25

SUPER COP IN HOUSE OF HORRORS

The werewolf called his wife. It was after two A.M. now. Her voice was small and childlike with sleep, so he could tell that he had wakened her. He could also tell, by how quickly she had answered the phone, that she had dozed off in a chair or on the living-room sofa, waiting for his call.

“Zach?”

“Yeah, it’s me, baby, I’m okay.”

“What happened, baby? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay, yeah.”

“Everyone was so worried. No one knew where you were. Even Martin didn’t know.”

“I had some trouble with the bad guys, but it’s all right now.”

“Are you hurt? Did they hurt you?”

“They did not. I am okay. I’ll be home in a few hours. Go to bed.”

“They were all out looking for you. I was afraid.”

“It’s all right now, sweetheart. Go to bed. I’m okay.”

He slipped the phone into his jacket pocket. He bowed his head, pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, and closed his eyes, weary to the bone. The red and blue lights played over him where he stood.

He was at Sea View again. He’d retreated to a corner den for privacy. The cops were everywhere out there, inside the house on every floor, down on the beach, and out in the driveway, where their figures were lit by the red and blue flashing lights of their cars—the same lights that came through the den window and flickered on him. The coroner was already in the wine cellar. The meat wagons were pulling up outside to collect the bodies.

It had all happened that quickly—very quickly, when he considered where he’d been and what he’d been up to when the moon crested.

Cleaning up the aftermath of his wolf escapades had been even easier this time than the last. The devil was on his side again, he thought. The devil was with his own.

After finding himself human in the tall grass, he had made his way naked along the dunes back to Abend’s secluded beach house. It wasn’t far. He was there in under twenty minutes.

Still naked, he had gotten rid of the corpses: he had dragged the bloody remains of Satan and the monk deep into the surf, trusting to the sharks to dispose of them. He had driven the wrecked Camaro back into the driveway. He found his own Crown Vic behind the closed door of the garage.

His clothes were inside the house: his phone, his wallet, his change, everything was lying atop his neatly folded suit on the floor in a small empty room near the room where he’d been shackled to the cot. He found his shredded, blood-soaked undershorts on the floor in the living room. He took the rags with him to toss out later and quickly cleaned his blood off the floor.

As it had been with Margo’s house, so here: he wasn’t worried about forensics. Abend had chosen this place for its isolation. The cops might never find it. If they did—well, he had an excuse for having been here: the bad guys had brought him here after they’d kidnapped him. If anything, the story of his travails in the clutches of the evildoers would help explain the bruises and scratches he’d gotten in the woods after his wolf-self had murdered Margo. As for the monk and Satan, if their remains happened to wash up onshore, so be it. He didn’t know how they had gotten themselves killed. Maybe Abend had punished them for letting him get away. Anyone’s guess was as good as his. If they washed up. Which they probably wouldn’t. Probably the sharks would get them. The devil helps his own.

And as before, he didn’t have to get away with it forever. Just one more day. Just one more chance at Abend and the dagger. After that, win or lose, it wouldn’t matter. After that, win or lose, he couldn’t go on living with himself anyway.

When he was done with the cleanup, he got in his car and made his way back to Sea View. He didn’t turn his phone back on until he reached the place. Once there, he called the local law, then Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell, and finally Grace. He told them the story pretty much the way it had happened. He had been suspicious of Angela Bose. He had returned to question her. He had found her house deserted and unlocked. Fearing that Bose was in danger, he had searched the place and discovered the bodies. Then the bad guys had captured him.

On what had happened after that, he was unclear. He had been drugged and held for hours, unconscious most of the time. He had a vague memory of being questioned by Abend, but ultimately the gangster had left him to the tender mercies of his two thugs. Zach had managed to escape them somehow and to drive back to Sea View. But he’d still been under the influence of the drugs, and he couldn’t remember where he’d been or how he’d gotten back.

He conveniently left out the whole turning-into-a-wolf-and-eating-people business. Too difficult to explain.

There were more cars outside the mansion now, more flashing lights, more cops. Zach came out of the den and wove his way through the milling crowd of uniforms and detectives. He found the homicide guy in charge, a balding, beefy working stiff with the unlikely name of Stinger Blaine. Taller than Zach and much bigger around, he was in a rumpled gray-blue leisure suit—looked like he’d dropped it at the foot of his bed before collapsing for the evening. A taste of beer was on his breath, but he seemed sober enough. His cop-suspicious eyes were alert, at any rate.

“What a mess,” he said, shaking his head, resting from the general melee with his hands on his wide hips.

“How many are there, does it turn out?” said Zach.

