IN HIS DEPARTMENT SEDAN, HAZARD FELT AS adrift as any sailor’s ghost on an abandoned and rotting ship, chained to his floating haunt by nothing more than the stubborn habit of living. Disoriented, with no purpose that made sense.
In the rain and mist, the streets seemed like the shipping lanes of a strange spook-ridden sea, and it was easy to imagine—and almost possible to believe—that many of the seemingly diaphanous vehicles gliding past him in the veiled night were piloted by spirits that had given up the flesh but not the city.
He had phoned in the license number on the Land Rover and had learned that it was registered to Kurtz Ivory International, whatever that might be. According to DMV records, the only vehicle registered to Vladimir Laputa was a 2002 BMW, not an Acura like the one that had been salted in the parking garage.
Having obtained that information, Hazard didn’t know what he could do next. He didn’t like being at a loss for action.
Every time he tried to puzzle out his next move, however, into his memory came the image of Dunny Whistler sorcerously transformed from flesh into a cascade of water, in an instant becoming one with [503] the puddle in which he had stood, performing a splashless vanishment.
In the wake of that sight, in the cold continuing echo of the conversation with the dead Hector X, logical reasoning failed Hazard. He found his thoughts spiraling again and again through the same disturbing chambers, down into a nautilus shell of dread.
Although he had missed lunch, he wasn’t hungry. Although he had no appetite, he stopped at a drive-in fast-food palace for a king’s plate of cheeseburgers and French fries.
The king’s plate proved to be a bag, of course, and the chalice of coffee was a Styrofoam cup full of a bitter swill that had been brewed with tree bark. Probably hemlock.
He remained too agitated to sit in the restaurant parking lot to have dinner. He drove while he ate.
He needed to keep moving. Like a shark, he felt that he would die if ever he stopped.
Eventually he returned to the tony neighborhood in which the professor lived. He parked across the street from the house.
Sitting there, he heard in his mind the warning voice of Dunny—Two bullets in the brain—and he knew beyond doubt that he would have suffered precisely that end if he had rung Laputa’s doorbell.
For now the hyena, as Rachel Dalton had called him, was out on an Acura adventure. Without its resident demon, the house was just a house, not a killing ground.
Hazard phoned Robbery/Homicide and obtained Sam Kesselman’s home telephone number.
In possession of the number, he considered what he was about to do. He knew that with this move he might be handing his enemies all the weapons they would need to destroy him.
His Granny Rose had once told him that woven throughout the very fabric of the world is an invisible web of evil, and that across this vast construction, deadly spiders quiver to the same secret seductive [504] music, and do the same dark work, each in its own way. If you don’t resist this sticky web when you feel it plucking at you, as often it does, then you will become one of the twisted eight-legged souls that dance upon it. And if the poisonous spiders are not crushed at every opportunity, there will sooner than later be spiders uncountable, but no humanity at all.
Hazard keyed in the number.
Sam Kesselman himself answered, first with a cough and a sneeze and a curse, but then in a voice so cracked and rough that he sounded like the product of a genetic-engineering lab working on human-frog crossbreeds.
“Man, you sound bad. You seen a doctor?”
“Yeah. Flu’s a virus. Antibiotics don’t work. Doctor gave me some cough medicine. Said get lots of rest, drink lots of fluid. Been drinkin............