Dominion by Fred Saberhagen (spiritual books to read TXT) 📗

   He hadn’t been hard to spot.

   The patrolmen had picked up Feathers at about eight-thirty in the evening, and it was only a little after nine when Joe arrived at headquarters with Charley Snider. Fortunately the two of them had been together, working not far away, when the word about Feathers reached them.

   The old man, still wearing the gaily decorated robe in which he’d come back from somewhere to Skid Row, was sitting in one of the interrogation room’s comfortable chairs, staring at nothing, when the two police lieutenants arrived. There were two or three other chairs in the room, and a sort of desk, and some other more special equipment, most of it not visible.

   “Yo, Feathers,” said Charley Snider easily. The instant he entered the room he slowed down enormously from the rush he’d been in to reach it.  “Looks like somebody’s been givin’ you a hard time the past few days.”

   Actually, thought Joe Keogh, closing the door behind them, the old man waiting to be questioned by them looked quite hale; apart from his bizarre garment he looked very good indeed for a supposed Skid Row bum.

   The gray blue eyes, wary and weary, looked up at both detectives.  “I’m through with that name,” the old man told them in a raspy voice.

   This is no long-term wino, Joe thought to himself again. This old man was too healthy. If the overall physical description were not so completely different, he could more readily have believed—from something about the eyes—that this was Carados himself.

   In one wall was a small mirror, actually a oneway glass through which an observer in the next room could watch this one; and Joe shifted his position by a step, enough to catch the old man’s reflection clearly in the glass. That, as he understood the matter, was a simple and foolproof test for one exotic oddity at least, one which he was not going to try to discuss with Charley Snider. The old man was not a vampire.

   Charley meanwhile had seated himself casually on one corner of the desk. “Okay,” he said cheerfully to their prospective witness.  “What name would you like?”

   An expression flickered across the old man’s face, come and gone again in a moment; Joe had seen something like it on the faces of prisoners who were being offered some kind of a deal that they knew was really too good to be true.

   In this case the real wish was not to be attained. “Hawk will do,” the old man said, in a voice of compromise.

    “Hawk. Okay, then, Hawk. Mr. Hawk, is it?”

   A shrug.

   “Any complaints about the way you been treated here?”

   “Just about the fact of being picked up. Since you wanna know. You guys didn’t have any reason at all to pick me up.”

   “For your own good, Mr. Hawk. Your protection.”

   “Huh.”

   “And then, you see, that garment you have on there, it sort of suggested to the patrolmen that maybe something a bit unusual was going on. I’d even be inclined to think that way myself.”

   “Huh. I wasn’t drunk,” the man who used to call himself Feathers insisted. “I’m not drunk now. You charging me with that?”

   Charley appeared to take a careful, judgmental look at the old man’s condition. “You’re talking sensibly so far. Maybe you ain’t drunk. I don’t s’pose you’re gay, either, but that is quite a fancy getup. Want to tell me where you got it?”

   The ancient one flushed faintly. “I didn’t steal it.”

   “Didn’t say you did.”

   “A man wants to be decent, to try to keep from gettin’ busted, well, he’s gotta wear something.”

   Charley’s large brown hand was now cupping a photograph of Carados. One of Charley’s favorite tools in questioning was the sharp change of subject.  “Seen this man recently?”

   Hawk appeared to be grateful for the sharp change. He gave the picture some deliberate thought. When he looked up from it he was obviously making some mental calculation, one in which fear did not appear to have a value; as if, thought Joe, this business of being in jail were only a kind of game, that tomorrow would be over with and forgotten.

   “Yeah,” said Hawk at last, surprising both policemen by cooperating at once like the prince of solid citizens. He nodded deliberately. “That looks a lot like the guy who picked me up on the street a couple days ago. I’m pretty sure it’s him.”

   “Pretty sure? Or sure?”

   “It’s him.”

Joe and Charley exchanged a glance. “Where is he now?” There was a controlled tightness in Charley’s voice.

   When Hawk shook his head, conveying ignorance, Joe put in: “Where and when did you see him last?”

   “I’m not clear on what day it was.” Hawk pulled at his own beard, as if the length and feel of it were a matter of surprise and some distaste.

   “This’s what?”

   “Friday night.”

   Hawk shook his head again; the blur of time in the eye of his memory was all too visible. “Anyway, I know where.” He named a street intersection deep in the inner city. “He picked me up there, took me into a tavern a block away. It was late in the afternoon. Then he fed me something in a drink and I passed out.”

   “And where were you when you woke up?”

   Hawk looked at them both, not the way a street bum ought to be looking at detectives. “Next thing I can tell you I was back on the street, and your man was busting me for being in drag, or whatever. Ask him what for. And now I’m here.”

   Charley was tapping the photograph with one big finger. “This man’s name is Carados. That mean anything to you?”

   “Name? I don’t care anything about his name.”

   “You say he picked you up. Why’d he do that? What did he want?”

   “Said he