Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation Read Free Page B

to the library’s small but definitive section on
the husbandry of medicinal and psychoactive plants. Although Raszer was a
coffee drinker by nature, he was also celebrated among close friends for his
teas.
         To
Raszer’s hard-won erudition and reckless curiosity were added a set of
categorically feline physical attributes. He’d been a somewhat awkward and
ill-adapted boy, but had managed to overcome his handicaps with a punishing
regimen. He was a reasonably skillful rock climber, could handle a combat knife
well, and had managed to collect a black belt in karate before bridling at the
sensei’s authoritarian mindset. At this stage of his life, the youthful ugly
duckling had at least now achieved the grace of a swan. The sharp features that
had seemed too roughly sculpted in youth had emerged from the stone, chiseled
by both his Celtic and his Semitic ancestry.
         He was
still no Adonis, but the women Raszer desired were not interested in pretty
boys anyway. He was as fit as a formerly dissolute and still nonabstaining
forty-two-year-old could rightfully ask to be, and he had acquired with the
onset of his second life an exceptionally high tolerance for pain. One doctor
had pegged it as an overproduction of endorphins. A different kind of doctor
had once called it “Dionysian masochism”—a diagnosis that still made Raszer
laugh out loud.
           His most singular physical attribute, however,
was—in a word—metaphysical. There was a light in his eye. To the amazement of
L.A.’s most skillful opthamologists, this luminance wasn’t metaphorical, nor was
it caused by some lodged shard of glass or accident of shape. Raszer had, just
inside the stone-blue perimeter of his right iris, a “second pupil,” a dwarf
companion to the central orb. In bright sunlight, it contracted to a dull,
clay-colored fleck, no larger than the head of a pin. On gloomy days it
oscillated faintly, sometimes causing him headaches and vertigo. But in the
darkness of true night, and only when the flame of desire—sacred or profane—had
been fanned, it spun open and reeled out light like a strand of golden thread.
         Raszer
rose from the library shelf at the click-clickety-click of a pair of high-rise sandals and turned to see Monica come in, her streaked
surfer-girl hair attractively damp and her trench coat spattered with mud.
         “I crossed
the Jordan for you, Raszer,” she said. “Now whaddaya have for me?”
         “It’s
bad out there, huh?”
         “The
major intersections are all flooded. Another kid drowned in the L.A. River last
night.” She regarded her dappled coat. “And there’s mud . . . everywhere.”
         “Christ,”
said Raszer, “it just gets worse.” Defying the gloom, she still looked sunny,
and that, as always, got a little smile out of him. “Sorry about your mac. Now
take it off and sit down. I want to pick your fine, feminine right brain.”
         “About why
there are currently no women in your life?”    
           “No. About Scotty.”
         She
shook her head and released a sigh that was almost a moan. “Don’t you remember
telling me that obsession kills creativity? Why don’t we just spend a rainy
afternoon combing the society columns? Somebody’s kid has gotta be missing.”
         “I think
I lost him because I played it like a man,” he said, ignoring her. “I was
linear. I followed leads, not scents. How would you have—”
         “I
dunno,” she said. “The Gauntlet is a boys’ game. And anyway, boss, you have as
good a nose as most women.”
         “Not
when I’m in close. I had him. I was inside the game. I offered him his exit…his
goddamned ‘DX,’ for chrissakes. I had him on the phone and I lost him.”
         “Look,
Raszer,” she said, peeling off her coat to reveal jeans and an extra-large
sweatshirt with a S ex W ax logo.
“The guys who invented this game may be divinity students,