FIVE

Deanna Campbell had to resist the urge to kick her husband under the table, again.

She was sitting with Samuel, Mary, and Jack Bartow at an Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue. Upon their arrival at the airport in San Francisco, Mary had found a pay phone, called Bartow, and set up a time and place to meet and get more information on this supposed dragon. Meanwhile, Samuel and Deanna had waited for the luggage.

They’d packed two suitcases, one with enough clothes to last them all for a week, and the other with all the supplies and weapons they might need. It took forever for the second suitcase—the one with the clothes—to arrive, and Samuel was close to just abandoning it when it finally was disgorged onto the carousel.

“Could’ve been worse,” Deanna had whispered to her husband, “it could’ve been the other one that got lost.”

Samuel just scowled. Both suitcases were too large to fit into the overhead compartments, so they’d had to check them before boarding, which made Samuel nervous. The weapons they’d amassed—pistols, crossbows, shotguns, longbows, machetes, swords—would be prohibitively expensive to replace. Samuel’s dry-cleaning business and Deanna’s occasional substitute teaching work provided them with enough money to pay for Mary’s education and allow them to keep their armory stocked.

And occasionally buy last-minute plane tickets.

Yet here were times when the bills threatened to overwhelm them. That was the problem with hunting—it was a calling, not a profession, and callings didn’t feed the bulldog.

Mary was still on the phone when Deanna and Samuel found her.

“Look,” she was saying as they approached, “that was my last dime, and I really need to—Oh! Here’s Mom and Dad. I’ll see you soon, okay? Right on, Jack. Bye!”

“You used all your change?” Deanna asked before Samuel could say anything.

“Just catching up,” Mary said, then she shot a look at her father. “It’s not like we warned him we were coming.”

Samuel hadn’t wanted to pay the long-distance charge for a call to California.

Turning back to Deanna, Mary continued.

“Anyhow, he’s going to make reservations for six o’clock tonight at a place in North Beach.”

With that they rented a car and proceeded to their hotel—the Emperor Norton Lodge on Ellis Street in the Tenderloin—to unpack and make sure the weapons were all clean and ready.

It was Deanna’s idea to take the bus to North Beach— more popularly known as “Little Italy”—so they wouldn’t need to deal with trying to park in that busy neighborhood.

“But I don’t want to go weaponless,” Samuel had protested.

“The killings are in Chinatown, Samuel.”

“It’s not the dragon I’m worried about.”

Deanna just sighed, and Mary rolled her eyes.

They weren’t wholly unarmed, of course, but they did leave their firearms at the motel. It wasn’t wise for civilians to wander around a big city armed in these days of civil unrest. The local law tended to take a dim view of people carrying guns, and the last thing the Campbells wanted to do was gain the attention of the San Francisco Police Department.

On three separate occasions as they walked towards the restaurant, someone with long hair and bare feet tried to give Samuel a flower. It made his scowl so deep that Deanna feared his face would collapse in on itself.

Bartow was late for dinner, leaving the three of them waiting outside the restaurant. The reservation was in his name, and Samuel refused to wait at the bar with an underaged girl, even though nobody in the restaurant seemed to mind.

Finally, Bartow limped up the hill of Columbus Avenue, after having come out of the front entrance to the City Lights bookstore. Since the last time they’d seen him, he’d exchanged his plain wooden cane for an ornate walking stick sporting a dragon’s head handle.

Samuel’s eyes naturally went straight to Bartow’s left foot—or what was left of it. He’d had the injury before they met him last year—when he’d just turned seventeen—and claimed it was an accident due to a poorly maintained handgun. But Samuel was sure the young man had shot himself in the foot deliberately to avoid the draft.

“Sorry I’m late,” Bartow said. “Ferlinghetti was doing a reading, and it ran over.”

“Wow, that sounds swell,” Mary said with a smile, but Samuel just looked confused.

Deanna rode to his rescue.

“Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He’s a poet, and the owner of that bookstore down the street.”

That just prompted a grunt, and with nothing more left to be said, they all went into the restaurant.

Once they were all seated and had ordered drinks, Bartow started asking Mary about school. His brown hair was Brylcreemed into a duck’s ass style, and he had a pencil-thin mustache that was almost black. He was exactly the type of boy Deanna would have swooned over when she was fifteen.

Before long, the conversation turned to the young girl’s social life, and that was what prompted the kick. As soon as the personal questions began, Samuel’s mood darkened— if such was possible—and he started glaring openly. He was about to interrupt when she let him have it.

Samuel jumped slightly, and looked at his wife.

She frowned at him, and her expression said, Let the young people talk. She knew how these things went, and didn’t want to be thrown out of such a nice restaurant.

He sighed, and held his tongue as long as he could. After a while, as Mary was telling Bartow what a nerd her math teacher was, he glanced at Deanna again, and she nodded.

“So, Jack,” Samuel said sharply, “what can you tell us about this so-called dragon?”

Bartow smiled.

“I’m not the only one calling it that, Sam,” he said.

Samuel’s face twitched, and Deanna sighed. He hated any diminutive of his name, and it would only serve to make an unpleasant conversation even more so.

