“Ain’t too many hunters that travel in a pair, and none’a the ones I know about match your descriptions, so I figured it was the pair’a you. Didn’t know for sure till I got here, though.”
“What would you have done if we were normal burglars?” Sam asked.
Shrugging, McBain said, “Busted you. And the Five-oh was gonna send backup if they didn’t hear from me in twenty. Trust me, after ten years’a this, I’ve gotten real good at coverin’ my ass. See, you guys can just leave town. Me, I gotta stay and clean up.”
Dean put away his EMF meter. “Nothin’. All right, listen, we gotta motor. I don’t think there’s anything else to find here.”
McBain said, “You think this is part of a ritual? I assume there’s more to it, and the next piece is gonna be Monday.”
Again the brothers exchanged glances. “Uh, yeah,” Sam said.
“I follow phases of the moon—kind of an occupational hazard.”
Sam quickly explained the ritual from some freak named Percival Samuels. “The next murder’s either gonna be on Webster Avenue near Beford Park Boulevard or at Fordham Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.”
Scratching her nose, McBain said, “Yeah, okay. Tell you what, I’ll help out—take whichever location you two don’t.” Dean got a sour expression at that. “You got a problem, brushy-top?”
“A couple, actually. First of all, please stop calling me ‘brushy-top.’”
Sam broke into a wide grin at that.
“Secondly, I’m not sure I buy this whole ‘crusading cop who fights demons on the side’ crap—or that you knew Dad.”
In truth, McBain had expected this—both that Dean would dislike the nickname and that the brothers would be hinky about the fact that she knew their father. Having met John Winchester more than once, it didn’t surprise her in the least that he neglected to tell his sons about her. John wasn’t exactly big on sharing. Besides, she’d gotten word of some of Sam and Dean’s hunts, and while they hadn’t made a lot of mistakes, the few they did make were ones she wouldn’t have expected of John’s sons—unless he held things back from them.
“John Winchester,” she said, “white male, approximately fifty-three years old, six-foot-one, a hundred ninety pounds, dark hair, brown eyes, occasional beard depending on his mood, former U.S. Marine, wife Mary, deceased, two sons, Sam and Dean. Came to New York City on three separate occasions, once to hunt a golem in Brighton Beach, once to deal with a haunting on the subway—”
Sam’s mouth fell open. “The phantom subway conductor?”
McBain smirked. “Sorta. This spirit prob’ly was the basis for that crazy legend.”
“What was the third one?” Dean asked.
“I swear to God, he slew a dragon. It was down in Chinatown—that was one crazy-ass case, lemme tell ya.”
Sam’s mouth fell even farther open. “Dad killed a dragon?”
Shrugging, McBain said, “Well, it was a small one.”
Attitude still firmly in place, Dean said, “And you helped him?”
“Tried to. Mostly he snarled and spit at me—kinda like what you’re doin’ now, brushy-top—and told me to stay outta his way.”
“Did you?” Dean asked.
“Not the first time. After we almost shot each other, we came to an understandin’. He kept me posted on his movements when he came to town, I told him what I knew, and I kept an eye on him from a distance.”
Finally, Dean relented. “Yeah, that sounds like Dad.”
“Listen, Detective, we’d better get going,” Sam said gently.
McBain reached into her jacket pocket and removed her cardholder, picking out two business cards. “Here,” she said, handing one to each of the brothers. “My cell’s on there. You need me, use that one. If either one’a you calls to MPU, there’s a record of it. The cell’s my personal phone, so it’s safer.”
“Thanks,” Sam said, pocketing the card.
The three of them went back upstairs, McBain switching the light off behind them, Dean closing and relocking the door once they were back out in the driveway.
After Dean clicked the padlock on the driveway gate shut and they were both standing at their respective cars, McBain said, “Listen, you two, be careful. I covered you this time, but it ain’t gonna be easy, especially if you’re gonna go pulling felonies on me.”
“We can handle the cops,” Dean said defensively.
