by Lee Killough
Castle Drugs loomed before him. He hit the door — wrench — and landed heavily on the floor inside. His head spun and he felt sweat running down his face. On elbows and knees, to avoid leaving any bloody hand prints, he crawled to the counters along the left wall and down behind them to the display case where he saw Rosie Wiest working two weeks ago.
Inside the display case sat a heavenly host of ceramic angels and cherubs and a row of boxes holding rosaries.
Garreth pushed a handle on the sliding door behind the case using his knuckles to avoid leaving fingerprints. Unlocked. He slid the glass open and pulled out a box. Though Lane must be seconds behind him, he moved other boxes to hide the gap before crawling around the end of the display case into the nearest aisle. Giving thanks the shelves still ran parallel to the front of the store and provided the intruder concealment he warned Mrs. Wiest about. Listening for any sound up front, he removed the rosary from its box and hid the box behind bottles of mouthwash on the bottom shelf, then he pushed to his feet and opened his jacket to examine the wound in his side. The pointed end of the arrow protruded from his shirt, having passed though his body armor, but despite the pain and warmth of blood spreading down his size, did not feel stuck in him. Maybe just caught his skin?
Footsteps whispered up front.
Garreth’s heart lurched. He peered around the shelf. Lane stood just inside the front door, an arrow ready in her bow, her head tilted, listening. Garreth forced himself to breathe slowly and softly.
“Hello, Inspector,” Lane said. “I smell you. I smell your fear. Are you badly hurt? I warned you how a diet of animal blood affects your recuperative powers.”
He needed to get close to her…behind her. Come to me, blood mother. He groaned softly.
Lane’s head turned, hunting the source of the sound. “Come out, come…out.”
He yelled at himself in his head to drown her voice. Don’t listen, don’t listen. Make her listen. He whimpered.
Lane moved forward, almost soundlessly now…past the checkout counter…past the photo counter. “Stop…hiding.”
He groaned.
She passed the batteries to the rosary display case.
Breathing as little as possible, ears straining for sounds of Lane’s approach, he waited. Steps whispered closer.
Garreth grabbed a dental floss package and tossed it over the shelves into the next aisle. It clattered on the floor.
He heard her spin…step into the aisle.
Gathering all his will, Garreth made himself move…leaping around the end of the shelves. With his arm and ribs screaming with agony at lifting his arm, he tossed the loop of beads over her head and mask and jerked it snug.
Lane reached for her neck, snarling, dropping the bow and arrow she had ready for him. Then her hand touched the crucifix in the middle of the rosary. She shrieked…the high, tearing sound of someone in mortal agony. Garreth needed all his will to keep the rosary tight.
“Garreth, let loose!” Lane cried. “I can’t stand the pain!” She clawed at his hands. “I’ll do whatever you want…anything…just take this thing off me. Please. Please!” She began sobbing.
Dizziness swept through him. His knees trembled, making him fight to stay on his feet. Was this capture too late? Had he become too weakened to hold on to her?
He thought of Duncan shot down, of Mossman and Adair’s drained bodies…of Harry bleeding almost to death on Wink O’Hare’s floor. Of his own shattered life. The maiden is powerful. Grimly, he held the rosary tight.
“We’re going to walk out of here and back to my place.” He hoped.
“Yes. Yes! Whatever you want, if you’ll just take this thing off! Inspector, it’s burning me! It’s a thousand times worse than the barrier around dwellings. Help me. Take it off! Garreth, please!” Lane screamed.
Wrench!
Only his grip on the rosary kept him on his feet…and kept him standing while he kicked in the drug store’s door to fake a break-in and explain the presence of a bow and arrow on the floor. The street spun around him. He shivered with cold, a sensation he noted in dismay. Could he hang on long enough to reach his place?
Lane started screaming. “Help! Someone help me!”
Garreth jerked the rosary. “Shut up!”
She subsided into raspy gasps. Her hatred beat at him. He angled for Maple Street. Whoever had gone to Duncan’s aid would initially concentrate activity at the north end of the block near Oak. If he forced Lane past the south end, then stuck to alleys and back yards, they should reach his place without being seen.
