“We should talk to your father-in-law,” I told Lilly.
She shook her head. “Can’t. He’s in Shorehaven.”
“The nursing home?”
“He’s had three strokes over the past four months. The third left him in a coma. He can’t talk to anyone. They don’t expect him to live much longer.”
When I looked at the ink sketch again, I understood that Bobby’s “radically weird” had referred not only to the hand-lettered words but also to the crow itself. The drawing had a malevolent aura: The wing feathers bristled; the beak was open as if to let out a shriek; the talons were spread and hooked; and the eye, though merely a white circle, seemed to radiate evil, fury.
“May I keep this?” I asked Lilly.
She nodded. “It feels dirty. I don’t want to touch it.”
We left Lilly there with a cup of tea and with hope that, if it could have been measured, might not have equaled the volume of juice she could squeeze from the lemon wedge on her saucer.
Descending the porch steps, Sasha said, “Bobby, you better bring Jenna Wing back here as quick as you can.”
I gave him the sketch of the crow. “Show her this. Ask her if she remembers any case Louis worked on… anything that might explain this.”
As we crossed the backyard, Sasha took my hand.
Bobby said, “Who’s spinning music when you’re here?”
“Doogie Sassman’s covering for me,” she said.
“Mr. Harley-Davidson, the man-mountain love machine,” Bobby said, leading us along the brick walk beside the garage. “What program format does he favor — head-banging heavy metal?”
“Waltzes,” Sasha said. “Fox-trots, tangos, rumbas, cha-chas. I’ve warned him he has to stick with the tune sheet I gave him, ’cause otherwise, he’d just play dance music. He loves ballroom dancing.”
Pushing open the gate, Bobby stopped, turned, and stared at Sasha in disbelief. To me, he said, “You knew this?”
“No.”
“Ballroom dancing?”
Sasha said, “He’s won some prizes.”
“Doogie? He’s as big as a Volkswagen Beetle.”
“The old Volkswagen Beetle or the new one?” I asked.
“The new one,” Bobby said.
“He’s a big guy, but he’s very graceful,” Sasha said.
“He has a tight turning radius,” I told Bobby.
The thing that happens so easily among us, the thing that makes us so close, was happening again. The groove or rhythm or mood or whatever it is we so routinely fall into with one another — we were falling into it again. You can handle anything, including the end of the world as we know it, if at your side are friends with the proper attitude.
Bobby said, “I thought Doogie hangs out in biker bars, not ballrooms.”
“For fun, he’s a bouncer in a biker bar two evenings a week,” Sasha said, “but I don’t think he hangs out there otherwise.”
“For fun?” Bobby said.
“He enjoys breaking heads,” Sasha said.
“Who doesn’t,” I said.
As we followed Bobby into the alleyway, he said, “The dude is a way skilled audio engineer, rides a Harley like he came out of the womb on it, dates awesome women who make any Ms. Universe look like the average resident of an oyster shell, fights drunken psycho bikers for fun, wins prizes for ballroom dancing — this sounds like a bro we want with us when we go back to Wyvern.”
I said, “Yeah, my big worry has been what we’ll do if there’s a tango competition.”
“Exactly.” To Sasha, Bobby said, “You think he’d be up for it?”
She nodded. “I think Doogie’s always up for everything.”
I expected to find a police cruiser or an unmarked sedan behind the garage, and unamused authority figures waiting for us. The alley was deserted.
A pale gray swath of sky outlined the hills to the east. The breeze raised a chorus of whispers from the windbreak of eucalyptus trees along the canyon crest, as if warning me to hurry home before the morning found me.
“And Doogie has all those tattoos,” I said.
“Yeah,” Bobby said, “he’s got more tattoos than a drunken sailor with four mothers and ten wives.”
To Sasha, I said, “If you’re getting into any hostile situation, and it involves a super-huge guy covered with tattoos, you want him on your side.”
“It’s a fundamental rule of survival,” Bobby agreed.
“It’s discussed in every biology textbook,” I said.
“It’s in the Bible,” Bobby said.
“Leviticus,” I said.
“It’s in Exodus, too,” Bobby said, “and Deuteronomy.”
Alerted by movement and by a glimpse of eyeshine, Bobby snapped the shotgun into firing position, I drew the Glock from my shoulder holster, Sasha pulled her revolver, and we swung toward the perceived threat, forming a manic tableau of paranoia and rugged individualism that would have been perfection if we’d just had one of those pre-Revolutionary War flags that featured a coiled serpent and the words
Twenty feet north of us, along the eastern side of the alley, making no sound to compete with the soughing of the wind, coyotes appeared among the trunks of the eucalyptus trees. They came over the canyon crest, through the bunchgrass and wild flax, between bushy clumps of goatsbeard.
These prairie wolves, smaller than true wolves, with narrower muzzles and lighter variegated coats, possess much of the beauty and charm of wolves, of all dogs. Even in their benign moments, however, after they have hunted and fed to contentment, when they are playing or sunning in a meadow, they still look dangerous and predatory to such an extent that they are not likely to inspire a line of cuddly stuffed toys, and if one of them is chosen as the ideal photogenic pet by the next resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we can be reasonably sure that the Antichrist has his finger on the nuclear trigger.
Slinking out of the canyon, among the trees, into the alley in the earliest ashen light of this cloud-shrouded morning, the coyotes looked post-apocalyptic, like the hellish hunters in a world long past its doomsday. Heads thrust forward, yellow eyes glowing in the gloom, ears pricked, jaws cracked in humorless serrated grins, they arrived and gathered and turned to face us in dreamlike silence, as though they had escaped from a Navajo mystic’s peyote-inspired vision.
Ordinarily, coyotes travel overland in single file, but these came in a swarm, and once in the alleyway, they stood flank-to-flank, closer than any canine pack, huddling together rather like a colony of rats. Their breath, hotter than ours, smoked in the coolish air. I didn’t attempt to count them, but they numbered more than thirty, all adults, no pups.
We could have tried to get into Sasha’s Explorer and pull the doors shut, but we all sensed that any sudden movement from us or any show of fear might invite a vicious assault. The most we dared to do was slowly reverse a step or two, until our backs were to some degree protected by the pair of parked vehicles.
Coyote attacks on adult human beings are rare but not unknown. Even in hunting pairs or in a pack, they will stalk and chase down a man or woman only if desperate with hunger because a drought has lowered the population of mice, rabbits, and other small wildlife. Young children, left unattended in a park or in a backyard adjacent to open range, are more often seized and savaged and dragged away, but these incidents are also rare, especially considering the vast expanses of territory that human beings and coyotes inhabit together throughout the West.
I was most worried not by what coyotes might usually do, but by the perception that these were not
