Breeds 2 (25 page)

Haley pointed to a grim bouquet of security cameras, perched high above on the walls at regular intervals.

John frowned at the devices, sensing their danger.

A wide slope edged downwards at a comfortable grade. John looked up, seeing how the hillside climbed all the way up to a protective fence, hiding both highway and the traffic slowing down to catch the shopping center’s off-ramp. Loading bay doors for various outlets lined the left wall, each one designated by smaller signs bathed in white light. Metallic dumpsters rested against the wall, their bulks gleaming under nearby fluorescent glows and stretching onwards in a bumpy line of braille. The containers were of various lengths, some only square boxes while others were almost as long as a school bus. They varied in height, from five feet high to a more daunting six feet.

“Here we are,” Haley whispered, creeping toward the first bin. “The first treasure chest.”

John followed her along, eyeing the metal box. Overhead, traffic rumbled by like missiles running on fumes.

“This one,” Haley said and stopped before a dumpster spattered with warning signs and phone numbers. With a little grunt, she tried flipping the lid off and failed. “Well, shit. They have a padlock on it now. Come on. There’s another one. This section has a couple of men’s shops. Or did, anyway. Let’s see if we can find you something warm.”

The next bin was also locked, but the third wasn’t. Haley threw the lid back with some effort and peered inside.

“Your first dumpster dive,” Haley announced with a little smile, nodding at the garbage collection of boxes and bags. “Okay, root through the boxes first. Don’t worry about the garbage bags. And don’t litter. That really pisses off folks. And, really, the city doesn’t need it. You start on that end and I’ll start over here.”

With that, she got a foot up on a protruding piece of metal and leaned into the bin, until her butt was aimed at the night sky. She pawed through the refuse, peeking here and there, discarding everything. John watched her for a few seconds, stepped up to an opposite corner, and tentatively retrieved a cardboard box. Several blue packing slips were stuck to the front.

“That one looks promising,” Haley said.

John peeked inside the box before turning it over and giving it a shake. Nothing fell out.

“Happens,” she said. “And for the record, this is a long shot. Don’t be surprised if we don’t find shit here. Actually, be happy if we don’t find shit.”

She smiled and glanced at the security cameras. The dark fixtures stared back with baleful scrutiny, melting her humor. “Work fast. We might not have much time.”

With that, she sped up her search. At one point she climbed into the bin to get to a few boxes out of reach.

“What’s the date?” Haley asked herself and stood up. “I know of a few apartment complexes that might have some goodies tossed to the curb. Some places have monthly trash nights for heavy things. Furniture and such. Some people toss out clothes then, too. Whole wardrobes sometimes. Not bad when you don’t think about why they’re tossing out perfectly good clothes.”

She got a leg over the dumpster’s lip and swung herself out with a groan.

“This isn’t for me anymore. I should be…” She trailed off and turned her face away from her companion, hiding a second’s worth of grief and regret. “Come on.”

The next bin was too high to climb into, so Haley told John they’d come back for it. The dumpster after that had no lid at all and didn’t appear full. A good two-thirds of its mass was cloaked in shadows. Haley stopped and peeked over the side, her expression lighting at the contents.

“Okay, I’m too short for this one so you go in and dig. There’s some stuff at the bottom. Lower yourself down in there and look for anything useful. This might be the one. Once found a dress in here.”

John looked at her.

“Go on,” Haley said and indicated he crawl over the lip. “In you go. Said I’m too short. These tall ones are a bitch to climb back out of when you’re inside.”

Unsure of himself, John gripped the dumpster’s top and hauled himself up. He got one leg over, then the other, and dropped on cardboard. He looked to Haley for direction.

“Get moving,” she said, finger twirling at the floor. “Hurry. This one’s going to take a while to really get through. I’ll keep watch.”

John nodded, whether consciously or not, and hunkered down. He kicked at some of the larger scraps of refuse and uncovered a few things of note. A pair of gloves. Styrofoam popcorn filler, but nothing that interested him. A long plank had various bent nails hammered at different angles, so he moved that to one side, sifting through clumps of damp paper that he didn’t like to touch or smell.

“See anything?”

John grunted.

