The two of them looked over the parking lot, each seeing it in their own way but neither able to identify what was causing the psychic stench and making the hair on the back of their necks stand on end. A pair of bored-looking uniforms was standing near the front door, watching them without much interest, and other than the brilliant yellow tape surrounding the lot, it looked as it should on any other day of the year. All in all, it was relatively normal for a murder scene, except for some unidentifiable something that was itching at both of their minds.
They turned to look at one another and then laughed as they shrugged in unison. “Just a case of the creeps, I guess,” Drakanis said. Woods wasn’t really buying it—he was feeling something anyway, and if he was feeling something, that meant it had to be pretty strong—but he nodded, if for no other reason than to calm them both down.
“Screw it. Let’s get to work,” he said and then started up the walk with Drakanis tailing a half step behind. He stopped at the tape and waved at the officers, who didn’t bother to leave their posts or check IDs but just waved him through. On a lot of days, Drakanis would have been irritated and Woods would have been amused by the less-than-perfect job performance going on here, but both of them were becoming known figures around the station. Besides, Damien thought, it isn’t like there’s much to guard anyway.
He lifted the tape up and waited for Drakanis to slip under it and then followed after him. The officers finally decided that at least some measure of professionalism should be displayed—especially given the near riot that was probably picking up again over at the office—and the younger of the two approached them, stifling a yawn against the back of her hand.
Woods knew the slender, rat-faced cop who was coming up to him—he made it his business to at least get names and faces from almost everyone he was around as soon as possible—but only in the vague, passing-in-the-hallways fashion. Officer Taeda was not known for either outstanding or horrid performance and preferred to be in her cruiser to sitting at the office, so the two of them had never had much occasion to associate. Taeda gave a brief glance at Woods’ badge before nodding.
“Woods. Here on one of Parker’s errands?” The voice matched the expression; still half asleep, Taeda was putting out plumes of fog that reeked of last night’s eggnog and schnapps with every word, slurring them ever so slightly.
At least someone was having a party last night. Maybe it’s not all gone to hell just yet after all, he thought as he manufactured a smile. “You could say that. Got dragged in against your will, Taeda, or just had an early morning pick-me-up?”
Taeda shrugged, gave Drakanis a once-over, and then waved them back to her partner and the entrance. She started back herself without waiting to see if they would follow or not. Her voice carried a bit of a barb in it, a warning maybe, as she spoke over her shoulder. “Little of both, Woods. Kept some in a thermos. I’m willing to share, if you feel like you need a dose of Christmas spirit.”
Drakanis laughed; he couldn’t help it really. The sound just escaped when he thought of the nearly rabid folks outside the police station, the deranged and possibly resurrected serial killer on the loose, and the world-destroying demon that was due to wake up any day now contrasted with one hungover officer offering them all a nip from her bottle. Given the sharp looks he got from Taeda and Woods and the way Taeda’s partner’s head turned in his direction, inclined slightly like he was looking at Drakanis over the rim of a pair of old man’s spectacles, he guessed they didn’t see the humor in it.
“Never mind. Just thinking how there are a lot of folks out there who could stand a little Christmas cheer. Make your jobs a hell of a lot easier, I imagine.”
Taeda’s partner raised a thermos in one gloved hand, as if toasting them. He was an older man with sloped shoulders, crooked legs, and a dignified frosting to his hair, who had been born Manfred Manderly but whom everyone just called Old Man.
“Ayuh, true, true. So pass ’er ’round, boys—and girl, don’t give me that look, Janice—and give a toast to the cap’n.”
Manderly’s Yankee accent—difficult at the best of times—was thickened by cold and the nips he had apparently been taking at Taeda’s thermos, making it nearly impossible for Drakanis to sort it out at first. When he saw Woods take the thermos and raise it, “To the captain, sure thing,” his brain translated it again and got most of the sense.
The thermos was passed around, first to Woods, then to Taeda, and then back to Manderly. Finally, it rested in Drakanis’s hands, and he raised it up.
