-1-

 

I see dead people.

Make a joke. Go ahead, people do.

Fuck ‘em.

I see dead people.

Not all of them. My life would be too crowded. Just some. The ones who need to be seen.

The ones who need me to see them.

 

-2-

 

The diner’s name is Delta of Venus.

Most people think that’s a pun of some kind, or a reference to Mississippi. It’s not. The owner’s name’s not Venus. One of her girlfriend’s was. It’s like that.

I had my spot. Corner of the counter, close to the coffee. Out of the line of foot traffic to the john. Quiet most of the time. I dig the quiet. Kind of need it. My head is noisy enough.

It was a Thursday night, deep into a slow week. The kind of week Friday won’t make better and Saturday won’t salvage. Me on my stool, last sip of my fourth or fifth cup of coffee, half a plate of meatloaf going cold. Reading The Waste Land and wondering what kind of hell Eliot was in when he wrote it. World War I was over and he wrote poetry like the world was all for shit. Like he’d peeled back the curtain and the great and powerful Oz was a sorry little pedophile and Dorothy was going to have a bad night. Depressing as fuck.

The coffee was good. The day blew.

Eve, the evening waitress, was topping off ketchup bottles and not wasting either of our time on small talk. Not on a Thursday like this. These kinds of days don’t bring out the chattiness in anyone who’s paying attention. Outside, there was a sad, slow rain and most of the people who came in smelled like wet dogs.

Then she came in.

I saw the door open. Saw it in the shiny metal of the big coffee urn. Saw her come in. Watched her stand there for a moment, not sure of what she was doing. Saw her look around. Saw nobody else look back.

Saw her spot me. And know me. And chew her lip for a moment before coming my way.

Little thing, no bigger than half a minute. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Slim as a promise. Pretty as a daffodil.

Lost and scared.

Looking for me.

People like her find me. I never ask how they heard of me. In my line of work, the referral process is complicated. I get most of my standard clients from asshole law firms like Scarebaby and Twitch. Yeah, J. Heron Scarebaby and Iver Twitch. Real names. Some people are that fucking unlucky, and that dim that they won’t use a different name for business. Or, maybe it’s a matter of rats finding the right sewer. Not sure, don’t care. They hire me for scut-work. Skip traces, missing persons. Stuff like that. Pays the light bill, buys me coffee.

They hadn’t sent her, though. She found me a whole other way.

I signaled Eve and tapped the rim of my coffee cup with the band of my wedding ring. Still wore the ring after all this time. Married to the memory, I suppose. Eve topped me off.

“Gimme a sec,” I said.

She looked around to see what was what. Looked scared when she did it, which is fair enough. People are like that around me. Then she found something intensely interesting to do at the far end of the counter. Didn’t look my way again.

There were five other people in the Delta. Two were regulars: a night watchman on the way to his midnight shift, and Lefty Wright, who was always topping off his Diet Coke with liberal shots of Early Times. Neither of them would give a cold, wet shit if a velociraptor walked in and ordered the blue-plate special.

The other three were a gaggle of hipsters who must have gone looking for one of those no-name clubs, or the kind of dance party that’s only ever advertised by obscure Internet posts. Probably got bad directions and brought iffy decision making capabilities with them because they lingered here in this part of town long enough to order pancakes at a place like this. That, or they were hipster wannabes who thought the Delta was retro cool. It’s not. And pretty soon they were going to let common sense trump their peer pressure and then they’d fade away.

That left me and the girl.

I didn’t turn, but I patted the red Naugahyde stool next to me. Maybe it was the color that drew her eye. I’m pretty sure it’s the only color people like her can see. That’s what one of them told me. Just red, white, black and a lot of shades of gray.

That’s fucked up.

The girl hesitated a moment longer, then she seemed to come to a decision and came over. Didn’t make a sound.

She stopped and stood there, watching me as I watched her in the steel mirror of the coffee maker.

