29

SHUT UP WHEN YOU’RE TALKING TO ME

There was something stark and desolate about Abalmar. I liked Wisconsin in general—in some ways, it reminded me of Alaska, both the place and the people. But Abalmar had a bit of a Rust Belt vibe going on. Of course, my perceptions might have been influenced by the fact that I was coming there to hunt a supernatural serial killer, but we passed several abandoned sites whose function looked vaguely industrial and agricultural while we were driving through the outskirts of the city.

“Somebody ought to pay some local artists to prettify places like this,” I said. We were passing a big machine whose white paint was peeling and whose function was uncertain. It seemed to be some kind of mobile vertical conveyer belt.

“Artists,” Vigil snorted from the backseat. Tula was driving our Ford Escort. I’d wanted to sit behind the steering wheel, but Tula claimed to get motion sick if she couldn’t drive. I’d never heard of a werewolf getting motion sick before, but if she was lying, she was doing a good job of it, and I respected that.

Virgil elaborated. “The kinds you’re talking about would papier-mâché giant penises over everything.”

“What kinds do you think John is talking about?” Tula wondered. Something about her question suggested that Finland apparently had a lot more respect for artists and government subsidies than Virgil did. She only got that tone when there was a “Stupid Americans” subtext running beneath her words.

“The kind that take grant money from the government,” Virgil said. “They feel ashamed of taking money from Big Brother, so they go out of their way to be controversial. So they can tell their friends they’re sticking it to the Man instead of being bought off.”

“Biting the Man that feeds them,” I mused. “You’re thinking of someone specific.” There was too much bitterness in his voice.

“A couple that turned their art studio into a foster home,” Virgil admitted. “Professional leeches and child neglecters.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to stereotype,” Tula chided. “That would be like me saying all cops are grouches who hate artists just because I know one.”

“I don’t hate artists,” Virgil said. “I’ve just met a lot of cop-hating parasites who hid behind that term.”

Tula turned up the music. I forgot what it was as soon as I heard it. Some generic Auto-Tuned dance babble, but it served its purpose and ended the conversation. When the song was over, she turned the radio down and addressed me. “Are you sure you don’t want us to go with you?”

“I’m sure,” I said curtly. “Come get me in an hour and a half.”

“Should we bring a hearse?” Tula wondered.

I was about to test Matthew Bradley’s security. A werewolf from the Abalmar tribe had been killed just that morning, found with a silver bullet in her head, and it hadn’t been Matthew who had informed Bernard about it. The information had come from another werewolf in Matthew’s organization, or his disorganization. I wanted to get a good look at Matthew’s operation without warning him I was coming.

“Look,” I said, “Nikolai says this group runs on testosterone. If they catch me, I’ll praise them. If they don’t catch me, I’ll put them on guard in a way that they need to be put on guard.”

“And if they kill you, I get my ass chewed by Bernard,” Virgil grumbled. “And I take ass-chewings a lot more seriously now that they’re not just a figure of speech.”

“I think you just want to play ninja,” Tula added, but she wasn’t trying to argue me out of anything. Tula liked trouble. She had come to America specifically because she had heard that a group of werewolves was taking on the knights there. “You could let Paul do this.”

“There’s some alpha male posturing involved,” I admitted. If Matthew’s inner circle was as big a bunch of swaggering assholes as Nikolai said, they were going to challenge me anyway. Better to take them off balance and get it over with fast, on my terms. “I want to establish my credentials.”

“So that’s how you’re going to introduce yourself?” Tula made her voice raspy. “I’m Batman.”

“See, ideally, you two would realize I wasn’t in the car at this point,” I said. “And Virgil would ask how I did that. But I don’t know how to open a car door quietly.”

Virgil chuckled. “I’ll pretend not to see you leave if it’ll get your ass out of here.”

“Just for that, I’m leaving Tula in charge.” I got out of the car, but I could still hear them talking after I closed the door and hit the woods on the side of the road.

I couldn’t decide if making a firing range the Abalmar tribe’s de facto headquarters was inspired or idiotic. “Fire on the Hole” was miles outside of the city, and it said something about this Matthew Bradley that the tribe’s seat of power wasn’t accessible. On the other hand, clan members had a legitimate reason for keeping weapons around, there was plenty of surrounding land for werewolves to roam around as therapy or security, and everyone in the Abalmar tribe could get practice with firearms.

