Werewolf Cop (15 page)

Still, he kept his eyes on that window as he walked across the empty street. He scanned all the windows but kept coming back to that one until he reached the sidewalk, reached the building, and stepped under the scaffolding to reach the front doors. The doors were two majestic slabs of carved mahogany, sadly scratched and weathered. There was no padlock on them—no lock of any kind. Zach pulled the handle on one and, sure enough, it opened.

He stepped through into the foyer. He caught a glimpse of ruin. A shattered mosaic on the floor, lacerated walls, a lopsided balustrade rising with the stairs. Then the door swung shut behind him and the place went dark. Not full dark—there was gray light from the window of a gutted ground-floor apartment against the far wall—but dark enough, the shadows hanging like drapery. Zach smelled brick dust and emptiness and . . . something else. A heat at his nostrils. A whiff of something alive. Someone. . . .

He drew out his flashlight. Panned it from one wall of the foyer to the other. He moved behind the beam to the stairway and started up.

The treads moaned grievously as he made his ascent. He paused on the second landing. Moved the flashlight over the hallway from the far corner on his left to the near corner, just to his right. Everything was silent. No movement anywhere. Still that smell—the hot smell of life—had grown thicker as he climbed.

On the third landing, some unthinkable creature suddenly skittered across the floor, out ahead of his light. Not a rat—too jittery and insectile—but if it was a cockroach, Christ, he didn't want to think about the size of it. He was from Texas and he'd seen a toe-biter or two in his time, waterbugs the size of your forearm that would take a chunk right out of your foot given half a chance. He hadn't liked them on the prairie; the thought of something that size here, full of the filth of the city, roiled the waves in his stomach again.

Whatever it was, it was gone before he got the beam on it. Just as well. He didn't want to see it. He stood where he was and caught his breath and let his heart steady. Then he reached for the shattered orb of the newel post and was about to head up to the fourth floor, the floor where he'd seen that movement at the window.

But before he took a step, somebody screamed.

It was ugly—an ugly scream. A man's scream—the sound wrenched out of him as if someone had rammed a hand down his gullet and ripped it up out of his belly. A gurgling death scream.

Zach had his gun in his hand—his gun and flashlight in his two hands braced together—and was chasing the flashlight beam up the next flight before the sound faded away. He swung around the landing balustrade—saw the assassin waiting for him down the hall—a robed, hunched, monkish, rat-featured man with long greasy hair. Zach fired and dove and rolled behind the cover of the corner before the blast of the killer's giant pistol made the walls quake around him.

Plaster pattered to the floor. What the hell was that bastard shooting? A Dezzy, Zach figured: a gangster's Desert Island .50 cal.

Zach rose to one knee. He shouted, “Drop that heater, you son of a bitch! I'm a federal officer!”

No answer. Not even another shot. Zach pressed his body against the wall, whipped his gun-and-flashlight around the corner in front of him, and peeked out behind it. He caught a quick glimpse of the killer scuttling around the corner at the hall's opposite end, gone before he could get a shot off. He climbed to his feet and was about to go after the guy when another gunman—this one goateed, grinning, and satanic—broke through a doorway and fired another Dezzy cannon—
boom! boom!
—twice, running, shooting wild. Zach let out a strangled curse as he pulled back into cover—then immediately swung out around the corner again, gun and flashlight first, and squeezed the trigger. The jolt of the 9mm went up his arm and glass shattered somewhere, but this second killer had turned the corner too and gotten away.

Zach held the gun and flashlight steady, trained them on the open door. Edged down the hallway.

Suddenly, a black blast went through his mind, a quaking jolt of pure nothingness that filled his heart with terror. He thought:
What? What? What just happened?

And Dominic Abend stepped out into the pale white of the flashlight's beam.

He was a looming presence in the gray light and gunsmoke: even taller and broader than he seemed in the photographs, his shaven head large and powerful, his eyes vital and flashing. He held a longsword, the hilt out from his side, the blade half lifted across his body, so that the line of the bright metal slashed the dark spill of his black overcoat.

“Drop the weapon, Abend!” shouted Zach, approaching him slow step by slow step. It was the excitement of the gunfight that made him shout, the confusion of that dark jolt he'd felt. “I want you alive, but I'll take you dead. Drop it.”

