Werewolf Cop (31 page)

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.”

26

ROTH AND WASHINGTON

T
he detectives—Inspectors, they were called—were named Danny Roth and Alonzo Washington. Except for the fact that one was white and one black, they looked pretty much alike. Both were enormous: six-foot-something top-to-toe, huge shoulders, huge chests, huge bellies. Both had close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, baggy eyes, saggy features, mournful and grave. The white guy's big nose went out and down, the black guy's big nose went splat across his face. Other than that: cop twins.

They met with Zach in Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell's office. Zach sat on the sofa, his arm across the back of it as if he were relaxed. Roth—the white guy—perched on the very edge of Rebecca's armchair, as if the broad seat were too tiny for his bulk to squeeze into. The black guy—Washington—sat on the sofa as far from Zach as he could, even drawing his big frame back a little as if to increase the distance.

Rebecca sat behind her desk, her legs in their navy slacks crossed at the knee, her long chin pinched between thumb and finger-knuckle as she looked on with great seriousness. The TV on the wall was turned off: that's how serious she was.

Outside the window, a sky-load of dark gray clouds hulked ominously behind the wedge-topped skyscraper.

“You understand, you're not a suspect or anything,” said Washington. He was one of those outsized men who had to breathe hard when he spoke. His tone suggested that they were all reasonable people here, all here to be reasonable. “We know this was a wild animal attack.”

“We're just trying to ascertain what exactly happened,” said Roth, who was also one of those heavy-breathing fat guys and also tried to sound reasonable. “So we can make sure there's no ongoing danger to the community.”