Year's Best Scifi 7 Part 8

"And now?"

"You tell me, you're the private eye. Aren't you supposed to have a hunch or something?"

"I'm hunchless so far," I said. "Though I'm certain this is some kind of hoax. An elaborate and deadly one, to be sure."

"Whatever it is," said Prang, "I want the Enorme back. Hoax or not, it's the find of the century, and it belongs to my museum. That's why you're here. Unless we find it before the police, I'll never get it back."

"They see it as stolen property," I said. "And we can count on Ward to keep the press away from those footprints, at least until he comes up with an explanation. He doesn't like to look stupid."

"Neither do I," Prang pointed out. "So where do we begin? What do we do?"

"We begin," I said, starting for the door, "by figuring out where we would hide a statue if we wanted people to think it was a legendary monster come to life. Then we go and get it."

"Wait!" said Prang. "I'm coming with you."

New Orleans's cemeteries are called the "Cities of the Dead," because they are all tombs, in long rows like little stone houses. No one is buried in the ground because the water table is so high.

The nearest was La Gare des Morts, only a quarter of a mile from the museum. "Paydirt," I said, when I saw that the ancient rusted gate had been forced open.

"Why are you so certain that this is all a hoax?" Prang asked, as we slipped between the twisted bars.

"Ninety-seven percent of all supernatural events are crude hoaxes," I said.

"What about the other three percent?"

"Clever hoaxes," I said.

From the gate, narrow "streets" between the tombs led off in three directions. I was trying to decide where to begin the search when my cell phone rang.

"Jack Villon. Supernatural Private Eye."

"Kill me..." It was a man's voice, a hoa.r.s.e, sleepy whisper.

"Who is this?"

"Tree..."

Click. Dial tone.

"Who was that?" Prang asked.

"My hunch," I said, folding my phone.

There was only one tree in the cemetery, a large live oak festooned with Spanish moss. Underneath it, a tomb had been opened-violently. The iron door was twisted off its hinges. Two headless bodies lay outside, clothed in rotted rags, flung in a ghoulish twisted pile. They were so old and dessicated that they no longer smelled. The heads lay nearby, both turned up, eyeless, toward the sky.

But dead bodies, even headless ones, were not what interested me. Two enormous three-toed stone feet stuck out of the tomb, pointing skyward.

We had found the Enorme.

With Prang at my side, I crept forward and felt the three-toed feet, then the thick short legs, each as smooth as granite, and cold: cold as any stone.

The light inside the tomb was dim. The statue lay on its back between two opened coffins, the source, I was sure, of the bodies outside. The smell was worse for being faint. The big stone eyes were blank, looking straight up.

I touched the Enorme's wolf-like snout. Stone. Cold dead stone.

"What now?" Prang whispered.

"You have recovered your stolen property," I said. "Now we call Ward and report it. That makes everything legal."

"Now do you believe?" Prang asked, as we headed back to the museum, after watching Ward's minions dust the area for prints, the cemetery groundskeepers refill and close the tomb, and the museum crew load the Enorme onto a flatbed truck.

"Nope."

"An ancient statue that comes to life in the full moon. And kills! If that's not supernatural, what is?"

"Nothing is," I said. "There is no such thing as the supernatural. There is a natural, scientific, materialist explanation for everything. Didn't you ever read Arthur Conan Doyle-or Edward O. Wilson?"

"I thought you were a Supernatural Private Eye!" she said, lighting a new Camel off her latest casualty.

"That's why I hired you."

"This is New Orleans," I said. We were following the flatbed through the streets toward the museum.

No one paid any attention to the big stone gargoyle on the bed of the truck. "Everybody has to have a specialty, the spookier the better. Besides, I got your Enorme back, didn't I?"

"Yes, but it will only happen again. Last night was just a warm-up. Tonight is the full moon."

"Good," I said, "I'll be there, watching. Tell Ward the museum is providing its own security."

We found a rail-thin black man in a Cardin suit waiting for us in Prang's office.

"Boudin," he said, extending his hand. "Le Louvre."

"Welcome to New Orleans," said Prang. "What can you tell us?"

"The photos were interesting but inconclusive," Boudin said. He held up a small device the size and shape of my cell phone. "I will do a quantum magneto-scan and let you know."

Luckily, the new window hadn't been installed yet, so the Enorme could be hoisted into the museum's lab by crane and laid out on the table. It was late afternoon before the workmen had fixed the windows and gone.

Prang went out for cigarettes, while Boudin scanned the Enorme with his device. I took the opportunity to get my first good look at the statue I had been hired to recover and protect. It was made out of some kind of smooth stone, and except for its size-about eight feet in length-there was nothing special about it. Laid out, it looked less like a medieval gargoyle and more like a kid's idea of a monster.

It had big blank eyes, short arms, thick legs with enormous claws, and two rows of stone "teeth," like a shark. It looked sort of Mayan, vaguely European, and even a little bit East Indian. It had aspects of every monster ever imagined, anywhere in the world.