Even in the shadows, he saw Abend smile—that thin, cruel, damp, and somehow ancient smile of his. He saw it just before he felt the pain—the excruciatingly deep burn—like being stabbed in the ankle with a blade of fire.

Zach looked down and saw the horror that had locked on to him—a tremendous cockroach—an insect at least a full foot long—its legs scrambling clackety-clack over his shoe as it twisted its beak into his flesh.

He shouted and, with an instinctive spasm, tried to kick it off him. As he did, he caught a glimpse of the other one on the wall, just as big—bigger!—right by his face. He glimpsed its searching mandibles—its weirdly human expression of gleeful hunger. Then, with a wet flutter of wings, it sprang at his eyes.

Zach reeled away, batting at the thing wildly so that the light from his flashlight jerked over Abend's grin—up over another bug on the wall, and another nearby it—and up over the ceiling where five or six more of the monsters had crawled out from under the chipped plaster trim.

The flying waterbug dropped to the floor beside the other, the one Zach had kicked away, and amidst two more that were scrabbling toward Zach's feet quickly. Zach staggered back away from them, his flashlight lifting over the corridor—and in its wavering beam, he saw them all.

There were dozens of them. Roaches and waterbugs of mind-boggling size—impossible, preternatural size. They were racing toward him over the walls. Swarming toward him across the floor. The hall was filled with their hungry chittering and with the eager skidding patter of their legs. His light went up and—oh God, they were above him too, on the ceiling. Even now, one dropped onto his shoulder. He knocked it off with the flashlight—and another dropped into his hair.

Zach let out a scream. Writhing, he had to put gun and flashlight in one hand so he could tear the clawing creature off his head with his fingers, drag its wriggling legs and searching beak out of the tangle of his hair. For a moment, he caught sight of its gleeful hungry human eyes staring into his. He felt its six legs clawing for purchase in his hand. Then, his gorge rising, he flung it down onto the floor—and saw that there were so many of them now! A swarming brown mass flowing toward him as one.

Afraid of Abend and his sword—the unseen swipe of steel across his throat—he sought the gangster in a panic, waving the flashlight beam all around him. Where the hell was the man? There! Right where he'd been. Grinning in amusement. Turning calmly now. Strolling quietly away, tapping the longsword's blade against his leg in an easy rhythm.

Teeth gritted, Zach made to chase after him. But the bugs crunched and exploded under his shoes, and he tripped on them and slid in their goo. Two more were climbing onto his pants legs. One took a lacerating bite of his calf that made him cry out. As he fought them off, he nearly toppled over, nearly went down—and the image that flashed through his mind—himself on the floor, the creatures swimming up over him, devouring him, tearing him apart—filled him with nausea and terror.

He saw the back of Abend's overcoat as the gangster vanished around the corner, but he had no chance of going after him now. All he could do was struggle to keep his balance. The floor, the walls, the ceiling—they were one great moving carpet of enormous roaches, swarming up him, falling on him, bent on bringing him down.

He had to get out of here. The door. He had to get to the door. Get into the apartment.

He let out a roar of fury and kicked a clutch of the giant, chiggering creatures out of his way. He stumbled forward, feeling waterbugs gathering in a rising pool at his feet, catching glimpses of them as they tumbled over one another to get their huge mandibles into him. He crushed one of them underfoot—his shoe sinking in yellow gunk—and he fell sideways against the wall so that the swarm there snapped at his face. One fell onto his neck, its quick feet scrabbling at his skin there. He gave another scream and knocked it off.

He reached the open door. Charged through it. Kicked it shut behind him, spinning into the room, pulling another squirming monster off his shoulder. The bug went skittering away out of sight, and Zach, in a full panic, desperately passed the flashlight beam over his body—and screamed out “Fuck!” as he saw one of the insects clinging to his thigh by its mandibles. He struck it with the butt of his gun. It would not let go. He struck it again, hard. It lost its grip, fell to the floor, and scurried away.

Gasping, Zach passed his hands over every part of himself, feeling for more of the insects. There were none. He began to gag, acid coming into his throat. Then, quickly, he realized his danger and stopped himself. He turned his flashlight on the room, here, there, scanning for any other killers. A man with a gun—or with a sword—any of Abend's thugs could already have killed him three times over. But no, there was nobody in sight. He was alone here.

