City of Night

said, “Mr. Aubrey is over there past the pagan fountain, among the roses. And please don’t make fun of his hat.”
    “His hat?” Michael asked.
    “Lulana insists he wear a sun hat if he’s going to spend half the day in the garden. He’s mostly bald, so she worries he’ll get head-top skin cancer. Mr. Aubrey hated the hat at first. He only recently got used to it.”
    Carson said, “Never thought I’d see the day when anyone would be the boss of Aubrey Picou.”
    “Lulana doesn’t so much boss,” said Moses. “She sort of just tough-loves everyone into obedience.”
    A brick walkway led from the back veranda steps, across the lawn, encircled the pagan fountain, and continued to the rose garden.
    The sculptured-marble fountain featured three life-size figures. Pan, a male form with goat legs and horns, played a flute and chased two nude women—or they chased him—around a column twined with grapevines.
    “My eye for antiques isn’t infallible,” Michael said, “but I’m pretty sure that’s eighteenth-century Las Vegas.”
    The rosebushes grew in rows, with aisles of decomposed granite between. In the third of four aisles stood a bag of fertilizer, a tank sprayer, and trays of neatly arranged gardening tools.
    Here, too, was Aubrey Picou, under a straw hat with such a broad brim that squirrels could have raced around it for exercise.
    Before he noticed them and looked up, he was humming a tune. It sounded like “His Lamp Will Overcome All Darkness.”
    Aubrey was eighty years old and had a baby face: an eighty-year-old baby face, but nevertheless pink and plump and pinchable. Even in the deep shade of his anticancer headgear, his blue eyes twinkled with merriment.
    “Of all the cops I know,” said Aubrey, “here are the two I like the best.”
    “Do you like any others at all?” Carson asked.
    “Not one of the bastards, no,” Aubrey said. “But then none of the rest ever saved my life.”
    “What’s with the stupid hat?” Michael asked.
    Aubrey’s smile became a grimace. “What’s it matter if I die of skin cancer? I’m eighty years old. I gotta die of something.”
    “Lulana doesn’t want you to die before you find Jesus.”
    Aubrey sighed. “With those three running the show, I trip over Jesus every time I turn around.”
    “If anyone can redeem you,” Carson said, “it’ll be Lulana.”
    Aubrey looked as if he would say something acerbic. Instead he sighed again. “I never used to have a conscience. Now I do. It’s more annoying than this absurd hat.”
    “Why wear the hat if you hate it?” Michael asked.
    Aubrey glanced toward the house. “If I take it off, she’ll see. Then I won’t get any of Evangeline’s pie.”
    “The praline-cinnamon cream pie.”
    “With fried-pecan topping,” Aubrey said. “I love that pie.” He sighed.
    “You sigh a lot these days,” Michael said.
    “I’ve become pathetic, haven’t I?”
    “You used to be pathetic,” Carson said. “What you’ve become is a little bit human.”
    “It’s disconcerting,” Michael said.
    “Don’t I know,” Aubrey agreed. “So what brings you guys here?”
    Carson said, “We need some big, loud, door-busting guns.”
     
     
     

Chapter 16
     
    Glorious, the stink: pungent, pervasive, penetrating.
    Nick Frigg imagined that the smell of the pits had saturated his flesh, his blood, his bones, in the same way that the scent of smoldering hickory permeated even the thickest cuts of meat in a smokehouse.
    He relished the thought that to the core he smelled like all varieties of decomposition, like the death that he longed for and that he could not have.
    In his thigh-high rubber boots, Nick strode across the west pit, empty cans of everything rattling in his wake, empty egg cartons and cracker boxes crunching-crackling underfoot, toward the spot where the surface of the trash had swelled and rolled and settled. That peculiar activity appeared to have ceased.
    Although compacted by the wide-tracked garbage galleons that crawled these desolate realms, the trash field—between sixty and seventy feet deep in this pit—occasionally shifted under Nick, for by its nature it was riddled with small voids. Agile, with lightning reflexes, he rarely lost his footing.
    When he arrived at the site of the movement that he had seen from the elevated rampart, the surface did not look significantly different from the hundred fifty feet of refuse across which he had just traveled. Squashed cans, broken