“No? Well, take another look.”

At her insistence, John lowered himself into the bin once again.

Misplaced plastic containers, baby clothing, cracked lamp fixtures. He uprooted a drying blanket and frowned at the stink. There was a small chair with two broken legs and a mess of what might have been an empty tub of yogurt. John turned in circles and scoured the area around his feet.

A child’s doll sat not four feet away on a pile of cardboard, arms open and button eyes smiling. The toy interested him and, for whatever the reason, he stepped toward it.

And slipped.

He fell backwards, feet shooting out from underneath, hands rushing behind him to cushion the crash.

A nail, hammered into that dangerous length of wood and straight enough to be spiteful, punched through the meaty middle of John’s left hand and popped out the other side. That shocking spike immobilized him at the bottom of the dumpster as if in the grip of a terrible electrical current while the bin’s opening perfectly framed the night in dark lines. John inhaled sharply, held it, and bellowed. He jerked his hand right then left, but the nail refused to let go.

John’s squeal reached an agonized pitch.

“What’s wrong?” Haley blurted, peeping over the dumpster’s lip.

“Hey!”

A door along the mall’s back end opened and two uniformed individuals emerged, their heavy-duty belts jingling. A man and a woman, none too pleased with the pair of two-legged raccoons on their doorstep.

“Oh, hi,” Haley said, dropping back while John remained inside, still wailing.

“The hell you guys doing?” the man asked as he dug his heel into the door’s base, lowering a metal leg to prevent the door from closing. The woman approached the dumpster and glanced inside.

“Just looking,” Haley said, her attention split between the two guards.

“The one in here is hurt.”

“Goddammit,” the male officer fumed and pulled a radio receiver off his tactical vest. He turned, and Haley glimpsed the words ‘MALL SECURITY’ stamped across his back. “Gene, you there?”

“Sir, are you all right?” the female officer yelled, attempting to out-yowl a screaming John.

“You just stay where you are,” the man warned, glaring at Haley. “What’s wrong with him, Patty?”

“Hell if I know. Looks like something done to his hand.”

“Goddammit,” the man declared again before barking, “Gene, you there? Answer me!”

“Sir, can you get up?” Patty said, surveying the edge of the dumpster as if it were a cliff side. “Sir, answer me when I’m speaking to you. Can you get up?”

“Ma’am, just step away from the bin there,” the male officer directed. “You’re trespassing on private property and have to leave the area immediately. If you refuse I’ll call the police and have them arrest you for trespassing.
Gene
! Answer me!”

“Sir, are you able to stand?” Patty repeated while her partner droned out his memorized warning.

John abruptly stood, his shoulders clearing the dumpster’s height, and he straightened his back. The sudden move made Patty step back, one hand going to her belt.

“Joey,” Patty said in alarm.

Joey and Haley both looked to the dumpster as John yanked the troublesome plank from his hand and clanged the wood off a metal wall. He screamed at his palm before side-jumping out of the bin, clearing the lip with ease. He landed between the security staff.

“Jesus Christ,” Joey exclaimed, drawing one leg back as if making to kick.

John charged him.

The security guard whirled into a powerful back kick, buckling John at the waist and stopping him in his tracks. Air escaped John and he staggered back a step just as Patty cracked an extended baton across his back.

John straightened, face contorted with hurt.

Joey punched him across the face, driving him to the pavement.

“John!” Haley shouted, hands gnarled into fists at her sides.

“You attacked me first,” Joey got out, chest heaving from the shot of adrenaline. “You attacked me. You came at me and I defended myself.”

“I saw it,” Patty said, arm cocked and ready if the homeless guy wanted to go another round. “I saw it.”

The homeless guy did.

John stood like a spring breaking free of a worn sofa. One hand lashed out and dug into Joey’s neck and hoisted the gurgling security officer off his feet. Joey’s strangled cry was nipped just as Patty cranked John’s lower back with the baton once again, seeking to free her partner.

John hissed at the impact, spine arching to the brink of hyperextension, but absorbed the blow. He bounced Joey off a concrete wall and whirled upon Patty as she jabbed the baton deep into John’s midsection. The blow dropped him to his knees, gasping.

