Chuck Hogan

by The Blood Artists (epub)

  And it is a messy procedure for someone else to perform, with the rest of the place showing otherwise clean."

  "But an unmatched sneaker print in the bathroom. A palm print at the sink. A pinprick."

  "These are unexplained. And then there is Blossom."

  "What about her?"

  "I had hoped to resolve this before coming to you with it. We lost her yesterday. This is not unusual, as you know. It's difficult trailing someone who doesn't seem to know where she's going herself. But we activated the trace on her car, and late yesterday pinpointed it in a garage across from the CNN Center downtown."

  "Near the church."

  Freeley nodded. "Naturally." The Enterprise Church was a cult movement derived from the works of twentieth-century science fiction writer Gene Roddenberry and popular Star Fleet conventions. Its members awaited the coming Rendezvous whereby an alien landing party would arrive on Earth to mete out justice for their murdered comrade, Jesus Christ. Blossom had been a devoted follower ever since her recovery.

  Freeley said, "She wasn't there, but a member said some of them were out recruiting, or whatever they call it, for their church's ten-year Star Date anniversary gathering here in Atlanta, this New Year's Eve."

  Maryk frowned. "Then Blossom remains unaccounted for? What about Milkmaid?"

  Freeley shrugged dismissively. "Milkmaid is fine, the same."

  "You're certain?"

  "I saw her yesterday. Mystified as ever. Paranoid, hypochondriacal.

  She nearly walked into a Boston streetcar yesterday morning. But she is accounted for. Nothing going on there."

  Maryk mulled things over. "Tell me exactly how we lost Blossom."

  "Early-morning traffic. She jumped a red by accident and wriggled away from her tail, then didn't show up where we had expected her to."

  "I've told them a dozen times," he said, "follow the person, not the car." Maryk stood. "I want Blossom located by sight. I want that immediately. I want an exact position on her until we can get to the bottom of this Lancet situation."

  Freeley nodded. "I'll get on it myself" Maryk was alone with Stephen in B4. Stephen's vitals had crashed overnight but his brain activity never flatlined and Maryk had successfully revived him.

  Stephen had been plateau for vitals since then and was starting to retain some IV meal. Pupil response evinced further improvement.

  Maryk had prepped another 500 mi dose of Milkmaid serum. He was administering it when Stephen began to speak.

  The nurse that morning had detailed occasional moans and a few instances of trembling in each arm. But nothing could have prepared Maryk to see Stephen stirring beneath him. Stephen's diminished facial features were like the features of a prototype of Stephen Pearse awaiting more cosmetic girth. His hands were the thin speckled hands of a man twice his age. The tube between Stephen's lips drew his head leftward and formed his dry mouth into an emotionless smirk. His lips opened and his whispered voice broke the controlled silence of B4.

  "Bobby." Then his eyes opened. Maryk stepped back and nearly dropped the empty glass ampule to the floor. Stephen's eyes were blood-red around the pale blue irises and distended inside depressed sockets, Maryk reapproached the side of the gurney. He watched as the word again worked its way up Stephen's gaunt throat like a cartridge sliding into a rifle chamber. "Bobby." Stephen's dull eyes reached around the bright lab. He bared his thin lips around the tube as though he were sounding out the letter e. His teeth were yellow-gray like cheap ivory and too large now for his jaw. He was staring at the ceiling. "Where am 1?"

  His pupils drifted subtly. He was going to pass out again.

  Maryk said, "The BDC.Stephen's throat was raw from the infection and the tubes. The words came out in gasps. "Sick?"

  Maryk stood stiffly over him. Stephen's revival was nothing short of extraordinary. Maryk's success surprised even himself. "Peter Maryk is treating you," Maryk said.

  Stephen's eyelids closed. His brow went slack but his lips around the tube remained tense. He was still conscious. His blind eyes opened again and gazed up at the piped ceiling. There were full breaths between rasps. He still believed he was speaking to Bobby Chiles.

  "Don't. Let. Maryk. Take over. BDC " His jaw relaxed then and his lips parted with a sigh. His eyes closed again and he was out.

