“Shoot me and Edgar will never lose those wings and tail feathers. I’m the only person who can change him back.”
“If I give you Afterlife now, you have no incentive to keep your end of the bargain. You’ll checkmate me, and Edgar and I will end up dead.”
A feint smile of admiration returned to her lips. “You’re half right. I like Edgar just the way he is.”
“Which leaves me six feet under.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe I’ll turn you into a field mouse and watch Edgar eat you alive.”
“Not if I kill you now, sweetheart. At least I’ll finish your zonbies and put an end to your vodou.”
“I sacrificed my baby to get where I am. Are you willing to sacrifice Edgar to shut me down?”
Jake swallowed. I don’t know.
Then a vicious smell overwhelmed him, an odor he hadn’t smelled in over a year since his days in Homicide: the stench of a rotting corpse. Before he could react, muscular arms encircled his chest, pinning his arms to his side and squeezing the breath from him. The birdcage and Glock clattered on the cement, and the birdcage rolled with Edgar shrieking.
No!
Katrina had tricked him. She had only run off at the mouth to give her undead slave time to sneak up on him. And now she stood perfectly poised and unconcerned with any threat he might have posed, a look of amusement on her face.
Jake struggled in his oppressor’s steel grip but could not shake the creature loose. None of Katrina’s other zonbies had reeked like this. Unable to breathe, he twisted his head around and gaped at Malachai’s dead face. Unlike the other zonbies, Malachai had not undergone any kind of preservation. He smelled and looked like death, and as his purplish lips pulled back into a snarl, revealing a full set of teeth, Jake saw hatred blazing in his eyes.
Hearing a stutter of footsteps, Jake snapped his head around in time to see Katrina seize the birdcage and dash back to her spot. Renewing his efforts to break free of Malachai’s crushing hold on him, he lunged at her. With his oxygen cut off, he heard his brain throbbing in his skull and feared he would lose consciousness.
“Let him breathe,” Katrina said, her eyes gleaming from the torchlight.
Malachai loosened his grip just enough for Jake to suck in some air.
“You’ll have to forgive Malachai for being overzealous. He isn’t a zonbie but a zombie. With the right knowledge, there are numerous ways to resurrect the dead. He remains a slave to my will, but I’ve allowed him to retain a certain amount of ambition. It’s impossible for him to move against me, so you’re his sole reason for ‘living.’ He doesn’t like you very much. When he’s finished with you and I’m finished with him, the police will discover what appear to be the corpses of two men who killed each other. I want his body identified. I want there to be no doubt on the streets about who’s running this city now.”
Arching his back, Jake gasped for more air and saw Katrina raise the cage high enough to stare at Edgar. Admiring her handiwork, she unlatched the cage with her free hand, groped for the quivering bird, which pecked at her hand, and allowed the cage to fall to the ground so she could restrain the panicked raven with both hands.
“No!” Jake’s voice rose into the night.
As Edgar flapped his wings, Katrina closed the fingers of her right hand around his neck and extended both arms, as if offering a sacrifice.
Edgar stopped croaking, and his wings stilled.
“Give me Afterlife, or I’ll break his neck and use him for a feather duster. I won’t lie to you: there’s no saving yourself. But at least Edgar will live.”
Staring at the raven in Katrina’s hands, Jake couldn’t help but imagine her baby. He sagged in Malachai’s rancid arms and bowed his head. “All right. You win. Afterlife is yours.”
“Damn you. Where is it?”
“I taped it to the bottom of the birdcage.”
Katrina set one foot on top of the birdcage and spun it around so that the jewel case taped to its bottom came into view. She looked up with disbelief spreading across her face. “That disc contains the most awesome secrets in the history of mankind and you hid it underneath bird shit?”
Kneeling on the ground with one hand still gripping Edgar’s neck, she tore the tape from the jewel case, which landed on the cement, and removed the DVD. Opening the tray of her laptop, she inserted the disc and raised the screen. She watched the program boot up, the screen’s blue glow illuminating her anticipation. Her face transformed into a flesh-and-blood realization of rapture as she paged through Afterlife’s contents.
