Bones of the Barbary Coast Read Online Free PDF Page B

the last few months? You've been busting it your whole life, nobody's going to complain you're not pulling your weight. You know you'll hand off your open cases at the end, pick up your gold watch, and then you're, whatever, you're at home fondling the TV remote 'til the bagpipes play."
    Back in the kitchen, Bert opened a rear door and tipped his head to a flight of stairs that led down to the back corner of the terrace. Cree went out to a breeze that lifted her hair and tickled her cheeks, smelling of ocean and the exotic scent essence of northern California, eucalyptus. They walked together to the garden area in the middle of the terrace.
    Evening was settling over the city. In the light of a sun floating on the rim of the Pacific, the sky above the Golden Gate was a swirl of peach and pink, lavender and turquoise, that threw an opaline light on the water. On the far side, the hills were mounds of luminous pastels, cut with valleys of shadow; on this side, the city fell steeply away in a sweep of dimming pink and beige punctuated already by a few window lights. Behind Cree, the house was a Victorian jewel box, its facade warmed by the colors of the sky, windows reflecting back the dying sunlight.
    "And the other way?" she prompted. "The other way you retire?"
    "Yeah, the other way is you hold your head up, you follow through right to the end. You don't slow down, if anything you push it harder."
    "Why?"
    "Because you want to be proud when you're done. That's what you gotta live with from here on out, so you want to know you did the best you could. You don't do that, you've disrespected your job, you've basically said what you did all along was useless anyway." Bert sat on one of the benches, pulled out a cigarette but didn't light it. "So I get one more John Doe. We can incinerate him and write him up as a number, no fuss, I'm clear. Or we can give him a decent burial, say a few words, maybe put a name on his tombstone." He looked back at her challengingly. "That seem old fashioned to you?"
    "Old-fashioned conservative or bleeding-heart liberal."
    "I also knew Horace, how much he was gonna love getting his hands on this guy. Write a paper about him, maybe."
    "And you called me in because . . ."
    "Don't bother. There's no goddamned ghost, okay? Nobody to psychoanalyze, either. You deal with Bert Marchetti, what you see is what you get. I got no depths for you to plumb." Suggesting otherwise, his gestures had gotten vehement again. "I called you in because you're a licensed PI, you do historical research, and I could use the help. It's half a favor to Horace, he can use supporting data about this unusual specimen, but I got other cases to attend to. I also thought, with you I got a personal connection that'll help keep it confidential. Like Horace said, we don't want attention from screwballs, and nobody will be happy we're spending our time or taxpayers' money on this—state's in a budget crisis, why do you think they elected the Terminator? This job is gonna be a lot of time-consuming work, up to your neck in newspaper morgues and historical libraries. Stuff that'll eat my clock when I got more recent dead people to deal with. And, yeah, I'm curious—how the rubble got in there, what really went down. Something fishy there."
    He glanced over to see how well she was buying it and must have seen that she wasn't, quite. "And, yeah," he went on quietly, "I figured, you know, the wolfman thing, that would be kind of up your alley."
    "You don't believe in ghosts . . . how about werewolves?"
    The eyes slitted again. "Aw, Jesus. This isn't about me, what I believe, what I don't, it's about some poor freak bastard who died and at the very least deserves not to be forgotten by everyone, every time! If you don't get that, I can't explain it. I don't believe in that crap. I don't believe in anything, okay? Except maybe, this much, this much"—he shook a thick forefinger and thumb, held a millimeter apart—"in getting my goddamned