“Seven-fucking-teen of them, can you believe it? The last one, the M.E. says, within the last forty-eight hours.”

“Yeah, the one on the table. He looked pretty fresh.”

“One of them in the closets I recognized. Pross. Questioned her a year or so ago after one of the local girls helped her john speedball himself to death. Fucking Guyland, man. You city boys have no idea.”

“Was she homeless, the pross?”

“Off and on, yeah, why?”

“I’ll bet they all were,” said Zach. “Bose supported homeless shelters all across the island.”

“You’re thinking she gave some of her clientele a lift home from time to time.”

“Brought them back to Abend, yeah.”

“I thought this Abend guy was gangsta. Organized crime and such. What was this—his hobby?”

Zach gave a snort and nodded vaguely. He didn’t want to mention the dagger or human sacrifice or the whole centuries-old-evil angle, though he was pretty sure that’s what this was about. In fact, he was pretty sure that if he could get some time alone to think it through, he could figure out the whole case now. He had a sense that he was closer to Abend than ever, closer than anyone had been since he’d escaped the gulags and recovered the baselard. That was the thing that was keeping him going, despite all the horror: he was so close.

Driving home, he tried to focus on the facts he knew. If nothing else, the exercise was a refuge from the chaos in his mind. When he wasn’t thinking cop-thoughts, he had to fight off the wolf-flashbacks of the night: the monk’s throat in his mouth—running on the beach with the weird eternal animal life-force in him—the urge to kill like lust coursing all through his body as he crouched poised above the teenage lovers, his muscles tensed to spring. Memories no human mind should hold. Sensations no man ought to know.

The intermittent highway street lamps glared in his face through the windshield. The interplay of dark and light was soporific and God, he was already tired to his bones. But the flashbacks—ripping open the monk’s belly like tearing a canvas sack—pausing to savor the weeping terror of Satan before he struck—these jolted him awake whenever his head bowed toward the wheel. Then, alert for a while, he focused his mind on the case to hold the flashbacks at bay. Dark and light. Thoughts and flashbacks. A hypnotic checkerboard pattern within and without him.

“The dagger was never stolen,” he murmured aloud. “It was never missing at all.”

The headlights of an oncoming semi blinded him. When the truck passed with a rumble and whoosh, he had to squint through the glass to make out the black highway. Then, suddenly, his own high beams picked out a woman standing right in front of him.

There was no time to brake. He drove right into her. He gasped—but there was no impact: the fender passed straight through her. The next moment, Zach smelled cigarette smoke and the sour aroma of meat going rotten. He turned to see Gretchen Dankl smoking sullenly in the seat beside him.

“She had it,” he said to her groggily. “Angela Bose had the dagger all along.”

“There is always a woman,” said Dankl, lifting the cigarette to her lips in those long witchy fingers, the smoke swirling around that anxious-monkey face of hers. “But it never lasts.” Then she dissolved into shadow, leaving only those faintly sickening scents to stale the air of the car.

Only after she was gone did Zach think of all the questions he wanted to ask her. He remembered Abend’s blade ripping him open—the agony—the sense of mortal violation—and the wounds miraculously healing as the full moon rose. Was it like that now? Was he indestructible? Could only a person of faith with a silver bullet end him—as he wanted to be ended—as he had ended Dankl herself?

And was that the power that had entered the baselard when the executioner had cut Peter Stumpf’s hand off, when the demonic blood and holy water had mingled on the blade? The power of life? The power of rejuvenation? Or was there more to it than that?

He sensed that the rules of this new game were more complex and dangerous than he yet knew, but still he felt his way forward, figuring out what he could.

Dominic Abend had been alive for a long time. Zach thought back to the photograph Dankl had shown him: a man in his thirties in a Nazi uniform. And he remembered his own naïve reaction: Why, he’d be well over a hundred years old by now! That was just it: he was. Something—the power of the dagger—had extended his life.

Here, a street lamp shone in on him sharply, and he flashed back to Abend’s strangely bulging eyes, his sunken cheeks and sockets, the shifting in his skin like maggots. . . .

He was rotting. Abend. He was dying. He had lost the dagger and was decaying. That was why he was so desperate, so crazily violent, so willing to break his own rules and show himself in his quest to get the dagger back.

Zach shook his head quickly, fighting off sleep. This was falling into place now, all falling into place as he had hoped it would. Seventeen dead in the Sea View wine cellar. Angela Bose had been there for a year and a half. One sacrifice a month. At the full moon when the wolf’s blood in the blade became active. The magic of the dagger supercharged the blood of those it slaughtered. The blood of the sacrifice reinvigorated the blood of the living. . . .