A firm believer in subduing an attacker, Patty clanked the baton off the back of his head.

She hammered him again as his knuckles kissed asphalt, and a third time when he lifted his grimacing face and looked her straight in the eye.

“Stay down,” Patty hissed and cracked him a fourth time across that snarling, mad-dog expression, splitting the skin of his forehead in a burst of berry juice. “Stay
down
.”

John swatted her across her midsection with the back of one hand, the blow so fast she didn’t have time to react. Patty flew into the dumpster’s metallic girth, ringing it like a church bell.

“You fucker,” Joey slurred, propped up on one elbow and trying to rise.

John rushed and grabbed the security man, brought Joey in close, and bared teeth that elongated into fangs. Joey’s face went slack and he kicked at John’s lower legs, frantic to escape.

One boot caught John in the knee.

The shot infuriated him.

He slammed Joey’s head against the concrete wall, squashing the life from the guard in an egg burst of skull matter. A surprised shriek spun John around, his hand dripping with horrific pulp.

Haley stood at the light’s fringe, her hands clamped to her face, her eyes about ready to burst from their sockets.

John huffed, cavernous lungs working like a freight train, the cords on his neck prominent and bulging. His eyes had become black. His teeth daggers. And his fingers.

Knives extended from his fingers.

Haley barely possessed breath to scream and so released a mangled wheeze of unchecked terror. She spun away drunkenly, attention split between the man she thought she knew and the best escape route. John wasn’t really John at all. He wasn’t even a person. And that was enough to break through the communications jam between her brain and her legs.

Haley ran.

She only made it ten strides when the claws clamped about her neck.

Returning from the shitter a full five pounds lighter, Gene Malkin, the on-duty security supervisor, stopped and stared at the bank of security screens. The displays showed the fight as it happened behind the mall, in pale, cheap-ass quality Gene often complained about to the mall manager, right up to Joey getting his face squashed into a concrete block. Gene’s jaw dropped and hung on the breeze as if the hinges had just been freshly greased. The color in his cheeks bled out in a drain-sucking rush, as the screens displayed Joey’s killer rushing after the fleeing bag woman and grabbing her around the neck.

Joey’s killer smashed the bag woman into a trash bin’s side. The resulting tomato-like spurt of her head paralyzed Gene to the core.

That was a person
, a voice chatted in his skull.

Something caught the murderer’s attention, and he half-turned, dropping the dead woman as he did so.

Oh shit,
Gene thought as all of his sphincters, known and unknown, tightened at once.

The door. The
open
door.

The lights and smells and all within lured Joey’s killer toward the yawning mouth of the open door, hesitantly at first, as if wary of a trap. The sharp camera display recorded every movement as a silent, high-quality movie.

Gene grabbed the telephone on his desk. He jammed the receiver to his ear and punched in the quick and dirty number to the Halifax police department, his eyes never leaving the screen as the man who had executed at least two people––one of whom was a valued security staffer and his friend––slowly entered the mall’s back door.

“Oh
shit
,” Gene said, breathless, his heart already exceeding recommended RPMs. The killer disappeared from the camera’s frame.

“Yeah, we got a crazy person here in the Martin and MacDonald,” he barked when a voice answered the line. “You heard me. We got a fucking murderer in the Martin and MacDonald Mall, so send over whatever you got. Fucking
now
!”

The water dripped from the mop bucket’s wringer when Jake Redmond pressed his weight down on the lever. He eased off, adjusted his mop, and squeezed again, hearing a pee-like trickle. Damn food court and the fuck-heads who ate there didn’t give a damn about the effort he or Connor or Christine put into keeping the place clean. It was just whoops sorry about that, with some lame excuse and a shit-eating grin. Almost as if it was on purpose, and those were the only ones who hung around. With a thousand-plus souls herded through the food court in the run of a day, something hitting the floor was an almost guaranteed event, but it still got on Jake’s nerves. What really twisted his pearly danglers were the assholes who decided to mix things up a bit, just for shits and giggles. And if he ever found the prick who had left two pounds—two whole
pounds
—of pure, patiently collected canine scat on a table, well, Jake would probably be arrested for shoving his mop up their asshole. There was no justice.