Timothy Hallinan - The Bone Polisher

“The girlie,” he said. “Just think about the precious little girlie. She’s not going to want you to come home with your guts in your pockets.” I heard him ease himself off the desk. “I’ll be right next to you, close enough to pick the spot where it’ll hurt longest before you die. And then, of course, a lot of other people will die, too.”

“No one has to die.”

“Put on your mask, Simeon. And don’t tempt me.”

He followed me through the door, but before he could come up beside me we practically collided with Spurrier. Spurrier had his Big Bad Wolf mask shoved back on his head and one hand over his mouth. He looked fevered and disoriented.

“Hey, Ike,” I said.

Spurrier barely registered us. “Ooolp,” he said, barreling through the door to the men’s room. I watched one of my hopes disappear.

“Cop?” Wilder asked. A cheer went up from the ballroom.

“Yes,” I said helplessly. Spurrier vomited violently in the bathroom.

“Cops are like women. They shouldn’t drink. Are all the cops dressed out of Disney?”

“No. It’s a coincidence.”

“How are they dressed?”

“As cops.” The cheering rose and peaked. “Sounds like your friends are in trouble.”

“Cretins,” he said. “Keep moving.”

He threw his left arm over my shoulder and we came out of the hallway and into the cavernous space of the Paragon Ballroom. Wilder stopped near Bernadette’s font, and I stopped with him. Hanks, Christy, and Henry were on the stage, but the space in front of it was empty. Literally everyone else had their backs to us, focused on the doorway.

The crowd broke open, and one of the skinheads emerged, bleeding from the head and trying to break into a run. He covered less than a yard before he was tackled from behind by a guitar-toting mariachi and Joel Farfman’s beefy Tonto, who dragged him back into the thick of the melee. He got kicked by a remarkable assortment of shoes before he vanished from sight.

There was nobody near us.

Wilder registered it a split second after I did and began to withdraw his arm from my shoulders, but I grabbed his wrist in both hands, pulled it down, and stuck out my hip. I lifted him from the floor as he tried frantically to free the gun from the cape, and brought him around my hip, and he was down, slamming his shoulder against the base of the font, and I raised my foot to kick his gun hand, but he rolled away from me and came up on one knee, the gun pointed at my middle again, and I stopped cold, involuntarily sucking in my midsection. I was aware of a movement on the stage behind him, and Darryl Wilder screwed up his mouth and spat at me, swiveled on his knees, raised the automatic with both hands, and shot Ferris Hanks twice.

Hanks staggered back across the stage as though he’d been kicked by a horse, blood gouting from his side and one of his thighs. He collided with the wall behind the stage and started to crumple. He hadn’t even hit the floor before Henry pulled a gun from the boxy suit and emptied the chamber into Darryl Wilder, punching him back into the font, which collapsed around him with a tinkle of glass and a rush of water.

There was no miracle. Darryl Wilder died while my ears were still ringing.

On Friday, two days after the wake and eleven days after Max Grover was murdered, Christy flew to Boulder to take part in the farewell service Max had designed in his will. It had been delayed twice: first for the police autopsy, and then to give Max’s sister a chance to regain her bearings. When she felt well enough, she called Christy personally and invited him to come.

Christy later told me that the sun had been shining when he landed in Boulder, although it was unseasonably cold. He hadn’t been dressed warmly enough. He’d taken a cab to a small white clapboard house on the city’s outskirts, huddling in the backseat and using the forty-minute ride to continue outlining his plans for Max’s institute. Helen, Max’s sister, had come to the curb to greet him. Already inside the house were four tiny women in their eighties and Max’s lawyer, the same Mr. Jenks I’d talked to on the phone. Mr. Jenks was the shortest person in the room.

There had been hot tea and home-baked seed cake and talk of Max. Tears were not encouraged. Max, in Helen’s view, had been exactly who he’d wanted to be, and the service was a way for them all to pay tribute to a good man who’d managed to live a good life. When they left the house, Helen asked Christy to carry the urn containing Max’s ashes. Outside, they saw that the sky had disappeared beneath a featureless ceiling of gray clouds.

With Mr. Jenks at the wheel of a van, the seven of them drove up the side of a mountain and over several miles of dirt track before stopping at a grove of trees-the property Max had left to Helen. A wind had kicked up, forcing Helen to raise her voice as she read Max’s farewell. Christy wouldn’t tell me what Max had written. When Helen was finished reading she took the urn from Christy and threw a handful of ashes into the air. Christy raised his eyes and saw them coming down, coming down everywhere, thick and fast and white, lost in a flurry of sudden snow.

The day that Christy was in Denver, Ferris Hanks went home from the hospital. At seven that evening I drove up Sunset Plaza Drive and through the open gate, parking Alice on the brick circular drive that arched in front of the house. I didn’t ring the bell; the front door was ajar. Cold air streamed through it into the night.

Two of Ferris’s Yorkies met me at the door, sniffing my ankles in a perfunctory, professional manner. The big living room was empty. I stood there for a moment, listening to nothing in particular and looking around. The people crowded into the teak carvings held their frozen dance steps. Heavy cobwebs, gray with dust, drooped above the thick open beams. I hadn’t noticed them on my first visit.

To the left were two steps leading up to a dark dining room, dominated by a massive carved table at least fifteen feet long. Chairs of wood and leather were pushed back from it all along its length, as though the party had risen only moments before. I counted twenty of them. Dust coated the leather seats.

The Yorkies trotted along in front of me, anticipating my destination, as I crossed the living room and climbed the spiral stair to the second story. The stairs curved upward, hugging the walls of a circular tower, sliced by long thin windows, some of them thirty feet high. The city blinked and glittered below like broken glass.

The hallway leading to the bedrooms was arched; its white plaster walls were lighted every four or five feet by black iron sconces left over from the Spanish Inquisition. The Yorkies scampered through a partially open door, and I followed them into an enormous vault-ceilinged, white-carpeted bedroom.

“What a nice surprise,” Ferris Hanks said with his back to me.

He lay on his side, dead center in the king-sized bed, facing a small black-and-white television set and surrounded by his little dogs. He looked very small. The blankets had been tented above his broken leg. The screen of the television set showed me the hall I had just come through.

“Japanese,” Hanks said, still looking at the screen. “They’re so clever, don’t you think? That’s what people say, anyway. Watch.” The picture changed: the front door. Then the living room. Then the gate outside. “You didn’t bring me flowers,” he said, still facing the screen.

“No,” I said. “I figured you might be allergic.”

“You’re going to have to come over here,” he said. “I can’t roll over without help, and Henry seems to have decided to take a turn in the evening air. Just when I wanted someone to read to me. Would you like to read to me?”