“To the captain.” Only after he upended the thermos and had the liquid rushing into his mouth did he think that he should have been watching Damien’s face more closely when the younger man tasted it.
The flavor was something only Taeda—whose dead taste buds had been a topic of conversation even when he was still on the force—could enjoy; eggnog had never been intended to be mixed with butterscotch and sour apple schnapps. He nearly choked as his throat closed in complete revulsion at the idea of allowing the mix into his stomach. Over the rim of the thermos, he could see Taeda grinning, a wicked gleam shining in her brown eyes and telling him all he needed to know about whether that had been intentional or not.
He managed to force himself to swallow it, coughed into his hand, and fought the urge to sick it back up as he passed the thermos back to Taeda. “That’s an… interesting mix,” he croaked out, which prompted laughter from her and Old Man both.
“Ayuh, this is also true. But y’get used to it.” As if to prove the point, Manderly filched the thermos from Taeda’s hands with a surprisingly nimble gesture and took another mouthful, grinning from ear to ear the whole time.
Woods just shook his head and started to push between Taeda and Manderly. They rolled their eyes at each other and then at Woods, passing the thermos back once again. Then they stepped apart. “Michael Drakanis, come onnnnnn dowwwwn!” Taeda said, in her best Bob Barker voice—which wasn’t very good, to be honest, but she deserved points for trying, Drakanis supposed—before pushing at him to go on through. When he didn’t move at first, she arched one of her almost nonexistent brows and tried to hide the smirk he could see simmering underneath her apparently friendly smile.
“What’s the problem? Not here to see the big mess? Afraid the monsters are going to get you if you go in?” While her voice was trying to sound friendly, just a bit of a tease, Drakanis was catching a great deal of actual malice coming off of her, though he couldn’t feel any particular reason for it.
Woods had stopped just inside the door. He was glancing over his shoulder and looking at them all with concern, but Drakanis just shook his head and moved onward.
Actually, that’s pretty much exactly what I’m worried about, he thought as he stepped inside.
The first thing that they noticed was the smell; it should have still had at least a whiff of the coppery scent of spilled blood, a whiff of decomposition, but neither was present. Woods leaned out the door, quirking a brow at Taeda. “Hey, sweetie, was somebody in here? Cleaning up or somethin’?”
Taeda shrugged. “Don’t ask me; I just got here today. And I’m not your sweetie.”
Woods grinned. “Oh, I know you love me. What about you, Manderly? Any insights?”
The old man was struggling to get a cigarette lit in the rising winds, taking his time with it. Woods drummed his fingers on the doorjamb, sparing a brief glance back through the door to see Drakanis head on past the desk and into the freezer without him. Manderly grinned around his cancer stick, finally getting it to stay lit, and took a deep drag. “Nawp,” came the reply. “Should I ’ave? Too smelly in there for ya?”
Woods shook his head. “Never mind.” He slid back inside and let the door swing shut after him. Then he looked around the front room. It was pretty much the way the photos had shown it. Someone had dumped the coffee mug and put it away, but that was the only
difference. The bloodstains on the floor were still present and still in vivid Technicolor, and the chalk markings that had been laid down to mark the drag patterns were still undisturbed. There was just no smell in the place.
Had he had more time to think about it, Damien might have been able to do something more than stand, dumbfounded, when the gunshot went off. He might have noticed that while it didn’t smell inside at all, outside there had been a whiff of rotting meat, carried on the winds that had been trying so hard to break Old Man’s bad habits. But the gunshot, followed almost immediately by Drakanis’s shout of “Christ!” broke off most of his train of thought. He felt like someone had just shot his body full of Novocain and left him waiting for the surgeon to start cutting.
Two more gunshots, followed by a scream, broke his paralysis. He never thought of calling for help, of trying to drag Taeda and Manderly in. He could feel it in his bones that it wouldn’t matter if he did. The door would be locked, or they wouldn’t hear, or hell, they might even have been in on it. The oppression he’d felt in the air outside had been this, a trap waiting to be sprung, and he knew who had been responsible. He’d just been too stupid to catch it in time.