  Maryk stood over him smiling harshly. The console screen behind him beeped twice. Maryk went away from Stephen and turned to the keyboard.

  A window opened on Freeley. She was standing before a cement wall under dusky sulfurous light. She was inside a parking garage. She spoke quickly but was otherwise composed. "Blossom is down," she said.

  Maryk gripped the console. His gray eyes burned.

  Freeley went on, "She was in the backseat of the car the entire time, slumped down. A day, at least. Same way: both wrists."

  "Milkmaid," Maryk said at once. "At work. Just confirmed it. Should I go?"

  Maryk glowered at the console. "Should I go?" she said again.

  "No. You stay on Blossom. Tell them to stick tight to Milkmaid and don't let her out of their sight. I'm going up to Boston to bring her in myself."

  The Alley

  Melanie stood in the doorway to the narrow alley adjacent to the Penny University. It was raining, nighttime, but early still, and too early to be out already on her second cigarette break.

  Melanie didn't actually smoke. Her scarred lungs couldn't take it.

  But at the Penny University you had to work eight and a half hours in order to be paid for eight: healthy people were assigned their thirty-minute dinner break in one lump sum, meaning four hours of nonstop customers on either side, whereas nicotine junkies were rewarded for their disgusting habit with a fifteen-minute dinner and three floating five-minute smokers. Smoking breaks were impossible for the managers to monitor, so it was far and away worth the artless deception in order to be able to stretch five minutes of peace and quiet into ten or even fifteen minutes of pure customerless joy. These fake breaks were the only thing that kept her going. The alley was thick with exhaust from the cars on the street, and because of that she wound up sucking in some noxious fumes anyway, but as far as Melanie was concerned, sacrificing long-range health for short-range sanity was -really no sacrifice at all.

  The Penny University was a four-story brick tower that dominated the wide city corner of Commonwealth and Harvard avenues. It served anything brewed-coffee, tea, beer-and the fare that went with it.

  Melanie had been employed there as a barista-which, she had come to learn, was Spanish for "coffee jerk"-for a record four straight weeks now.

  Her foot propped open the heavy door. At least it was only rain, not snow. The hot scent of coffee breathing behind her had seemed pleasant her first week; now it was like the cumulative sigh of a thousand waitresses, rankling the hair on the back of her head. Unseen Harvard Avenue was crowded at the entrance to the alley, and she could hear young voices laughing and tires whispering against the static of the rain, and see the headlights spraying the brick alley walls. Every university student in Boston spent at least one year living in the Allston-Brighton community of trolleys and alleyways and immigrants, and every one of them drifted like chicly-bandaged zombies into the Penny University for a steaming cup of central nervous system stimulant on a drizzling Friday night.

  Her breath misted out into the cold alley air as she hugged her chest over her red apron. Her foot had started to cramp, and just as she was repositioning her hip against the heavy black door, she heard a small noise from the other end of the alley. It was a purposeful thump, like a person kicking a wall. A single yellow safety light shone down upon the narrow car path and narrower curbs where the alley veered rightward and out of her view, deadending at the dumpsters. She watched the light for shadows, expecting to see some homeless person come stumbling out, zipping up. Something about the noise had sounded human.

  Now there was the slightest odor, in itself not peculiar for that alley, but a scent far different from coffee groun
ds and turned cream.

  It struck Melanie as oddly familiar, which only magnified her sense of dread. It smelled like sickness. Melanie did something extraordinary then. She went back in from her five-minute nonsmoking break one minute early.

  With the fire door closed to the quiet rain and the vats of trendily flavored beer groaning around her, she felt foolish about her fear and shook it off. Cutting short her sanity-preserving break did not bode well for the rest of the night. She wove a path back through the labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling vats to the work area behind the coffee counter, retying her red apron.

