Standing up from the couch, he walked over to Manfred. “I didn’t wanna let you down, but I couldn’t be around that stupid moggy for more’n five minutes, so I asked the guys to cover for me on the insulin shots.”
“Wait,” Robbie said, “this was when you had the reunion, you said? What was it, oh-four?”
Nodding, Manfred said, “Yeah. And I trusted you to—”
Aldo held up his hands. “I know, I know, but—” He turned around. “Tell him, guys.”
Robbie and Tommy both nodded. “Yeah, we took care of it.”
Sam looked over at Eddie, who was also nodding.
Now Manfred was shaking his head in disbelief. “I never even showed you guys how to give ’er the shot—I just showed Aldo.”
Tommy laughed. “Dude, we know how to navigate around a hypodermic, I’m telling you that right now.”
Sam looked at Dean. Dean shrugged and said, “Well, look, it doesn’t change one fact: Roxy’s dead.”
Everyone turned and looked at Sam and Dean, as if surprised that the two of them were still even in the room. “Say what?” Aldo said.
“She’s dead,” Manfred said. “And the reason I know she’s dead is ’cause her ghost’s been hauntin’ me for a couple weeks now, every time I come back from a gig at the Park in Rear.”
There was silence for several seconds after that.
Then Aldo, Robbie, and Tommy burst out laughing. Eddie didn’t, but Sam assumed that his face would crack open if he even smiled.
Between guffaws, Robbie said, “I coulda sworn April Fool’s Day was in, y’know, April.”
“We’re serious,” Dean said.
Aldo shook his head, still laughing. “I always thought Ash wasn’t wired too good, and this proves it, if you jokers’re his friends.”
Dean turned to his brother. “Sam?”
Showtime, Sam thought, and hefted Dad’s journal, turning it to the page he’d bookmarked with a paper clip.
“Phasmates mortua hic ligata admovete audieminique!”
Robbie frowned. “What is that, German?”
Tommy looked at Robbie. “Nah, that’s Latin.” At Robbie’s dubious look, he said, “What? I took it in high school.”
Sam repeated, “Phasmates mortua hic ligata admovete audieminique!”
“This is nuts!” Aldo said. “There ain’t no such thing as—”
For the third and final time, Sam said, “Phasmates mortua hic ligata admovete audieminique!”
With a clatter, the windows started rattling and the CDs started vibrating in their racks, the collision of plastic on jewel case making a terrible racket.
Leaping to his feet, Tommy said, “What the hell?”
The others were all looking around and at each other and at Sam. He recognized the expressions on their faces because he’d seen it more times than he could count: This can’t be happening. This isn’t real. This must be fake. This violates my view of the world. Make it stop!
Then the cackling started.
Aldo went incredibly pale after that. In a small voice, he said, “Roxy?”
The cackling continued, but Roxy’s voice cried, “Love me! Love me! Love me!”
And then she appeared.
The blond hair was stragglier than it had been the last time, and it was harder to make out her eyes, but the Queensrÿche shirt was still visible, and her mouth was wide open, screaming the words, “Love me!”
This time, though, she went straight for the window where Eddie was standing.
Eddie’s face changed for the first time in Sam’s brief acquaintance with him: His eyes widened, his mouth contorted into a scream, he waved his arms back and forth in front of his face, and he yelled, “Get away from me, you bitch! You’re dead! Dead and buried!”
Manfred stared at the bass player. “Eddie, what the hell?”
“Love me! Love me!” the spirit of Roxy Carmichael kept screaming.
“I told you no, you stupid bimbo!” Eddie screamed. “Get away from me, you’re dead!”
“Love me!”
Tommy and Robbie had run over to the living room entryway where Sam and Dean were standing with Manfred and Aldo. “Make it go away, man,” Robbie said.
“Why?” Sam asked.
“What the hell kinda question’s that?” Tommy asked. “Get ridda that thing, or I swear, I’ll go medieval on your ass, I’m tellin’ you that right now!”
“Love me! Love me!”
Several CDs fell onto the hardwood floor. The windows rattled harder.
“Go away!” Eddie screamed. “I killed you already, go away!”
