Seek and Ye Shall Find — Wednesday, February 27, 1991, 5:50 PM

Hampden Avenue / Cherry Hills Village

Denver, Colorado

Flash woke hungry and cold. Five nights since the last feed and the body remembered before the mind did. A thinness in the limbs, a looseness behind the eyes, a way the room’s edges softened into something he had to work to see. The basement bedroom in Emerson’s house smelled of carpet adhesive and old cedar and the particular absence of cooking that meant a house where nobody ate. He sat up. His hands shook. Not badly. Enough.

Sundown came at ten to six on the last Wednesday in February and Denver gave it up without ceremony. Gray sky to dark sky. A band of orange along the mountains that lasted forty seconds and then the city turned on its headlights and its furnaces and forgot the sun had been there at all.

He took the IROC-Z south on University and cut west toward Hampden. The commercial strips thinned out past the Cherry Creek underpass. Dollar stores and check cashing and a pawnshop with its gate half-down. The kind of block where a man could stop his car and nobody asked why. The need was a sound now, a low hum in the base of his skull, and it pulled him toward the lit patch at the end of the strip like a frequency he could not tune out.

The preacher was working an empty sidewalk. Worn suit, shoulders shiny from years of the same hanger. A handheld mic wired to a battery amp the size of a lunch pail, cranked loud enough to fill the parking lot of a closed carpet warehouse. He wasn’t begging God for the lost. He was furious at them. At the empty concrete. At a city that walked past him every night and left him broadcasting to bus shelters and dead storefronts.

Flash heard him before he saw him. The voice came through the car window two blocks out – and you’ll stand there with your hands in your pockets like a man waiting for a bus that quit running – and something in the cadence was familiar. Not the words. The rhythm. A man onstage playing to an empty house because the alternative was silence, and silence was the thing that would kill him.

He parked. Got out. Walked into the preacher’s light.

The old man stopped mid-sentence. Sixty, maybe. Suit pressed, cuffs frayed white where the thread had given up. He didn’t ask for money. He didn’t ask Flash to be saved. He pointed the mic like a measuring instrument.

“You’re not lost. Lost ones, they keep walking. You stopped. So what is it. You come to laugh, or you come because something in you finally got loud enough you couldn’t sleep through it.”

Flash hit him before the sentence ended. Shoulder, hip, drive, pin. The preacher went against the dark storefront glass and Flash’s arms were around him and the old man was strong for sixty, all sinew and decades of lifting his own anger above his head, but it didn’t matter. Flash had him and the glass bowed but didn’t break and the mic clattered away across the sidewalk, trailing its wire.

The eyes changed. Furious to afraid to tired of being afraid and not surprised.

The bite opened him. Hot blood, all argument, a body that ran on anger because anger was the last fuel it had. It hit five empty nights like a match dropped into an open pipe and Flash’s vision cleared and his hands stopped shaking and the world came back in edges and definition. The preacher stopped fighting. His hands opened against Flash’s coat. His mouth moved but the words had left him.

Flash drank twice past safe. The anger thinned into something quieter. Exhaustion. The taste of a man who had outlived the people he was trying to save. Flash pulled off. Set the preacher down against the glass. The old man’s eyes were half-open, unfocused. No clean memory. No one on the strip to see. The amp whined feedback into the empty lot.

Flash set the mic in the old man’s lap and left.

The IROC-Z came up Emerson’s drive a little after half past nine. Everyone had beat him home. Marcus’s rental, Monica’s sedan, Terri’s hatchback. The house was the kind of house that looked like it had been built to hold parties for a hundred people and now held five who had no business being in it. Emerson’s study. Dark wood, dead fireplace, lamp light, the smell of leather furniture drying out.

Terri was on the arm of a chair, not in it. Monica had a manila folder closed on her knee with one hand flat on it. Marcus was standing by the cold fireplace. Emerson sat deepest in, holding a glass of something amber he hadn’t touched.

“You eat?” Marcus said. “Good. Because the answer on Klondike came back, and you’re going to want to be thinking straight when you hear it.”

Flash dropped into a chair. Tipped a hand. Go.

Marcus gave it flat. The blood weakened with distance from the source. Thirteen steps removed was the wall. Past it, the blood couldn’t carry itself forward. A bite at that remove killed, or it did nothing. It did not make another. Klondike was thirteen steps out. So were they.

The thing Klondike had been waiting on, a line, someone to carry his name past his own end, was never going to happen. The serum gave them the hunger and the long nights and everything else on the bill, and it left out the one clause Klondike was holding onto. He’d been waiting on an answer that was always going to be no.

Monica looked at Terri. “Did anyone get to him today.”

“Phone’s a phone. Somebody could’ve called the service. ‘Saddle.’ Bought him a day.”

Emerson set the glass down. A small exact sound on the side table. “I called it through at eleven this morning. The service takes a word and a callback number. I gave the word. I gave this house’s line.” He paused. “I didn’t mention it because I didn’t know if it was the right thing, and I have made several wrong decisions this week that I announced with confidence. So I made this one without.”

“He call back,” Monica said.

“Not yet. The service confirmed delivery. Whether that was enough to make a man like Mr. Klondike wait another night–”

Marcus cut him off. “It bought time. It didn’t buy a reason. And the reason just died in this room.”

Flash paid his own tab next. He and Terri had walked the Broadstreet. Confirmed that Edward Williams owned the place, fronted a house band called Seventh Son, hadn’t aged in fifteen years. They’d gone inside. Edward made them both in under a minute and then he’d made the whole room watch them leave. “He’s got my face. He’s got Terri’s. He didn’t chase. Which means he didn’t need to.”

Terri was on her feet. “Means he’s the kind who finds out who you are first. Then comes.”

Monica opened the folder and read it straight through. The fire that killed Prestor’s people. Filed arson-homicide, open, stalled. The accelerant pattern was professional. Point-of-origin work, not a splash job. And the body count was wrong. The press said three dead. The medical examiner’s worksheet listed four sets of remains. The fourth wasn’t named. Logged as “unidentified, presumed incidental.” Nobody was incidental in a building burned on purpose. Somebody died in that fire the city never went looking for.

Then Emerson. Hadrick had come to him in January wanting four million made quiet. Offshore, layered, for Prestor’s work. Emerson refused. But he’d looked at what he was refusing, and he’d found the money. Not a foundation, not a university. A holding company. And the holding company’s registered agent was a law firm. Holland and Hart. The same firm whose Mr. Goldring had taken Detective Brandt’s telephone call about Emerson that morning.

Monica closed the folder.

“Then this was never two cases. Prestor’s money and the man investigating us walk into the same building downtown. Question is whether Holland and Hart is the firm that cleaned up after Prestor, or the firm that’s hunting him. Because we just put Emerson’s name in their hallway, and we don’t know which one we did it to.”

The study was quiet. The fireplace was cold. Five people sat in a dead man’s furniture with a dead man’s money keeping the lights on and one firm’s name written across every thread they’d pulled.

Flash looked at the glass in Emerson’s hand. Amber, untouched, the ice long melted. A man holding something he couldn’t drink in a house he couldn’t explain in a life that had stopped making sense three weeks ago. Flash knew the feeling. He’d just fed on it.