“It’s your dime, sweetheart,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

I picked up the Tabasco sauce and shook it over the meatloaf. Used enough of it to kill the taste. The specials sign over the kitchen window doesn’t say what kind of meat is in it, and I’m not brave enough to ask. I’m reasonably sure that whatever it was ran on four legs. Beyond that, I wouldn’t give Vegas odds on it being a cow or a pig.

“You want to sit down?” I asked.

Still nothing, so I turned and saw why.

Her face was as pale as milk. She wore too much makeup and clearly didn’t know how to put it on. Little girl style—too much of everything, none of the subtlety that comes with experience. Glitter tube top and spandex micro mini. Expensive shoes. Clothes couldn’t have been hers. Maybe an older sister, maybe a friend who was more of a party girl. They looked embarrassing on her. Sad.

She had one hoop earring in her right ear. The left earlobe was torn. No earring. No other jewelry that I could see. No purse, no phone, no rings. That one earring damn near broke my heart.

“You know how this works?” I asked.

Nothing. Or, maybe a little bit of a nod.

“It’s a one way ticket, so you’d better be sure, kid.”

She lifted her hand to touch her throat. Long, pale throat. Like a ballet dancer. She was a pretty kid, but she would have been beautiful as a woman.

Would have been.

Her fingers brushed at a dark line that ran from just under her left ear and went all the way around to her right. She tried to say something. Couldn’t. The line opened like a mouth and it said something obscene. Not in words. What flowed from between the lips of that mouth was wet and in the only color she could see.

She wanted to show me. She wanted me to see. She needed me to understand.

I saw. And I understood.

 

-3-

 

Later, after she faded away and left me to my coffee and mystery meat, I stared at the floor where she stood. There was no mark, no drops of blood. Nothing. Eve came back and gave me my check. I tossed a ten down on a six-dollar tab and shambled out into the night. Behind me I heard Eve call goodbye.

“Night, Monk.”

I blew her a kiss like I always do. Eve’s a good gal. Nice. Minds her own business. Keeps counsel with her own shit. Two kids at home and she works double shifts most nights. One of those quiet heroes who do their best to not let their kids be like them. I liked her.

It was fifteen minutes past being able to go home and get a quiet night’s sleep. The rain had stopped, so I walked for a while, letting the night show me where to go. The girl hadn’t been able to tell me, but that doesn’t matter. I’d seen her, smelled the blood. Knew the scent.

Walked.

And walked.

Found myself midway up a back street, halfway between I Don’t Know and Nobody Cares. Only a few cars by the curbs, but they were stripped hulks. Dead as the girl. Most of the houses were boarded up. Most of the boards had been pried loose by junkies or thieves looking to strip out anything they could. Copper pipes, wires, whatever. Couple of the houses had been torn down, but the rubble hadn’t been hauled off.

What the hell had that little girl been doing on a street like this?

Fuck me.

I had a pocket flashlight on my key chain and used it to help me find the spot.

It was there. A dark smudge on the sidewalk. Even from ten feet away I knew it was what I was looking for. There were footprints all over the place, pressed into the dirt, overlapping. Car tire tracks, too. The rain had wiped most of it away, smeared a lot of the rest, but it was there to be read. If I looked hard enough I’d probably find the flapping ends of yellow crime scene tape, ‘cause they never clean that stuff up. Not completely, and not in a neighborhood like this. Whole fucking area’s a crime scene. Still in progress, too, for the most part.

Doesn’t matter. That’s me bitching.

I knelt by the smudge. That was what mattered.

It was dried. Red turns to brown as the cells thicken and die. Smell goes away, too. At first, it’s the stink of freshly sheared copper, then it’s sweet, then it’s gone. Mostly gone. I can always find a trace. A whiff.

And it was hers. Same scent. If I was a poet like Eliot maybe I’d call it the perfume of innocence. Something corny like that. I’m not, so I don’t. It’s just blood. Even the rain couldn’t wash it away.

I squatted there for a few minutes, listening to water drip from the old buildings. Letting the smells sink in deep enough so I could pin them to the walls of my head.

