Under the Gun

by Hannah Jayne

  It was an image I never bothered to strain from my mind, because I knew it was burned into my subconscious.

  I rolled down the window and pressed my head out, gulping in a huge lungful of the slightly salt-tinged air. I leaned back into the car. “Did they tell you anything when headquarters called it in?”

  Alex chewed his bottom lip and shook his head silently—a sure sign he knew more than he was letting on.

  “Alex? I can handle it.”

  Silence.

  “I have a gun, you know.”

  He gently let his foot off the gas but kept his gaze fixed on the street ahead. “Are you threatening me with an unloaded gun?”

  I sucked a quick breath through my teeth. “Just tell me: is it as bad as last time?”

  “Let’s just say property values are about to plunge again.”

  “Huh?”

  Alex nodded toward the house on the other side of the street, just a few houses past this one. Police lights were washing the sidewalk in rounds of red and blue as officers unfurled their yellow crime scene tape and held back curious onlookers. An ambulance was stationed with back doors open, but no one was inside, and no one seemed to be moving very quickly.

  “I don’t suppose it’s worth asking if you want to stay in the car,” Alex said.

  But my eyes were glued to the house.

  Yes, I’m a wimp. Yes, I turn into a quivering bowl of jelly when blood—that isn’t nicely encased in a blood bag—is present. But this was something different. It wasn’t a fear so much as a deep foreboding. An all-over sense that once I walked into that house, something would be set in motion and nothing that I knew would seem real anymore.

  I licked my lips and put my hand on the car door. “No, it’s not worth asking. Let’s go.”

  Two ashen-faced pup officers ran out of the house as we approached the walk. Both doubled over in the bushes rimming the house, but only one started to vomit. A chill started at the base of my neck and went down my spine. I hugged my elbows and hung close to Alex.

  We stepped into the foyer of the residence—it was big and grand, as to be expected in the neighborhood, but it was empty, a collection of orb-eyed statues staring at no one. A murmured hum came from a room just to our left and I followed Alex as he headed straight for it, the heels of my boots click-clacking on the marble floors and bouncing off the mile-high ceilings.

  The dim room was immediately ten degrees hotter than the deserted foyer and crammed with bodies in flak jackets and weapons belts. A bank of black-and-white televisions lined one wall nearly floor to ceiling, and a desk ran the entire length underneath, littered with wired telephones and a complicated-looking control panel.

  “What is all this?” I whispered to Alex.

  “Panic room, essentially,” he muttered.

  Officer Romero was one of the officers crammed in the room and he looked over his shoulder when he heard my voice. “State of the art.” He waved his hand over the equipment. “I don’t even think the CIA has this kind of shit yet. Grace, Lawson. Glad you’re here.”

  “Who needs this kind of security?” I asked, trying my best to pick up the home owner’s identity. “The president? Justin Bieber?”

  “Tia Shively.”

  Alex and I looked at each other, blank faced.

  “Very wealthy. Old money,” Romero said.

  “Silver-spoon-in-her-mouth kind of thing?” Alex asked.

  “More like golden microchip. Married to Kidson Jobs.”

  “The concert promoter?”

  “Actually”—Romero shut his notebook—“the former barista. Apparently old Kidson made Tia’s lattes with a little something extra because she married him six months later.” Romero shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he just had an enormous dipstick. She swoops in, marries Kidson—she’s twenty-five, by the way. He’s out of the country and something trips the house alarm out here.”

  Alex gestured toward the monitors. “So is this the crime scene?”

  “No.” Romero shook his head. “It’s the crime.”

  Officer Romero barked out an order and a space opened up at the desk. Alex and I squeezed our way in so we had a better vantage point. “That one there is a camera facing over the back fence.”

  Alex nodded and I squinted at the grainy image. I could barely make out gray, oblong fuzzy patches; I assumed they were juniper bushes.

  Romero tapped the screen. “This is a stone wall right here.” He pointed to a short white block that peeked through the blobs of trees. “Roll it back a few minutes, will ya, fella?”

  The screen dissolved into a series of skips and lines and returned to the same grainy picture. “This is the crime?” I asked.

  “Just wait.” Romero never took his eyes off the screen. “There!”

  Another blob. This was so dark it was almost black and moving fast. It popped up over the fence and tore across the lawn. The juniper blobs seemed to tremble as it whipped by.

  “What was that?” Alex wanted to know.

  Romero moved to the next screen. “This is the living room. French doors open up from the backyard”—he motioned back to the first screen—“into this room.”

  “Okay . . .” Alex said.

