by Lee, Edward
“Come here, I need to talk to you.”
In any city you don’t approach faceless voices at night, not that Locke had any money for muggers. But he felt no fear. Was it his drunkenness, or an insight?
Another step and he made the car: a shiny black Firebird, one of those Formula models; its waxed lacquer hood looked like polished obsidian. Locke’s eyes adjusted in the pallor of the streetlight.
Sitting at the wheel was White Shirt.
“Figured it out yet?”
“Figured what out yet?” Locke queried. Suddenly his curiosity overwhelmed his inebriation. His face smacked of the wet cold.
“How do you kill your feelings?” White Shirt looked past Locke’s shoulder, at the moon. “I know the answer. God just whispered it to me, just now. Think I’m lying?”
Locke was insensate. “What’s the answer?”
“Transposition, man.”
“What?”
“Metamorphosis.”
Christ. Reason snapped back, and maybe even a trace of sobriety. “Hey, you’re pretty drunk. You should call a cab.”
White Shirt ignored the comment. “You still love her, don’t you?”
Locke stalled in the cold. White Shirt must’ve deduced his plight by reading the poems he’d written on the napkins. “Yes,” he eventually said.
“I know the feeling. That’s the transposition. That’s the link, I guess.”
The link?
The darkness rose again in Locke’s heart, like the darkness which now idled about White Shirt’s head.
An aura. A black aura.
“That’s what makes the two of us the same.”
Locke stared.
“And we want to know how to make it go away, don’t we? We want to know how to kill our feelings.”
Locke’s heart seemed to seize. His joints locked up.
“I can show you.”
Locke didn’t know from guns. He only knew that the gun White Shirt was suddenly pointing at him was huge. The giant tarnished revolver looked like it weighed ten pounds. Locke thought he could’ve stuck his entire thumb into the end of the barrel and there’d still be play.
“Don’t move, Locke. Listen.”
Even in the swift, bracing terror, Locke caught the illogic. “How do you know my n—”
“I’m not sure what this is about. It’s… funny,” White Shirt seemed to muse to him. “‘Heralds in ashes, heralds of love. Pewter mugs dangle up above like the hasp on my soul’s broken lock.’”
Then White Shirt smiled.
Locke remembered the beer-club mugs hanging from the ceiling over the bar. He remembered how White Shirt had been staring at them…
“It’s kind of like that,” White Shirt said next. “But this isn’t a herald, Locke. It’s a portent. A warning, I guess.”
“A warning?”
White Shirt’s arm didn’t waver against the big revolver’s weight. His eyes gleamed like diamond chips. “Love is a great power, did you know that?” He chuckled. “Of course you do. But it’s also like a summons. It calls to things. It calls to things that are alike. Doesn’t matter if they’re good or bad—you know what I mean? Maybe it’s primordial or genetic. I don’t know. It just calls to things that are alike.”
Locke’s eyes felt stapled open. “What things?” he asked.
“Sometimes wonderful things. And sometimes the worst things you could ever imagine.”
Lunatic, Locke realized. Madman. This guy was going to kill him. Locke figured his only chance was to drop to the ground and try to roll…
White Shirt cocked the pistol, as if he’d sensed the calculation. The click of the hammer sounded like a piece of tinder snapping.
“People are whispering to me,” White Shirt informed him. “That’s part of the summons. They’re using me, I suppose. ‘Into heaven or the saddest realm of nether… my love for you goes on forever.’”
Impossible. The poem he’d written yesterday, and had later thrown out. How could White Shirt possibly quote a poem he’d never seen?
“Arrivals,” the gun-wielder went on. Behind them another ambulance roved slowly down the street, its lights throbbing but its siren off. “He’s coming, Locke.” The gleam in White Shirt’s diamond eyes flicked out. “He’s coming soon.”
“No!” Locke lurched forward and yelled.
White Shirt, his face touched by the saddest smile, plugged the gun barrel into his left ear, and—
“Jesus Christ don’t do it, man!”
—squeezed the trigger.
BANG!
The bullet made its exit through the right temple, and in the process evacuated the entirety of White Shirt’s skull, leaving hanks of brains and viscera pasted to the passenger side of the car’s plush Scotch-Guarded interior.
EIGHT
The Second Arrival
(i)
The new dawn left him awash in light the color of despondency: deathlike, pale, drained. North Precinct Homicide Captain Jack Cordesman stepped onto the coaming of the 24-foot cabin cruiser called WE’RE AWEIGH. Another 64; they always got them early in the morning. TSD floodlamps blazed in the entrance, behind intent shadows. Cordesman went down the short steps of the companionway, then stopped, forced to glance down at the atrocity. What kind of a world is this? he thought.
“Kenneth Parker Ubell,” the uniformed first responder told him. “Also known as ‘Wire.’ We been looking for this fucker a long time.”
“What, he’s skell?”
“Scumbag across the board, sir. Word is he’s pinching for the fences in south county. Done county time on a GTA and a stint in the state cut—multiple counts of armed burglary. ID’d him through the latent datalink in my car. Hell of a machine, Captain.”