Back in the day, before I went off to play soldier, before I ditched that shit and went bumming along the pilgrim road trying to rewire my brain, smells never used to mean much. That changed. First time I didn’t die when an IED blew my friends to rags, I began to pay attention. Death smells different than life. Pain has its own smell.

So does murder.

I stopped being able to not pay attention, if you can dig that. I lost the knack for turning away and not seeing.

There was a monk in Nepal who told me I had a gift. A crazy lady down in a shack near a fish camp in bayou country told me I had a curse. They were talking about the same thing. They’re both right, I suppose.

A priest in a shitty church in Nicaragua told me I had a calling. I told him that maybe it was more like a mission. He thought about it and told me I was probably right. We were drinking in the chapel. That’s all that was left of the church. They don’t call them Hellfire missiles for nothing.

The girl had come to me. Couldn’t say what she wanted because of what they’d done to her. Didn’t matter. She said enough.

I dug my kit out of my jacket pocket, unzipped it. Uncapped a little glass vial, took the cork off the scalpel and spent two minutes scraping as much of the blood as I could get into the vial. Then I removed the bottle of holy water, filled the dropper and added seven drops. Always seven, no more, no less. That’s the way it works, and I don’t need to fuck with it. Then I put everything away, zipped up the case and stood. My knees creaked. I’m looking at forty close enough to read the fine print. My knees are older than that.

Spent another forty minutes poking around, but I knew I wasn’t going to find anything the cops hadn’t. They’re pretty good. Lots of experience with crime scenes around here. They even catch the bad guys sometimes.

Not this time, though, or the girl wouldn’t have come to me.

It’s all about the justice.

The vial was the only thing that didn’t go back into the case. That was in my pants pocket. It weighed nothing, but it was fifty fucking pounds heavy. It made me drag my feet all the way to the tattoo parlor.

 

-4-

 

Patty Cakes has a little skin art place just south of Boundary Street, right between a glam bar called Pornstash and a deli called Open All Night, which, to my knowledge, has never been open. Someone nailed a Bible to the front door, so take that any way you want.

The tattoo joint was open all night. Never during the day, as far as I know. It wasn’t that kind of place. I saw Patty in there, stick thin with a purple Mohawk and granny glasses, hunched over the arm of a biker who looked like Jerry Garcia. Yeah, I know, Jerry’s been dead for years. This guy looked like Jerry would look now. His name was Elmo something. I didn’t care enough to remember the rest.

“Hey, Monk,” Patty said when she heard the little bell over the door.

“Hey, Mr. Addison,” Elmo said. He was always a polite s.o.b.

“Hey,” I said and hooked a stool with my foot, dragged it over so I could watch Patty work. She was half-Filipino Chinese, with interesting scars on her face. Lot of backstory to her. I know most of it, but almost nobody else does. She knows a lot about me, too. We don’t sleep together, but we’ve stayed up drinking more nights than I can count. She’s one of my people, the little circle of folks I actually trust. We met the year I came back, and she spotted something in me from the jump. Bought me my first meal at the Delta.

She was working on green tints for a tat of climbing roses that ran from right thumb to left. Dozens of roses, hundreds of leaves.

“Nice,” I said.

Elmo grinned like a kid on Christmas. “She’s nearly done.”

I nodded. Elmo was an ink junkie. He’d be back. Not just to elaborate on the tattoo, but because it was Patty sinking the ink. People come from all over just for her. I do. Like me, she has her gifts. Or maybe it’s that she has her mission, too. But that’s her story, and this isn’t that.

Patty sat back and studied her work. “Okay, Elmo, that’s it for now. Let it set. Go home and take care of it, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Give Steve a kiss for me.”

“Sure.” He got up, stood in front of the floor-length mirror for a minute, grinning at the work. His eyes were a little glazed. He walked out wearing only a beater and jeans, his leather jacket forgotten on a chair. I knew he’d be back for it tomorrow. They always come back to Patty Cakes.