Still, if I was a knight and wanted to attack the place, I wouldn’t have a hard time getting a gun inside the perimeter. I would just pretend to be a paying customer. So, maybe it was a good thing Matthew didn’t seem to have many.

I was in sight of the place when I first caught the smell of cigarette smoke. Dumb. It not only made the sentry easy to locate, but having a nicotine stick fired up right under his nostrils made it harder for him to scent me. Deciding to wait and watch for a while, it didn’t take me long to figure out that the sentry was stationary and not taking his job very seriously.

I couldn’t move around the other side, not with werewolves and the wind the way it was, but grass was tall on the fringes of the surrounding tree lines, and when I scanned the area with my field glasses, I could see a patch on the opposite side of the firing range where waist-high stalks had been crushed down recently. Another sentry, most likely, posted on the opposite side. The land in back of the firing range had been cleared for at least two thousand yards for outside distance shooting, and if there was anyone that far back, I was content to leave them be.

There were three large trash cans parked outside a side door, and I could smell that they weren’t empty. If I could reach them, they would hide me from the sentry with the cigarette, conceal me from both his eyes and nose. I waited. Soon I heard a car with loud music blaring out of the windows pulling up the driveway. It was my other claw member, Paul.

Paul had been scoping the area out with a long-range rifle. Now he was providing some noise cover and drawing eyes his way. If he saw any of signs of trouble, he would try to help me. If not, he would turn around as if he’d gotten lost and drive off again.

I moved. It was five seconds from the edge of the woods, but I didn’t rush. Quick, darting movements in someone’s peripheral vision actually attract people’s attention more than slow and casual motions. Besides, if the sentry saw me dashing for the door, he’d level his rifle immediately. If he saw me walking confidently, he would take a few seconds to try to identify me and figure out who I was and how I belonged there.

I made it to the trash cans. The cigarette sucker was probably staring at Paul’s car, which was now halted in the driveway while Paul looked at a map.

I couldn’t hear anyone on the other side of the door, and the lock would have been easy to pick if it weren’t for the weird side angle I was coming from and the fact that I had to time my efforts in sync with the target-shooting going on inside. But I slid the door open as a gun went off, and the door didn’t have loud, creaking hinges and the music from Paul’s radio was still providing some cover. I slipped into a break room.

There was a storeroom with a keypad, but it was dark and werewolves see in infrared. Something shifted in my optic nerves while I stared, and then the world went red and I could tell which buttons had been punched by the heat impressions on the keys. I could even tell which number had been punched first and which last by the intensity of the thermal impressions, though the middle ones were harder to distinguish, and that made it easy to figure out the code, though again I had to time the beeps with gunfire from the back of the building.

From there, it was easy to make my way to the opposite door between the storeroom and the front lobby, where a group was having an animated discussion. The voices became more distinct as Paul’s car drove off.

“Hell, how do we know it was a knight, Matthew?” A deep gravelly voice.

“You can’t just make a silver bullet, Brett.” Nikolai had said that Matthew had been an army engineer. “They won’t cycle through a chamber properly unless they’re near perfect, and silver is temperamental.”

“What, you mean the Lone Ranger wasn’t real?” This voice was kind of high-pitched. Not shrill or squeaky, but high.

Matthew spat into some kind of bottle or jar. “You’d need custom-made bullet molds, furnaces that were programmed down to the decimal point, timing charts, and motherfucking insane control conditions to keep impurities out. I’m telling you, boys, nobody but knights make industrial-grade silver bullets. They’ve got secret facilities.”

“You said you had some.” The voice sounded suspicious.

I could hear Matthew slide a magazine out of a gun. “What I’ve got is a lead missile with a silver payload. I just drill the open notch in a hollow-point a little deeper, melt down some silver, pour it in, and bam! One werewolf to go. Cheap and sexy. Just like I like it.”

“But… why are you carrying silver bullets around?” That was from someone who didn’t sound very bright. If I wasn’t mistaking the sounds, the speaker was playing checkers with someone else.

There was an awkward silence.

“Hold on.” A voice that was deep but somehow suggested youth. Real youth. I could tell that the speaker was intervening to take some of the attention off of his friend. “If it takes a factory, how did they make silver bullets back before they had factories?”

