Werewolf Cop (37 page)

And now the ghosts returned.

He saw them out there in the darkening rain. Dim figures, barely discernible through the dusk and downpour. They watched him pass with mournful expressions and haunted eyes. Once, as the dusk imperceptibly died into the night, as the car's interior, lit only by the dashboard's green-blue lights, became difficult to see, he sensed a presence near him. He smelled that nauseating mingled stench of rotting meat and cigarette smoke. He glanced up in the mirror, expecting to see dead eyes staring back at him. Instead, he saw nothing but the backseat shadows. He glanced over at the passenger seat. Nothing but the shadows there as well.

And just then, the lightning struck and Gretchen Dankl was beside him. She was visible only for an instant but, in that instant, he saw her gaze at him with tragic sorrow. She was confessing with her eyes what he had already guessed out in the woods earlier that day: that she had failed—that all the werewolves over the last three and a half centuries had failed—because they feared to succeed. They did not want to reclaim the dagger. They did not want to end the curse. The consequences were too terrible. They were too afraid to face them.

And so they had left the job unfinished. They had left it for him.

Then the flickering lightning snapped out, and there was nothing in the passenger seat but the shadows again.

He drove on through the rain and the darkness.

As he left the Taconic State Parkway, he turned off his siren. He buzzed down the window, reached out into the rain, and pulled his flasher in, tossing it on the floor. He wanted to travel the last miles inconspicuously, approach the mansion in secret. He drove along one wooded two-lane, then another. His headlights turned the downpour silver. Lightning etched the tangled shapes of naked autumn trees, their branches tormented by the high winds.

There were no signs leading to the mansion, but he knew the way. He turned off the last two-lane onto a rutted road. The road wound upward, deeper and deeper into the storm-tossed forest. Nothing here but trees around him—swaying trees and rain and lightning—and the climbing macadam full of cracks and divots. The Crown Vic bounced and rattled over the broken pavement, making its way upward.

In the black and chaos of it all, he nearly missed the trailhead, but a violent flash picked it out of the darkness just before he passed it.

There was a wide dirt fire road that led off the damaged macadam and up into the woods. A diamond-link fence blocked the way. The fence was held shut with a padlocked chain. Zach drove past it and continued a few dozen yards, traveling slowly until he spotted a turnout. He stopped then. He brought the Crown Vic around in a three-point turn until he was facing back the way he'd come. Then he slid into the turnout, edging the car as close to the tree line as he could get it.

The turnout was overhung by swaying oak branches. The car huddled under them and under the darkness of the night. Zach killed the lights. Killed the engine. He did not think Goulart would see him there, not unless he was on the lookout for him.

He took off his seatbelt. Twisted around to reach into the back seat. He got ahold of his plastic raincoat. In the tight space behind the wheel, he had to struggle to get the coat on. When he was done, he fetched a flashlight out of the glove compartment. He held the flashlight on his lap and waited.

The rain thundered on the Crown Vic's roof. He had gotten here in good time. He still had more than twenty minutes left before the crisis. He sat and felt the minutes going by in an electric silence. The silence was worse to him—more suspenseful—than a ticking clock. It was as if the seconds were sneaking past him unseen. Sixteen minutes to moonrise. Fifteen. Zach sat still. As the minutes dwindled, his heartbeat grew louder and kept the time for him, but that was just as bad as the silence, maybe worse.

A rumble of thunder and then, finally, a double smear of white on the Crown Vic's rain-drenched windshield. Headlights. Goulart. Zach watched him approach. He couldn't see the make of the oncoming car, but he guessed it was his partner's own Camaro. It slowed as it reached the trailhead. Stopped.

Zach held his breath. Had Goulart spotted him? No, he just had to get out of the car to unlock the gate, that's all. Zach sat very still and watched. Goulart's headlights illuminated the wash and play of rainfall on the windshield. Through the moving sheet of water, Zach saw the driver's door of the Camaro swing open. The lights inside the car went on. He could make out Goulart's shadow, washed to liquid by the running liquid on the glass. And he saw too the blurry shadow of his passenger.

The fact that Goulart had not come here alone surprised him for only a second. Then, with a subtle wave of nausea, he understood. This was Goulart's offering, his part of the bargain. This was what he was bringing to the sacrifice: the dagger's next victim.

