Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

“You got it.”

“So what does that have to do with Zinc?”

“The patrol car that picked him up found him standing in the middle of the street with a pair of heavyduty wire cutters in his hand. The street’d been cleaned right out, Jilly. There wasn’t a bike left on the block—just the cut locks and chains left behind.”

“So where are the bikes?”

Lou shrugged. “Who knows. Probably in a Foxville chopshop having their serial numbers changed.

Jilly, you’ve got to get Zinc to tell us who he was working with. Christ, they took off, leaving him to hold the bag. He doesn’t owe them a thing now.”

Jilly shook her head slowly. “This doesn’t make any sense. Zinc’s not the criminal kind.”

“I’ll tell you what doesn’t make any sense,” Lou said. “The kid himself. He’s heading straight for the loonie bin with all his talk about Elvis clones and Venusian thought machines and feral fuck—” He glanced at Sue and covered up the profanity with a cough. “Feral bicycles leading the domesticated ones away.”

“He said that?”

Lou nodded. “That’s why he was clipping the locks—to set the bikes free so that they could follow their, and I quote, ‘spiritual leader, home to the place of mystery.’”

“That’s a new one,” Jilly said.

“You’re having me on—right?” Lou said. “That’s all you can say? It’s a new one? The Elvis clones are old hat now? Christ on a comet. Would you give me a break? Just get the kid to roll over and I’ll make sure things go easy for him.”

“Christ on a comet?” Sue repeated softly.

“C’mon, Lou,” Jilly said. “How can I make Zinc tell you something he doesn’t know? Maybe he found those wire cutters on the street—just before the patrol car came. For all we know he could—”

“He said he cut the locks.”

The air went out of Jilly. “Right,” she said. She slouched in her chair. “I forgot you’d said that.”

“Maybe the bikes really did just go off on their own,” Sue said. Lou gave her a weary look, but Jilly sat up straighter. “I wonder,” she began.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Sue said. “I was only joking.”

“I know you were,” Jilly said. “But I’ve seen enough odd things in this world that I won’t say anything’s impossible anymore.”

“The police department doesn’t see things quite the same way,”

Lou told Jilly. The dryness of his tone wasn’t lost on her. “I know.”

“I want these bike thieves, Jilly.”

“Are you arresting Zinc?”

Lou shook his head. “I’ve got nothing to hold him on except for circumstantial evidence.”

“I thought you said he admitted to cutting the locks,” Sue said. Jilly shot her a quick fierce look that plainly said, Don’t make waves when he’s giving us what we came for.

Lou nodded. “Yeah. He admitted to that. He also admitted to knowing a hobo who was really a spy from Pluto and asked why the patrolmen had traded in their white Vegas suits for uniforms. He wanted to hear them sing ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ For next of kin he put down Bigfoot.”

“Gigantopithecus blacki,” Jilly said.

Lou looked at her. “What?”

“Some guy at Washington State University’s given Bigfoot a Latin name now. Giganto—”

Lou cut her off. “That’s what I thought you said.” He turned back to Sue. “So you see, his admitting to cutting the locks isn’t really going to amount to much. Not when a lawyer with half a brain can get him off without even having to work up a sweat.”

“Does that mean he’s free to go then?” Jilly asked.

Lou nodded. “Yeah. He can go. But keep him out of trouble, Jilly. He’s in here again, and I’m sending him straight to the Zeb for psychiatric testing. And try to convince him to come clean on this—okay? It’s not just for me, it’s for him too. We break this case and find out he’s involved, nobody’s going to go easy on him. We don’t give out rain checks.”

“Not even for dinner?” Jilly asked brightly, happy now that she knew Zinc was getting out.

“What do you mean?”

Jilly grabbed a pencil and paper from his desk and scrawled “Jilly Coppercorn owes Hotshot Lou one dinner, restaurant of her choice,” and passed it over to him.

“I think they call this a bribe,” he said.

“I call it keeping in touch with your friends,” Jilly replied and gave him a big grin.

Lou glanced at Sue and rolled his eyes.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I’m the sane one here.”

“You wish,” Jilly told her.

Lou heaved himself to his feet with exaggerated weariness. “C’mon, let’s get your friend out of here before he decides to sue us because we don’t have our coffee flown in from the Twilight Zone,” he said as he led the way down to the holding cells.

Zinc had the look of a street kid about two days away from a good meal. His jeans, Tshirt, and cotton jacket were ragged, but clean; his hair was a badly mown lawn, with tufts standing up here and there like exclamation points. The pupils of his dark brown eyes seemed too large for someone who never did drugs. He was seventeen, but acted half his age.

The only home he had was a squat in Upper Foxville that he shared with a couple of performance artists, so that was where Jilly and Sue took him in Sue’s Mazda. The living space he shared with the artists was on the upper story of a deserted tenement where someone had put together a makeshift loft by the simple method of removing all the walls, leaving a large empty area cluttered only by support pillars and the squatters’ belongings.

Lucia and Ursula were there when they arrived, practicing one of their pieces to the accompaniment of a ghetto blaster pumping out a mixture of electronic music and the sound of breaking glass at a barely audible volume. Lucia was wrapped in plastic and lying on the floor, her black hair spread out in an arc around her head. Every few moments one of her limbs would twitch, the plastic wrap stretching tight against her skin with the movement. Ursula crouched beside the blaster, chanting a poem that consisted only ofthe line, “There are no patterns.” She’d shaved her head since the last time Jilly had seen her.

“What am I doing here?” Sue asked softly. She made no effort to keep the look of astonishment from her features.

“Seeing how the other half lives,” Jilly said as she led the way across the loft to where Zinc’s junkyard of belongings took up a good third of the available space.

“But just look at this stuff,” Sue said. “And how did he get that in here?”

She pointed to a Volkswagen bug that was sitting up on blocks, missing only its wheels and front hood. Scattered all around it was a hodgepodge of metal scraps, old furniture, boxes filled with wiring and God only knew what.

“Piece by piece,” Jilly told her.

“And then he reassembled it here?”

Jilly nodded.

“Okay. I’ll bite. Why?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

Jilly grinned as Sue quickly shook her head. During the entire trip from the precinct station, Zinc had carefully explained his theory of the world to her, how the planet Earth was actually an asylum for insane aliens, and that was why nothing made sense.

Zinc followed the pair of them across the room, stopping only long enough to greet his squatmates.

“Hi, Luce. Hi, Urse.” Lucia never looked at him.

“There are no patterns,” Ursula said.

Zinc nodded thoughtfully.

“Maybe there’s a pattern in that,” Sue offered.

“Don’t start,” Jilly said. She turned to Zinc. “Are you going to be all right?”

“You should’ve seen them go, Jill,” Zinc said. “All shiny and wet, just whizzing down the street, heading for the hills.”