Matthew clapped his hands. “Boone, back in the old days, you could shove just about anything down a big-bored musket. You coulda probably tamped down the silverware with some gunpowder, and boom! Thar she blows! Nowadays, we have precision weapons.”

If running Matthew’s pack was just a question of knowing something about guns, the guy would be a lock.

Matthew’s voice went grave again. “That’s why it was a knight that killed Sharon.”

“What about a werewolf knight?” Brett asked.

I could tell from Matthew’s tone that he was smiling one of those smiles that aren’t real. His voice had an amused edge. “Why would this Charming character kill Sharon?”

“Maybe he wants to make you look bad so Bernard will give him your place,” Brett suggested. “Doesn’t it seem weird, him coming here and Sharon dying on the same day?”

Okay, enough of that. I opened the door. “Yeah, because everything was going great before I came along.”

Brett, Matthew, and I were the only ones behind the service counter. Brett was a big sandy-haired lunk with a big moustache and a baseball cap, a lumbering six-foot-six mook who had never heard of manscaping. Matthew was a curly-haired brownish blond who was about my height and gaunt but muscular. A wiry blond youth with shoulder-length hair was sitting at the counter, and a huge, burly brown-haired man was playing checkers with a muscular black-haired youth whose genes had gone through an ethnic blender set on high. The latter could have been Native American or Latino or Caucasian or Hawaiian or Asian or some combination of all of those things.

Everybody had at least one item of clothing that had come out of an army surplus store.

“SHIT!” the wiry blond yelped. Brett turned and took a step closer to me, a confused look on his face. Matthew slapped the clip back into his handgun and aimed it at me, but he half lowered the weapon when he realized that I was unarmed and standing motionless. The two checkers players turned their bodies to face me but otherwise remained still.

“Hi, I’m John Charming,” I said. “I wanted to see how tight your security was.”

Nobody said anything.

“It’s not,” I added helpfully. “Tight, I mean.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Matthew’s voice was low and taut.

“My job,” I assured him. “Bernard wants me to whip this tribe into shape.”

“By disrespecting me in my own house?”

“It’s only disrespect because I got this far,” I pointed out. “If you’d stopped me, I’d be respecting the hell out of you right now. But you’ve got a sentry out there who’s smoking and texting. You’ve got trash cans right next to your side entrance, and you’re not wiping down your keypads.”

The big one, Brett, muttered, “He’s trying to make you look bad, just like I said.”

I smiled without really smiling. “And you have a right-hand man who’s giving you bad advice because he wants your job. He’s trying to get you to take me out so Bernard will take you out, and he’ll have an open field.”

“Shut your damn hole before I shut it for you,” Brett growled.

“Don’t be like that, Brett. You’re a hoot,” I said. “Watching you try to be a smooth manipulator is like watching a moose do ballet. What did you do, read Machiavelli for Dummies? Or do you just like Godfather movies?”

Brett yelled something that wasn’t a word and came for me.

If he’d used his height and reach to keep me at a distance while he threw punches, he might have given me a hard time, but I guess Brett liked to rely on his fast healing and weight to take smaller, more skilled fighters to the ground. I bobbed under Brett’s first lunging swing and came up strong with two rapid palm-heel strikes that he ran straight into. The first one broke one of Brett’s ribs. The second one drove that rib through a lung. I was aiming for his heart, but that hardly ever happens. Too much muscle and bone in the way.

I stepped aside as momentum made Brett stumble past me. He took another halting step while clutching his chest. I imagine he had a horrified expression on his face, but I didn’t really see it. He sank to one knee, wheezing, and I stepped behind him, got one arm along his jaw while I grabbed his temple with one hand and his chin with the other, and snapped his neck by turning my whole body.

“So, anyway, I was with Nikolai when your tribe member was killed this morning,” I said conversationally while Brett collapsed. “And Nikolai wants to know why he had to hear about it from somebody else.”

By this time, the wiry blond also had a gun on me. Matthew still had his gun at half-mast, but the mention of Nikolai calmed him down considerably. He smiled crookedly. “I had this dumb-ass idea that maybe I could handle my own damn problems.”

“Yeah, well, I’m mostly here to find the Butcher of Abalmar,” I said. “The sooner that’s done, the sooner I’m out of your hair.”

Matthew indicated the spot where Brett was gagging and gurgling. “Ah… is he all right?”