  “Oh my God!” My heart stopped when I saw it. It still wasn’t completely clear.

  But I knew exactly what it was.

  I started swallowing hard, trying to quell the frenetic thump of my heart. No, I told myself, it couldn’t be. But even before I could continue on my personal reassurance effort, Romero rewound the tape again. The black blob bounded backward out of the front doors and across the lawn, and threw itself over the fence. Romero pulled his sausage-y finger from the button and the grainy line shot across the screen once more, as did the blob. I looked down at my shoes.

  Alex nudged my shoulder and I looked up, my eyes locking on to his.

  “Then there’s this,” Romero continued, completely unaware of my and Alex’s silent conversation. I held my breath, an anxious flutter rippling through my stomach.

  The image on the next screen was a bit easier to make out. It was the living room, set up with a glowing fireplace, a coffee table as big as my bedroom, and two overstuffed couches that could sit an entire football team each. A woman was curled up on one end of the couch, barefoot, with a loose-knit afghan thrown around her torso. Her expression was blank and if it weren’t for her dark eyes that caught the flickering reflection from the television screen and blinked occasionally, I would have thought she was already dead.

  It was less than a minute before the woman snapped to attention, sitting up on the couch. Even on the silent, black-and-white tape, her terror was clearly evident from the ramrod straightness of her spine, from the way her eyes went from lifeless orbs to saucer-wide and frighteningly alive. The blob from the other screen broke through the French doors. The glass seemed to explode more than shatter, the shards of glass seeming to stop and float on the grainy film.

  I licked my lips and implored myself to look away—I knew what was about to happen. But it was impossible. My eyes felt physically drawn to the picture and I narrowed my gaze, trying to hide my wince as the blob—now more clearly an animal, hunched on all fours with shaggy, dark fur that was dotted with glass shavings, leaves, and dirt—tore across the room and went directly for the woman on the couch.

  She reared up, trying to push her small legs against the hulking cushions, but her speed was no match for the animal. It cleared the couch in a millisecond, was on her a second later, and before I could let out a breath—or a cry—the woman was his. She swatted once and he grabbed her arm in his massive paw, giving her a yank that shook her entire body; she flopped like a rag doll. Her head lolled, long hair flying in sad, luxurious waves around her, her eyes directly toward the camera as the animal’s jaws snapped open, then quickly closed around her neck. I watched in terrified horror, my eyes locked on hers, as the life drained out of them. There was no reflection, no vision. Her eyes went immediately to cold, hard marbles t
hat gazed, unseeing, into the eye that had caught her demise.

  “It’s a wolf.” I’m not sure if I said it or if Alex did, but either way I felt both guilty and betrayed. Like I should have said something then, should have somehow apologized or stopped it, but I was still riveted to the screen.

  The wolf dumped what remained of the woman’s lifeless body—clawed and blood covered—and looked directly into the camera as if he knew we were watching him—as if he knew I was watching him. There was no remorse, no wild hunger, no rabid fire in his eyes. He simply blinked as a droplet of tar-colored blood—her blood—dripped from his razor teeth onto her rapidly paling forehead. He shifted then and she flopped from the couch onto the shag carpeting, discarded, destroyed.

  The camera cut out then, the image of the staring wolf and the broken woman seared into my memory forever.

  It seemed like an hour passed as we all stood in the room, staring at the bank of television screens. The temperature seemed to rise with every minute and I felt the sweat bead above my upper lip, begin to prick at my hairline. My clothes felt immediately sticky and damp, and Alex swung his head to look at me.

  “You okay, Lawson?”

  We had been partners—friends—long enough; I knew that he knew what I was thinking. But I still felt the overwhelming need to hide any indication of my suspicions.

  I nodded and opened my mouth, but when I tried to talk, my throat felt stuffed with sand. Alex put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently.

  “Is there somewhere we can grab a drink of water?” Alex asked Romero, but kept his eyes on me.

  “Yeah, sure.” Romero stepped back from us. “I can grab you guys something. You’re going to want it before we take a look at the crime scene . . . and probably to wash your mouth out with after.” Seemingly unaffected, Romero left the room and Alex and I were alone.

  “So?” Alex’s brows went up into his bangs.

  I flopped into one of the big leather executive chairs set in front of the monitors and swiveled so my back was facing them. “So, what?”

  Alex cocked his head, his lips pursed. “Wolf.”

  The way he said it, I wasn’t sure if he was asking or telling me. I started at my thighs, drew a squirrely figure eight on my jeans with my fingernail. “Is that what you think?” I finally asked him.

