Bed of Nails (7 page)

Things were about to get even hairier.

Keith Road loomed ahead.

West to east across the slope of the mountainside, there were five major roads, and one of them was Keith. Here, just east of Victoria Park, where it intersected St. Andrews, Keith was a divided thoroughfare with a grassy swath down the center. The Olds shot through the stop sign on the curb, causing brakes to screech a moment before one eastbound car rear-ended another. Momentum carried the fugitives across that lane and the median, where, with a peel of rubber and a belch of smoke, the ragtop veered east in the westbound lane.

Now traffic was swerving and jumping both curbs to avoid head-on collisions.

The dominant brake on a chopper is the front-end one. Hit the rear brake too hard in a turn and you might skid out. Unlike a bicycle, which has little weight, a hog is heavy enough to keep hugging the ground. So Red Beard rode the front brake as they hit the intersection, leaning hard to the right to take the sharp corner, then he gunned the hog full-throttle in the eastbound lane so they could parallel the Olds on this side of the median.

Gaining …

Gaining …

Then out came the gun.

A block ahead, at St. Davids Avenue, the grassy median vanished and the lanes converged. Closing on the point where the parallel lanes joined, the Olds and its pursuers were on a collision course, when down slid the window on the passenger’s side of the car so the hooker riding shotgun could blast at them. The gun in her grip was the piece the pimp had used to shoot up the bar.

Bwam!
She fired as the Olds cut in front of the hog.

The biker leaned into a corner that didn’t exist, angling across the rear of the Olds into the oncoming lane so they could put the car between them and the muzzle flash. That zig made the bullet miss its mark, then a quick zag realigned them with the backside of their quarry.

Ridgeway …

Then Moody Avenue whizzed by.

Ahead, Grand Boulevard met Keith on the left. Keith marked the southern toe of that wide green avenue up the mountainside. Queensbury—a much narrower road—took over on the right to descend the downhill slope. Responding perhaps to a shots-fired call from the bar, the flashing red-and-blue wigwags of a patrol car raced toward them on Keith. With squealing tires, the Olds took evasive action in another fishtail turn and detoured south on Queensbury.

The suicide run.

“Pull back!” Chandler shouted.

But Red Beard didn’t hear.

The roar of the hog and the muffling of the Viking helmet squelched the cop’s words.

Down this shallow canyon of single-story shops and single-family dwellings plunged the pursuing chopper like a bat
into
hell. Revved up to this speed at high rpms, his foot shifting up four gears to kick out all the stops, Red Beard was amazed that his baby didn’t let him down, for she had a false neutral between her third and fourth gears. The wind whipped his long locks across the Mountie’s face. Through Sixth, through Fifth, through Fourth, they plummeted at warp speed.

“Pull back!

“Pull back!

“Pull back!”
Zinc hollered, but to no avail. His shouting retreated in their jet stream.

Unfortunately for the fugitives, Queensbury ended at Third. Beyond that T-intersection was Moodyville Park, commemorating the settlement of Moodyville, from whence sailed the barque
Ellen Lewis
on November 24, 1864, carrying the first cargo of lumber from Burrard Inlet.

In a blur, the car was across Third and heading into the park. Passing a fire hydrant that signaled the start of an access lane, it barreled along the bumpy tract that L’d to the right, where—unable to take a curve at such a high speed—the Olds shot into space as the ground dropped away beneath it.

It wasn’t the Grand Canyon, but it was drop-off enough. In a soar reminiscent of the climax in
Thelma and Louise,
the convertible was airborne in a graceful descending arc, until it slammed the hard reality of this less-than-sheer cliff. The nosedive had carried it fifty yards down the tree-studded slope, where it bounced and took off again, picking up momentum like a snowball rolling downhill. The gas tank blew in midair, and the Olds plunged toward the Low Level Road as a blazing fireball.

