Tricked

Granuaile’s expression indicated that she was less than credulous. “Atticus. The Patterson film is widely regarded as making Bigfoot famous. But it’s also widely regarded as a hoax.”

“And it was. It was me in an ape suit. I did a custom job, put some fake hairy br**sts on there, and once they lost me, I shifted away and laughed my ass off.”

Granuaile’s face remained stony. “No, I’m sorry, I’m not buying it.”

“Who else can walk around in a suit like that and then disappear without a trace?”

“That’s easy,” Granuaile replied. “Keyser Söze.” She blew on the tips of her fingers. “Poof. He’s gone.”

"If Sasquatch is really Keyser Söze, it’s no wonder they never caught him!"

“No,” I said, thumping my chest, “I did it. It was me.”

“Whatever, Atticus. Why would you do something like that?”

“Because I get bored sometimes. I want to see how gullible people are. Come on, a giant apelike creature in the Pacific Northwest, when all the apes in the world live in tropical zones? Who would believe something like that?”

“A significant percentage of Americans.”

“Clearly. But the truth is that there were two such creatures, both males, centuries ago just south of Lake Okeechobee. A subtropical zone.”

Granuaile snorted derisively. “You expect me to believe that after you just told me you made up the whole thing about Bigfoot?”

"The greatest trick that Sasquatch ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist."

“Fine. Sit there in your fortress of disbelief. Discovering a true Sasquatch was a tangent to the main story anyway: I bound the New World to Tír na nÓg almost entirely by myself, though it took me many years. Many mind-numbing, lonely years, Faolan’s surly companionship notwithstanding. But there was another benefit to that mission I shouldn’t neglect to mention. There were times when I was blown away by the virgin beauty of the land—kind of like that guy who lost his shit on the Internet at the full double rainbow across the sky. Remember that guy? He kept asking what it meant. And it is not so difficult a question to answer. It means that we are loved, like all living things that Gaia sustains. There is a poetry in the canopies of forests and in the gentle roll of hills, a song in the wind and a benediction in the kiss of the sun. There are stories in the chuckle of waters in creeks, and epics told in the tides of oceans. There are trees, Granuaile, that seem sometimes like they have grown all their lives just to feel the touch of my hand upon their trunks, they are so welcoming to me. You will feel that welcome in your hands someday. You’ll feel it in your toes as you walk upon the earth. I cannot wait to see that love bloom in your eyes.”

“It’s there already, sensei. Sonora showed me. While you were gone to Asgard.”

Tears glistened at the edges of her eyes, all mockery of my Sasquatch story forgotten. She knew precisely what I meant—she had changed; she understood. And she became almost unbearably beautiful to me in that moment.

“So it is,” I said. I sighed and tried to get the train of my thoughts back onto its original track. “After I completed binding the western hemisphere to Tír na nÓg—a process of centuries—I always kept a lookout for additional places to bind to the Irish planes. Lots of those bindings have been ruined by development, but plenty are still around.”

“Are there any near here?”

“There are some near Flagstaff. Or we could head west to the Kaibab Plateau. Not much else in the way of forests near here.” She accepted this without comment, and Oberon jumped in with his own question.

"Atticus? What happened to your wolverine friend?"

That is another story, Oberon, and it’s not a very happy one. He was with me for nearly a hundred years, though. I do miss him, like I miss everyone.

"How many years have we been together? It must be forty-seven or something like that."

I petted him and kissed the top of his head. No, we have only been friends for twelve years.

"That’s all? I’m kind of jealous of him now. What does moose taste like?"

Kind of like caribou.

"Oh, I see! Um. What does caribou taste like?"

Like elk or deer, just slightly different.

"Can we go hunt moose or caribou when this is over?"

I don’t see why not. It’ll be cold though. They live far to the north.

"Bring it!"

The fact that the skinwalkers never approached the hogan and asked for a supper of Druid tartare convinced me that Famine’s spell had been successfully broken; Hel now thought I was dead. According to what Frank had shared about them earlier, the skinwalkers were more concerned with defending their territory than with anything else. I knew they would have to be dealt with eventually, but when I thought of how I might be able to match their speed, my lower left eyelid began to twitch. That problem could wait a night or so and stew in my subconscious while I conducted some business in Flagstaff.

When it was time to greet the sun and the skinwalkers had slunk away to their evil lair—which I imagined was full of bones and skins—I pulled Coyote aside from the others.

“Need to go to Flagstaff today to take care of a bunch of errands. You’ll be all right, won’t you?”

Coyote scanned me up and down, searching, perhaps, for signs that I was going to abandon the project. “Well, yeah, but I thought you ran your errands yesterday in Kayenta.”

“I have a few more to run. Should be back tomorrow.”

Coyote pursed his lips. “Maybe I should help you run them.”

“You’re welcome to come along if you want. But I think you’re more needed here.”

“What is it you need to do, if you don’t mind me askin’?”

“We gotta make my apprentice disappear. And maybe we can do something about that vampire problem.”

Chapter 15

The key to faking deaths is a fine appreciation of arterial spray patterns. One might be tempted to simply smear a bit of blood here and there, but forensics fellows these days are a bit more sophisticated than they used to be. If they figure the scene is a fake, they’ll tell the family and then said family will never hold that all-important funeral for closure. Without a body, the coroner would never issue a death certificate, but the police would at least designate it a cold case if you could convince them there was a high probability of death.

I have found that blood bags work very well at simulating spray with a strategically poked hole; apply pressure to the bottom of the bag, practice a bit, and before long you will be able to write stories of carnage and odes to gore.