Dean walked over to the hallway, where he’d hidden his shotgun. Cocking it, he walked into the living room and held it up, taking aim at the spirit.
Predictably, one of the band members objected. Robbie stepped forward, but Sam grabbed his shoulder. “Trust us.”
“Hell with that—you brought that thing in here.”
“It was here before these fellas got here,” Manfred said.
Aldo, Sam noticed, wasn’t saying a word, but he looked furious.
“Love me!”
“Cover your ears,” Sam said, suiting action to words.
With a deafening blast, Dean fired rock-salt rounds at Roxy’s spirit, and she dissipated.
“Ow!” Eddie gripped his right arm with his left. Some of the rock salt had pelted him. Sam couldn’t bring himself to be sorry about it.
As soon as Roxy disappeared, two things happened: The house stopped rattling, and Aldo ran across the living room and belted Eddie in the jaw.
Even as Eddie collapsed to the hardwood floor, Aldo kicked him, then bent over to punch him again, screaming, “You son of a bitch, you killed her!”
Dean grabbed Aldo’s wrist. “Don’t. I’m right there with you, dude, but don’t.”
Aldo whirled around. “Let go’a me, Sam.”
“I’m Dean, and I ain’t lettin’ go. Let’s give him a chance to talk.” Dean looked down at Eddie, who was curled up into a fetal position, tears streaking his cheeks. “If you don’t like what he says, then I’ll help you beat the crap out of him. But if nothing else, we need to know what he did to her—and to her body.”
Aldo stared at Dean for several seconds, then nodded, lowering his arm, at which point Dean let go of it.
“It was an accident,” Eddie muttered.
Grabbing the bass player by the lapels of his black vest, Dean hauled him to his feet. “Get up. Now talk, or I let him go to town on you. What happened?”
“It was—” Eddie sniffled, and wiped the tears from his eyes. “It was when Manfred was at his reunion. Aldo didn’t wanna be near Lucille, so Robbie, Tommy, and me each took turns. I had Saturday night and Sunday mornin’, so I could stay the night Saturday. I invited Roxy over.”
“What?” Aldo screamed.
“I was screwin’ her, okay?” Eddie said defensively. “It wasn’t a big deal. She told me you didn’t satisfy her in bed no more, and I figured what the hell, I’d been wantin’ a piece’a her since she came on to Manfred back in the day. But it was nothin’, it was just sex.”
Aldo stepped forward, fists clenched. “Just sex?”
“Easy,” Dean said, a hand on Aldo’s shoulder.
“So after we screwed, she put on the Queensrÿche T-shirt and starts talkin’ about how we should be together permanent. I didn’t want that.”
“What, she wasn’t good enough for you?” Aldo asked. Sam could hear the fury in his voice, and he wasn’t entirely sure Dean would be able to hold him back much longer.
“For screwin’ around, sure, but I didn’t want the stupid bitch as a girlfriend. Woulda messed up the band, for one thing, ’cause if she broke up with you and went with me, it’d be all messed up, and I didn’t even like the stupid bitch. Just liked her body’s all.”
Manfred said, “So, what, you killed her?”
Turning to face Manfred, Eddie said, “No! God, we just—it was an accident, she tripped and fell down the
damn staircase, right after we had this big-ass fight. I told her I didn’t want a relationship, she said fine, whatever, she was getting something to drink in the kitchen, and she tripped and fell.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Aldo asked. “Roxy never tripped in her life.”
“Maybe she was drunk,” Eddie said lamely.
Shaking his head, Manfred said, “She was sober, man, you knew that. C’mon, we ain’t stupid. ’Sides, you just said you killed her and that was, whadayacallit—spur of the moment stuff.”
Sam said, “I’m willing to bet all these guys will testify to you admitting you killed her.” He hoped that wouldn’t be the case, honestly, as the other members of Scottso would make awful witnesses, plus the circumstances under which Eddie confessed weren’t really repeatable in a court of law. Rather than pursue that, Sam asked, “What did you do with the body?”
“Buried her in the backyard.” Eddie shook his head. “Took all freakin’ night, too.”