She got up and locked the door, flipped the sign to CLOSED and turned out the front lights. I stripped off my coat and shirt, caught sight of myself in the mirror. An unenamored lady once told me I look like a shaved ape. Fair enough. I’m bigger than most people, wider than most, deeper than most. A lot of me is covered in ink. None of it’s really pretty. Not like those roses. It’s all faces. Dozens of them. Small, about the size of a half-dollar. Very detailed. Photo real, almost. Men and women. Kids. All ages and races. Faces.

“Let me have it,” she said, holding out a hand. I hadn’t even told her why I was there. She knew me, though. Knew my moods. So I dug the vial out of my pocket and handed it to her. She took it, held it up to the light, sighed, nodded. “Gimme a sec. Have a beer.”

I found two bottles of Fat Pauly’s, a craft lager from Iligan City in the Philippines, cracked them open, set one down on her work table, lowered myself into her chair and sipped the other. Good beer. Ice cold. I watched her work.

She removed the rubber stopper from the vial and used a sterile syringe to suck up every last drop, then she injected the mixture into a jar of ink. It didn’t matter that the ink was black. All of my tats are black. The white is my skin. Any color that shows up is from scars that still had some pink in them, but that would fade away after a while.

I drank my beer as Patty worked. Her eyes were open, but I knew that she wasn’t seeing anything in that room. Her pupils were pinpoints and there was sweat on her forehead and upper lip. She began chanting something in Tagalog that I couldn’t follow. Not one of my languages. When she was done mixing, she stopped chanting and cut me a look.

“You want the strap?”

“No,” I said.

She held out a thick piece of leather. “Take the strap.”

“No.”

“Why do we go through this every time?”

“I don’t need it,” I told her.

“I do. Goddamn it, Monk, I can’t work with you screaming in my ear. Take the fucking strap.”

I sighed. “Okay. Give me the fucking strap.”

She slapped it into my palm, and I put it between my teeth. She got out a clean needle and set the bottle of ink close at hand. She didn’t ask me what I wanted her to draw. She knew.

I didn’t start screaming right away. Not until she began putting the features on the little girl’s face.

We were both glad I had the fucking strap.

 

-5-

 

It took her an hour to get it right, and I could feel when it was right. We both could.

I spat the strap onto my lap and sat there, gasping, out of breath, fucked up. I could see the pity in Patty’s eyes. She was crying a little, like she always does. The light in the room had changed. Become brighter, and the edges of everything were so sharp I could cut myself on their reality. All the colors bled away. Except for red, white, black and all those shades of gray. That’s what I saw. It’s all I’d see until I was done with what I had to do.

Sometimes it was like that for days. Other times it was fast. Depends on how good a look the girl got and what I’d be able to tell from that look.

Patty helped me up, grunting with the effort. I was two-fifty and change. None of it blubber. A lot of it was scar tissue. The room did an Irish céilí dance around me, and my brain kept trying to flip the circuit breakers off.

“If you’re going to throw up, use the bathroom.”

“Not this time,” I managed to wheeze, then I grabbed my stuff, clumsied my way into my shirt and jacket and stumbled out into the night, mumbling something to her that was supposed to be thanks but might have been fuck you.

Patty wouldn’t take offense. She understood.

Like I said, one of my people.

The night was hung wrong. The buildings leaned like drunks and the moon hid a guilty smile behind torn streamers of cloud. It took me half an hour to find my way back to where the girl was killed. My eyes weren’t seeing where my feet were walking and sometimes I crashed into things, tripped over lines in the pavement, tried to walk down an alley that wasn’t there. It’s like that for a bit, but it settles down.

Once I was on that street, it settled down a lot.

I stood by the step where I’d found her blood.

This is where it gets difficult for me. Victims don’t usually know enough to really help, not even when I can see what they saw when they died. Like I was doing now. Half the time they didn’t see it coming. A drive-by, or a hazy image of a tire iron. The feel of hands grabbing them from behind.