  Beverly was working to her right, tamping an espresso filter at the rear of the coffee station. Beverly had mousy blond hair and choppy bangs that clung to the lashes of her sleepy eyes. "You're back early," she said over the prep chatter. "Didn't want to miss anything." Melanie lingered there in the shadows of the twin vats, surveying the main floor. The motif inside was neo-gloom, all red neon and shiny black wood and moody shadow over each floor spun out from a central spiral stairway, with lots of nooks and crannies on the upper levels and plenty of ports for charging up student tablets. Bottom line the Penny University was a caffeine bordello for the university smart set.

  In Melanie's varied and vast work experience, wearing out jobs like they were nylons, she had found the sole redeeming quality of a retail or service-oriented position to be the camaraderie found among co-suffering, codependent co-workers. The Penny University, however, stood as the exception to this trench-mentality rule. The microbrewers hated the baristas who hated the pastry chefs and so on down the line.

  Customers. Constantly customers. If the absentee owners prayed, they prayed to the God of Precipitation on Weekend Nights. Inclemency meant lines out the doors. Melanie watched the kids stamping off street grime onto the spongy entrance mats and could smell, even over the roasted beans, the wet-winter scent of coat sweat and dank wool; fleecy sheep herding together over boysenberry beer, or triple-foam, triple lattes, or super-steeped, hemp-brewed pots of tea.

  As she was watching the crowded entrance, a man stepped in from the rain wearing a simple gray suit, standing out from the rest of the young, pained hipsters. The trunk-necked hand-stampers deferred to his flashed ID, and as the man returned his billfold to his pocket, Melanie saw that he wore latex gloves.

  She resisted her overactive imagination as she watched from the shadows of the creaking vats. The man proceeded to the center island supply station, rather than straight into the coffee line or up the spiral stairs to the beer floor and beyond, stopping at the recycled napkins and flavored stirrers, eyeing the wide ground floor and allowing Melanie a good, long look.

  It was the well-dressed man from the trolley, the one who had pushed her out of the path of the oncoming streetcar. The shoulders and pant cuffs of his cheap suit were dark with rain. She wondered for a moment if it had been him out in the alley, but realized there was no way he could have gotten back to the entrance so fast.

  Two other men, whom she recognized as semiregular customers, rose almost simultaneously on opposite ends of the floor and wandered close to the man in the suit. They were dressed like students, though as she now paid attention to them, she saw that they were definitely older.

  A wave like a charge of electricity left her motionless and buzzing.

  The dark-haired man from the trolley started to move. He crossed from the center island, scanning the vats as he approached the mess counter.

  He couldn't see her there in the shadows. The man appeared concerned.

  The other two fanned back out from the center island. Kids near them, as though sensing some sort of trouble, moved out of their way.

  The dark-haired one from the trolley skipped the line and went straight to the barista well where the drinks were being prepared.

  Beverly was foaming up some milk when the man caught her eye. Melanie tried to whisper to her to wait, but the man was too close.

  Beverly started toward him with the milk-frothing pitcher in hand.

  Even with wet shoulders and his drowned-puppy hair, the man was dark and blandly attractive and smiling forwardly, which guaranteed that Beverly would be on her way to help.

  They met. Melanie could hear none of it, what with the orders being taken, the click and clatter of spoons and saucers, and the piped-in blues overhead. She watched the man produce his billfold-careful, in a conspicuous way, to display his identification only to Beverly, as though letting her in on something. Some sixth sense must have told him he had an easy mark. Beverly set the hot pitcher on the countertop and pulled down her mouth guard without taking her eyes from his credentials.

  Melanie never saw them near her apartment or her work, only on the streets. That was how she was able to keep her sanity about being followed. "Health" something, he seemed to be saying to Beverly, as in "health matter," or "health emergency." Beverly evidently shared his concern, as she was nodding slowly. Melanie began her retreat just as Beverly turned and looked back from the cocoa-powdered counter, her ratty blond bangs twitching over blinking mouse eyes. She appeared to be alarmed, searching the vat spaces, at first not seeing Melanie.

  Then she did see her there. Melanie shook her head, pleadingly, but Beverly jerked back and elbowed the stainless steel pitcher clatteringly to the floor. The blue tile went white with boiling milk.