He jumped over the desk, knocking over a pencil jar and nearly breaking his neck when he slipped in the blood. Why is it still wet? went streaking through his mind at that point before he slammed into the door between reception and the freezer at full tilt.
What he saw in the freezer stopped him cold. He thought that if he had been a cartoon character, little skidding and screeching noises would have accompanied him. His jaw fell open when he saw what was clawing at Drakanis, and a wheeze escaped from between his lips, which were already turning blue from shock.
“Christ.”
Chapter 33
9:00 am, December 23, 1999
“I don’t get why they think the morgue is so damned important. It’s not like there’s anything there that is going to help.”
Brokov didn’t sound happy at all this morning, which Parker found interesting. Given the thumping against the wall that had woken him up early and kept him that way until Woods and Mike had left about half an hour ago, he had expected her to be cheerier this morning.
Of course, the fact the guy she was making all that noise with might be marching off to die this morning—or sometime soon, anyway—might have a little to do with that, I guess, he thought. Or maybe it was just a headache from staying up too late and having one too many beers. Whatever the reason, Brokov was obviously not going to be pleasant to deal with this morning.
She settled into her chair, poured coffee from the leftovers from the night before, and buried her nose in the cup. The slurping sounds that ensued made Parker think of a pig in its trough, but he decided it wouldn’t be wise to say so. When she dragged herself out of the cup and glared at him with bloodshot eyes, he knew that had been the right decision.
“Glad you don’t have to go to work this morning, Brokov?”
“Fuck you, Parker. Not like any work is getting done anyway. You saw how empty the place was.”
Parker shrugged and then folded his fingers over each other and started cracking them. With each pop, he thought he could see the veins in Sheila’s temples pulsing larger and larger.
By the time he’d reached the middle finger on his left hand, Sheila broke. “Would you quit that?”
“Can’t help it. I’m bored.”
“So find something to do. Why didn’t you go with them this morning, anyway?”
Her tone was accusatory, making Parker think of the way it supposedly had been back in the dim old days: the womenfolk sending their men out to shoot “that thar bar” or some other bullshit. He shrugged and prodded at her. “Why didn’t you?”
She scowled, turned away from him, and slurped at her coffee again. She mumbled something into the mug and then put it against her forehead as if trying to banish a headache or a fever.
“Didn’t catch that, Brokov. What did you say?” The trace of a smile was evident in Parker’s voice, causing her to look up at him. He was grinning, with the look of a cat working out how to get at that can of tuna on the top shelf. She wondered if his ancestors had worn grins like that before they landed their boats and stormed some bunch of unfortunate potato farmers and decided the answer to that one was probably yes.
“Because I wasn’t invited, asshole.” Her voice was full of venom, and Parker thought he could hear the faintest echoes of himself in that voice, the way he’d been as a young man before coming under Morrigan’s wing and getting his act together. Thinking of the captain made his throat start to close up, so he tried to push that away and kept prodding at her.
“Did you always do what your daddy told you to, Sheila?” The tone was half mockery and half genuine curiosity. He’d always pegged Sheila as daddy’s little girl, the good girl who was number one on the cheerleading squad, who always got what she wanted and had never been in any serious arguments with her parents. Now he was going to find out if that was a bet he’d win.
“My daddy has nothing to do with anything, Vince. Now get out of my face about it, okay?”
I win that one, I think. Next. “Okay. Then answer me this one. If you give a damn what happens to Damien, then why don’t you remember you’re a fucking cop too and have just as much right as he does to head out there and take a look?”
Parker pushed back from the kitchen table, bumping his head on the cone-lamp that hung over it as he did. He winced, rubbed his head, and started toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Her tone was sharper than she’d intended, and she immediately began cursing herself for it. Parker either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
“To the morgue. See what turns up. Are you coming, or do you want to sit and mope some more?”
