He picked his way across the sagging piece of fence, and I went after him. When we were clear of the fence, Mitch started to run. When I didn’t keep up with him, he came back to nip me in the calf. Dehydrated, hungry, frozen, I ran with him across a paved road, up a steep hill, onto a plateau covered in dead grass that was springy and flat underfoot. Maybe I had fallen asleep again, because it was too much like a fairy tale, where you go through the demon-filled woods and come to a magical castle—at least, the grounds to the magical castle.
I had a stitch in my side and black spots dancing in front of my eyes, which I kept confusing with Mitch. Only his hoarse bark kept me going in the right direction, or, at least, the direction he was headed. I was floating now, the turf a yard or more below my feet. I could fly, it was the magic of the fairy castle, one mud-heavy foot leaving the ground, the other leaping behind it, I only had to move my arms a little, and I catapulted headfirst down the hill, rolling over and over until I was almost lying in a lake.
A giant hound appeared, the familiar of the witch whose castle I’d invaded. He grabbed my coat sleeve and tried to pull me along the ground, but he couldn’t move me. He bit my arm and I sat up.
Mitch. Yes, my dog. Leading me on a mission impossible, a mission to nowhere. He bit me again, hard enough to break through my peacoat. I shrieked and pushed myself upright again.
“Jeesh, you a marine sergeant or what?” I croaked at him.
He looked at me balefully: I was the sorriest excuse for a recruit he’d seen in all his years in the corps. He trotted along the edge of the water, stopping briefly for a drink. We went around a bend, and I saw in the distance a small fleet of blue trucks and, in front of me, brown mountains of garbage. The city dump. We were at the city dump? This hound led me through hell to get to the world’s biggest supply of garbage?
“When I find someone to drive me home, you are—” I broke off my hoarse and useless threat. Mitch had disappeared over the side of a pit. I walked cautiously to the edge. It had been dug out and abandoned: dead, scrubby weeds were starting to grow along the sides.
Two bodies lay at the bottom. I scrambled down the rocky clay, my exhaustion forgotten. Both bodies had been badly beaten, so beaten they were black and purple, with pieces of skin flayed off. One seemed to be a man, but it was the woman Mitch was pawing at anxiously. She had a mass of tawny hair around her swollen, battered face. I knew that hair, I knew that black leather coat. And the crimson fragment on the fence, that had been her scarf. I’d watched Marcena Love tie that scarf up any number of times. My good-luck scarf, she called it, I always wear it in battle zones.
The man—I looked and looked away. Not Morrell, how could it be? The black spots in front of my eyes grew and danced, blotting out the gray sky and the mangled bodies. My gorge rose and my empty stomach heaved. I turned away and vomited up a trickle of bile.
28
It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, No, It’s…
I pulled myself together by force of will. I desperately needed water; my legs were trembling as much from dehydration as from shock and exhaustion. I was tempted again by the bourbon in my pocket, but if I drank whiskey now, on my empty, dried-out stomach, I’d just get sick.
I crouched next to the bodies. The man was taller and broader than my lover, or than Billy.
Think, Warshawski, save the melodrama for the daytime soaps. Romeo, I supposed. Romeo Czernin. He looked very dead to me, but I tried to find a pulse in the purply pulp that had been his neck. I couldn’t feel any movement, but my own fingers were so numb I might be missing it. His skin was still warm; if he was dead, it hadn’t been for long.
Mitch was anxiously licking Marcena’s face. When I dragged him aside to put a hand against her neck, I did feel a faint, erratic beat. I pulled out my cell phone, but using it as a flashlight must have drained the battery—it was completely dead.
I struggled to my feet. The garbage trucks might be a half mile away, a long trek across this terrain, but I didn’t know anyplace closer to go for help—I certainly couldn’t make it back the way we’d come in the hopes Mr. Contreras was still there with the car.
“Will you stay with her, old boy?” I said to Mitch. “Maybe if you lie against her, keep her warm, she’ll live.”
I gave him a hand signal, the command to lie down and then to stay. He whimpered and looked at me uncertainly, but settled down again next to Marcena. I was starting to hoist myself up the side of the pit when I heard a phone ring. It was so unexpected that I thought I was hallucinating again, phones in the middle of nowhere, fried eggs might fall at my feet in a second or two.
“Marcena’s cell phone!” I laughed a little hysterically and turned back to her.
The ringing was coming from Romeo’s body, not Marcena’s. It stopped, message going to voice mail, I guess. I stuck a squeamish hand into his coat pockets and came up with a bunch of keys, a pack of cigarettes, and a fistful of lottery tickets. The phone started ringing again. His jeans pockets. His jeans were torn and plastered to his body by his drying blood. I could hardly bear to touch them, but I held my breath and stuck a hand into the left front pocket to extract the phone.
“Billy?” A sharp male voice spoke.
“No. Who are you? We need help, we need an ambulance.”