  Panic, unreasoned and immediate, burst within Melanie, and she turned and took off running. She threaded back through the fat shadows, stumbling and misjudging a turn on the wet floor and careening sharply into one of the vats, her bony shoulder prodding a light boom and her bag strap snagging on a gauge. She nearly ripped her arm off freeing herself, lunging between two copper bellies back toward the red EXIT sign over the side door. She hit the disabled alarm bar with both hands and spilled hard into the slick alleyway, flopping over the wet curb outside and almost failing down. Her momentum carried her into the far brick wall, which she pushed off from, fleeing toward the closed end of the alley.

  She stopped at the beginning of the turn, seeing the pallid safety light through the rain and realizing she would be trapped in the dead end. She spun and ran back up the alley, fighting the apron tangling between her legs, past the door to the Penny University as it burst open and the dark-haired man from the trolley splashed out.

  "Wait!" he said, reaching for her.

  But she was past him, running up the alley toward the street. She went ten or twelve steps before headlights swung in front of her, brightly sweeping the slicked walls as a large car bumped over the corner into the alley, bouncing on its suspension, bearing down upon her. She stopped and threw out her hands, and the car skidded to a stop, fishtailing to the brick wall. The passenger door swung open and barred her only exit. The shadow of a large man emerged.

  Her bag. She went into it madly, up to her elbow, fumbling for her Mace.

  He closed the car door and stepped forward through the headlights.

  Behind her, the dark-haired man's footsteps scuffed off the wet curb.

  "Mace," she whispered crazily, jogging the contents of her bag, and her hairbrush and gum wrappers spilled out onto the tar. She backed sideways from the headlights to the wall, her lungs beginning to contract.

  The man from the car strode through the rain-filled beams with a thick, quick leg. He appeared impossibly large before her, his face lost in shadow, the headlights catching his white hair and giving it an odd glow.

  White hair. Her breath left her. Something happened to her then, like a thing opening or unfolding inside her.

  She found her inhaler again and flung it away desperately, digging deeper, shaking her bag, backing up against the wet alley wall in his shrinking shadow, dizzy with revelation and a lack of air. She trapped the cylinder in the corner of her bag finally and whipped it out. She fooled with the safety guard over the trigger, fooled with it, fooled with it, then got it free as his shadow fell over her.

  His hand closed around her hand and the Mace. She looked up and saw his face then,
the cool gray eyes, the plunging nose. It was the face that was always missing from her paintings. Something overturned inside her, a revolution of head and stomach. Her neck bucked as her chest contracted, and she pitched forward.

  She vomited. She was gasping for breath, sagging, her legs bowing beneath her as his hand remained around hers, the only thing holding her up.

  Behind her, breathless: Where was she? Outside? Then, from above-deep, strange, stem: Sloppy. The last thing we needed was a commotion. Melanie choked on a hollow groan. Her vision swam as her body went limp. 'The headlights shining on the man's black shoes drifted and twisted, and then abruptly stopped twisting, and the dark rain stopped falling all at once.

  The girl passed out. Maryk held her dangling by her hand.

  "Psychosomatic," he explained to the others. "Put her in the car."

  They took her from him. Pasco came off the curb with an explanation.

  "I lost her inside," Pasco said. "She was hidden in back behind the counter. I thought something might have happened."

  Maryk held up a gloved hand to stop him, "We have people taking down plates and VIN numbers?"

  "Every vehicle within a three-block radius."

  "I want the names and addresses of everyone inside. Then shutter this coffeehouse, or whatever it is, for one week. A health hazard, to cover your blunder. Make it real."

  Another Special Path agent nearby looked up from her tablet.

  "We're into her apartment. Everything's quiet."

  Maryk was kicking the vomit off his shoes. "Start packing it up then.

  Take special care with any paintings. They are to be delivered directly to me."

  He was looking into the alley as he said this. He saw a shadow flicker across the dim light at the far end where the alley curved.

  Maryk turned to Pasco. "Where does the alley go?"

  "Nowhere," Pasco said. "It's a dead end."