Folding his arms beneath Malachai’s, Jake reached inside his left sleeve and pulled out the dagger that he had hidden there. He drove AK’s weapon, which had skewered his eye, into Malachai’s thigh with no effect. Yanking the useless dagger free, he held on to it for comfort as congealed blood oozed out of Malachai’s leg like jelly.
Katrina rose, holding Edgar by his neck. The bird beat his wings to prevent being choked. “You’re unpredictable, but so am I.” She flung Edgar over her head, and he took to the air, soaring into the night and disappearing from view.
Jake screamed, a painful cry that petered out to a strangled gasp. He could never save Edgar now. All his actions over the last twenty hours had amounted to nothing, and Katrina possessed Afterlife. “Edgar …”
Katrina regarded him with cool eyes. “Kill him.”
Malachai resumed his crushing hold, and Jake thought his ribs would snap.
“You don’t mind if I stay and watch, do you, Jake? I like to watch.”
With the wind knocked out of him, Jake could not answer.
Malachai leaned back, lifting Jake’s legs off the ground. Unable to leverage himself, Jake struggled like a beached fish. Watching the fight, Katrina picked up her laptop. Jake flailed his arms, unable to make use of the dagger. He pitched his head forward, then threw it back into Malachai’s face as hard as he could. Malachai did not react, but Jake felt the zombie’s nose flatten out.
Jake rocked forward and slammed his head back again, sending pain through his skull and empty eye socket. He repeated this again and again. The pain of impact lessened, and he heard squishing sounds behind him. Lukewarm fluid ran down the back of his neck. Katrina’s face screwed up in surprise, and Malachai increased the intensity of his hold. Jake’s vision darkened, and he felt his consciousness slipping away.
One … more … time!
Throwing his head back once more, he heard a soggy sound and felt a skull caving in. He prayed it wasn’t his and felt reassured when Malachai tipped forward and released him. Jake fell on his hands and knees but dragged Malachai with him. Through the pain, he realized that his head and Malachai’s had merged together. Bracing his left hand against Malachai’s chest, he twisted his body sideways and stepped aside. After a great ripping sound, his head came free. Malachai staggered in a half circle, muscles dripping off his brittle skull.
Stunned, Jake shook his head. Wasting no time, he lunged forward and swung the dagger at the blinded zombie. The blade drove into Malachai’s temple with a deep crunch, and Jake realized his foe’s body was already in a state of decomposition.
Malachai reached up for the hilt protruding from the side of his head, his body jerking from side to side. His fingers closed around the handle, then slipped away, and he collapsed in a heap on the ground. A dark sphere rose from the shell and faded.
Jake grabbed the back of his head. His hand came away dripping flesh that resembled cooked fat. Malachai’s face.
As Katrina backed away, Jake’s eyes settled on his gun. She sprinted in the opposite direction, running for the construction elevator. Jake scooped up the gun and ran after her, but the pain in his head slowed him down, and he even fell to one knee before resuming the foot chase.
Katrina threw herself into the elevator and slammed the cage door behind her. A moment later, as Jake caught up, the elevator’s motor coughed to life and the elevator rose. Jake slowed to a stop beneath the elevator and watched its
ascent.
Following the sound of the motor, he aimed his Glock at the greasy metal and fired at it repeatedly. The muzzle fire flashing from the Glock’s barrel did little to soothe his headache. Rounds sparked against the motor, and shell casings collected on the ground. Black smoke spewed out of the motor, which sputtered to a stop. Looking up, Jake saw the elevator had stopped as well.
Seconds later, the cage door swung open, and Katrina stood at its edge. Measuring the distance to the ladder alongside the elevator, she jumped the four feet with one arm clutching the laptop. Jake watched in awe as her lead foot landed on one ladder rung and her free hand caught another with the grace of a dancer.
Holstering his smoking gun, Jake ran to the ladder and climbed after her. Twenty feet up, with his head throbbing, he saw her dress flapping around her. Then something dark obscured his view.