“This ain’t no red-state sheriff ’s office, brushy-top, we’re talkin’ the NYPD, and we’re talkin’ a federal warrant for multiple homicides. I know you hunter types like livin’ on the edge, but right now that edge is pointed right at your balls, you feel me? You don’t know me, you don’t trust me, you don’t like me, but right now, you need me. So don’t do nothin’ stupid, and we’ll all get outta this alive.”
Without waiting for either brother to reply, McBain got into her Saturn, turned it on, and drove off, heading toward Kingsbridge Road, which would take her back to the Major Deegan. That’d get her to the Triboro and back to her Queens apartment, where she’d get all of two hours’ sleep before having to head into One Police Plaza to report for her shift tomorrow. Right now she was on a Wednesday to Sunday rotation, but at least that meant she’d be free to help the Winchesters out on Monday. If we’re lucky, we’ll stop another poor bastard from getting killed.
ELEVEN
The Afiri house
The Bronx, New York
Saturday 18 November 2006
Dean wasn’t used to being the first one up—he was even less used to it when he got up at noon. But Manfred’s door was shut, his snoring clearly audible even through the closed door, and a peek into the other guest room showed that Sam was not only out like a light, but drooling on the pillow. Pausing to get a picture of that with his cell phone, he then took a shower, went downstairs, and—after throwing a load of their dirty clothes into the washer—plunked himself down on the couch, opened up Sam’s laptop, and found that crazy guy’s Poe website.
Among other things, “Arthur Gordon Pym” had archived a whole bunch of Poe’s stories on his site, so Dean started reading them while drinking some of Manfred’s killer coffee out of a mug that said, ibm: italian by marriage, with the three letters in the red, white, and green of the Italian flag. That coffee also went a very long way toward reminding Dean as to what he liked about Manfred. So did the soundtrack for his reading, which was the dulcet tones of Rush’s self-titled album. Both factors did a great deal to wash the taste of Scottso out of his brain.
By the time Sam stumbled downstairs wearing only a pair of pants, Dean put on his best mad-scientist voice. “It’s alive, I tell you, alive!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sam muttered, heading straight into the kitchen.
Grinning, Dean looked back at the laptop, taking his third shot at reading this particular paragraph, and finally giving up.
When Sam came into the living room, clutching a mug that had a Dilbert cartoon on it, Dean said, “Dude, you told me that this Rue Morgue thing was the first detective story, right?”
“Yeah, why?” Sam said as he sat on the easy chair.
“’Cause I gotta tell ya, this is the worst piece of crap I ever read in my life. I mean, the other stories weren’t bad. Soon’s I started reading ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ I remembered it from that stupid class I took back at that crappy Catholic school in Illinois. But this Rue Morgue story…” He trailed off.
Sam shrugged as he sipped his coffee. “What can I tell you, Dean, it was revolutionary at the time. And hey, if it wasn’t for that story, we probably wouldn’t have CSI today.”
“No loss,” Dean said. “There’s better things on Thursday nights anyhow.”
“It gets better once you get past the opening,” Sam said.
Dean agreed with his brother only insofar as the story couldn’t possibly have gotten any worse. The opening was just stultifying, going on for pages and pages about nothing. Where were the murders? The detecting? The orangutan, for
crying out loud?
Just as “Working Man” came to an end, Sam gulped down some more coffee and then asked, “So whadja think of Detective McBain?”
Setting the laptop aside, Dean blew out a breath. “I can’t believe Dad didn’t tell us about her.”
“Really? ’Cause I have no trouble believing that Dad didn’t tell us about her. He didn’t tell us about the roadhouse, he didn’t tell us about Ellen or Jo or Ellen’s husband, he didn’t tell us about Elkins, he didn’t—”
Throwing up his hands in surrender, Dean said, “All right, all right.” He shook his head and gulped down the remainder of his own coffee, which had gone fairly cold. “I been thinkin’ a lot about her, actually,” he said, “and I think we can trust her.”
Sam’s eyelids had been half closed since he came down the stairs, but they opened all the way now. “Really? Not that I don’t agree, but I’m surprised to hear you say it.”
