Vicious Grace

Page 19

“Grace,” I said. “But not. Close, but never quite right.”
Aubrey nodded and pointed to the table before him.
“He’s been reading up too,” he said.
“On?”
“Schizophrenia. Dementia. Compulsive personality disorders.” Aubrey cocked his head, reading the title of a book. “Dream interpretation.”
The kitchen was a mess. Piles of old dishes teetered by the sink. The smell of spoiled food thickened. Dark brown beer bottles stood in uneven ranks on the countertop. A few had the labels picked off. One was broken. Out the back window, a small yard had been neatly kept not too long ago. I didn’t see anyone back there. In the living room, Aubrey whistled low. When I got back, he was holding up an old-looking leather-bound book. The title on the spine was worked-gold Gothic lettering and looked German to me.
“I’ve heard about this book, but I’ve never seen a copy,” Aubrey said. I stood beside him. The title page sported a woodcut print that looked at first glance like a human form, until I noticed that all the parts—arms, legs, improbably oversized penis—were also drawings of buildings and people, like one of those optical illusions where you could see something as either a face or a collection of objects. The title was Der Körper und der Geist, and below that, in smaller, bright red letters: Ein Versuch auf dem verklemmten Leviathan.
“It belonged to the grandfather,” Aubrey said. “His name’s on the flyleaf.”
“Any idea what it says?”
“The title translates to ‘Body and Spirit,’ but the subtitle’s new to me. Versuch is experiment or trial, but I think it can also mean essay. So, I guess an essay or an experiment of the something-or-other Leviathan?”
“Look at its hands,” I said. The woodcut was rough, the printing old. If I hadn’t seen them in a different context earlier in the day, I would have thought the strange, almost disjointed fingers were just bad technique.
“Good call,” he said, his voice grim.
I was about to reach for my cell phone with the idea of getting Ex and Chogyi Jake up to speed when a sound came from behind us, familiar from a dozen action flicks: the slick and clatter of a round being racked in a shotgun.
ELEVEN
My body dove forward, pushing Aubrey down, almost before I knew I was doing it. By the time my conscious mind caught up, I was crouching between coffee table and couch. My weight was on my fingertips and the balls of my feet. Aubrey lay half behind the couch, his breath ragged. I wanted to look at him to make sure it was just surprise and caution, that I hadn’t hurt him, but my head wouldn’t turn.
In the dark frame of the hallway, the man with the shotgun stood. He was broad across the shoulders and belly with a neck as wide as his head. His eyes seemed to tremble in their sockets, and his face was flushed the deep red of rage. His bathrobe and T-shirt were stained by grease and time. As I watched, he took another step into the room, growling like a dog. He swung the shotgun toward me, the barrel deep as a well. I flipped the coffee table up between us and dropped low as the blast reduced it to splinters. Then, against all common sense and instinct, I leaped forward.
His eyes widened, and he took half a step back. He’d started racking a second round, but I had the barrel in my hand, the heat searing my skin like I’d grabbed a skillet. He was easily one and a half of me, but I twisted, pointing the barrel at the ceiling. I drove my knee up toward his crotch, but I didn’t have the leverage to put any power into the blow. We were both holding the shotgun now, fighting for it. I tried to push him back, but he rose up over me, pressing down until my wrists ached. His breath stank of whiskey. His eyes were bloodshot.
He charged with a roar, bulling me forward into the ruins of the coffee table. I kept hold of the shotgun and let myself fall back, the force of his attack and my weight both pulling him forward. As he fell on top of me, I tried the knee again with much more satisfying results. We were locked together on the floor so close that I felt his gasp of pain against my cheek. I twisted my body, pulling my arms in between us and digging a straight-fingered hand in under his ribs. I heard Aubrey someplace to my right and felt a shudder as something hit my assailant’s back. It didn’t matter. He’d flinched back from my hand strike, and I could squirm out from beneath him. Small, younger, fueled by magic, I was on my knees before he could get his hands under him. I dropped an elbow onto his left kidney twice, then pulled the shotgun away from him.
When he could finally roll over, it was too late. I had a fresh round racked, and the barrel digging into the flesh of his throat. The fight was over, and I felt myself starting to tremble and pant in its aftermath. He sneered up at me, his lips in a squared gape of defiance and rage. And there was something else. The knowledge that his death was a finger’s twitch away. Something that looked like relief.
“David Souder?” I said between pants.