And then what?
He saw only one answer. But the deaths had to look like an accident, and it had to destroy their bodies. A fiery crash of the ZX should do. It would solve everything. Lane would be punished and he pay for her blood with his. He could stop fighting blood hunger; Grandma Doyle would be relieved; Brian could be adopted in clear conscience.
They crossed the tracks. Lane reached for his hands, but each time her nails touched his skin, Garreth jerked the rosary and she subsided with a gasp of anguish. He gritted his teeth, fighting dizziness and weakness…fighting to keep his hold on her and his balance on the slick paving.
Up Kansas, motors roared. Garreth looked around to see Scott’s Trans Am gunning out of the mist, just in front of a pickup jacked high on its axles. He sucked in a breath of relief. He did not have to take her all the way home.
Before he could debate the rightness of the action, or change his mind, he caught Lane’s chin with his good hand. A quick jerk snapped her head around backward on her neck with a crack like a gunshot. Too fast for her to know what happened, he hoped. Then he shoved his hands under her arms and leaped directly in the path of the Trans Am.
It had no chance to stop. Scott tried. Brakes screamed…but his tires found no traction on the paving and the Trans Am spun end for end. Garreth kept moving, pushing himself and the slack Lane between vehicle and a solid old light pole in front of the theater…until hurtling metal wrapped itself sideways around the pole, Lane, and Garreth. The pickup piled into the Trans Am, further crushing them and the car against the pole.
Wrench.
Garreth found himself rolling on the sidewalk, shoulder and side burning with pain, arrow now driven out through the front of his jacket.
“No!” he howled. He was not supposed to pass through the pole! He was supposed to die in the crash and burn with Lane.
Then he realized there was no fire, only the smell of spilling gas.
Lurching to his feet, Garreth scrambled for the driver’s door. The crash had jammed it. He smashed the window with his radio and pulled out the dazed boy. “Run!” he yelled at the pickup’s driver. “It’s going to blow!”
Dropping the radio, he searched Scott’s pockets. Good. There were the cigarettes and lighter Garreth expected to find. Flicking the lighter, he tossed it under the Trans Am and hauled Scott backward.
Flame engulfed the car and quickly spread to the pickup and the light pole.
Violet ran out of the hotel with a fire extinguisher.
Garreth reached for it. “I’ll do this. You take the boys in the hotel and call the fire department.”
He contrived to fall, with the extinguisher “coming apart” in his hands, spewing foam on the sidewalk instead of the flames. After that, he and the people who materialized out of the hotel could only stand and watch the car, and Lane’s body, burn.
An unexpected sense of desolation swept him. In spite of his outrage at her crimes, in spite of burning hatred for what she had done to Harry and him, her death hurt. Pain closed his throat…grief for the child whose torment had driven her to seek the power of the vampire life and use it to vent her hatred on humanity, for the waste of an intellect curious and clever enough to theorize what made vampires, for the voice that would never sing enchantment again.
The fire department arrived in time to save the light pole and keep Lane from burning to the bone, but what Garreth saw amid the metal wrapped around h
er, told him her hands had charred beyond recovery of fingerprints and the hockey mask looked melted onto her face. An autopsy, if they bothered with one, could establish her as female but forty-eight years too young to be Mada Bieber.
Reassured Lane could not be identified, Garreth felt as if his bones melted. He faded back against the theater ticket booth and slid down to sit on the sidewalk.
In moments feet gathered around him. Voices began exclaiming about his bloody jacket and the arrow protruding from it, began asking questions.
He ignored them. God he was tired…too tired to answer, too tired to feel suicidal any longer, too tired even to feel pain. He closed his eyes and shut out the world.