Dean shrugged. “Toldja before, I know cops. Dude, you and me—but especially me—we’re the collar of the century. Any cop would give his left nut to bust either one of us right now. Last night, she had us cold. She coulda taken us in, gotten her face on the news, got promoted—hell, she’d have her choice of assignments, she brought us in. And she didn’t. No way a cop does that.”
“Unless there are extenuating circumstances.”
“Exactly.” Dean got up and said, “I’m gonna refill the java cup.”
Sam unfolded himself from the easy chair and followed. “You know, I’ve been thinking about Dad—that’s why I slept so late, to be honest, I was tossin’ and turnin’ with this half the night after we got back.”
Crap crap crap, Dean thought as he entered the kitchen. The absolute last thing he wanted right now was to get into a talk with Sam about Dad. He wasn’t ready to go there with Sammy, not yet.
Approaching the coffeemaker, Dean saw that Sam had only left the dregs in the bottom of the glass pot. Grabbing it, holding it up, and sloshing the sludgy remains around the bottom, he said, “Dude! Coffeemaker etiquette. You finish, you make another pot.”
Sam recoiled as if Dean had slapped him. “I didn’t finish it—there’s some left.”
Dean glared at Sam. “You gotta be kiddin’ me.”
“Anyhow,” Sam said as Dean dumped the remains into the sink. “I was thinkin’ back to when we were at Bobby’s and had Meg trapped in the circle.”
Unsure where Sam was going with this, Dean just grunted noncommittally as he rinsed out the pot.
“Remember when Bobby told us that Meg was a possessed human?”
Dean nodded as he filled the pot with cold water. He had only thought of Meg as a demon, presuming that she had simply taken on the form of a cute blonde.
Sam, still clutching his mug of coffee, said, “I’ll never forget the look on Bobby’s face when he told us that—and he said, ‘Can’t you tell?’ He couldn’t believe that we couldn’t recognize the signs.”
“What’s that got to do with Dad, Sam?” Dean asked, pouring the water into the coffeemaker, though he had a guess.
“That was something Dad could’ve taught us, but he didn’t. He didn’t tell us about other hunters, he didn’t tell us about the roadhouse, he didn’t tell us about vampires until we actually met some, he didn’t tell us about goofer dust. Sure, he taught us the basics, and he taught us how to fight and defend ourselves, but that was it. Hell, most of the lore I know, I learned on my own. And for all that we fought about it—I think Dad was glad I was at Stanford.”
Dean had moved to the freezer, and those words stopped him dead in his tracks. “What?”
“You don’t just get a free ride at Stanford, Dean—or anywhere else. You gotta fill out a ton of forms, and a parent or legal guardian has to sign most of ’em, especially the financial aid ones.”
This shocked Dean. “You mean Dad actually signed all that stuff?”
“At first, yeah. He bitched and moaned about it, but he signed everything.”
Dean shuddered as he dumped the coffee grounds into the filter, remembering the nasty arguments during that time. Dad accusing Sam of abandoning the family, Sam accusing Dad of either running his life or ruining his life, while he tried desperately (and failed miserably) to get them to calm down and talk to each other instead of at each other. To find out now that Dad had facilitated the process…
“Maybe,” Dean said slowly, “Dad didn’t think it was real. I mean, sure, fill out the forms, humor you, but then when you actually said you were leaving…”
Sam tilted his head. “I guess that’s possible. But still, that’s a lot of paperwork just to humor me. And honestly, he could’ve killed my whole college career at any point just by not filling the stuff out.”
None of this rang right to Dean. “You mean to tell me that Dad filled out that crap every year?”
“Uh—” Sam hesitated.
Dean knew that look on his brother’s face. He was hiding something. “What’d you do, Sammy?”
There was a long pause. The coffeemaker started gurgling as the boiling water poured through the filter and into the glass pot.
“I—” Sam gulped down some more coffee to stall, then said: “I got them to declare me independent.”
“Excuse me?”
“Dad wouldn’t speak to me after I left, so I couldn’t very well get him to fill out the paperwork for sophomore year, and I’m not a good enough forger to fake his signature. But I would’ve lost the scholarship, so I provided documentation that my father was missing and couldn’t be found—which, by the way, was a pretty easy sell, since Dad was missing from a legal perspective. So they declared me independent. I could fill out all the forms myself.”