“He’ll mend,” I assured him. “Trust me, if it were that easy to kill a werewolf, nobody would need silver bullets.”

“That’s good, then.” Matthew re-holstered his Beretta. “And you’re wrong about Brett wanting my job. He’s been giving me bad advice my whole life.”

I shrugged. “If you say so.”

“I do,” Matthew stated firmly. “Hey, maybe you should try to break into this place every day until you can’t do it anymore.”

Subtext: he wanted a chance to shoot my ass without getting in trouble for it.

“Good idea,” I said. “But I don’t want anyone thinking it’s some kind of drill if knights come calling.”

“I’ll talk to Lester and Sam,” he said grimly.

“So, the werewolf that was killed this morning was a real estate agent, right? Did your tribe acquire a lot of property through her?”

Matthew raised an eyebrow. “A couple of us. How did you find out about it so fast?”

“Somebody named Stacy reported it to Bernard,” I said.

Matthew got a sour look on his face. “Stacy wants to run the tribe like a PTA meeting. That bitch acts like she does all the work and I’m just a deadbeat, but as soon as things get rough, she finds a hole to hide in until I take care of it. Then she acts like it’s my fault that things get out of hand at all. She’s handy with all the paperwork and shit, but I’m getting tired of her attitude.”

“You say she wants to run the tribe like a PTA meeting,” I repeated. “How do you want to run it?”

“This is the Wild West, brother. We’re off the grid,” Matthew said. “We can’t call the cops. There’s no werewolf congress. You want to make committees to talk about taking werewolf censuses and collecting werewolf dues and making werewolf budgets, that’s all good, but when it gets down to the bone, we’re a gang or a cartel.”

“Even cartels have accountants,” I pointed out. “Property managers. Lawyers. Investors. Real estate agents.”

“Yeah, but they don’t mouth off about their bosses,” Matthew said. “If I was as bad as Stacy makes out, I would have gotten violent with her by now.”

“Okay,” I said, not agreeing or disagreeing. “But the real estate angle worries me. This Sharon probably knew a lot more about who’s who and who’s where than your average tribe member, and from what I understand, this Stacy is out there right now, contacting people who bought property through Sharon and relocating them.”

“Like I said,” Matthew said tightly, “she’s useful.”

“Do you know what codependence is?” I asked.

Matthew quirked his lips. “If I say yes, will you get off my ass?”

“No. It’s when two people use each other to avoid things they don’t want to deal with, and they resent the hell out of each other the whole time,” I said. “It sounds like you and this Stacy are codependent, but I’m not a marriage counselor. Have you considered offering Stacy protection right now?”

“Yeah, I considered it,” Matthew said. “And then I remembered that Stacy never gives me any credit when I step in and help her out. This time, she can come here and admit she needs help.”

“What, you don’t feel appreciated?” I held my arms open. “You want a hug?”

Matthew smiled a mean smile. “Fuck you. Bernard wants me to get my people in line. I’m getting my people in line.”

In other words, Stacy could either stop being a problem, or the knights could remove Matthew’s problem for him.

I wanted to ream him out and give him direct orders, but again, we were in front of his men, and I wasn’t ready to give up on Matthew. He had handled my intrusion pretty well, and it seemed to me there was still hope for the man. Not a lot of hope, maybe. Kind of a starving, weak, and beaten hope. But hope is like fire. Sometimes it can turn into something big fast if you can just keep a little bit of it alive.

Besides, I didn’t know enough to know who would take Matthew’s place. If it was Brett, God help the Abalmar tribe.

“After a knight attack is not the time to go on strike,” I managed. “It makes it look like this Stacy is protecting your people while you’re doing nothing. If she dies, she won’t be an example. She’ll be a martyr. If this is about power, order Stacy to tell you who needs protecting and where to send your soldiers. Tell her you’re sending men to keep an eye on her whether she likes it or not. Be the man she says you’re not.”

He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. He kind of liked the sound of that, even if he didn’t like the source.

“You can’t sit around waiting for her to do what you want her to do,” I pressed. “That keeps you on the sideline in the middle of the game. You have to be the quarterback.”

That’s right. I was using sports metaphors.

“Large and in charge,” Matthew muttered.

“Exactly,” I agreed, and tried not to look like I’d just thrown up in my mouth a little bit.

God, working on my people skills sucked.