Wetbones

this fucking discussion,' Jeff said.

Prentice thought: I'm helping him, I really am. This whole paranoid thing is just making a wreck of our lives. Both of us feeding on it emotionally – me because of Amy, Jeff because he feels bad about not taking care of Mitch.

The dreams Prentice had been having about Amy were enough to convince him he had some kind of morbid entanglement with her memory. Best all that were jettisoned..

'Mitch is probably deliberately letting you stew, man,' Prentice said. Everything he said was an attempt to convince himself as much as Jeff – an escape from culpability. From the sense of something precious inside him rotting away because he was trying to play along with Arthwright. 'I mean, think about it – Mitch is into rock'n'roll. Wants to be a head-bangin' rockstar. Chances are he's hanging out with that crowd on Sunset Boulevard, down by the Whisky, the other clubs down there. I mean – he probably was at Denver's, and then that didn't come to anything, and he split for town.'

But what about Amy? Prentice asked himself. Her connection to Denver. Her death.

He squashed the thought. Sometimes you have to just close your eyes and…

'Maybe you're right,' Jeff said grudgingly. 'But that headbangin' crowd is big, man. How am I supposed to find him in it – if that's where he is.

'A private eye. Go on foot and ask people in the lines outside the clubs. Maybe even see Mitch there. I mean, if you…' He broke off. He was about to say, If you tangle with the Denvers in court you could lose a lot of money – and and make an enemy of Arthwright. But if he said that, Mitch might realize that Arthwright had put him up to this.

Prentice writhed inside. Wrongwrongwrongwrong. The word like a bell pealing in his mind. Wrong.

Jeff hugged himself wearily. 'I'm fucking tired of thinking about this. I'll decide what to do tomorrow.'

The desk phone rang. Jeff answered it in a monotone. 'Yeah. Hello… Yeah, he's right here.'

He passed the phone over to Prentice and left the room.

Prentice put the phone to his ear. 'Tom Prentice here.'

'Hi, 'Tom Prentice here.' It's Lissa.'

Prentice's gut did another flip-flop. There was anticipation in it, and fear. 'Hi. I'm glad you called.'

'Listen – Zack wanted me to invite you to a party he's giving for some of his friends. He's giving it at their place, but he's setting it all up, I guess. Oh and I'm supposed to ask you – it was all very cryptic – how it's going 'with Jeff'? Whatever that's about.'

'Uh. Fine.' Could Jeff be listening on the extension? No, why would he? 'It's taken care of.'

'Good – I guess. I'm not in on that loop. Anyway – taking me to a party's a nice cheap date, don't you think?'

'I'd love to take you on the expensive kind.' But he was glad he didn't have to, yet. He was veering dangerously close to flat broke. God, he might have to write that video. ''For that matter, I'd take a trip to Baghdad with you in an F-16.'

'Good. I like an explosive date. But, in the meantime, Arthwright's party at the Denvers' is on Saturday -'

'It's where? ' Unable to hide his startlement.

'At the Denvers'. You're supposed to not bring you know-who. Can you pick me up?' She gave him the time and her address and they exchanged a few more vague innuendoes and he hung up.

Telling himself, This way I can clear up the question of Mitch being out there…

Then asking himself, What are you so scared of?

West Hollywood

'First time I saw a Wetbones body, I didn't want to believe it used to be people. If I believed that, shit, I'd have to puke,' Blume said. 'Eventually, I did have to puke.' He was six inches taller than Garner, but slumped in his chair almost to the same height; he had bushy hair receding with clown-like frontal baldness. A tired, cynical face built around a long, thin nose; the nondescript clothes that private detectives wear. He took another long pull on his beer. 'You sure you don't want a beer or something?' he asked Garner. 'I don't like to drink alone.'

Garner was tempted. He ached for a drink, sometimes, to put out the smoldering anguish of fear for Constance. But he wasn't going to throw away all those years of sobriety for anything so sickly as a mere temptation.

Garner shook his head. 'Naw. I'll have a Seven-Up though, if that helps.' They sat in a corner booth under a buzzing Felix The Cat clock. Garner wished they'd sat nearer the door. The tavern stank of old beer and a piss- choked bathroom.

'How many of these bodies have you seen?' Garner asked.

'If you can even call 'em bodies… Two.'

Blume heaved himself abruptly out of the booth and went to the bar. He came back moments later with a double tequila in one hand and a fizzing glass of soda in the other. He sat down, passing Garner the glass. 'They didn't have Seven-Up. Sprite.'

'Great. Fine. You were saying…'

Blume knocked back the double tequila in one swallow. Blew out his cheeks. Then shook his head sadly. 'If there hadn't been a skull, you wouldn'ta been able to tell it was human. Too much of a mess. Just a lot of… wet bones. Broken up wet bones. Wet with blood and… gunk. Piss and phlegm I guess. Even shit from the busted intestines. Busted bones and guts in the middle of a puddle of blood. No clothes around. It didn't look like it was dug up, neither. Too fresh. Not like somebody'd messed with a grave. You could just see these bones were new. And in one there was this busted skull, and the eye – well, one of the eyes was intact. But no lids…'

Garner swallowed. His mouth was very dry. He took a long drink of the Sprite. His tissues seemed to soak it up like desert sand sucking a raindrop. 'Seems to me it could still be… a hoax. Stolen bones from some medical school or… Were there organs?'

'Yeah. Some. What wasn't mushed into… gunk.'

'And skin?'

'I didn't see it. But there was a lot of stuff I couldn't quite make out what it was and I didn't wanna look that close.'

It's a big city. it wouldn't be her.

'But – why do you bring this up…?'

'They were all young girls, I heard, these bonepiles…' He shrugged. 'I don't wanna be insensitive or nothin' but…'

'Any identification of the…?' He waited, heart thudding so hard in his chest he thought that Blume must be able to hear it.

'Nope. That's part of why this thing hasn't really broken into the papers much because they're not connected to specific missing girls and the cops are taking the same tack that you did – that they're stolen bones… I.D. ing them's hard. There are so many missing kids in the L.A. area it's unbelievable.'

'Yeah. I know.' Garner fingered his soda glass. Stared at the slowly, slowly melting ice. 'But you drive around in this town for a day or two – especially when you're from out of town – and you find the statistics about missing kids very believable indeed, Blume…'

'You got any kind of fingerprints on your little girl?'

'Yes. I left them at your office with your boss when I first came in. And I've given the police a stat of them. They should be in the police computer.'

'As far as I know they haven't got any fingerprint I.D. on these Wetbones things yet. Hey, don't give me that look, it's a long shot – but we should push the cops into crosschecking it just to eliminate that longshot, when they've got some fingerprints on those bodies… If you can call 'em bodies…'

'You already said that,' Garner pointed out, through grating teeth.

Suddenly he felt like he was going to vomit. The smell of the men's room, the stale beer, the reek of booze off Blume himself. He wanted to shout at Blume that he was killing himself with alcohol, an addictive drug that's sold on television to children, sold in advance through hundreds of thousands of beer and wine commercials, but then his automatic guard against self righteousness came into play, and he said nothing, except, 'I need some air. Just keep looking for her, all right? I'll call you.'

Garner lurched out of the booth, staggered outside, as so many drunks did, coming out of Blume's favourite