Boudin agreed with my a.s.sessment. "Tres generique," he said. "If it weren't made out of this odd stone, which is from nowhere in Mexico, it would be of no interest whatsoever. And its age..."

"Its age?"

"According to my scanner the statue in its present form is almost a half a million years old-and so is the stone it's carved from! Of course that's some kind of quantum error-too young for stone and too old for art. They're recalibrating in Paris right now." He held up the scanner and smiled proudly. "This has a full-time satellite hookup, like GPS."

I acted impressed because he clearly wanted me to be, but I wasn't surprised. We live, all of us, in a very small world. Far too small for spooks.

Night was falling. I pulled out my trusty cell phone and ordered pizza, with pepperoni.

"Pepperoni?" Prang was back.

"The moon doesn't come up until after midnight," I said. "If I'm staying the night, you're paying expenses. And I don't eat pizza plain."

"Make it pepperoni on one side and mushrooms on the other," said Prang, as she tore open a new pack of Camels with her teeth. "I'm a vegetarian."

In a real private eye story this would be the beginning of an unlikely romance, but life, at least my life, is much too likely for that. Boudin went back to his hotel (still jet-lagged) while Prang and I retired to the corner of the lab where the techs watched TV on their breaks, and ate pizza and watched the evening news, which was luckily still Enorme-free. "Thanks to Ward," I explained. "He doesn't want the press all over a story until he can show them a suspect."

"What's the rub between you and him?" she asked.

"I was a cop for eighteen years," I said. "A hostage negotiator. We had an incident where a school princ.i.p.al went postal, took a third-grade cla.s.s hostage. I was about to get the kids released, when Ward bursts in shooting. Four kids and the teacher were blown away. I broke the blue wall of silence and filed a formal complaint."

"But Ward's still there."

"And I'm not," I said. "Go figure. And pa.s.s the pizza."

Prang got the couch; I got the armchair.

I missed my Jim Beam, but I had Charlie Rose on the TV, which is almost as good for putting you to sleep. It was a rerun-Stephen Jay Gould, talking about the intricacies of evolution. A favorite subject of mine.

But was it really a rerun? Halfway through their talk, Gould and Rose were joined by Charles Darwin.

I recognized him by his beard. Darwin's cell phone rang, and Rose and Gould both turned into girls, only it was three girls, all armed to the teeth...

I sat up and knew at once that I had been dreaming. Charlie's Angels was on the TV, a rerun.

Through the lab's windows came a soft silvery glow: the moon was rising. My cell phone was ringing.

I answered it to shut it up. "Jack Villon. Supernatural Private Eye."

"Kill me..." The same male voice as in the cemetery.

"Who is this!?"

I heard a click, and then a groan, behind me.

I turned around. Was I still dreaming? I certainly hoped so, for the Enorme was sitting up, staring straight at me. Its "eyes" were wide open, reflecting the newly risen moon like oversize silver coins.

"Wake up!" I whispered, poking Prang's shapely hip.

"What?" She sat up. "Oh s.h.i.t! Where's your gun?"

"Can't stand the things. Not that a gun would do any good..."

Still staring straight at me, the Enorme slid off the table in one fluid motion, graceful as a cat. It started across the room toward the couch, stubby arms outstretched in an eerie mixture of menace and plea...

I jumped behind the couch, Prang right behind me. "Who are you?" I asked. "What do you want?"

The Enorme stopped and looked around, as if confused. Then it turned away, toward the wall of windows. Moaning once again, it lowered its head and smashed through the windows, frame and all, and disappeared into the night.

Alarms started to howl, all over the building.

I ran for the window, pulling Prang by the arm. She twisted out of my grasp. "I have to turn off the alarms!" she said.

The parking lot was bathed in moonlight. I climbed out through the broken gla.s.s. There was no sign of the Enorme; not even b.l.o.o.d.y tracks this time. The cold light of the newly risen moon seemed to mock the certainties of a lifetime, which lay shattered all around me, like broken gla.s.s.

"Now do you believe?" Prang asked, lighting a cigarette at my side.

"Give me one of those."

"Thought you didn't smoke."

"I didn't believe in monsters either."

Prang had called the police to tell them it was a false alarm. Now she used my cell phone to call Boudin and tell him the truth.

"Incroyable," he said, when he arrived from his hotel.

"Have you heard from Paris?" I asked. "Any idea where that stone is from?"

Boudin shook his head. "It's not from anywhere because it's not stone. " He showed me his scanner.

Even with my bad French I could read the word at the bottom of the tiny screen:

Synthetique

"It's also slightly radioactive," said Boudin. "They're a.n.a.lyzing the scan in Paris to see if it's the material or a source inside."

"One question," said Prang, raising her chin and stroking her neck between thumb and forefinger.

"Why didn't it pinch our heads off?"