His shoulders sagged. He staggered slowly out of what had once been the front hall into the main apartment. Bright light from the windows here showed a gutted wreck of a room. In that first moment, it seemed empty. But then, trying to steady himself, Zach drew a deep breath—and the thick, rich, coppery, overwhelming scent of violence washed into him. He knew full well what he was about to find.

Johnny Grimhouse. The thief was strung up naked, his wrists tied high to a beam in a broken wall, his bare heels scraping the ruined floor. With his body stretched out like that, his wounds showed plainly. He had been sliced to ribbons, mutilated head to toe. His mouth was gaping and his eyes were wide—he seemed to be horrified by the sight of the half dozen or so foot-long roaches that were feeding on him, like piglets nursing at their sow. But that expression on his face—it only
seemed
to be horror, Zach knew.

Grimhouse was beyond all mortal horror. He was clearly dead.

13

HAUNTED

L
ater that evening, six-thirty or so, Zach sat at his dinner table watching Grace coax a meal-time prayer out of little Ann: “Thank you, God, for our dinner.” He thought they looked like angels from heaven, the two of them. Really. Grace, with her cheerful plump cheeks and bright faithful eyes framed by her honey ringlets, smiling across the table at the child. The child bowed over her clasped hands, making her earnest effort to shape the words that she could barely speak. The boy, too, Tom, with his head bowed and hands clasped too and his eyes closed: beautiful. So patient with his sister's efforts—though when it was his night to pray, Zach knew he would take such pride in showing her how it was done. Just look at them, he thought. And okay, he knew he was being mawkish. But all the same, there they were: the most mawkish greeting-card drawing of mother and children could not have done them justice, truly. He felt an aching hunger of love for all of them, almost an anguish of yearning, as if they were somehow beyond his reach: off in a sweet world of ideal and innocent goodness that he could only see far off from where he was, mired deep in the hellish images inside his mind.

“Very
good
, sweetheart,” said Grace when the little girl's prayer was finished.

They began to pass the meatloaf around. The meatloaf and the mashed potatoes and the greens. Good food in great abundance, Zach thought sentimentally—and the very fact that Grace had made this meal for them, that she had stood in the kitchen and cooked it for them, wife-and-motherly, struck him just then as a thing of impossible beauty, impossibly beyond the dark country of his thoughts. There, out there, was the family dinner, bright and far away. And here, in here, was Abend grinning at him through the gray light and gunsmoke. The swarming roaches on the walls and floor. The chattering hum of them and the wriggling touch of them—especially that one that had gotten tangled in his hair. He couldn't forget the feel of that. And Johnny Grimhouse—he couldn't forget the sight. The bloody body; the gaping mouth; the eyes staring at the insects . . . like piglets . . . Christ!

Little Tom had been patient long enough. He wanted to tell Daddy about his day now. He wanted to tell about the autumn leaves his kindergarten class had collected and pressed into a book. Zach managed to make the appropriate noises, nods, and smiles. He did the best he could, but he always suspected that children, his children at least, could tell when their father was really listening and when he was merely going through the motions. Or maybe that was just his guilt talking. He would have given the world to be fully present for the boy, his son whom he loved. He longed to slog up to him out of the gut-muck of ugliness inside him. But he was stuck down there in the dark, in the memory of those long minutes before backup arrived, long minutes when he had been alone in the room with Grimhouse's mutilated corpse and with the smell of death and with the sounds, the awful sounds of those insects feeding on him.

It wasn't just the gruesomeness of those minutes that held him. It was also their morbid mysteries. How had he known the things he knew, standing there? Sure, his senses were heightened—he'd always had that ability to go into what Goulart called hyper-focus mode, that elevated level of perception that helped him spot things in a crime scene other investigators missed. But just how heightened could his senses be? How could he smell the fading aroma of Johnny's
helpless
agony—and understand that it was helpless agony because Grimhouse hadn't known what Abend wanted him to tell? How could he not only smell Abend's frustration at being interrupted mid-torture, but
remember
that smell, match it to the smell of frustration he had picked up in the storage bin? Abend hadn't found what he wanted here either—Zach knew that. And he knew that Abend had been in such a hurry to get out without being seen that he had left a fingerprint on the doorknob. Zach would tell the Crime Scene Unit to search for it and they would find it sure enough. But how did he know? It wasn't normal. Nothing was normal about him anymore—he was different—he had been different ever since he'd come back from Germany, ever since he'd awoken from his fever.