Sam felt a vibration in his pocket. He’d muted his Treo, but the vibrate function still worked. Taking out the phone, the display indicated that it was Detective McBain. Stepping out into the hallway, he answered. “Detective, this is a coincidence.”
“Why’s that?”
“We were just about to call you. Riverdale’s part of the, uh, the Five-oh, right?”
McBain snorted. “Oh, you’re usin’ the lingo now? Real cute. Yeah, the Five-oh covers Riverdale, why?”
“You may want to call your friends there, ’cause we think that missing person, Roxy Carmichael, is buried in the backyard of the house we’re staying in.”
There was a pause. “Seriously?”
“Uh, yeah. That isn’t why you called, obviously. What’s up?”
“I’ll call the Five-oh when I’m done with you, but then you two need to get your white asses outta there.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah, of course.” They were still fugitives, and the police were likely to be there for a while, what with digging up Roxy’s body and taking statements from all of Scottso.
“Luckily, I got just the thing to keep you busy. That’s why I was callin’. Our buddy Arthur Gordon Pym’s gone missing.”
EIGHTEEN
Church of St. Nicholas of Tolentine
The Bronx, New York
Thursday 23 November 2006
Dean had to admit that he had no idea how Sam managed to find his way out of Riverdale. And this was a hard admission, as he had always prided himself on having an excellent sense of direction.
Once they got down the big hill of Riverdale Avenue, one of the neighborhood’s major thoroughfares, Dean had no trouble following where they were going. There was an entrance to the Major Deegan Expressway at West 230th Street, and the bottom of that hill put them at the corner of 231st, so Dean knew there were about six ways to get to the expressway from there. And they were going back to the corner of Fordham and MLK, where they’d last parted ways with McBain on Monday night, which was right off the expressway’s Fordham Road exit. He could have easily taken over driving from there.
But he had no faith in his ability to drive around Riverdale. And that really pissed him off.
Still, it needed to be done. Frankly, the fact that Mackey was missing just confirmed his suspicion that he was in on it with the sick bastard who was trying to resurrect Poe. But Sam said that McBain thought there was more to it than that. Either way, though, they had to get out of Manfred’s house before the cops turned up. Eddie was going to again confess to killing Roxy and burying her in the yard, and Manfred and Aldo both made it crystal clear they would not give Eddie the chance to renege on that statement. Furthermore, they all promised to leave Roxy’s spirit out of it—which wasn’t a difficult promise to obtain. Tommy’s exact words were, “No way I’m tellin’ no city cop about no ghost, I’m tellin’ you that right now.”
With luck, this would put Roxy’s spirit to rest.
Sam took the Impala up the exit ramp for Fordham Road, made the left turn onto Fordham, then went up the hill to MLK, the entire way spending way too much time at traffic lights. Sam turned right, found McBain’s Saturn parked in front of a fire hydrant, and double-parked the Impala in front of it.
“Thanks for comin’, guys,” McBain said. She was again wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, though this time the jeans were black and the sweatshirt had several Warner Bros. cartoon characters on it, a fashion choice that raised her in Dean’s estimation a notch.
“What happened?” Sam asked.
“I was out workin’ a case last night. Had my cell off, on account of a sudden ring would’ve compromised the police work a lot. Unfortunately, my provider sucks ass, so I didn’t get my voice mail until this afternoon. There were the usual four hundred phone calls from Aunt Vernetha that I get when I don’t call her every hour on the hour, and a message from Arthur.”
Sam frowned. “What’d he say?”
“Not a lot.” She reached into her coat pocket and took out her cell phone, flipped it open, held down the number one button, then put it on speaker.
A prerecorded voice said: “You have one saved message.”
Then a familiar whine. Mackey sounded breathless as he said, “Detective, it’s Arthur Gordon Pym. I’ve made a startling discovery, and you should get do—owlf!”
Dean then heard some thumping noises, then a few clattering noises, and then: “Wednesday, 11:39 P.M.”