“Am I getting this right?” Zach murmured. Because it all sounded so much like madness—but here he flashed back to the change that had exploded through him as he hung chained to the bars in the beach-house doorway. What could seem like madness after that? What could “madness” even mean?

There was a faint fizzle of static from the radio. Zach cursed. His lips twitched as he tried to sneer the machine into silence. Because he hadn’t turned the damned thing on, for Christ’s sake. It ought not to be making a sound.

He went on thinking, working it through. There was always a woman, but it never lasted. Angela Bose had sensed that her time with Abend was ending. How long had they been together? A year and a half? A decade? Two? Twenty years of never aging. But Abend was tired of her. Soon he would get rid of her and find another companion, and she would be left to grow suddenly old and die.

Then came the Guyland heists. Maybe it had just been a coincidence that the Grimhouse brothers had hit Sea View. Maybe she had heard about the heists and enlisted them. Or maybe the whole burglary spree had been her plan from the beginning. Zach favored the coincidence theory: if the Grimhouse brothers had known Bose was involved, they would have given her up when Abend tortured them.

So Sea View was hit in the heists, and Bose seized the moment to claim that the dagger had been stolen—when in fact it was probably so well hidden, the Grimhouse boys could never have found it. Abend trusted her. He believed her. He was in a panic. He knew he had to get the dagger back before the full moon faded or the years would catch up with him all at once. He went on a rampage, tracing the goods to the man who had fenced them—Paz—torturing Paz for the names of the Grimhouse brothers—torturing the brothers then. . . . And finally, when he could get nothing out of them, he realized the truth, that he had been betrayed by his lover. Bose—too afraid of Abend to steal the dagger outright—had seized upon the heist to pretend it had been stolen so she could keep it for herself, live on as Abend decayed and died. It was she—and she alone—who had sacrificed the homeless man Zach had found on the table. Then she had run for it, taking the dagger with her. If she could stay out of Abend’s reach for one more day and night, he would die, and the dagger would be hers.

“Stop,” said Zach aloud to the radio.

Because there was more static now, louder though still barely audible beneath the wind and engine noise. He wanted it to go away. He was sick and tired of hearing from the dead.

But they insisted. The radio flared, a loud white sough. He heard the soft voices buried within the hiss, like the cries of a civilization that had been swallowed by a snake. He heard the snicker of fire. Women’s pitiable screams. Children weeping for their mothers. Men gagging out their lives at the ends of ropes. He recognized all of it. It was the soundtrack of the vision he had had while under the influence of Abend’s drug. He hit the radio’s OFF button angrily, but the static didn’t even waver, and neither did the noises within the hiss: entire dying generations calling out to him over the airwaves.

“I have my own soul and my own sins,” he snapped at them.

But history flowed through him like animal life had flowed through the wolf. And amidst the static and the violent cries, he realized there were other voices. The dead trying to reach him, trying to tell him something, something he’d missed. In spite of himself, Zach listened. The radio sputtered and hissed. The voices whispered. Something about life. Something about fear. Something he’d missed.

The radio went silent.

Zach thought, He who would save his life at any cost must first become the servant of fear.

It was not his thought. It had come to him . . . through the radio? From somewhere, anyway. He had no idea what it meant.

All he did know was that there was one more night of the full moon left, one more night for Abend to find the dagger before decay overcame him. That meant Abend had to find Angela Bose before the moon reached its meridian this evening.

And that meant Zach somehow had to find her first.

Police everywhere would be on the lookout for that silver-blue Bentley of hers—how difficult could it be to spot? But Abend’s lines of influence ran deep into the police and government at every level. If someone saw Bose’s car, would the law learn about it before Abend did? The answer was by no means certain.

The long and dreamlike drive took him home again. After four A.M. now as he stepped out of the Crown Vic. Hardly worth going to bed, but he had to. He had to sleep.

The moment he came into the darkened bedroom, his wife rolled onto her back and put her white arms out to him. He kicked off his shoes and crawled across the mattress to her. He laid his head on her breast while she held him. He drew in that aroma she had, the scent of that other world inside her, that world he yearned for, a country on a far horizon, a homeland he was journeying away from, like the old emigrants on the sailing ships of yore.

“I was so worried,” she whispered in his ear and kissed him.

“I’m okay.”

“You can’t die, you know. You’re not allowed. We need you in this house. You’re our guy.”

It made his heart ache, because he was not okay, and he would have to die when this was over. There was no other way out that he could see. He had murdered Margo and he would have to die for it, and the best he could hope for was that Grace and his children would never find out what he had done, what he had become.