He nodded, the movement translating itself to my hand along the length of the gun.
“I’m Jayné. Hi. We’re here to help.”
I HADN’T gotten out of it totally unscathed. A splinter of coffee table had gouged a deep red stripe down my back, and the fall had driven a small finishing nail into my shoulder deep enough that only the small silver head showed like something equal parts body piercing and Home Depot. We got it out with a pair of pliers. The palm of my right hand was cooked red. I sat at the kitchen table, holding a Ziploc bag of ice cubes. My T-shirt was blood-soaked and torn. David, once he’d calmed down a little, had offered me an old gray University of Michigan sweatshirt that was too small to have ever been his.
The good news was I’d had several tetanus shots within the last year, didn’t seem to have soaked up any of the shotgun pellets, and wouldn’t have to go to a hospital to have little bits of metal spooned out of my flesh. Go me.
“That was incredible,” David Souder said as Aubrey applied a square bandage to the circular burn on the man’s neck. “The way you threw that table. And when you jumped? I mean you are goddamn fast. Are you a black belt or something?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“Stop moving,” Aubrey said.
“Sorry,” David said.
“The short version,” I said, “is that we’re working on a problem, and we have pretty good reason to think it involved your grandfather. And because of him, you.”
“Who put you up to—”
“Stop moving.”
Aubrey stepped back. He didn’t look happy.
“All right,” he said. “Move. That’s the best I can do.”
David put a hand to the bandage. I had the feeling he was less checking how it felt than whether it really existed.
“Who put you up to this?” he asked. “Was it Alexis?”
“No one put us up to it,” I said. “We were looking at something else. It involves a building your grandfather designed right before he died. We had some reason to think you were involved, even if you didn’t directly know you were.”
David looked from me to Aubrey and then back. With his fear and anger gone, he looked much less dangerous. His bulk made him look like a young Winston Churchill. His eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, and the way he held himself spoke of a profound exhaustion. He brushed at his robe with a wide hand, as if he could erase the stains with his palm.
“You’re really not . . . I’m sorry. But I can’t believe this is really happening.”
“I know. It’s weird,” I said. “How long has it been since you slept?”
“Three days this time. I’ve made it four or five before, but I was just starting to fade when I heard the two of you talking. You really know what’s going on? What’s wrong with me?”
Aubrey looked at me, his expression a question. How much do we tell him?
“We’re putting it together,” I said. “How about you tell us a little about what’s been going on with you. Compare notes.”
“I can get you something to drink,” Aubrey said.
“I’ll make some coffee,” David said, hauling himself up. “You two take decaf?”
We both agreed it would be fine. He lumbered over to the stove and started a teakettle to boil, his brows knotted. He was silent for so long, I felt like I had to prompt him.
“It started about a year ago,” I said.
“Yeah. It did. It was about eight months after the last part of the divorce. Alexis moved down to Dallas. We didn’t have any kids, and I never really liked her dog. It had been a long time coming, and with her gone I thought it was just some kind of delayed stress thing. Bad stuff happens and you seem all right for a while, but then it comes back up? I did that a lot when I was a kid. I was half expecting it. So when I started having the nightmares, I didn’t really think much about it.”
His voice was calm enough, and steady, but I felt like he was leaving out bits and pieces. Dropping half-thoughts out through the cracks between words. I’d been that tired a few times, but only a few, and not for long.
“Somewhere August, September?” I said.
“I don’t know. Somewhere in there, yeah. It started off just being a sense of waking up trapped. Like the blankets were too heavy, and I couldn’t open my eyes. But I knew where I was. I knew who I was. I figured it was a kind of metaphor. You know, you feel trapped and smothered in a relationship, and so you dream about being trapped and smothered. Pretty straightforward.”
He opened one of the cabinets and took down two mugs. There were other dishes, but none of them clean. He picked up a third mug off the table and rinsed it out.
“I was just using this one,” he said. “It hasn’t been sitting here like the others.”
“Okay,” I said. His embarrassment was touching in a weird way. For someone who’d tried to kill me less than an hour before, he seemed vulnerable and more than a little lost.
“So,” he said. “Well, I figured it was a phase. I could tough it out. But they kept getting worse. Going on longer. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night screaming. I wasn’t just stuck in bed anymore. I was buried. Like something out of a Poe story. I was in a coffin and I could hear the dirt hitting the lid. The more I had the dreams, the less I could rest, and the less I could rest, the worse they seemed to get.”