Unlike the Californians, Red Beard did know the lay of the land. On many a warm summer night, he’d gone for a putt with a bitch on the rigid, and he knew all the haunts—like Moodyville Park—where he could pull in, tear off her pants, lay her down, and fuck her under the stars. So there was no need for Zinc to shout “Pull back!” as they roared across Third. The biker knew the chase was over, and he geared down.

The hog braked to a halt where the Olds had left terra firma.

Tanker trucks cannot use Third Street because of the runaway grade on the west-to-east hill. To skirt the harbor, they must use the Low Level Road between the cliff that plunges from Moodyville Park and the grain elevator by the railroad tracks near Neptune Terminal. The trucker of one of those oil rigs had parked his tanker on the inside shoulder of the road at the foot of the cliff to check a shredded tire, and he stood there examining it as the Olds came flying in over him to hit the concrete and bounce like a fiery basketball toward the railroad tracks and a grain hopper being loaded with wheat from the silo.

The man was no fool. He ran like hell.

It seems laughable that something as wholesome as bread contains a deadly explosive. A grain-dust explosion unites four factors. The first is fuel, which is the grain dust itself. A solid fuel burns only at its surface, where there is air. A cloud of dust particles, however, has an immense surface area. As the size of the particles decreases, the chance of explosion increases, and where there’s a concentration of between forty and four thousand grams of dust per cubic meter, as there was in the hopper tonight, watch out!

The second factor is oxygen, which was present too. Combustion results when oxygen and fuel are ignited.

An ignition source is the third factor. If a cigarette or welding spark is enough, imagine the combustion potential of a flaming car like the Olds crashing into a grain hopper.

The fourth and final factor is confined space, for explosions result from the instantaneous buildup and release of pressure caused by rapid burning. Here, amid the clanking and ratcheting from the heavy machinery, each bin, silo, conveyor housing, bucket elevator, and hopper car offered itself as a pipe bomb.

The hopper blew apart when the Olds rammed into it. That blast set off a cascade effect as the pressure wave from the primary explosion billowed layered dust into clouds in other areas a microsecond ahead of the flame front.

BOOOOM!

The series of secondary explosions rocked the street as each blast set up and then set off the next. The ground shook like an earthquake at five points on the Richter scale. A ball of fire rolled out to wrap the fugitives in the Olds in a blanket of flames. As powerful as dynamite or natural gas, the combined force of the multiple grain-dust explosions hurled the car back across the Low Level Road, where what was left of the Olds pierced the parked oil tanker as blazing shrapnel, blowing it sky-high like a hellish geyser.

Heat from that eruption singed Red Beard’s beard.

The shock wave almost knocked the biker and the Mountie off the hog.

All that remained of the fugitives rained down as ash.

“When you Mounties get your man, you
really
get him,” the biker said.

Vancouver

November 5 (Two days later)

The newspapers were spread across one of the three antique library tables that had been joined in a U to make up C/Supt. Robert DeClercq’s desk at Special X. The papers were calling it a “miracle” that no innocent bystanders were killed in the high-speed chase. Denny the Barkeep had earned his fifteen minutes of fame through a series of inside-scoop interviews in which he recounted how he had “fingered both killers for the Mounted Police” because it was his “bartender’s duty to protect the producers, directors, and casting agents of the industry that I hope will soon employ me.” As for those who’d been at work in the grain elevator that night, never had they been so thankful for labor strife. The threat of a wildcat strike fomented by two malcontents had pulled the staff away from their posts shortly before the Olds came in for a landing. Lucky too was the trucker who’d run from the rig. He had—to quote one reporter—“experienced an epiphany, the effect of which was to veer him toward a new career. He will either try out for the Olympic team as a sprinter or switch to transporting Brussels sprouts instead of flammables.”

“Is it serious?”

“What, Chief?”

“Your new relationship?”