A small fan brush—the sort that one dude used to paint happy little trees—can paint a picture of blunt-force spatters if you flick the surface properly. Don’t use a toothbrush; those patterns are recognizable. You could even talk to yourself, as that painter did, while you flick blood around: “And maybe over here we have a nice stab wound. And, I don’t know, maybe there’s a few more back over here. Multiple stab wounds. It doesn’t matter, whatever you feel like.”

When it comes to the actual blood, my former policy was that it was best to use somebody else’s. You could even leave someone else’s hair, as long as it was plausibly the same color, and that was the best practice because magic users would have no way to track you down. Can’t do that anymore, however. Police routinely send all blood and other biological samples to labs for DNA matching, because some of those goodies might belong to the suspect. It’s tougher to fool the coppers these days, but I enjoy the challenge.

Granuaile wasn’t worried about constructing the crime scene, however. She steered me away from that topic.

“What I want to know is how you get around the documentation issues,” she said. She was driving us down to Flagstaff as Oberon napped in the backseat.

“Documentation of what?”

“Of your life before you take on a new identity. I mean, you can’t just show up. You need all this stuff. A credit history. How do you do it?”

“The lawyers do it for me these days. Werewolves in general have the inside line on identity changes. Since they have to uproot their entire packs occasionally and move to another territory, they all figure out some efficient way of getting the job done wherever they are. Hal’s operation is among the best, but you can approach almost any werewolf anywhere and get help with IDs if you need to.”

“All right, that’s good to know, but how do they do it?”

“Well, let’s make a list. You need a birth certificate, to begin with. Then some school records and immunizations. A driver’s license. A passport, a visa, and a green card.”

“What? A green card? Why do I need that?”

“Because no matter what names we use, we are always and forever from Panama.”

“We are? Why?”

“Because that’s where the corrupt officials are. At least the ones that Hal’s pack uses. So you and I—Reilly and Caitlin Collins—were born in Panama to Irish expatriates who died tragically when we were young. We were raised as orphans. We have birth certificates and transcripts and everything. I got better grades than you in school, by the way.”

She ignored this gibe and asked, “Did you do this when you started out as Atticus too?”

“Yep. Mostly all you need is the driver’s license, a Social Security number, and a bank account. Throw cash at a bank and they don’t really give a damn where you come from.”

“How do you get the Social Security number?”

“Same thing. Corrupt officials. Kind of determined ones, though. It’s tough to get around the internal security of the feds, but you can do it if you have the money to spend.”

“But will these IDs stand up under scrutiny? I bet your background as Atticus O’Sullivan is getting searched right now.”

I shrug. “It doesn’t need to stand up. The moment it comes under serious scrutiny, you move on. It only needs to be good enough to fool people at first glance. If it looks authentic, you don’t get the full background check.”

“Who were you before you were Atticus?”

“Still me. Just a different name.”

“Should I call you something else, like your original name?”

“No, Atticus will do. I like that one.”

“Good, I do too. What’s the worst name you’ve ever had?”

“Nigel. It was extremely uncomfortable. Never got used to it.”

Granuaile laughed. “Nigel? When was that?”

“It was only three months in Toronto in 1953, but every day was a new adventure in embarrassment. You never want to be Nigel in Toronto.”

When we got to Flagstaff, we drove to a medical supply store and Granuaile paid cash for some syringes, blood bags, surgical gloves, and other things we would never use. Padding the receipt would throw off the coppers if they ever got this far. I went in first, camouflaged, to make sure that there was no security camera to record the transaction. There was, of course, so I relaxed the silica bindings in the glass lens a wee bit and then allowed them to rebind once more in a different configuration. Light no longer passed through the lens in a sensible fashion, so it recorded nothing but visual noise from the moment Granuaile walked into the store. We ditched most of the purchases in an anonymous trash bin in a residential alley, keeping only what we’d need for the scene.

From there we drove to Shultz Pass Road on the north side of town and pulled over once we saw Shultz Tank below us to the right: a retention area full of stagnant water. There’s nothing in the way of homes or businesses there; it’s ponderosa pine on either side of the road, and the only traffic one can reasonably expect is mountain bikers and hikers heading to a trailhead somewhere—but even they were unlikely to show up on a weekday. Oberon trotted down the road a short distance to warn us of approaching traffic, commenting as he did that this area would be a great place for the death scene of a few squirrels. He kept to the shoulder, where a carpet of pine needles would conceal his tracks so I wouldn’t have to erase them later. He knew where to meet us when we were finished.

I drew blood from Granuaile—not a full pint, but the better part of one.

“Aren’t they going to find traces of you in here?” she asked, indicating the interior of the car.

“Yeah, but that’s okay. I’m already dead, so I couldn’t be the one who killed you. They’ll be assumed to be old traces. But I bet this is going to get Detective Geffert all excited when he hears about it. Your death will just emphasize for him that I must have been up to something awful. But the loose end here is really going to be Oberon. They’ll find traces of him in here too and wonder where he went, since he obviously hasn’t been found abandoned or stray anywhere. Not much I can do about that.”

Once Granuaile’s blood was drawn and a bit of adhesive placed in the crook of her elbow, we packed everything we would take into a backpack and reviewed the plan as I drew on a pair of surgical gloves and carefully held a stitching needle between my lips. Performance theater. Granuaile left her handbag with her “old” ID and everything on the passenger seat. I searched for a suitable fallen bough among the ponderosas and found one, then meticulously covered my tracks on the passenger side of the car. I made no effort to cover the dim tracks coming out of the forest, even though they would be nothing more than faint impressions in the carpet of pine needles and bunch grasses.

Oberon, how we doing? Anybody coming?

"All clear, Atticus."

Okay, we’re about to start.