It was kind of like that with the girl.

Olivia.

I realized I knew her name now.

Olivia Searcy.

Fifteen. Even younger than I thought, but I was right about the clothes. They were her sister’s. Shoes and push-up bra, too. She wanted to look older. No, she wanted to be older. But that was as old as she’d ever get.

I knew why she was there, and it was a bad episode of a teen romance flick. She was a sophomore in high school, he was a senior. Good looking, smart, from a family with some bucks. Good grades. A real find, and maybe in time he’d grow up and be a good man. But he was eighteen and all he wanted was pussy, and a lot of guys know that young pussy is often dumb pussy, which makes it easy pussy. So they come onto them, making them feel cool, feel special, feel loved. And they get some ass, maybe pop a cherry, and move on the instant the girl gets clingy. Fifteen year olds always get clingy, but there are always more of them. The boy, Drake, hadn’t yet plundered Olivia. It was part of the plan for tonight.

They went to a party at some other guy’s house a long way from here, in a part of town where stuff like this isn’t supposed to happen, which is a stupid thought because stuff like this happens everywhere. The party was fun and it was loud. They got high. Got smashed. He got grabby and she freaked. Maybe a moment of clarity, maybe she saw the satyr’s face behind the nice boy mask. Whatever. She bolted and ran.

She didn’t know if Drake tried to find her because she tried real hard not to be found.

She was found, though.

Just not by Drake.

For a little bit there I thought I was going to have to break some parents’ hearts by fucking up their pretty boy son, but that wasn’t in tonight’s playbook. Drake hadn’t done anything worse than be a high school dickhead. He got her drunk, but he hadn’t forced her, hadn’t slipped her a roofie. And, who knows, maybe if he’d found her in time he’d have become Galahad and fought for her honor. Might have saved her life.

Probably would have died with her.

Or, maybe the killer would have opted out and gone looking for someone else. A lot of serial killers and opportunistic killers are like that. They’re not Hannibal Lecter. They’re not tough, smart and dangerous. Most of them are cowards. They feel totally disempowered by whatever’s happened to them—abusive parents, bad genes, who the fuck cares? They hurt and terrify and mutilate and kill because it makes them feel powerful, but it’s a lie. It’s no more real than feeling powerful by wearing a Batman costume at Halloween. You may look the part, but you’re a long way from saving Gotham City.

All of that flooded through my brain while I stood there and looked at the street through the eyes of a dead girl. Seeing it the way Olivia saw it right as hands grabbed her from behind. Right as someone pulled her back against his body so she could feel his size, his strength, the hard press of his cock against her back. Right as he destroyed her. Right as the cold edge of the knife was pressed into the soft flesh under her left ear.

I felt all of that. Everything. Her nerve endings were mine. Her pain exploded through me. The desperate flutter of her heart changed the rhythm of mine into a panic, like the beating of a hummingbird’s wings against a closed window. I felt her break inside as he ruined her. I heard the prayers she prayed, and they echoed in my head like they’d echoed in hers. She hadn’t been able to scream them aloud because first there was a hand over her mouth, and then there was the knife against her throat and those threats in her ear.

And when he was done, I felt the burn.

That line, like someone moving an acetylene torch along a bead of lead. Moving from under my left ear to under my right.

I felt her die because I died, too. Olivia drowned in her own blood.

Then there was a strange time, an oddly quiet time, because I was with her when she was dead, too. When he wrapped her in a plastic tarp and put her in the trunk. It was so weird because while he did that he was almost gentle. As if afraid of hurting her.

Fucking psychopath.

While the car drove from where she’d died to where he’d dumped her, Olivia slipped into that special part of the universe where the dead see each other. Certain kinds of dead. The dead who were part of a family. Victims of the same knife.

His people.

Olivia discovered that she was not the only one. Not the first, not the tenth.

She wasn’t sure how many because he moved around so much. Had moved around. Not so much anymore. Not since he moved to this town. The victims she met were the ones who’d died here.

