She knew she wouldn’t have time to get up before it leapt again. She rolled onto her stomach and shielded her head.
“The fuck are you?”
It was that other officer speaking, unit 421—she didn’t know his name. This was followed by the deafening POW of his semiautomatic. Randall heard shattering glass and looked to see the creature flinch as her windshield acquired a huge spiderweb pattern. The plastic safety coating kept the glass from falling out of the frame.
Missed.
Another round from the gun, and this time the windshield did fall away, crumpling like a heavily creased scab. But the creature was already leaping off the far side of the hood.
Randall drew her own gun and remained prone.
Now she saw why 421 had missed: the officer was a good thirty feet to her right. They had practice-fired longer distances on the range, but Randall forgave the nervousness that sent his shots wild. She had only used her own gun once against a real adversary and knew how easily battle stress screwed things up.
Cowden’s cruiser was right behind the officer, charging up the street in reverse since it hadn’t had time to turn around. It screeched to a stop.
It took only a couple of heartbeats to notice all this—battle stress also accelerated one’s perceptions until subjective time flowed through the hourglass with the speed of ketchup. Randall looked back to see the creature dart out from behind her battered car.
She squeezed off a shot of her own, but the animal was already in motion—leaping a dozen feet into the air—and she missed. Her ears instantly clogged as they did whenever she fired without hearing protection.
The patrol officer who’d saved her life stopped short and looked up. His mouth dropped as he saw the thing descending on him. Still holding his gun in front of him with both hands, arms out and elbows locked—aiming straight ahead because he was looking for a normal, man-like target, one that stayed on the ground, say—he nevertheless swept his arms upward as if to take aim at the moon.
He didn’t have enough time. The creature landed on him like two hundred pounds of rocks. Randall heard both of his collar bones snap as the creature hammered its fists down upon impact. Screaming, the officer crumpled near the back bumper of Cowden’s car—gurgling as long fingernails slashed his throat.
Randall took aim again but hesitated when Cowden emerged. He was directly on the other side of her line of fire. The creature saw him and leapt away.
In Randall’s direction.
“Shit!” she said and fired anyway.
She thought she saw a spurt of blood eject behind it, but the searchlight was still trained on 421’s fallen form, and it was too dark to be sure.
But the creature didn’t attack her again. Instead, it hurtled over her. Randall turned to see it land just like a cat—front legs first, then hind legs—only its front legs weren’t front legs but arms. Once on the other side, it stood up like a man. It bent its head forward and sprinted away.
It’s just a man, she told herself. A man with a tail and backwards-bending knees, but still a man.
It bounded between the houses and disappeared into the dark treeline. Onlookers gaped from behind their glass storm doors.
✽ ✽ ✽
“Officer down! Officer down!”
Cowden kept shouting into his shoulder mike as he knelt over the fallen cop. He thrust his fingers into the neck wound, which gushed blood in steady pulses. On her feet now, Randall saw the officer’s eyes rolling in his sockets from here. His ashen cheeks stood in contrast against the blood—not dead yet, but soon.
The helicopter pilot was saying something over the radio. Randall’s paralysis broke, and she ran for her car.
“. . . still in the area, in the trees,” Helo 626 was saying. “I see ’im behind the houses, moving east toward Gallows Road.”
Randall yanked open her door. She retrieved her walkie-talkie and clipped it to her belt. She pressed a button beside the CAD to release the shotgun from its ceiling rack. A shotgun took two hands to operate properly, which meant going without a flashlight, but she figured at this point she’d rather have the extra firepower.
“He’s paused now,” the pilot radioed. “He’s in the back yard of the house three doors east of you. Detective, you might want to stay put till backup arrives.”
Randall took off running.
✽ ✽ ✽
One . . .
As she raced down the street, the detective counted off driveways and followed the helicopter’s searchlight. She jacked a shell into the shotgun.
Two . . .
Anger pulled her lips into a grimace. She knew she should control it, she’d been trained to, but the sight of the cop’s spurting neck and the sound of his snapping bones were in charge for the moment. It didn’t matter that she’d never learned the fallen officer’s name. It was the fact that he was an officer, a fraternal brother-in-arms—a bond Randall had taken seriously ever since her partner and two close friends died in the line of duty a few years ago.
Three.
She veered into the narrow space between the second and third houses. She realized the creature would hear her running down the side yard, so she stopped short, skidding a little on the moist grass.
Holding her breath, she peeked around the corner into the back yard illuminated by the searchlight.
At first she thought the pilot had made a mistake: all she saw was a deck at about eye level, a yard with an inflatable kiddie pool lying upside-down, and the woods marking the rear property line.
From beneath the deck came a throaty growl.
It sounded just like the cat she’d found on her first night as a patrol officer six years ago when investigating a noise complaint. Its owner had thrown it out of a second-story window and broken its leg.
The growling—actually more like a groan—became deeper and louder.
She saw it now, crouched in the shadowed crawlspace beneath the deck. Randall aimed her shotgun, wishing the searchlight could penetrate the darkness. Dammit, she should’ve brought her flashlight after all. Still, she could see it hadn’t noticed her yet—too busy licking the shoulder her bullet had grazed.