He held his wife and told her that he loved her, but that didn’t say half of what he felt. He didn’t have the words for what she was to him. There was nothing on earth to compare it to.

“Y’all smell bad,” she teased him, tweaking his ear with her fingers.

“I’ll shower.”

“Brush your teeth too.”

He flashed back on the monk writhing in his jaws, the hot blood coursing down his throat. He pressed his wife’s soft, warm body against his own. He pressed his face into her silky neck-skin, and smelled the blood coursing through her jugular.

“I will,” he said.

He pushed up off her, giving her one more lingering kiss as he drew away, hesitating then to look down at her, the sweet, faithful face in its tumbling curls, only just visible in the darkness.

She stroked his cheek. “I know God says we’re not supposed to hate them.” Her soft Texas twang was audible even when she whispered. “Or answer evil with evil. But the things they do. . . .”

“I know it.”

“I can hardly listen to the news. I think about y’all out there trying to stop them.”

“I know.”

“And when they try to hurt my sweetheart. . . .”

“Ssh. Don’t say that. They can’t hurt me, baby.”

“I can’t help thinking if they’d just stop—all the killing and stealing and hurting people—everyone’d be fine.”

“It’s a fallen world.”

“I know it.”

He smiled down at her in the dark, but the terrors of the night came back to him again. He remembered himself crouched above those two kids on the beach. Him—Zach—thinking how fine it’d be to devour them, how good they’d taste. He knew he had been only moments away from losing control of himself and tearing into them both . . . which made him remember the hunks of Satan’s flesh in his gullet. . . . A fallen world? All he wanted just then was to put his head back on his wife’s breast like it was his mama’s and listen to her talk the Bible talk that, sometimes, at times like this, he couldn’t even understand anymore.

He showered and brushed his teeth, fighting off memories all the while. He bent to spit toothpaste into the sink—and just as he straightened, he caught the face of a dead man in the mirror behind him—that dandy he’d seen by the side of the Long Island Expressway, the one in the blue-and-silver coat. He was standing right behind his shoulder now, staring at him somberly.

“Holy . . . !” Zach said aloud, startled.

The dandy had already vanished, but Zach’s heart was beating so hard, he thought he’d never get to sleep.

But he did. He slept for two hours, his head on Grace, her arms around him. Incredible peace. Even when the alarm woke him, he could feel how good it had been.

The children were at the kitchen table spooning milk and cereal into their mouths and Grace was pouring coffee for him when he turned on the family computer and saw the headline on the news site: “Super Cop in House of Horrors.” The story of the bodies in Angela Bose’s wine cellar had blasted Margo Heatherton’s picture off the site, at least. There were fresh riots in London too, so maybe with a little more devilish luck, Grace would never find out about Margo’s death at all, never match her face to the woman Zach had spoken to outside the church.

“That’s you, Daddy!” said little Tom, pointing to the monitor.

The site had used the old picture from the Oklahoma farmhouse, the one that showed Zach holstering his weapon after he’d gunned down Ray Mima, Goulart behind him, the rescued child in his arms. Tom had a copy of that picture taped up on his wall. He was proud of his Dad.

“Super Cop,” the child said. He was only just learning to read, but he knew those words from his comic books. “Are you the Super Cop, Daddy?”

“That’s just silly talk,” he said.

“We’re gonna have to get Daddy a uniform with a big S on it,” said Grace, looking over her shoulder from the coffee maker on the counter.

“I think my S looks big enough in my jeans,” said Zach.

Grace rolled her eyes. A moment later, Tom got the joke and snorted milk into his hands. “My S looks big enough in my jeans!”

“Oh, now look!” Grace scolded her husband, but she could hardly keep from laughing herself.

Zach ruffled the boy’s soft hair as he stood over him drinking his coffee. He winked affectionately at his daughter, who was giggling because Tom was.

They could never know, he thought, heavy-hearted. He had to die when this was over, and they could never know what he had become.

Grace went to the stove now to cook him some eggs, her voice trailing back to him as she moved: “Did you hear about that poor woman got killed by a bear in her own home up in Westchester? Sandy was telling me about it. . . .”

Before Zach could begin to rattle off the complex mix of half-truths and lies he had prepared for this moment, the phone in his pocket buzzed.

“I guess I know who that is,” Grace said, clattering a frying pan onto the stove top. And as Zach lifted the phone to his ear, she sang out, “Morning, Rebecca!”

“You better get in here,” said Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell.

Not her usual self-conscious I’m-all-business tone. Something more than that. Something that made Zach draw in an unsteady breath.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ve got a couple of detectives here from Westchester,” said Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell tensely. “They want to talk to you about Margo Heatherton.”