THE CAR PULLED up shortly after dawn. Iman heard it from her spot on the futon. She cradled a mug of tea in her lap. It was many hours before the typical start to her day, yet she was grateful her ride had come. Her sleep had been patchy and sour, a roundabout wander through a wasteland of exhaustion and bad dreams, and her once-cozy apartment now felt hostile and alien, thin sheets of domesticity wallpapering over war-zone rubble. Even her morning tea smelled burnt and ugly. The car honked once, a ginger tap on the horn. Iman grabbed her bag, dumped her tea in the sink, and left.
By the looks of him, Moore had slept no better than she had. Baggy flesh waddled the hollows beneath heavy-lidded eyes, and stubble tinted his jaw a ruddy brown. A cigarette dangled between his index and middle fingers, smoke curling out the rolled-down window. He took a drag and flicked the butt into the street as Iman got inside, stuffing her bag into the back seat.
“I wasn’t sure you’d be up,” he said.
“Yeah, well. Couldn’t sleep.”
“I guess it’s catching.”
“I guess.”
They drove in silence, pulsing along the arterial stretch of the QEW before hooking north on the 400. City became suburbs became farmers’ fields gone fallow, autumn’s harvest plowed under and the cover crops yet to grow. The radio grew warbled and patchy with static. Moore punched around some other stations and, dissatisfied with the selection, switched over to the CD player. Iman braced herself for a barrage of macho hard rock. Instead, the sound of a revving car engine preceded a nervous, jazzy bassline she recognized immediately. She listened to the opening vocals for confirmation. Sure enough, they kicked in with a hoarse, breathy rush, barking the first line in a single gust: “Seriousasaheartattack! Makes me feel this way . . . ”
“Is this Double Nickels?”
Moore smiled. “Good ear.”
“I didn’t know cops liked good music.”
He shrugged “I think there’s a Bad Company CD in the glove box if this is blowing your mind.”
The Minutemen’s frenetic, desultory opus took her mind off of the trip for a while, but she eventually found herself picking at scabs of anxiety until the blood ran fresh. Was Brian okay? What were they doing to him? She assumed Luka and his cronies were heading to Whitetooth Falls, but what if she and Moore got there and found it abandoned?
Moreover, what if they got there and found it wasn’t?
Moore seemed to sense her apprehension. “I can still turn around, you know. I’ve got time. There’s a GO Train station in Barrie that’ll get you home. I can spot you the fare.”
Iman listened for the voice of rational self-interest to pipe up, to try and goad her into accepting. She heard only silence. “My mind’s made up, detective.”
“At this point, I think you might as well start calling me David.” He reached across her lap and opened the glove compartment. “And if you’re set on coming, you’re going to need this.”
In the glove box, resting atop a cradle of folded maps and insurance slips, was a handgun. Its bore, though pointed away from Iman toward some arbitrary point in the back seat, seemed to peer at her like an accusing eye.
“It’s got a full clip. The first three in the chamber’ll be silver-plated. The rest are just your regular hollow points. I got the other silvers in mine. With luck, my supplier will get us more, but for now we’ve each got a three-wolf limit on our permits. You ever shoot a gun before?”
Iman shook her head.
David clucked his tongue. “I guessed as much. It’s not rocket science. It’s an automatic, no need to rack it. Point and shoot. The trick is to get as close as possible. Pistols aren’t meant for shooting more than twenty yards or so, anyway. That gunslinger stuff’s for the movies.”
Iman picked up the gun, her finger conscientiously keeping clear of the trigger. She rested it on open palms, studying its angles and the graceful fluting of its barrel. It was heavier than she expected, as if its deadly potential compounded its density.
“Is that what we’re going to do? Shoot them, I mean?”
“If we have to. I’d prefer we didn’t.”
“But you think we will.”
David didn’t reply. Iman ran her thumb along the length of the barrel.
“What if there’s a lot of them? I mean, we already know Luka has this other guy with him, plus the woods people Motes told us about.”
“My beef is with Luka and the man who shot Melissa. The others can pitch a tent and stay the winter, for all I care.”
“I’m not so sure they’ll feel the same way about you.”
“Probably not.”
Iman nodded. “So it’s you and me against the world, huh? Like Thelma and Louise.”
Moore laughed. “Hopefully we won’t need to drive off a cliff. And it’s not just you and me. I’ve got backup.”
Iman arched an eyebrow. “Backup? Like other cops?”
“About the exact opposite. But an ally’s an ally.”
I wonder if your precinct would agree, Iman thought, though the idea of any sort of ally was immeasurably comforting—she would’ve buddied up with Hitler at this point if he agreed to watch her back. “Where are they?”
“Making their own way north. I can’t say for sure where Luka might have eyes once we get into the boonies, and I’d just as soon not make the connection too obvious.”
Iman felt like she was inundating the man with questions, but there was one more she needed to ask if she was to have any hope of feeling better about the situation. “These people, do they know what they’re up against? I mean, are they, I dunno . . . werewolf hunters?”
“No, but they will be soon.”
She felt no better. “Okay, but what if they’re not cut out to be werewolf hunters? What if they don’t have what it takes?”
David kept his eyes locked on the road ahead of him, his voice calm and square. “Then they’ll be prey.”