I really wanted to do to her pet, she’d come apart at the seams. The bidders only wanted to buy him.

  The urge to throttle the miserable life out of her made my hands shake. I went into the hall, closed the door, and walked away. It wasn’t my place to put people out of their misery or dish out punishment for old crimes. I wasn’t pure as snow myself. Besides, no matter what she’d done, I didn’t want to see the expression she’d made when the nurse had pinched her.

  I went back to the stairs. Voices echoed up from the bottom floor, so I went farther down the hall to a narrow set of steps at the end. I paused at the top, but the only sound I could hear was a TV announcer droning away. I crept down.

  There was a short hallway at the bottom of the stairs that led to an exterior door. There were also three interior doors, one of which was open. The announcer’s voice and a flickering TV light came from there.

  I looked around, wondering how
I was going to pass that open door without alerting whoever was inside.

  An old woman in a maid’s uniform stepped into the doorway and stared at me. She glanced at my white jacket with contempt; she wasn’t fooled for a second.

  While I considered what I should do, she rolled her eyes and shut the door. Apparently, she wasn’t being paid to be security.

  I walked to the exterior door. There was a dead-bolt key on a hook by the door, but I left it. As long as I had my ghost knife, I didn’t need keys. I set the tray against the wall and went outside. After the musty warmth of the house, the cold made my skin feel tight on my face and hands.

  The cottage sat at the top of the bare slope. When I crossed to it, I would be in full view of anyone looking out of a back window. I wished I had some cloud cover to darken the lawn; the thick black power line that ran from the house to the guesthouse cast a moon shadow on the lawn.

  I jogged across the damp crabgrass. He’s the only dog of his kind in the world, Regina had said. A sapphire dog. I wondered if she was being literal or if that was more rotten poetry. I still imagined something with wings.

  Maybe it was a bad idea to imagine anything. Whether it had wings, was shaped like a dog, or was just a blue smear of light, I was going to have to destroy it. If I could. Better to keep an open mind.

  A stairway of mortared stone led up the muddy slope. I jogged up. The cottage faced away from the main house, and all but one of the ground-floor windows were shuttered. I peeked inside. A desk lamp shone onto scattered papers and a closed laptop, but the room beyond was dark. I circled around.

  There was a huge metal tank and a generator against the building. I rapped on the tank. It was nearly full. Regina had enough fuel to run that generator for weeks.

  The front of the cottage was pretty much what illustrated fairy-tale books had taught me to expect. There was a heavy wooden door with an even heavier lintel. On either side was a window split into four panes with a window box underneath. At the far side of the building, I saw the front of a parked ATV.