Where are those drinks, she thought, glancing around for the waiter.

“It’s ‘Samuel,’” Her husband said evenly. But to his credit, he didn’t snap. “Or better still, ‘Mr. Campbell.’”

“Dad...” Mary started, but Bartow put a hand on her arm.

“No, it’s all right, Mare,” Bartow said in a suddenly subdued tone. Then he turned back. “I apologize for my disrespect, sir.”

Samuel looked surprised, not knowing how to react. Deanna smiled into her napkin.

“Apology accepted,” he muttered.

Nodding confidently, Bartow reached into his shirt pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes.

“Anyhow, like I said, folks are referring to whatever it is that’s killed these four folks as ‘the heart of the dragon.’”

“Four?” Deanna interrupted. “I thought it was three.”

Placing a cigarette in his mouth, Bartow lit it with a zippo.

“It was, ma’am, but there was another last night. SFPD’s keeping this one out of the newspapers to avoid a panic, but I got a buddy on the job.” At Samuel’s dubious expression, he added, “I helped my parents exorcise a demon that had taken the guy’s son—sometimes a little Latin goes a long way. And that sort of thing buys a lotta gratitude.”

Samuel relented a bit.

“My buddy couldn’t get me the files, but he did provide some details about the victims. The first was named Michael Verlander, but everyone called him ‘Moondoggy.’”

“A hippie,” Samuel said.

“Yes, sir. But the place where he was found belongs to a guy named Frederick Gorczyk, whereabouts unknown. The next two were ordinary citizens of Chinatown. One was the manager of a laundry, and the other owned a restaurant. But the victim last night was different—a woman named Marybeth Wenzel, a student at Berkeley.”

“Do the victims have anything in common?” Samuel asked.

Bartow shook his head while dragging on his cigarette.

“At least not that anybody could find. Hard to say for sure, since the Chinese don’t usually talk to cops, so nobody knows much about those two. And this latest victim, the girl? She just makes it even worse. That’s why mum’s the word with the PD on the latest one. A hippie and two Chinese is one thing—they’ll barely get noticed. But this is a nice college girl, and that usually means lots of attention from the fourth estate.”

Their drinks arrived at that moment. Deanna sipped her 7-Up in annoyance at how right Bartow was. Immigrants and a dropout wouldn’t garner much press attention, but the newspapers would become a lot more interested once word of the girl’s death was made public.

“Do you really think it’s a dragon?” Mary asked eagerly.

Bartow shrugged and sipped from his glass of red wine.

“Dunno, Mare, but word all over Chinatown is whispered talk of ‘the heart of the dragon.’”

Samuel slugged down some of his beer.

“All right. You girls hit the books. See if you can find out what this ‘heart of the dragon’ is, and how it might relate. I’ll see if I can track down who summoned it.”

Bartow sat up straighter in his chair.

“What do you want me to do, sir?”

“We can take it from here, son,” Samuel said a little dismissively.

“Dad,” Mary said with a glare, “that’s not fair. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Jack.”

Samuel was about to argue, but Deanna cut him off.

“We can probably use his help on the research end,” she said.

Her husband tossed her a look of irritation, but she just stared right back. Samuel didn’t like working with other hunters, she knew, but given that Jack had actually called them in on this, it didn’t seem right to cut him off now.

“The three of us have our own way of doing things,” Samuel said in a tight voice. “I’m sure Jack understands that.”

Taking a final drag on his cigarette, Bartow stamped it out in the ashtray just as the waitress brought their food. He waited until after she’d placed all four plates in front of them before speaking.

“Look, I realize I can’t do much with my bum hoof, but I know my way around the public library, and I know this town. I can help.” Then he began cutting his veal parmigiana into neat rectangles with his knife and fork.

Samuel ignored his own meal and stared at Jack.

“It’s the bum hoof I’m concerned about, Jack. I’ll be honest with you—I’m not comfortable trusting my back to somebody who shot himself in the foot.”

Jack’s mouth was full, and Mary—who was twirling her spaghetti pomodoro around her fork—spoke before he could swallow and defend himself.

“Dad, what’s got into you,” she demanded. “Why are you being such a butthead?”

“I’m not being a—”

“He didn’t shoot himself in the foot!”

“So he says.”

“And so I say, because last time we were out here he showed me the wound. The angle’s wrong—it couldn’t possibly be self-inflicted.”

Deanna couldn’t help but smile with pride. She also hoped her husband didn’t pick up on the fact that Mary and Jack had been in such an intimate situation without his knowledge.

“Why didn’t you mention that before?” Samuel asked.

“Why didn’t you just trust me?” Mary shot back.

“Or me?” Jack asked, finally able to get a word in edgewise. “Look, I dig that you don’t like me, Mr. Campbell, but you knew both my parents. And I get the scene, believe me. I can help.”

Samuel glanced at Deanna, which told her that he felt outnumbered.

Deanna just dug into her pasta primavera, signaling to him that he was on his own.

Samuel finally speared his osso bucco with a fork, which prompted her to smile again. He’d never admit to losing the argument, but not trying to claim the last word was usually enough.