Bones of the Barbary Coast by Daniel Hecht Read Free Book Online

those, Joyce said when she'd told her. Joyce had a certain way of putting the behavior of men in perspective.
    But Cree suspected Paul's need for space had other origins: She'd scared him away. He'd come a long way toward her, but she had no doubt her unusual outlook on life and psychology was still a bit more than he could swallow. He had been candid in expressing his reservations about her willingness—an unhealthy compulsion?—to put herself in situations of mental and physical danger.
    She thought of calling Joyce, to check in on how her mother was doing and to ask advice about historical research, but then remembered it would be almost midnight in New York, too late to call. She could salve her lonelies by checking in with Dee, too, and at some point she really should call Mom and ask some questions about Bert.
    Who is this guy, Mom?
    It wasn't that Bert's explanations were so bad. Maybe it was just as he said: He thought the poor guy deserved at least a token effort, a name on his tombstone; he didn't have the time himself but he wanted to help his friend Horace get supporting data on this unique specimen. It could also be that Bert was feeling old and lonely and scared of retirement and had grabbed at an excuse to reconnect with the Black family.
    Or there was some other element here, some other agenda. She was ready to believe him when he said he didn't believe in ghosts, but he had taken serious evasive maneuvers when she'd asked about werewolves.
    She found herself at the window again, staring at nothing much through the fog. She was tired, but she didn't feel sleepy Parapsychological researchers became by necessity somewhat nocturnal, but that wasn't the only reason. Blue as she was, she had to smile at how predictable her responses were. The wolfman had awakened that feeling she knew so well, and enjoyed: that hunger to know, to understand. Who was he?
    Daytime was not good for her empathic process, and anyway the house would be full of carpenters and their noise, so her days were best devoted to conventional historical research. She'd begin that work tomorrow, but tonight a visit to the house was in order. It was generally wise to get off to a running start on these things.

5
     
    B ERT CRUISED SOUTH on Divisadero, feeling weary and heavy, unhappy with himself. He lit a cigarette, but it didn't offer much comfort. He was tired enough to go straight to bed, but when he pictured turning on the lights in his house, seeing the familiar paneling and the shag rug and the unmade bed with the deep impression of his own body in the middle, he knew he wasn't up for it. Instead of turning right on Market, he cut over toward downtown and the Tenderloin Club. He assigned himself a limit of four tonight.
    He pulled up in the loading zone, got out, and beeped the doors locked. Inside, the bartender was the new gal, a skinny woman with a narrow but friendly face, who he'd seen a couple times before. She was probably about forty, but she dressed younger, tight jeans and a blousey white shirt rolled to reveal stringy, muscled forearms. She lifted her chin to him as she tapped someone's beer. The Tenderloin Club wasn't a great place, but it was unpretentious, a basic bar that saw to the comforts of its regulars. Once it had been one of the main police hangouts, but over the years the cops had drifted elsewhere. Now the customers were mostly younger guys from the DA's office and lower-level city administration who came because it wasn't that far from City Hall. There were only six or eight other drinkers tonight.
    Bert told the bartender a Johnnie Walker straight up and another in a few minutes, she could bring it over. He waited for the first and took it and a glass of water over to a booth along the wall, where he sat beneath a dusty marlin and tasted the whiskey carefully. You could toss them back and then you didn't think you'd had much because it wouldn't start hitting you until you'd done more than you should, so he'd been