Twenty-six of them.

The youngest was eight.

I met those victims, too, because I was inside the memory. Like I’d actually been there. That’s how it worked. I talked to them, and most of them already knew who and what I was. The first time I’d encountered that it shocked the shit out of me. But now I understood. Not to say I’m used to it, because I’d have to be a special kind of fucked up to be used to something like that. No, it was more like I knew how to deal. How to use it.

Some of them had died just like Olivia. An attack from behind. Everything from behind. No chance of an identification. He varied it a little. One of those nearly patternless killers that the FBI have no idea how to profile. A knife across the throat, an icepick between the right ribs, a garrote made from a guitar string, a broken neck.

Most were like that.

Most. Not all.

There was one who fought. She’d had a little judo and some tae kwon do. Not enough, but enough to make him work for it. It was one of the early ones, after he’d moved here. The one that made him want to never bring them home again. She’d gotten out and he’d chased her into the front yard and caught her before she could wake the neighbors. Single homes, lots of yard on all sides. Cul-de-sac. When he caught up to her she spun around and tried to make a fight of it.

I saw every second of it.

The yard. The house.

Him.

I saw him.

I saw him block her punch, and then a big fist floated toward her face and she was gone. He was a big guy and he knew how to hit. The punch broke the girl’s neck, which made it easier on her, if easy is a word that even applies.

I stood there and watched all of it play out inside my head. No idea how long I was there. Time doesn’t matter much when I’m in that space. I was there for every second of every minute of every attack. Beginning to end. All the way to when he dumped them, or buried them, or dropped them off a bridge.

Stack it all up and it was days.

Days.

Shotgunned into my head.

I wish I’d had the leather strap. Instead, I had to bite down on nothing, clamp my jaws, ball my fists, clench my gut and eat the fucking pain.

It wouldn’t save any of those girls. Not one. And maybe it wouldn’t matter that I felt it all but didn’t have to live it. Or die from it. I know that.

I couldn’t help a single one of them. I couldn’t help Olivia.

But as my skin screamed from the phantom touches and the blades and everything else, I swore that I’d help the next girl.

Goddamn son of a bitch, I’d help the next girl.

Because, you see, I saw the house.

I saw the number beside the door.

I saw the tags on the car parked in the drive.

And I saw the motherfucker’s face.

I went and sat down on the step next to the blood. Waited. I knew she’d be there eventually. It was how it worked.

Still surprised me when I looked up and there she was. Pale, thin, young, her face as bright as a candle. Eyes filled with forever.

“You can still opt out,” I told her. “I can turn this over to the cops. Let them handle it.”

She said nothing, but she gave me a look. We both knew that this guy was too careful. There would be no evidence of any kind. He’d been doing this for years and he knew his tradecraft. No semen, no hairs, nothing left for them to trace. The knife was gone where no one would ever find it. And he wasn’t a souvenir collector. The smarter ones aren’t. They could turn his house inside out and the only things they’d find would be jack and shit.

Even if they watched him, he’d turn it off for a while. For long enough. Police can’t afford to run surveillance for very long. They lose interest, even if they thought the guy was good for Olivia’s murder.

I sighed. Actually, I wanted to cry. What she was asking was big and ugly and it was going to hurt both of us.

She stood there with a necklace of bright red and those bottomless eyes.

She didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to.

The price was the price. She was willing to pay it because she was a decent kid who would probably have grown up to be someone of note. Someone with power. Someone who cared. Those eyes told me that this wasn’t about her.

It was all about the next girl.

And the one after that.

And the one after that.

I buried my face in my hands and wept.

 

-6-

 

It took me two days to run it all down. The girl misremembered the license number, so that killed half a day.

Then I put the pieces together. Bang, bang, bang.

Once that happens, everything moves quickly.

