Beaming, he said, “Detective O’Connor, I’m amazed to see you haven’t shot Mr. Michael yet.”
“My aim’s good,” she assured him, “but he can move fast.”
Well-padded but not fat, a robust and towering man with hands as big as dinner plates, Moses served as a deacon at the church and sang in the same gospel choir as his sisters, Lulana and Evangeline.
“They’re here to see the mister but not to trouble him,” Lulana told her brother. “If it looks like they’re troubling him, after all, lift them by the scruffs of their necks and put them in the street.”
As Lulana went inside, Moses said, “You heard Lulana. You may be police officers, but she’s the law around here. The Law and the Way. I would be in your debt if you didn’t make it necessary for me to scruff-carry you out of here.”
“If we find ourselves getting out of hand,” Michael said, “we’ll scruff-carry each other.”
Pointing with his paintbrush, Moses said, “Mr. Aubrey is over there past the pagan fountain, among the roses. And please don’t make fun of his hat.”
“His hat?” Michael asked.
“Lulana insists he wear a sun hat if he’s going to spend half the day in the garden. He’s mostly bald, so she worries he’ll get head-top skin cancer. Mr. Aubrey hated the hat at first. He only recently got used to it.”
Carson said, “Never thought I’d see the day when anyone would be the boss of Aubrey Picou.”
“Lulana doesn’t so much boss,” said Moses. “She sort of just tough-loves everyone into obedience.”
A brick walkway led from the back veranda steps, across the lawn, encircled the pagan fountain, and continued to the rose garden.
The sculptured-marble fountain featured three life-size figures. Pan, a male form with goat legs and horns, played a flute and chased two nude women — or they chased him — around a column twined with grapevines.
“My eye for antiques isn’t infallible,” Michael said, “but I’m pretty sure that’s eighteenth-century Las Vegas.”
The rosebushes grew in rows, with aisles of decomposed granite between. In the third of four aisles stood a bag of fertilizer, a tank sprayer, and trays of neatly arranged gardening tools.
Here, too, was Aubrey Picou, under a straw hat with such a broad brim that squirrels could have raced around it for exercise.
Before he noticed them and looked up, he was humming a tune. It sounded like “His Lamp Will Overcome All Darkness.”
Aubrey was eighty years old and had a baby face: an eighty-year-old baby face, but nevertheless pink and plump and pinchable. Even in the deep shade of his anticancer headgear, his blue eyes twinkled with merriment.
“Of all the cops I know,” said Aubrey, “here are the two I like the best.”
“Do you like any others at all?” Carson asked.
“Not one of the bastards, no,” Aubrey said. “But then none of the rest ever saved my life.”
“What’s with the stupid hat?” Michael asked.
Aubrey’s smile became a grimace. “What’s it matter if I die of skin cancer? I’m eighty years old. I gotta die of something.”
“Lulana doesn’t want you to die before you find Jesus.”
Aubrey sighed. “With those three running the show, I trip over Jesus every time I turn around.”
“If anyone can redeem you,” Carson said, “it’ll be Lulana.”
Aubrey looked as if he would say something acerbic. Instead he sighed again. “I never used to have a conscience. Now I do. It’s more annoying than this absurd hat.”
“Why wear the hat if you hate it?” Michael asked.
Aubrey glanced toward the house. “If I take it off, she’ll see. Then I won’t get any of Evangeline’s pie.”
“The praline-cinnamon cream pie.”
“With fried-pecan topping,” Aubrey said. “I love that pie.” He sighed.
“You sigh a lot these days,” Michael said.
“I’ve become pathetic, haven’t I?”
“You used to be pathetic,” Carson said. “What you’ve become is a little bit human.”
“It’s disconcerting,” Michael said.
“Don’t I know,” Aubrey agreed. “So what brings you guys here?”
Carson said, “We need some big, loud, door-busting guns.”
Chapter 16
Glorious, the stink: pungent, pervasive, penetrating.
Nick Frigg imagined that the smell of the pits had saturated his flesh, his blood, his bones, in the same way that the scent of smoldering hickory permeated even the thickest cuts of meat in a smokehouse.
He relished the thought that to the core he smelled like all varieties of decomposition, like the death that he longed for and that he could not have.
In his thigh-high rubber boots, Nick strode across the west pit, empty cans of everything rattling in his wake, empty egg cartons and cracker boxes crunching-crackling underfoot, toward the spot where the surface of the trash had swelled and rolled and settled. That peculiar activity appeared to have ceased.
Although compacted by the wide-tracked garbage galleons that crawled these desolate realms, the trash field — between sixty and seventy feet deep in this pit — occasionally shifted under Nick, for by its nature it was riddled with small voids. Agile, with lightning reflexes, he rarely lost his footing.
When he arrived at the site of the movement that he had seen from the elevated rampart, the surface did not look significantly different from the hundred fifty feet of refuse across which he had just traveled. Squashed cans, broken glass, uncountable plastic items from bleach bottles to broken toys, drifts of moldering landscape trimmings — palm fronds, free limbs, grass — full trash bags knotted at their necks…
He saw a doll with tangled legs and a cracked brow. Pretending that beneath his foot lay a real child of the Old Race, Nick stomped until he shattered the smiling face.
Turning slowly 360 degrees, he studied the debris more closely.
He sniffed, sniffed, using his genetically enhanced sense of smell to seek a clue as to what might have caused the unusual rolling movement in this sea of trash. Methane escaped the depths of the pit, but that scent seemed no more intense than usual.
Rats. He smelled rats nearby. In a dump, this was no more surprising than catching a whiff of garbage. The musky scent of rodents pervaded the entire fenced grounds of Crosswoods Waste Management.
He detected clusters of those whiskered individuals all around him, but he could not smell a pack so large that, swarming through a burrow, it would be capable of destabilizing the surface of the trash field.
Nick roamed the immediate area, looking, sniffing, and then squatted — rubber boots squeaking — and waited. Motionless. Listening. Breathing quietly but deeply.
The sounds of the unloading semis at the east pit gradually receded, as did the distant growl of the garbage galleons.
As if to assist him, the air hung heavy and still. There was no breeze to whisper distractingly in his ears. The brutal sun seared silence into the day.
At times like this, the sweet reek of the pit could convey him into something like a Zen state of relaxed yet intense observation.
He lost track of time, became so blissed-out that he didn’t know how many minutes passed until he heard the voice, and he could not be certain that it hadn’t spoken several times before he registered it.
“
Soft, tremulous, in an indefinite timbre, the one word question could have been posed by either a male or a female.
Dog-nose Nick waited, sniffed.
“
This time the question seemed to come simultaneously from four or five individuals, male and female.