The laptop!
Flattening himself against the ladder, face turned down and left arm protecting his crown, he braced for the impact. A flat side of the laptop slammed into his forearm, fracturing it from wrist to elbow. Screaming, he wrapped his right arm around a rung so he would not release it. The laptop continued its descent, then shattered into pieces on the ground. He knew that if he investigated, he would find no sign of Afterlife and Katrina would evade him. Wincing, he looked up again.
She had vanished.
Without hesitation, he resumed climbing, every pull of his left arm reducing him to whimpers. He had to prevent Katrina from escaping. He needed to hear from her lips that she could not bring Edgar back, and then she needed to die. He scaled the ladder, feeling his injured arm swell up like Popeye’s. Fifty feet from the foundation at ground level, he stopped.
Why would she go any higher than this?
He looked down just in time to glimpse a flash of white disappearing onto the fourth floor of the construction site, ten feet below him.
Tricked me, he thought as he climbed back down. Now he had to make the same leap she had, without the use of his left arm to grab the girder for support. Pushing off with his right hand and foot, he crossed the chasm, his left foot reaching the ledge. He pitched forward, rolled, and came up in a crouch.
Now what? This floor of the unfinished building stretched into total darkness. If he turned on his flashlight, she’d know his location. He edged forward into the darkness, his arm aching even more now that he had stopped climbing. Hearing a slight scuffling sound, he pivoted to see Katrina’s silhouette darting from behind a girder. With great speed, she leapt off the edge and seized one rung in both hands and scrambled up the ladder. Jake mimicked her move, aware that he had only one good hand with which to grab the ladder. His hand passed between rungs in the darkness, and the impact of him crashing face-first into the ladder almost propelled him backwards into empty space.
Tilting his head back, he saw his quarry had almost reached the gantry that would lead her to the plywood fence and the sidewalk beyond it. Draping his left arm around the ladder, he reached for his Glock, doubting that a one-eyed man in extreme pain could hit a target, even at this close range and from his angle.
Katrina’s hands touched the gantry, and then she screamed, a sound that chilled and surprised Jake. Her hair billowed around her head. She pounded on the gantry and kicked at nothing. Then she fell.
Jake saw it in slow motion: her hands clawing at empty space. As she tipped backwards so that she plummeted headfirst, Jake noticed a black shape perched on the gantry’s edge.
Edgar!
But if the raven had not flown away, then the bokor must not die; she needed to return Edgar to normal. On reflex, as Katrina pirouetted to certain death, Jake seized the rung with his right hand and snared her wrist with his left.
This is going to hurt…
He hated being right at the worst times. Katrina’s body jerked Jake’s fractured arm, forcing him to scream again. Her legs swung past her head so that she became upright again, but the front of her body crashed into the ladder with a reverberating thud. The pain that traveled the length of Jake’s left arm and back was so intense that he thought the bones in his arm would split in two, and he screamed through clenched teeth.
Katrina swung her free arm up and clutched Jake’s wrist, which only intensified his pain, and he already clung to the ladder for dear life.
He made eye contact with Katrina, whose panic-stricken face bled from several deep gashes inflicted on her by Edgar. “Help me …”
Jake’s face heated with strain. “Promise me you’ll change Edgar back.”
“I … swear it…”
He believed her, but he didn’t know if he could save her. “Grab the ladder, so you can let go of my arm.”
She kicked in the air. “I can’t…”
And then Jake heard the flapping of wings as Edgar came in for the kill. The raven’s claws raked Katrina’s face, and he pecked at her eyes, wings still flapping.
Jake’s heart leapt in his chest. “Edgar, no!”
Katrina sacrificed herself to the great god of gravity, and as she plunged through the air, Jake saw that her gaping left eye socket lacked an eyeball. As the raven spread its wings and circled the space above her, Katrina continued to claw at empty air, a look of disbelief on her face. Then darkness swallowed her features, and she flattened out on the foundation below.