2
To Garreth, it indicated his state of debilitation that he never resisted being admitted to the hospital, refused to think about daylight turning the bed into misery, could not bother to worry about the results of his bloodwork, and did not even mind that they put him in a room with Duncan. Once Dr. Staab in the ER mentioned giving him blood, nothing else mattered. For all her deception, he knew Lane had not lied about recuperation and human blood. Blood revived him in San Francisco; he wanted it now, whatever it took to get it. He lay watching the blood bag slowly empty, feeling pain and weakness ease a little more with every drop, and fought an urge to just unplug the tube from the catheter in his arm and suck the bag dry. Fighting less because Duncan might see than the fear drinking human blood would give him a hunger impossible to satisfy with cattle blood and turn him into Lane, preying on people.
Duncan, of course, wanted all the details about what happened after Garreth left him in the alley.
Garreth sighed and said, “It’s a blur. I think I was running on pure reflex and adrenaline.”
He had a more complete story for Danzig in the ER, of course…that in pursuit of the assailant, whom he spotted smashing Castle’s front door — probably planning to steal drugs — he entered the drug store, where the assailant managed to get behind him and take another shot. But instead of going down, Garreth turned and grabbed the bow. At which point the assailant fled. Garreth again pursued him…caught up as they crossed the tracks and entered the southbound lanes of Kansas…and managed to grab the back of the assailant’s jacket. He did not see or hear the Trans Am until it was on top of them. He had not drawn his gun after firing once at the sale barn because pursuing his assailant took all his strength.
Danzig listened in silence to the end, then said, “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t call for backup after you were attacked at the sale barn, or respond to Doris and Duncan when they called you.”
Garreth shook his head in pretended frustration. “I kept trying. I heard them but they obviously didn’t hear me. I fell on the radio when the arrow hit me. Maybe that damaged the mike.”
Fortunately the radio was also a casualty of the fire.
Danzig appeared to accept that. The worst moment had come next, when Danzig said, “Tell me what you know about Mada Bieber.”
Garreth froze. “What does she have to do with this?”
“Nothing as far as I know, but Anna Bieber has been calling the station. She hasn’t seen her daughter since the wedding reception but said Mada took a ride with you earlier and wondered if she said anything to you that might explain her disappearance.”
A loose end that needed tying up…in a way that never connected it to their John Doe assailant. He frowned as though thinking back. “Maybe, though I didn’t understand that at the time. She came out of the gym and asked to ride along with me, saying she needed to talk to me. What she wanted to was to tell me she’s my grandmother, that she lied to her mother about not being pregnant. She clearly felt extreme guilt about the lie, and about abandoning the baby. She said, ‘But I didn’t want him to suffer the stigma of being a bastard that I did.’”
Danzig said, “I guess there’s a part of your grandmother search I haven’t heard.”
“A part I didn’t know myself until a few weeks ago. Anyway, Mada said she knew Colleen Mikaelian would be a wonderful mother, much better than she could be. ‘For years I thought about telling Mama,’ she said, ‘but I kept thinking how disappointed she’d be with me, and how people would whisper behind her, like mother like daughter and the daughter didn’t even have the decency to get married and give the bastard a name. I didn’t want to shame her that way.’”
An ah-ha look of understanding came into Danzig’s eyes.
“‘Now the lie has come to haunt me,’ she said. I said, so tell your mother quietly. No one else has to know. She said if she did it would change Anna’s attitude toward me and everyone would figure it out. I said so let them. Anna didn’t let your birth shame her and she’ll ignore any talk about you.” When I dropped her back at the high school she said she was going to tell her mother. But maybe she lost her nerve.”
“And took off? Without clothes, and without her rental car?”
Oh, god…that needed explanation. But not by him…not tonight. His brain felt like sludge. Maybe just as well. Pat explanations always sounded suspicious to him. He imagined they did to Danzig, too. So Garreth confined himself to a shrug. It hurt like hell. “She’s always kept in contact with Anna. Hopefully she’ll call or something and explain.”
Lying in bed watching the blood bag deflate and tuning out Duncan’s rambling speculation on the identity of their psycho, Garreth wondered how to have Mada make contact and establish herself as alive elsewhere, definitely separating her disappearance from John Doe’s appearance. When his brain still produced no bright idea, he turned to considering the real irony of the evening. Not long after Garreth arrived in the room, City Councilman Al Dreiling had come up the hall from his son’s room, the son Garreth might have killed while destroying Lane, to thank Garreth for saving Scott’s life. “I know he’s been a pain in the butt for you guys. Maybe this will make him finally listen to me and grow up.”