DeClercq tapped the photograph of Chandler on the front page of
The Province.
Snapped as Zinc and Red Beard arrived on the customized chopper at the scene of the explosion on the Low Level Road the night before last, it caught the inspector hugging the outlaw’s back like a gang girl. The cutline for the candid shot read, “Strange bedfellows.”

“I’m his bitch on a rigid.”

“I don’t want to hear,” said DeClercq, wincing. “Your sex life is none of my business, Inspector. As long as whatever you do on his rigid you continue to do
out
of uniform.”

“You’re a card,” punned Zinc as he pinned a tarot card to the Strategy Wall in DeClercq’s office, located on the second floor of the Tudor building at Thirty-third and Heather. Here, at the West Coast headquarters of the RCMP—a string of structures that stretched four blocks south to Thirty-seventh—the floor-to-ceiling corkboard that sheathed both windowless walls of this airy, high-vaulted corner loft was the operational heart of Special X. Fiftyish, lean and wiry, his dark hair now graying at the temples and flanking even darker, brooding eyes, DeClercq was, above all other skills, a military strategist, so when he worked a case, he worked it visually. The Strategy Wall was his equivalent of the campaign maps on which generals have moved toy soldiers around for centuries.

“He’s a card too,” Chandler said, pinning a photo of the vic found suspended upside down at the Lions Gate beside the tarot card depicting the Hanged Man.

“Déjà vu.”

“I’ll say.”

“It reminds me of the Ripper.”

The chief finished perusing the report from Internal that lay on his desk—searching for signs that witch hunters were out to crucify Zinc, DeClercq’s second-in-command—then he pushed back his chair to join Chandler at the Wall. The chair was an antique from the early days of the Force, high-backed with a barley-sugar frame and the bison-head crest of the Mounties carved as a crown. A portrait titled
Last Great Council of the West
hung behind the desk. Guarded by the Mounted Police, their hands on their swords, the pith-helmeted governor general, the Marquess of Lorne, sat in regal splendor beneath an awning at Blackfoot Crossing in 1881, a tribe of feathered Indians squatting at his feet. In recent years, the Force had changed to embrace both founding myths. Now there were whole detachments of Native officers, and DeClercq’s third-in-command was a full-blooded Plains Cree.

The modern Mounties stood side by side in front of the juxtaposed pinups. Way back in 1921, this heritage building—once known as the Heather Stables—had been a barracks for 200 redcoats and 140 horses. Befitting its royal pedigree, DeClercq’s office gazed out across a vast expanse of green lawn at Queen Elizabeth Park on the crest of Little Mountain. The morning sun beaming through the front windows highlighted the bloodshed in the photo of the dangling victim so that it glared as red as a Horseman’s scarlet tunic.

“Quad superius,”
Chandler said as he tapped the tarot card.

“As above,” DeClercq translated.

“Sicut inferius,”
said the inspector, sliding his finger across to the crime-scene photo.

“So below,” the chief translated. “You even remember the Latin?”

“For the past two days, Alex and I have rehashed the Ripper case. And I reread
Deadman’s Island,
her account of our ordeal.”

Mentioning Alex, the Ripper, and Deadman’s Island flashed Zinc’s memory back. Etched in his mind as vividly as if it were this instant in time was the first glimpse he had caught of Alexis Hunt. The floatplane was rocking at the dock in Vancouver’s harbor. All but one of the crime writers invited to a mystery weekend at an as-yet-undisclosed location were aboard. The event had been auctioned off to aid Children’s Hospital. The secret benefactor who had outbid all rivals had challenged the sleuths to match wits with a “real cop” for a $50,000 prize. If the cop won, the prize would also go to charity, so C/Supt. Robert DeClercq of Special X had been asked to provide a good detective for a good cause. Zinc Chandler had mostly recovered from a bullet to his head, but he was still suspended from active duty until the aftermath of the Cutthroat fiasco was sorted out, so that’s how he found himself seated among the slew of writers in the floatplane.