Technology. Wonderful. A Hair & Fibers guy was studiously vacuuming the carpet, while another fumed for latents around the forward cabin. But Cordesman was still staring, still not quite sure how this thing at his feet could be human.
The uniform prattled on. “Got about ten outstanding warrants. A dust burnout according to our squeals; used to deal coke before the Jamakes moved in, and the word is he snuffed two of our inside stools on the DEA jam we had going a couple of years back. World’s better off without him you ask me.”
So the guy was skell. Fine. What goes around comes around. But what had happened? Who had done… this?
The smell was extraordinary. Cordesman hadn’t smelled anything like it since that time the Jamakes had left a couple of movers hanging upside down in a project laundry room. Bellies slit open. Guts on the floor. Cordesman pitied the janitor. The odor spiked him: fresh offal, excrement, fresh blood. Kenneth Parker Ubell, alias Wire, or what was left of him, lay nude upon his side. His innards had been expeditiously hauled out of his abdominal cavity, as though someone had been searching for something lost among the crowd of organs. The cabin had been decorated; Cordesman thought of a high school party adorned with crepe paper, only in this case the crepe paper was the majority of the small intestine, hanging from the low ceiling. The rest had been thrown around. And his head… his head…
“Somebody did the job on this guy,” the uniform remarked.
“Even bad guys have bad days.” Cordesman surveyed the cramped cabin, careful not to step past the evidence line. Wire’s clothes lay aside, unbuttoned, not torn. “I don’t like the clothes.”
“Sir?”
“I mean what the fuck happened here? What, this guy was busting onto the boat for stuff to pinch, then somebody caught him? Suddenly the perp’s the victim? And why take off his clothes?”
“He was raped,” a tight, nasally voice answered.
The figure aft turned. It was Jill Brock, Deputy Superintendent of Technical Services, a.k.a. Evidence Section. She wore booties, acetate gloves, and a hairnet, to prevent erroneous fiberfall from contaminating the crime sector. “Good morning, Captain,” she added.
Cordesman made a face. “What do you mean raped?”
“The crime of forced sexual in
tercourse without consent.”
“I know what rape means, Jill. Usually it’s women who’re raped, not guys.”
Jill Brock shrugged. She was skinny, bony, pallid. “Changing times, sir. You ever walked through Broadway? I’ll bet a lot of the fellas there would turn you on. This guy’s an ex-con. Lots of ’em get turned in the joint.”
“How do you know he was raped?”
“Non-reflexive rectal dilation, giveaway sign. Happens a lot in the bigger cities and the state cuts. Washington, Baltimore, your old stomping grounds. Death by asphyxia, choked to death during the act. You want to see his asshole, Captain?”
“No thanks. I gotta drive.”
“My guess is he was working with a partner. The partner turned on him during the job.”
“Come on, Jill,” Cordesman objected. “His partner sodomized him and then tore him up into a cold cut platter?”
Again, Jill Brock shrugged.
“Any prints?”
“All over the place, sir,” she said, grasping a CRP portable ultraviolet spotter. “Got a lot of funny fall too, long red pigmentation, along with some kinks. Ask the owners if any redheads or number ones have been on the boat. I’ll run the jizz, the prints, and the scale-counts fast as I can, and cross-reff them through the department intranet. And another funny thing, no toolmarks on the lock.”
Cordesman looked at her warped. He wasn’t buying the “partner” rap. Wire was skell, but he was smalltime. “And what about his head, Jill?” he inquired. “What happened to his head?”
“That’s the weirdest part, obviously. I’ve never seen a cranial insult anything like this. Don’t know what kind of thing could pry off the top of a man’s skull. The point is his brain’s gone.”
“His what is… what?”
“His brain’s gone,” Jill Brock matter-of-factly repeated.
“You mean blown out?”
“No sir. There’s no gunshot evidence. Somebody took his brain.”
Cordesman needed a drink. Yeah, a Fiddich, rocks. Make that two. He’d quit years ago but right now he wished he hadn’t. He stared openly at her, and at the revelation. “Jill, people don’t take brains. They take exams, they take vitamins, they take vacations. But they don’t take brains.”
Jill Brock shrugged. “Tell that to this guy, Captain. ’Cos somebody sure as hell took his.”
(ii)
Wire’s brain tasted exquisite.
(iii)
Stillness had settled on the Sound. Fog lay upon its waters like a fallen cloud, obscuring the shore. The sweet, stagnant smell of the bay lulled him, along with the droning, vibrating diesels. A raw mist chilled his face. It made him shiver under his foul-weather jacket, his nerves on edge, he felt coiled like a high-tension spring.
Something set his senses on high.
Not too much longer…
It was 9 p.m., 2100 to the military. Their course lay towards the Ballard Bridge and the Fisherman’s Terminal, just south of Golden Gardens. The lights of the homes on Sunset Hill shone as clearly as any beacon drawing the Betruger to Elliot Bay. As they neared the mark, he could see the light reflecting from Harbor Island with its smoking chimneys spewing and glowing smelters, and downtown Seattle with the huge Christmas star in place on the old Fredrick & Nelson’s, and finally, their destination, the festive string of lights that delineated the Terminal.