“So you’re saying you disowned Dad?”
Sam opened his mouth, closed it, then lamely said, “He disowned me first.”
Anger flared within Dean, but it burned to ashes almost instantly. After the crap Dad pulled on his freakin’ deathbed, I’m not about to defend the sonofabitch.
Besides, it was over and done with. Getting into an argument with Sam about Dad right now would just about kill him, Dean thought.
“Fine,” he said tersely, “so what’s all this got to do with him not telling us about McBain?”
“Remember that air-traffic guy, Jerry?”
Dean nodded. He and Dad had saved Jerry Panowski from a poltergeist, and Jerry later called in him and Sam when a spirit was crashing planes. He wasn’t sure what Jerry had to do with anything, though. “What about him?”
“He said that Dad went on about how proud he was that I was at Stanford. I couldn’t believe it, but now I’m starting to understand.”
Having pretty much lost all track of Sam’s point—if he even had one—Dean threw up his hands. “Understand what?”
“Even while he was training us, he was protecting us. He yelled at me for going to Stanford, but he was proud of me—and helped me go in the first place. For everything he taught us, there’s about fifty things we’ve had to figure out on our own or got caught off-guard by. Hell, Dean, the whole reason he up and disappeared a year ago was because he was trying to protect us from the demon, and he only let us come with him after we dropped a brick wall on his head.”
Dean found himself staring intently at Manfred’s sink, listening to the gurgling of the coffeemaker.
After several quiet seconds, Sam tentatively said, “Dean?”
Finally, Dean turned around and stared up at his brother, the man he’d come to find when Dad had disappeared, the man he’d been told to protect at all costs, and kill if he couldn’t protect him.
In a very soft voice, Dean said, “You know what I think? I think Dad’s need to fight evil was constantly fighting with his need to keep you and me safe. And I think he couldn’t win that fight, and I think that fight killed him.”
Sam and Dean just stared at each other for a few seconds.
Manfred’s voice sounded from the staircase. “You fellas awake?”
Both b
rothers said “In here” simultaneously. Unable to help himself, Dean broke into what turned out to be a cathartic grin. Sam returned it.
Manfred, wearing a pair of hole-filled sweatpants and a faded tie-dyed T-shirt, shuffled into the kitchen on bare feet. “You fellas all right?”
“Yeah,” Dean said, “just had our daily allotment of emo-angst. We’re over it. Oh, and I put in a load of wash. That okay?”
“No problemo, fellas. My casa is your casa.”
“Thanks.”
“Now, normally I wouldn’t be up this early on a Saturday, but I jus’ ’membered somethin’ you fellas might wanna know about.” He walked over to the cabinet, pulled out a pottery mug that had an ugly scrunched-up face carved into the side of it and the word grumble etched over it, and poured himself some coffee. “A while back Aldo had himself a girlfriend who was a real ’rÿcher.”
Sam squinted. Dean rolled his eyes. “He means a Queensrÿche fan, not the first officer of the Enterprise.”
Before Sam could say anything, Manfred went on: “Her name was Roxy—er, somethin’. I think.”
“Was she a blonde?” Dean asked.
Manfred gulped down some coffee and then gave a gap-toothed grin. “Aldo only dates blondes. Anyhow, I’m gonna head upstairs and find me some porn on the Internet. Talk atcha later, fellas.”
Wincing, Dean said, “Oh, no” after Manfred left.
“What is it?” Sam asked.
“We gotta talk to Aldo about Roxy. Which means we gotta go back to the Park in Rear.”
Sam grinned. “It’s hell bein’ a hero, ain’t it, Dean?”
“Screw you.”
TWELVE
The Park in Rear
Larchmont, New York
Saturday 18 November 2006
Dean’s second trip to the Park in Rear was a marked improvement on his first for two reasons: no sign of Janine, and Jennifer was working the bar again. Better yet, Jennifer was wearing leather pants instead of tight jeans.
“Well well well,” Jennifer said when he approached the bar with Sam, “look who’s back.”
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