A second more, and Zach knew who it was—or, that is, he guessed who it was and then he saw and knew for sure. Because now she lit a cigarette—and at the same moment, the rain ran heavily down the Crown Vic's windshield and for that moment the view half-cleared and the orange flame of the lighter clarified her face behind the Camaro's ticking wipers.

Imogen Storm. Of course. That was why Goulart had moved so quickly to seduce her. Not just because she was so young, her life force so powerful—unlike the homeless men and women Abend had settled for up till now—but she was dangerous too, a smart reporter who was getting close to the truth. Abend could silence her and refresh himself at the same time, keep his secret and go on living.

And Goulart would be healed by her blood. That's what it was all about in the end. Life. Time. More life, more time. Goulart had spoken the truth: he would never have sold himself for money. He was too good a cop for that. But he was sick. He was terminal. He was desperate. And he believed in nothing, nothing that was worth dying for anyway. Why should he not then live? It was as Grace had said. In his hour of darkness, when doing what was wrong made perfect sense, he had had nothing to keep him from corruption.

Zach sat still in the deep shadows behind the Crown Vic's wheel. The match-light played over Imogen's pixie features, her turned-up nose, her short, nearly blue-black hair. Zach was touched by how young she was, how unconcerned and unafraid even here, even now, convinced and pacified by whatever Goulart had told her, probably already half in love with him, the only man who had ever believed her. Zach felt again how much he liked her, and it made his heart hurt.

Then she had her cigarette lit and the flame winked out and a fresh wave of rain poured down Zach's windshield. Zach squinted through the rippling tide as Goulart returned to the car, as he dropped in next to Imogen and shut the door. The Camaro's interior lights went off and both passengers vanished into the shadows. The car's headlights began to move again. They turned and started up the dirt lane into the forest.

Zach sat for another moment. He watched as the glow of the car sank away into the bowing and sweeping trees—watched until it was swallowed by the blackness of the storm.

Then he stepped out into the rain and followed on foot.

31

SACRIFICE

E
ven now, after all he'd seen of it, the force of the tempest surprised him. The wind drove at him hard from the side, nearly knocking him off balance. The rain lashed and stung his face and instantly drenched his clothes everywhere they weren't covered by his raincoat: his shoes, the bottoms of his pants, the exposed cuff of his suit jacket. Soon, even his shirt was somehow clammy.

All the same, conscious of the time, he moved quickly. Goulart hadn't relocked the gate. Zach went through, bent his body against the storm, and pushed into the woods.

The going was tough. The dirt road rose steadily. The hard-packed surface was soft with water, nearly mud. All around him, the wind gasped and howled with a voice like phantoms and pushed against him with phantom hands. The rain that soaked him thundered on the bare branches and on the fallen leaves. It left deep, dirty puddles all along the way, and brown streams that flooded the gutters. Lightning tore the sky. It showed the trees towering all around him, bending and swaying violently like orgiastic dancers. Thunder followed and shook the air as if with wrath. It drowned out every other sound—then died, and left only the thunder of the rain.

Head bent, teeth gritted, Zach followed the weak yellow beam of his flashlight up the road. It wasn't a long way. The hill was not high. A few more minutes of bullying through the storm, and he broke out of the tree line into a scraggly clearing.

Though the night seemed black in these last minutes before moonrise, he could, in fact, make out the even darker shape of the ruin against the sky. Big—the mansion was really big and hulking and ominous. With a melodrama that melodrama wouldn't dare to imitate, a single zigzagging bolt of lightning knifed the air behind the structure, and the whole scene was revealed: the surrounding of broken trees and half-grown scrub; the remains of fences standing slanted in the mud; the turrets and gables, arches and broken windows of the massive building itself—the whole ghostly array.

When the lightning flickered out—and as a crash of thunder broke over the following darkness—Zach spotted the dim candle-glow within the ruin, a wavering yellow in the black depths of a window. The thunder drifted down like dust and into silence. In that rain-spattered silence, Zach heard Imogen scream.

She screamed just once. Such a hopeless cry. A sound at first filled with the anguish of betrayal, and then simply desolate. After that, there was only the noise of the wind and rain.