McBain closed the phone. “That ain’t the fun part. I tried calling him back about twelve times and got nothin’, not even voice mail, so I traced his cell’s transponder.” She pointed at the sidewalk where it met the base of an apartment building. “It was lying there.” Then she reached back into her coat pocket and took out two broken halves of a single cell phone. “And this is what it looked like.”
“That’s not good,” Sam said.
“Look, I feel sorry for the guy,” Dean lied, “but what’re we supposed to do?”
McBain stared at him. “Find him, brushy-top. He said he made a ‘startling discovery,’ and that can only mean one thing.”
Smirking, Dean said, “He didn’t listen to you when you told him to leave this alone?”
To Dean’s surprise, McBain actually smirked back. “Okay, two things. The other is that he found our guy, and our guy took him and his phone out with extreme prejudice.”
Sam rubbed his pointy little chin. “You think our bad guy kidnapped him and plans to make him victim number five?”
Dean said, “Yeah, but the big day isn’t until Tuesday, so—” Then he cut himself off. “The others he planned ahead, though. He had to kidnap the monkey, and he had to have set things up in the empty house and the empty apartment beforehand.”
“He killed the Lowrance woman days before the ritual,” Sam added.
“Welcome to the conversation,” McBain said dryly. “Now I already checked, and there ain’t no empty places anywhere in this intersection. The park’s too out in the open.”
“So were the two kids,” Dean pointed out.
“Yeah,” McBain said, “but then he had a sedated orangutan. Now he’s got an unwilling hostage, and one he wasn’t plannin’ on. Wherever he’s doin’ this, it’s gotta be outta sight.”
Sam was staring down the street toward Fordham Road, his brow furrowed. Dean, knowing that look, said, “What’re you thinkin’, Sammy?”
“That church at the corner.”
“St. Nicholas of Tolentine,” McBain said. “What about it?”
“Does it have a bell tower?”
McBain nodded. “Yeah, they ring it out every Saturday night and Sunday when there’s mass.”
“One of Poe’s most famous poems is ‘The Bells.’ In fact, it was inspired by church bells.”
Dean frowned. “Anybody die in that one?”
Sam shook his head. “But that may not stop our guy.”
“Especially if he found a short annoying guy in a polyester suit getting in his business,” Dean muttered. “That may als
o mess up the timetable.”
“He’s been following the ritual pretty closely,” Sam said, “and the phases of the moon are the critical part. However he’s re-creating ‘The Bells,’ he…”
After he trailed off, Dean prompted him. “Sam?”
Turning to stare intently at his brother, Sam said, “I just remembered a couple lines of the poem: ‘In a’—something something—‘to the mercy of the fire, / In a mad expostulation with the’—something—‘frantic fire, / Leaping higher, higher, higher.’”
Unbidden, images from Dean’s nightmare came back to him. The demon who’d killed Mom and Sam’s girlfriend Jessica did so by pinning them to the ceiling and consuming them with fire. In his nightmare, Dean saw that happen to several of the women in his and Sam’s life that they’d cared about. He would likely never consider Mackey someone he cared about, but he still wouldn’t wish immolation on anyone, nor did he have any desire to see it happen again.
McBain started walking toward the corner. “Let’s go.”
“Oh, this is fine,” Dean grumbled to himself. They were the ones who came up with the course of action, and she was taking the lead?
He reminded himself that they wouldn’t even have been there if not for McBain, and they did need something to do while the cops crawled all over their crash space.
Ultimately, it came down to the fact that he didn’t like cops. Never had, mainly because he saw them as ignorant. Of course, so was most of the world, but the law’s obliviousness was particularly counterproductive to his and Sam’s work. He had long since lost track of the number of times the police had done little but get in their way—since Baltimore, more than ever. True, there were occasional exceptions—there was Ballard, and that deputy in Hibbing. Of course, Hibbing wasn’t actually a proper case, as there wasn’t anything demonic about the family, so the deputy in question, Kathleen, was still just as ignorant.
McBain, though, appeared to be one of the good guys. And, whether or not he was willing to admit it, she had helped out.
But he still didn’t like it. He held to his belief that he and Sam worked best alone.
As they walked, McBain said, “Hey, remind me when this is all over—I got somethin’ that may interest the two of you.”
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