I ran the guy through the databases we PIs use, and after an hour I knew everything about him. I had his school records and his service record—one tour in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. Made me hate him even more. He was divorced, no kids. Parents dead, his only living relative was a brother in Des Moines. I figured there were bodies buried in Des Moines, too, but I’d never know about them. He owned three Jack in the Box franchise stores and had half-interest in a fourth. Drove a hybrid, recycled and had solar panels on his house. I almost found that funny.

I was in his Netflix and Hulu accounts, his bank account and everything else he had. If there was a pattern there, or a clue as to what he was, it wasn’t there. He was very smart and very careful.

No cops were ever going to catch him.

I parked my car on the route he took to work and waited until I saw him drive past on his way home. Gave him an hour while I watched the sun go down. Twilight dragged some clouds across the sky, and the news guy said it was going to rain again. Fine. Rain was good. It was loud and it chased people off the streets.

Lightning forked the sky and thunder was right behind it. Big, booming. The rains started as a deluge. No pussy light drizzle first. One second nothing, then it was raining alley cats and junkyard dogs.

I got out of my car and opened an umbrella. I really don’t give a shit about getting wet, but umbrellas block line-of-sight. They make you invisible. I walked through the rain to his yard, went in through the gate, up along the flagstone path and knocked on the door.

Had to knock twice.

He had half a confused smile on his face when he opened the door, the way people do when they aren’t expecting anyone. Especially during a storm.

Big guy, an inch taller than me, maybe only ten pounds lighter. His debit card record says that he keeps his gym membership up to date. I knew from my research that he’d boxed in college. Wrestled, too. And he had Army training.

Whatever.

I said, “Mr. Gardner?”

“What do you want?”

I hit him.

Real fucking hard.

A two-knuckle punch to the face, right beside the nose. Cracks the infraorbital foramen. Mashes the sinus. Feels a lot like getting shot in the face, except you don’t die.

He went back and down, falling inside his house, and I swarmed in after him, letting the umbrella go. The wind whipped it away and took it somewhere. Maybe Oz for all I know. I never saw it again.

Gardner fell hard, but he fell the right way, like he knew what he was doing. Twisting to take the fall on his palms, letting his arm muscles soak up the shock. His head had to be ringing like Quasimodo’s bells, but he wasn’t going out easy.

He kicked at me as I came for him. Tricky bastard. A good kick, too, flat of the heel going for the front of my knee. If he’d connected, I’d have gone down with a busted leg, and he’d have had all the time in the world to do whatever he wanted.

If he’d connected.

I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night. I bent my knee into the kick and bent over to punch the side of his foot. I knew some tricks, too.

In the movies there’s a brawl. A long fight with all sorts of fancy moves, deadly holds, exciting escapes, a real gladiatorial match.

That’s the movies.

In the real world, fights are, to paraphrase Hobbs, nasty, brutal and short.

He had that one kick, that one chance. I didn’t give him a second one. I gave him nothing.

I took everything.

When I was done I was covered in blood, my chest heaving, staring at what was left of him there in the living room. I’d closed the door. The curtains were closed over drawn shades. The TV was on. Some kind of CSI show with the volume cranked up. Outside the storm was shaking the world.

He wasn’t dead.

Mostly, but not entirely.

That would come a little later.

He wasn’t going anywhere, though. That would have been structurally impossible.

I went into the kitchen and found a basting brush. Slapped it back and forth over his face to get it wet, then I wrote on the wall. It took a while. I made sure he was watching. I wrote the names of every girl he had killed.

Every one that I’d met there in the darkness of Olivia’s hell.

Gardner was whimpering. Crying. Begging.

When I was done I unzipped my pants, pulled out my dick and pissed on him.

He was sobbing now. Maybe he was that broken or that scared. Maybe it was his last play, trying to hold a match to the candle of my compassion.

Maybe.

But he was praying in the wrong church.

While I worked, I kept praying that Olivia wouldn’t show up to see this. Most of them do. None of them should. I didn’t want her here.

I looked around for her.

She didn’t come.

It helped a little, but not a lot. I knew I’d see her again.