Zach moved quickly across the muddy clearing.

Soon, the mansion loomed blackly over him. Its soaring brick walls and peaked towers gave him some shelter from the lash and buffet of the storm. Afraid of being spotted, he kept his flashlight pointed to the ground. He couldn't see much that way, but he could still make out the yellow candlelight at a window up ahead of him. He edged along the mansion's base in the direction of the glow, peering hard through the downpour, looking for an entry.

Lightning struck again, and in the silver flash he saw the covered portico only a few yards away.

His feet sinking in mud, his socks soaked through with it, he reached the porch. He stepped into the deeper darkness beneath its roof. There was the mansion doorway directly in front of him, wide open except for two boards that had been nailed up some time ago to keep out intruders. There was one board slanting across the top and another across the bottom. The others—the boards that had blocked the middle of the door—had been torn off and casually tossed to the floor against the porch wall.

Zach killed his flashlight and slipped it into his pocket. He ducked down beneath the top board and stepped over the bottom board and entered Windward.

With that single step across the threshold, Zach seemed to leave the violence of the storm far behind. The ceaseless drench and drumbeat of the rain grew distant and was replaced by the drip-drip-dripping audible here and there in the quiet recesses of the broken-down house. The punishing wind dropped to nothing. The thunder was muffled. The chill in the air seemed to soften. Tense as he was—and he was very tense, his whole inner self feeling like a bowstring stretched to its firing limit—it was a relief to come in out of the rain.

Zach pushed back the hood of his coat. Consciously breathing in a long, slow rhythm, he peered into the darkness. He could see little more than vague patches of gray, suggestions of nooks, corners, corridors, and turnings. He edged forward—forward some more—and soon felt the space open wider before him. Then lightning crackled at a window, and for a moment he saw a broad foyer littered with rubble, a wide, broken staircase winding up into nothingness. Then the lightning died.

Zach let out a trembling breath. How long till moonrise now? he wondered. He didn't know. He had lost his sense of time.

He scanned the blackness. There was the candle-glow again, off to his left. He pinned his gaze on it and started that way.

He tried to walk softly, slowly, silently, but the rubble crunched beneath his feet with every step. Creatures scrambled away from him in unseen corners. Rats, probably—but they made him think of the waterbugs that had attacked him in Long Island City. He shuddered—then nearly cried aloud as cobwebs seized his face and clung to it. Fighting panic, he stopped to claw them out of his eyes and spit them from his mouth. When he was free of them, he had to reorient himself, looking around again to re-locate the candle-glow.

There it was—at the end of a short hallway. He went toward it, the walls closing in on either side of him. Halfway down the corridor, he began to hear a murmur of voices.

He reached inside his jacket now and drew out his gun.

The wind rose and the rain rose, but there was no lightning and the way ahead was sunk in deep obscurity. Zach held out his free hand until he felt the wall. Using that as a guide, he edged forward; forward more.

What came to him then, as he inched through the shadows—what came unwanted into his mind—was the memory of Gretchen Dankl—the look in her eyes, her ghost eyes, as she had last appeared to him, in the car as he was driving up. That look—tragic, guilt-ridden, and condemnatory—it was a confession of fear—and an accusation of fear. Well, she was right in that accusation, Zach thought. He was afraid, more afraid than he had ever been, even as a boy. He could feel the sweat of his palm on the handle of the gun. He could hear his own pulse in his ears and feel the airy weakness in his belly. He had to force himself to keep his mind off Grace, to keep from thinking of his children, whom he would never see again. Thoughts of his family could only make him weak and maudlin now. The people he loved could only bind him to the world—this world he had to leave behind. Love was the enemy of death, and it was death he had come for—he knew that now. So yes, he was afraid.

Another step through the darkness—toward the candle-glow—and the general murmur up ahead began to separate itself into voices, each voice growing clearer and more distinct as Zach approached. He heard Goulart speak—not the words, just the tone of it—and he heard Abend answer, then he heard Goulart speak again. But what was awful—what he slowly realized was truly horrifying—was that underneath their voices, there was another sound, a sound that went on continuously while the men chatted, a pitiable counterpoint to their indifferent conversation.