Edgar…
Holding tight to the ladder, Jake found he could no longer use his left hand at all. He had no choice but to step onto a rung and shoot his hand up to a higher rung. With tremendous effort, he reached the gantry and saw the shiny Afterlife disc lying near the edge, its surface smeared with red lipstick where Katrina had held it in her mouth. Too exhausted to pull himself onto the gantry, he rested for a moment, gathering his remaining strength, then threw one leg over the metal walkway and rolled onto it, chest heaving.
Edgar lighted onto the edge, his black beak open wide to accommodate the ruptured orb he had ripped from Katrina’s head. Bloody muscles dangled from the eyeball. With perfect balance, he spat the eye over the edge.
Jake closed his eye and swallowed, measuring the extent of his failure. Edgar would never be human again, but at least the zonbies had been destroyed. Opening his eye, he took in the clear night sky, then raised his throbbing left arm so he could see his watch. Midnight, the witching hour. Grimacing, he held back laughter and tears at the same time.
Edgar just blinked at him and cawed at the darkness.
EPILOGUE
Jake parked the battered Monte Carlo on a residential street in Jackson Heights. Surveying the row houses, brownstones, and two-family homes, he switched off the engine and gathered his thoughts. Sunlight glared off the car’s dirty windshield. He saw teenage boys loitering on stoops, glancing at corners where zonbies had probably dealt Black Magic only the night before.
This morning the TV news shows had devoted all their airtime to the sensational events rocking the city: twenty-four hours after thirty embalmed corpses were discovered at drug spots around the city with bullet holes in their heads, another sixty had been discovered without bullet holes but also without fingertips, toes, or teeth.
Mayor Madigan announced his intention to arrange for mass viewings of the bodies to help with identification, and Governor Santucci assigned emergency funds to the city, so NYPD could rehire the thousands of cops who had been laid off. Both politicians vowed to take the city back from the vicious drug lords who had committed such heinous acts. According to police commissioner Bryant, “massive amounts” of the deadly narcotic known as Black Magic had already been confiscated.
Jake smiled to himself, knowing that his former colleagues in blue had taken into custody only the small amounts of drugs carried on the persons of Malachai’s undead soldiers, now dead. He also knew that a certain amount of Black Magic would find its way back onto the streets and that in another day or two—hell, maybe even tonight—neighborhood hoppers would take to the corners, dispensing their customary contraband.
Getting out of the damaged ca
r, he mounted the steps of a white house and rang the doorbell.
A black woman with hair tight to her scalp opened the door. She wore business casual slacks and a blouse, and her weary expression grew animated at the sight of him. “Jake …” Joyce embraced him, then pulled back. “What happened to your eye?”
“It’s a long story. I’m still getting used to the patch. Can I see Martin?”
“Yes, thanks for coming by.” Stepping back from the door, she allowed Jake to enter the hallway and then her living room. Martin sat slumped on the sofa, watching news.
“Hi, Martin.”
“Jake!” Martin ran into Jake’s arms, then looked up at him with hopeful eyes. “Do you know where my dad is?”
Jake offered a weak smile. “I wish I did. Let’s sit down.”
Joyce joined them on the sofa.
“Don’t ask me how, but I know that your father is alive. Call it a sixth sense that partners develop over time.”
“Is he hurt?”
Jake considered the question. “I don’t think so. But I don’t think he’s able to contact anyone, either.”
“All they’re talking about on the news is this drug war,” Joyce said. “It sounds like they’re devoting all their resources to fighting these animals behind Black Magic.”
“You’re right. I don’t think the police will find him. But I will. I promise you, I’ll do everything in my power to find him and bring him home.”
Joyce’s eyes teared up. “I believe you.”
“If either of you ever needs anything—and I mean anything—you call me first. Don’t hesitate to pick up the phone or come by my office.”
“Thank you, Jake.”
“If I get tied up on a case and you don’t hear from me, don’t think I’ve forgotten about you or Edgar. I’m making this the number one priority in my life.”
Martin bowed his head, hiding his tears, and Jake eased his hurt arm around the boy’s shoulders.
Desperate Souls Page 28