With the buoys a hundred feet on the Betruger’s stern, Jason brought the starboard engine to idle. A distant green light swung past his bow. The Betruger was in the bay. Looking up at the Ballard Bridge they took a left into the terminal. Twenty minutes later, he guided the vessel to the dock with the engines alone. The captain of a passing ferry gave a noncommittal wave as his passengers gawked at the immense and exorbitant yacht that was coursing along. The ship slowed to a dead stop in front of the marina’s north “t.” With the forward starboard engine thrusters, Jason closed the gap between the bow and the pier. Anna, about as talkative as she always was, tossed a hauser to the dock girl. Jason got a good look: short honey-colored hair and tan muscular legs made him wonder just how long it had been since—
Well, last night didn’t really count, did it?
Dreams didn’t count…
The Betruger fought against the aft thruster as it forced the stern near the dock. Anna was setting spring lines while Jason wondered about how to get into the dock girl’s pants. The way he felt now, he’d have more luck; Anna wasn’t biting. In fact, she’d weirded out for the whole trip, barely said a word. But the entire trip was weird, Jason had to admit. Sometimes you just felt things, and this had never felt right at all.
Lethe.
Fuckin’ weirdo, Jason had no problem articulating. His money’s green, sure, but what kind of guy hires you to take his one-point-five-mil yacht up the coast, says he’ll meet you at the marina, but doesn’t even leave a number so you can call when you pull into the dock?
A fuckin’ weirdo, that’s who.
Oh, well. Why worry? They were tied up now, they’d arrived at their destination, and there was no sign of Lethe on the pier. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait for this screwball?
««—»»
He drained the last of his Beck’s in the galley. His watch read quarter of eleven. Women, he thought. They take forever and a day. But, hell, he’d given her enough time; he rapped twice on Anna’s cabin door. Nothing. He held his breath, but all he heard was the sound of his own pulse. “Anna?” he called. “We better get topside. Your gear ready? I’m sure Lethe’ll be here any minute—it’s getting late.”
Nothing.
“Anna?”
No running shower, no hair dryer, nothing.
He knocked again and gently opened the door. The cabin was dark, the bed made. She ain’t here. She’s already topside, and I’m standing here talking to a friggin’ door!
A soft red light escaped from under the door to the master cabin. Jason could hear a soft rustling noise. Why would she be in here? he wondered, then he gently opened up the cabin door. “Anna, what are you doing in here? Looking for Focke Wolfs? Come on, getten zee lead out,” he tried to joke. But—
The joke ended when he looked ahead.
A single glimpse showed him the steel crate. Its lid, somehow, had been pushed off, and then another glimpse showed him what was inside.
The veneered, dark wood. The plush white pillowed interior. The lined lid cocked open—
Footstand, my ass! That’s a coffin!
But what his next glimpse showed him was infinitely worse.
Sprawled across the floor lay Anna. Her long blonde hair lay spread around her head, a macabre halo. Someone in a white suit crouched over her…
Anna’s limbs twitched as her glassy eyes stared past the ceiling.
“What in God’s name…” Jason muttered.
The head of the figure in white jerked up. A shock of salt and pepper hair hung across the sharp planes of his face. Black eyes bore into Jason’s own.
Lethe smiled, blood ringing his mouth.
Anna’s T-shirt was sopped with blood, pasting the material wetly to her breasts. More—fresher—blood eddied in feeble pulses from her gnawed-open throat. Even in the red light, she looked anemic.
Rage launched Jason forward. He charged Lethe, raising the first thing in hand’s reach, a small fire extinguisher. “You fucker! So help me God I’m gonna split your head!” he promised, then caught Lethe squarely in the temple with the extinguisher, behind a good, hard swing. The impact made a tuned crack! Lethe’s head snapped back violently.
Then he looked at Jason and laughed.
Jason rammed a right so hard his hand hurt. Lethe’s head snapped back again, and then he laughed again.
A blurred backhand sent Jason flying into the port bulkhead; air and spittle exploded out of his mouth.
Jason’s mind dimmed. A chuckling could be heard.
Christ. I gotta get outa—
The hands which next ringed his throat felt like an iron collar.
Jason’s vision swam as the pain became acute. His arms flailed at Lethe’s head. Snapping sounds ground from Jason’s throat as, very quickly, his larynx was crushed. He could taste his own blood rising from his collapsed throat, and in a surprisingly neutral sensation, he understood that he was about to die.
The protruding bones of Jason’s neck emerged through his flesh, passing between Lethe’s fingers. The universe closed around the vampire’s face.
The next thing Jason saw was the ceiling. He could see Lethe talking but he couldn’t hear the words, and he could feel blood running into his ears.
Yeah, I’m dying, he thought. This is it, the Golden Hour. Shit…
Lethe came back into view. His arm was wrapped under Anna’s breasts, lifting her like a limp doll. His lips mouthed more soundless words.
It looked like he said drink.
Then he dropped Anna on top of Jason.
The soft blonde hair fell across Jason’s face, her firm breasts pressed to his chest. He’d always imagined that she would feel like this, and what a thing to recall now, dying, with his throat crushed. A sensation, at any rate. Yes, a nice sensation to die to.