At least we’re even on that account.
“412, I think it’s beneath the deck,” the helo pilot radioed.
The creature turned its head and hissed at the sound of her walkie-talkie.
Randall retreated back behind the corner of the house, scrabbling for her volume knob. “Goddammit.” She flattened herself against the house’s aluminum siding and took aim at the corner, expecting the creature to charge into her line of sight.
She was surprised when it didn’t.
Why isn’t it—
“A woman—there’s a woman!” the pilot said. “She’s coming out the back door!”
Randall broke cover. “Get back inside!”
The woman wasn’t a woman at all—a longhaired, gangly adolescent was more like it. She wore a long Washington Redskins jersey as a sleeping shirt and stood barefoot on the deck—inches above where the creature was hiding.
At first the teenager didn’t hear Randall screaming, too intent on the helicopter shining its light on her. Finally, she looked down at the detective, who was running toward her and raising the shotgun. But it was too late. The creature came out of its hiding place.
It swiped at the girl through the deck railing.
Its long nails sliced through her bare calves and sent blood splattering across the half open sliding glass door. She cried out and collapsed—again spoiling Randall’s line of fire.
The creature was on the deck’s far side, obliging Randall to circle around to set up her shot. She expected it to jump up and finish the job on the shrieking girl—maybe try another rape. But no, it was too smart. It scampered into the woods. Randall fired and missed, demolishing a tree trunk.
She followed her quarry into the woods, leaving the girl and her cries—“Help me!”—behind. She knew the helo would call for EMS. She believed it was already
doing so, but she couldn’t understand the radio transmissions over the swish of the undergrowth now tearing at her.
The illumination diminished to darkness as she left the searchlight behind. The ground dipped beneath her, and she nearly fell. She forced herself to slow down. She ducked just in time to avoid clotheslining herself on a low-hanging branch.
“Shit, it’s getting away.” She yanked her radio off her belt. “412 here. The animal’s heading south into the park.”
“Ten-four. I’m swinging over there now but can’t see much through the trees.”
The woods continued to thicken, forcing Randall to slow to a trot. She feared getting lost—or worse, becoming even more vulnerable.
Reluctantly, she turned around.
Chapter 5
Three hours later, Randall entered her small, one-bedroom apartment and slammed the door behind her. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and resisted the urge to scream.
She didn’t turn on the lights but saw well enough in the pre-dawn grayness to enter her living room. Dropping her gun and keys on the coffee table, she collapsed onto her sofa. She glanced at the medal standing on her shelf in its fancy wooden display case—a citation for closing a high number of cases last year—and suppressed another urge to go berserk.
So close. We almost had him!
They lost the creature in the park and spent most of those three hours searching for it. Randall helped—this time with her flashlight—although the pain from her shoulder bite had worsened. The paramedics tending to the teenager had suggested she go to the emergency room. “No thanks,” she answered. “Just clean it out and bandage it, and I’ll be good to go.” Fine, they said, but she should start a regimen of rabies shots until the animal was caught and tested for it. Randall said she doubted it was spreading rabies.
Disregarding medical advice was one thing, but standard operating procedure was quite another. At the first opportunity, she reported to her supervisor, by now on scene, to surrender her duty weapon, holster, belt, magazines, and handcuffs. It was SOP for any officer involved in the shooting of a suspect to surrender his or her duty gear as evidence and to be placed on administrative leave pending a routine investigation by Internal Affairs. The last time this happened, she was reinstated a week and three mandatory counseling sessions later.
But her boss, a thin black man with the strange name of Sergeant Lively, only looked up from the form he was filling out on the hood of his car and frowned at her. Flashing red lights from the rescue and police vehicles crowding onto the neighborhood street cast odd shadows across his face.
“I thought you said this is an animal, some type of an orangutan. An ape.”
“I . . . I did, sir. But it’s not like any kind of ape I’ve ever seen.”
The sergeant paused, glancing at the crime scene techs who were taping off the area where the cop was killed. He sucked his bottom lip in and out, then looked at her sidelong for a moment before returning to his report. “I’ll let you know if I need your gun, Randall. Until I hear otherwise, you shot at some type of wild animal—not a person—and I’m not putting you on leave for that. Now go home and rest. Report back in twelve hours, and help me make sense of all this. We’ll catch your animal in the meantime.”
“I sure as hell hope so, sir,” Randall said.
Now, as she replayed the conversation in her head, she tried to detect any hint that Lively blamed her for letting the animal escape. After all, Sergeant Lively was one of those who naysayed the promotion of a twenty-eight-year-old female to detective, then raised hell when Randall’s partner was killed on her first major case. It took Sergeant Tucker, he of the hairnet and paper booties, to intervene behind the scenes and save her bacon.
She stared dully at her blank white walls, which she hadn’t bothered to decorate because she was never home long enough. Wish I had someone to talk to. Not for the first time, she wondered if something was mentally wrong with her. Why couldn’t she just look on the bright side of things? She’d finally identified her suspect, after all. So what if she hadn’t caught him—or it—on the first try?