Brokov dropped her mug on the table with a definitive thud, shoved out of her own chair, and glared at him. “How many times do I have to say ‘fuck you’ before you catch on, Parker?”
“Is that a yes, then?”
“Christ, yes, okay, yes. Let’s go. Give me five minutes.”
“Make it three.”
He slipped out the door and went to get the car warmed up, making another mental wager with himself. He figured it would take her two and a half but knew she wouldn’t take the whole three. He proved to be off by a whole extra minute, since the car was barely running and the defogger was just getting started when she slammed the door and glowered at him.
“All right. Let’s roll.”
Chapter 34
9:30 am, December 23, 1999
Drakanis went sailing past him. He hit the wall beside the door and slumped. Woods could only hope the man wasn’t dead already. He tried to reach out, get at least a sense of Drakanis’s mind, but the psychic static in there from the things that were now advancing on him made any kind of reading impossible. Now he had to juggle this shit and hope they didn’t both end up dead.
Fuck that. You know better. You have to make sure Drakanis doesn’t end up dead. If that means they eat you, that’s just the way it goes, buddy. You know that. The bitch of it was that he did indeed know that. Among the other things his goddess had been forced to remind him was that he was expendable. Drakanis wasn’t. It was as simple as that, really.
He weighed his options, not liking any of them; they all ended up pretty much the same way, though the body count came out differently in all of them. Without the nudge he might have gotten from his former boss, he wasn’t sure which way was the right way, but he discovered a liberating fact: he didn’t really care.
“All right, assholes. You should have stayed down.” He scrabbled for the gun on his hip, the gun he’d only drawn twice in his career and never fired, and prayed. He raised it to eye level, not sure if it would matter if he got a head shot at all but just hoping, and squeezed the trigger.
The
report was almost deafening, and the recoil almost threw his arm out of the socket. It wasn’t much of a gun—just a standard issue 9-mm—but for someone unused to guns and how they worked, it was quite capable of bringing up all manner of problems.
Guess I shouldn’t have played invisible on qualifying day, he thought, as the gun smoke cleared and he was able to see the creatures. Now he was getting a much better look at them, and some calmness had come over him when he drew his weapon. He had never understood that until now, how once you had a weapon in your hands, your mind could deal with almost anything. He’d heard it but hadn’t really believed it until now. Now, he could assess the situation a little better, but that clearer assessment rated their odds a hell of a lot lower than when he’d just been shitting himself.
He could see five of them bunched together and advancing on him, plus another handful piling through the back door. He might not have known any of them in life, but it wasn’t hard for him to guess that these were the supposedly missing corpses that everyone was so upset about. He supposed it was possible that Karim had headed into one of the local boneyards to dig up his army, but the relative freshness of these corpses suggested otherwise. Most of them still possessed all their flesh, all the ones that should have had hair did, and while they stank, the smell was of fresh formaldehyde more than rot at this point. If that wasn’t enough to go on, the fact that most of them had Y-incisions cut into their chests—some stitched back up, some not—pretty much put the icing on the cake.
The five that were closest also seemed to be the freshest. Two of them were still wearing clothes, and both were large men, around six feet tall and weighing in at 250 pounds or so. One had his jaw missing and was still wearing his green and yellow rag; the other’s head stopped just above the eyebrows, thus it was lacking a do-rag, but he was wearing yellow and green parachute pants. From the look of them, he guessed they were some of the gangbangers that Hollis was supposed to have been cutting up last week when the shit hit the fan. Of the other three, one looked like an old man. He had no visible marks—except for the dangling black threads from the Y-cut and the bloodless lips of the wound itself—on him. Damien guessed that one had been a heart attack, or maybe a stroke given the way his face was twisted on the left side. One looked like he might have been friends with the first two. He was shorter than they were by at least a foot but had similar facial features and a set of holes peppering his chest and side that might have come from the same gun that tore off the other man’s jaw.
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