Eventually Duncan shut up. Garreth closed his eyes, savoring the silence and the feel of life dribbling into him.
“Garreth!”
Maggie! His eyes flew open.
She hurtled across the room to his bed and crushed the nearest hand with hers. “What happened? How bad are you hurt? Doris called Helen, thinking you might need some things here in the hospital and she called me, of course. I — ” She broke off to frown across at Duncan, who eyed the two of them with raised brows and the start of a sly smile. “Okay, Ed, say it!”
He blinked. “Say what?”
“Whatever smartass remarks about me or us you’re cooking up in your skull.” She straightened, hands on hips. “Now’s the time. Get it all out. Because if I hear anything from you later, or you start pulling your un-funny practical jokes, I will yank your nuts out through your throat!”
Duncan’s jaw dropped, then snapped shut.
“Fine!” Maggie said, and stepped around the bed to jerk the curtain between the two closed. Then she pulled up a chair beside the bed and reached through the bed rail to take Garreth’s hand again. “You don’t have to tell me anything right now. There’s all the time in the world later. Go to sleep. I’ll just sit here until they kick me out.”
At a guess, looking at her jaw, no one better try. Garreth squeezed her hand back, smiling at her…and discovered he had no regrets about surviving the crash. His life — unlife — might be tangled in lies, but Maggie, like Baumen, gave him reasons to continue it, and learn how to enjoy it.
3
Where do they end, the roads that lead a man through hell?
Maybe with the realization that hell is only what people make for themselves, Garreth thought, lying in his own bed four nights later with his arms around Maggie, breathing in the sweet scents of her blood and skin and the musky one of sex.
Maybe it ended with atonement. He needed to make amends for killing Lane and using Scott to destroy her. As much as he disliked the boy, he felt sorry for him at the hearing today, no longer cocky but white-faced at the consequences of his recklessness. In
the courtroom, Garreth silently committed himself to making friends with the boy.
He committed himself, too, to giving Anna Bieber friendship and support, to acting as the great-grandson she would soon believe him to be.
Lien gave him an explanation for Mada’s disappearance when he called her two days ago and told her everything…almost. Odd how he could confide so much in her…could confess to killing Lane, expecting understanding — which she gave him — ask her to abet a cover-up — which she agreed to — but still not be able to admit what he had become.
He thought maybe Lien could send a typed note to Anna, purporting to be from Mada, “confessing” to being Garreth’s grandmother and apologizing for running off because she felt so ashamed of having lied. Then the next time Lien read of an apartment house fire or other disaster with multiple casualties and some unidentified bodies, Lien would send another letter claiming to be a friend of Mada’s, regretting to inform Anna that Mada was believed to be one of the casualties.
“It won’t work,” Lien said. “If she were alive, even if she confessed by letter, she would resume calling her mother. No, there must be nothing from her until we’re ready to have her die. I read about fugue states not long ago. I think she left the gym for a breath of air and met the man in this horror movie costume stealing the bow and arrows — you did say they found that’s where the weapon came from — and he attacked her. He slammed her head into the wall and that concussion caused her to enter a fugue state in which she thought she was one of her old professional personalities.”
“Mala Babra,” Garreth said.
“Good. As Mala, she didn’t know what she was doing in this strange town when she should be in San Francisco singing so she walked away and along the highway thumbed a ride with a trucker. She made her way back here by stages, stopping here and there to make money singing in bars and such. Once she reached here she began recovering her memory and contacted a friend, me, Lucy Lee. I will call your Anna, give her the story and say I’ve given Mada a sleeping pill because she was so bewildered, but Mada herself will call in the morning. Only I’ll call again to say with great regret that while I was out for the evening, because I’m a singer, too, my apartment house burned and Mada died in it. Or I assume so because she wasn’t among the survivors and there are unidentified bodies. I’ll even offer to send Mrs. Bieber the newspaper article.”