A Mickey Mouse assignment.

Or so he had thought.

Barely discernible through the rain was the city’s downtown core. Huddled like an urchin at its feet was the shack of Thunderbird Charters. From the hut to the floatplane out on the water stretched a gangway and the heaving pier. The woman sea-legging down the gangplanks struggled against the Pacific squall, suitcase in one hand, umbrella in the opposite fighting the wind to block the slanted rain. Her black coat flapped about her like Batman’s cape, revealing a black pinch-waisted jacket and black jeans tucked into black cowboy boots. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail and clipped with silver heart-shaped barrettes, but wayward strands dancing about her face masked her features. Only as she climbed up into the plane did Zinc grasp her beauty: eyes as azure as South Seas lagoons, delicate bone structure around a most kissable mouth, with the grace of a ballerina in every move. It was the cliché of love at first sight, and Zinc’s heart was gone.

It still was.

Their destination had turned out to be the hellhole of Deadman’s Island. Their secret benefactor was none other than Jack the Ripper. Not the
real
Ripper—for that monster was long dead—but a rabid psychotic who thought he could use the Magick of the Tarot to conjure Jack from the there and then of East End London in 1888 to the here and now of modern-day Vancouver.

The ensuing carnival of carnage had cut short the careers of most of the writers lured to the island. One by one, the psycho had picked them off in fiendish ways, and had Zinc not thwarted him before he could sign the final occult symbol in blood, there would have been no survivors to tell their tale of horror. That task had fallen to Alex, during the many months she spent at home in Cannon Beach, Oregon, nursing Zinc back to health from a stabbing at the hands of the psychotic Ripper.
Deadman’s Island
became the title of her resulting book.

“I assume the Ripper’s still locked away on Colony Farm?” said DeClercq, pulling the inspector’s mind back to the Strategy Wall.

“Yes,” replied Chandler. “I phoned FPH. He’s confined in Ash 2, the high-security ward.”

“What about visitors?”

“No one suspicious. His only visitors are his lawyer and support staff from that law firm.”

“Wes Grimmer still his counsel?”

“Uh-huh,” replied Zinc. “But the Ripper is so far gone that he may never be fit to stand trial.”

“Is this the work of a copycat?” The chief forked two fingers of one hand at the Hanged Man card and the photo of the suspended corpse pinned to the Strategy Wall.

“It could be,” said the inspector. “The Ripper’s occult motive was all over the media at the time of his arrest. And Alex set it out in detail in her book.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“The M.O. is different, Chief. Our Ripper hanged four women in Vancouver at locations selected to form an inverted cross on a street map of this city. That mimicked what Jack the Ripper might have done in the East End of London with his first four victims. Then our Ripper lured a final female victim to Deadman’s Island to kill her at a ‘Magick place’ so that astral projection would propel his consciousness into the occult realm. Jack the Ripper might have done the same with his fifth and final victim in Room 13 of Miller’s Court. But here we have a single victim who is
male,
and the cross seems to be formed in how the man was strung up.”

“So it isn’t the Ripper. And it might not be a copycat.”

Chandler nodded. “The Tarot has enough influence on its own to spawn an occult killer.”

“Refresh me, Zinc.”

The Tarot, Chandler explained, is one of the great systems of divination. The others are the I Ching and Scandinavian runes. Tarot magic is “in the cards,” as each symbol relates a seeker to the physical and spiritual worlds. Symbols evoke both conscious and subconscious reactions, so it is believed that each card opens a door to the occult mind. The word “occult” means “unknown” or “hidden.” Occult manifestation occurs when subconscious insight enlightens the conscious reality of the seeker. Divination empowers the mind to bring the occult into being, so the cards reflect what is, has been, and will be. The Magick is in the seeker’s transmutation.