Gardner managed to force one word out. It took a lot of effort because I’d ruined him.

“P-please…,” he said.

He wanted me to end it. By then, I think that’s what he wanted.

I smiled.

“Fuck you,” I said.

The storm was raging, and I stood there for nearly an hour. Watching Gardner suffer. Watching him die.

Judge me if you want. If so, feel free to go fuck yourself.

When I left I stole one of his umbrellas.

I’d worn gloves and a ski mask. Everything I had on was disposable. It all got burned. I’m smart about that shit, too.

 

-7-

 

That night I got drunk. Because it’s the only reasonable thing to do.

Me and Patty, Lefty Wright, and a couple of the others. Ten of us huddled around a couple of tables in a black-as-pockets corner of Pornstash. Me and my people. No one had to ask what happened. Patty knew, some of the others maybe. Mostly not. But they all knew something had happened. We were those kinds of people, and this was that kind of town.

We drank and told lies, and if the laughter sounded fake at times and forced at others, then so what?

 

-8-

 

It was nearly dawn when I stumbled up the stairs, showered for the third time that day, and fell into bed.

I said some prayers to a God I knew was there but was pretty sure was insane. Or indifferent. Or both.

My windows are painted black because I sleep during the day. Mostly, anyway. I had a playlist running. John Lee Hooker and Son House. Old blues like that. Some Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen in there, too. Grumpy, cynical stuff. Broken hearts and spent shell casings and bars on the wrong side of the tracks. Like that.

Stuff I can sleep to.

When I can sleep.

Mostly, I can’t sleep.

My room’s always too crowded.

They are always there. It’s usually when I’m alone that I see them. Pale faces standing in silence. Or screaming. Some of them scream.

I wear long sleeve shirts to bed because they scream the loudest when they see their own faces. It’s like that. It’s how it all works.

When I’m at the edge of sleep, leaning over that big black drop, I can feel the faces on my skin move. I can feel their mouths open to scream, too. Sometimes the sheet gets soaked with tears that aren’t mine.

But which are mine now.

Olivia was there for the first time that night.

Standing in the corner, pale as a candle, looking far too young to be out this late. Thank god she wasn’t one of the screamers. She was a silent one. She with her red necklace that went from ear to ear.

My name is Gerald Addison. Most people call me Monk.

I drink too much and I hardly ever sleep.

And I do what I do.

 

 

 

 

A New York Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award® winner and freelancer for Marvel Comics, Jonathan Maberry knows his horror.

Among Maberry’s body of work are the novels Predator One, The Nightsiders, Ghost Road Blues, Patient Zero, The Wolfman and many others. Maberry’s nonfiction books include Ultimate Jujutsu: Principles and Practices, The Cryptopedia, Zombie CSU, Wanted Undead or Alive and others. His award-winning teen novel, Rot & Ruin, is now in development for film, and two of his books, Extinction Machine and V-Wars are in development for TV.

He edits a number of anthologies including a new series of The X-Files books, the V-Wars shared-world vampire apocalypse series, Scary Out There, an anthology of horror for teens, and the dark fantasy series Out of Tune. He was a featured expert on The History Channel special Zombies: A Living History and is a regular on the series True Monsters.

Maberry writes comics for Marvel, Dark Horse and IDW and his work includes Marvel Zombies Return, Captain America: Hail Hydra, Punisher: Naked Kill, DoomWar, Black Panther, Marvel Universe vs The Avengers, Bad Blood, V-Wars and Rot & Ruin.

Since 1978, Maberry has sold more than 1200 magazine feature articles, 3000 columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics and poetry. Maberry co-founded the Liars Club and founded the Writers Coffeehouse. He is a frequent keynote speaker and guest of honor at writers’ conferences and genre conventions including San Diego Comic Con, The Writer’s Digest Conference, The World Horror Con, New York Comic Con, Birmingham Comics Festival and many others.

He lives in Del Mar, California, with his wife, Sara Jo, and a fierce little dog named Rosie.