And what the fuck was that thing? She’d had cases take unusual—and downright bizarre—turns before, but this was the first time she’d encountered something she didn’t know how to describe. A cat creature? A man? A werecat? With a dick the size of a wine bottle?
She would have to think on that one awhile.
Her sinuses were congested again. Fucking allergies. She yanked tissues from a box on the coffee table and blew her nose so hard that her whole face hurt afterward.
If I just had someone to talk to, she thought again—then, remembering the creature’s grotesque sexuality, laughed at herself. Nurse John would suggest two vigorous fucks and to call him in the morning. Or to call him in the morning for two vigorous fucks, whatever. Maybe that was the real problem. Ol’ Chrissy Randall, the hottest cop on the force, was too cranky and bitchy to have a sex drive, thanks to her allergies and fatigue.
There was more to that subject, though, and she knew it. And it was more complex than her usual self-talking justification for ignoring men—“They’re nothing but baggage, bravado, and bullshit!”—but she didn’t feel like pondering it right now. She’d had enough depression for one night.
So, other options for solace: family and friends. Family meant Mom because Randall had no siblings and because Dad died of emphysema while she was a freshman at Georgetown. Her grandparents were also dead, and she hadn’t spoken to her two cousins in California for over ten years. But Mom didn’t get up until nine a.m., when Randall would be sleeping like a vampire until her next night shift. Besides, Mom would only say something like, For Pete’s sake, Chrissy, just get a desk job, and accuse her again of having a hard head. Yeah, tons of solace there. Sometimes she was glad Mom lived way the hell up in New Jersey.
A regular friend—a female friend—would be welcome. It wouldn’t matter if they never talked about anything but last night’s rerun of Sex and the City. It would be a distraction. Talking about dumb stuff would in fact be preferable. She already got enough of other people’s troubles during her job, so she wasn’t much interested in yet more helpings of drama, thank you very much, or in puking up her own. But making friends, even shallow ones, meant meeting people without the defined roles of police work—when small talk wasn’t as simple as bitching about the complexity of the FR300T Police Crash Report form. It was just too hard.
As it was, the people she felt closest to were her fellow officers—most of them men. A few of them, like Heager, had done the “Randall Shamble,” which she’d learned was locker room lingo for asking her out on a date and getting shot down faster than a fire range target at ten feet. She busted her ass for them, and they for her—they were all a team and a brotherhood, after all—and she would have gladly stayed out there another six hours if it meant bagging that rapist cop-killing cat freak motherfucker.
She looked at the medal on her shelf again and tried to clear her mind.
Closing her eyes and pinching her aching sinuses, Randall leaned her head back against her plaid couch—the couch that hardly anybody except her had ever sat on after she bought it for a hundred bucks from the Fannie & Mae’s Thrift Shop next door—and willed herself to relax. Cooking odors wafted up from the JF Carry-Out Pizza that she lived over, and she realized she’d consumed nothing but coffee for the past twelve hours.
She fell asleep before she could do something about it.
✽ ✽ ✽
Margaret Connolly needed to get the hell out of the hospital for a while. It was eight a.m., and she’d been up for over twenty-four hours. As soon as Daniella’s breakfast was delivered to her room here on the seventh floor of the Inova Women’s Center and someone returned with the results of the morning CAT scan, she planned to go home for a few hours of sleep . . . if she could sleep.
“Mom, I’m so hungry,” Daniella whined from her bed.
Margaret didn’t find this surprising, given how her da
ughter had been vomiting for most of the night due to concussion-related dizziness. Her stomach was past empty.
They’d removed the backboard when spinal x-rays revealed no bone damage, but she still wore the cervical collar. Thankfully, her scalp laceration had turned out to be more bloody than serious, and the hair they’d shaved to stitch up and bandage the wound would grow back in a month or so. Head x-rays had shown a simple linear fracture beginning at the superior and anterior portion of the parietal bone, extending laterally and anteriorally toward a point near the left squamosal suture and spehnoid bone—or a hairline crack going from the top of her skull to just over her left temple. Margaret had breathed a sigh of relief at that news as well. She’d been afraid Daniella had suffered a depression fracture, which might have entailed a worse brain injury.
“Mom, food, please . . .”
Margaret took off her glasses and wiped her eyes, struggling to stay upright in her chair. “I know, honey. It’ll be here soon. Just try to sleep.”
They’d had this same exchange five minutes ago, but the concussion had jarred Daniella’s short-term memory free of its moorings. Margaret, mustering her wits long enough last night to consult Dr. Bowen like a fellow professional, had mentioned the possibility of a subdural hematoma—bleeding inside the brain. Bowen had agreed it was a concern. “Well, if you’re going to be here all night,” Bowen had said with a strange bit of eye-rolling, “then you might as well assist us by conducting neuro-status checks. Alert the nurse if there’s any change in her mentation.”
Margaret had eagerly done so, periodically asking Daniella to recite her name, the date (forgiving her for saying yesterday’s since it was past midnight), and her location. What she noticed and dutifully reported to hospital staff was not encouraging: Daniella claimed she was still at home or in the ambulance. She complained of nausea and headaches. If the CAT scan showed a blood clot on Daniella’s brain, Margaret was afraid they would have to surgically evacuate it.
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