The origin of the Tarot is an unsolved mystery. The deck has worn many guises through the centuries, but the basic meaning of each symbol has remained the same. A tarot deck consists of seventy-eight cards. The fifty-six in the four suits are called the Minor Arcana, and they evolved into modern playing cards. The twenty-two symbolic pictures are the Major Arcana, and those images reflect the occult’s Greater Secrets.

Occult power is omnipotent. That’s the basic law. All things—including us—reflect a greater power—the greater power of the occult realm.

So what’s “up there” …

Quod superius …

Projects “down here” …

Sicut inferius …

And manifests itself as what we call reality.

“As above, so below.”

The Tarot hides the key to the occult realm. Find that key and a seeker will gain occult power. The Greater Secrets of the Major Arcana have been attributed to many sources. To Egyptian hieroglyphics in history’s oldest book. To the kabbalistic lore of ancient Hebrews and nomadic gypsies from India. To the city of Fez in Morocco, where symbols were used as the common language of diverse cultures. Even to refugees from Atlantis, who encoded dark wisdom in the deck as their doomed land sank into the sea.

“For Jungians,” Zinc said, “tarot symbols represent the archetypes of our collective unconscious. Whatever their origin, the Greater Secrets were mysteries even back in the Dark Ages. The oldest deck found in Europe dates from 1392.”

“That’s the problem,” said DeClercq. “The Tarot has stood the test of time. Anything that old takes on sacred meaning. The world is full of true believers seeking Greater Secrets. What motivates a suicide bomber to kill himself in the name of Islam? How many witches or heretics were burned at the stake in the name of Christ, and how many ‘heathens’ were enslaved by zealous missionaries? If that’s the curse of divine religions espousing peace and harmony, what’s the power of the Tarot, which is tied to the black arts?”

“Power enough to motivate murder.”

“And captivate a psycho.”

“Especially—” Zinc began.

“The Hanged Man,” finished DeClercq.

The most obscure card in a tarot deck is the Hanged Man. To hang upside down is a time-honored symbol for spiritual awakening. Odin, the Norse god, so hanged himself on Yggdrasil, the wonder tree, so he could gain mystical power to read the fortune-telling runes. Yoga practitioners stand on their heads to move energy from the base of their spines to their inverted brains. Caught in a moment of suspension before all is revealed, the Hanged Man symbolizes sacrifice to gain prophetic power. Reversal in life is possible through reversal of mind. This card hides the key to the occult realm. That’s why it encodes the most sought-after Greater Secret in the Tarot.

The Mounties studied the pinned-up card.

“Remember how it works?” Chandler asked.

“Sort of,” said DeClercq. “It’s been a while since I last read the Ripper file and
Deadman’s Island.
”

“The seeker blindly picks a card from the Major Arcana—”

“His significator.”

“—to reveal his inner being.”

“In the case of our Ripper, that card was the Hanged Man.”

“For Jack the Ripper too.”

“Or so our Ripper thought.”

“Because of the theory of the Golden Dawn.”

The Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in nineteenth-century Britain by S. MacGregor Mathers. Members of the Dawn included Bram Stoker, the author of
Dracula,
Aleister Crowley, the notorious Satanist, and A. E. Waite, who designed the card of the Hanged Man pinned to the Strategy Wall. In 1888, the year of Jack the Ripper, Mathers penned
The Tarot: Its Occult Signification.
His theory—adopted by the Dawn—was that the Tarot was a door through which seekers could work their will on the universe.

How?

By astral projection.

Between the occult realm and its reflection as the here and now of reality lies what Mathers called the astral plane. Psychic vibrations pulse through that cosmic medium to create our physical world. The Dawn thought it possible, with the right key, to intercept those wavelengths before they reflected down here. If the Tarot hid the key to the occult realm, properly ritualizing its symbols would not only open the closed path to the astral plane, but also enable the seeker to project his own consciousness toward the occult realm so that his “astral double” could intercept and alter the psychic vibrations before they arrived to reflect as the here and now, thereby changing the illusion of our reality.