  I heard Alex sigh. “I thought it, you said it.”

  My ears burned.

  “Did you recognize it—uh, him?”

  I know the question wasn’t meant to be inflammatory, but I was suddenly mad. “No, I don’t know who that was,” I hissed. “My—our werewolves adhere to strict bylaws. You know it’s true, Alex. If not, this wouldn’t be the first case like this you’ve ever seen.”

  Alex crossed his arms in front of his chest. “It isn’t.”

  He turned and walked away leaving me sitting in the monitor room, the hum of the TVs mercifully drowning out any sound in my head.

  Romero led us on a cursory walk of the crime scene. There wasn’t much to see as the room was in shambles from the attack, but every gauge, every blood-soaked slash brought me back to the Sutro Point crime scene, to the vacant eyes of those two girls as their blood pooled in the dirt. The magnitude of the destruction, of the images on the tape should have prepared me for the body. I steeled myself as we closed in on it, our bootied feet sinking into the heavy pile carpet, the blood bubbling around my toes. I knew it would be bad. But until Romero peeled back a few inches of the blood-soaked cloth covering Tia Shively, I didn’t know how bad.

  I tried to suck in a breath. I tried to keep my knees from buckling, to keep my stomach from folding in on itself as what remained of Tia—what remained of her mangled body—looked up at me. Her face was so ravaged that I could only imagine what she must have looked like in real, non-grainy life. But even in death, her terror—her torture—was unmistakable.

  “Oh God,” I breathed.

  Alex nodded curtly once, all the blood rushing from his face and leaving it a pasty, sallow yellow. Romero dropped the corner of the sheet back down. “I thought we’d never see anything worse than the last one.” He laughed a barking, guttural laugh that had no joy in it and shook his head. “Guess I should have known better.”

  “You have any leads?”

  Romero shrugged. “You saw the tape, Grace, same as I did.”

  “So what are you calling it?”

  “Wild animal attack.”

  My mouth felt glued shut. My feet felt rooted to the floor, but I felt like I wasn’t there, that I was watching the entire scene from above, ready to change the channel, to turn off the TV at any moment.

  Romero jerked his head toward me. “Maybe you should get her out of here.”

  I knew I should be angry. I was tired of being meek, of being led away by the elbow or patted on the head with a patronizing smile, but Tia Shively was more than I could take. I felt Alex’s fingers close around my arm; I felt for the floor with my toe as I tried to take a step, and suddenly I stopped.

  “Are there any other cameras?” I managed.

  Romero blinked. “Uh, no. I mean, she’s got six cameras, and you saw—” He breathed heavily, the buttons straining on his uniform. “You saw what happened.”

  I shook Alex’s hand from my arm. “You think what did this—you’re sure it was an animal?”

  Romero scratched his chin. “I don’t want to face the media and tell them that there is a wild dog loose in San Francisco. A dog—or wolf, or fuck, a wooly mammoth—that’s doing this kind of thing. People are going to think the police department has lost it. But you saw the same thing I did. That wasn’t human.”

  I licked my lips. “What are you planning on doing?”

  Romero swung his head toward the other officers and crime scene investigators in the room as they brushed for fingerprints and bagged evidence. He leaned in close and Alex and I leaned toward him. “I’m not a man who believes in any of this hoodoo or myths, but I saw what I saw. I’m getting my men silver bullets and I’m telling them to shoot to kill.”

  Alex and I were silent as he drove me back to my car. We had just pulled into the police station parking lot when he looked at me, his face partially obscured by the moonless night.

  “You still think this murderer could be human?”

  I swallowed heavily and felt exhaustion wash over me. I had held my face steady through the crime scene and spent the entire drive home digging my teeth into my bottom lip and blinking back tears. This couldn’t be right.

  Alex killed the engine and palmed the key. “Are you sure you don’t have anything to tell me, Lawson?”

  I shook my head silently. I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth. If I told Alex that Sampson was back, Alex would ask him questions and Sampson would tell the truth and once he was cleared, we’d able to find the real killers, I reasoned. Or, I told myself, I could tell Alex and Alex would interview Sampson and Sampson would tell the truth and Romero would shoot to kill.

  Sampson couldn’t, I repeated silently. He wouldn’t.

  “Lawson?” The streetlight picked up the glinting blue in Alex’s eyes and I felt more disconnected, more unsteady. There was Will, there was Alex. There were two heinous murder scenes that pointed to a werewolf—and I had one hiding out across the hall from me. I was normally a good girl. I was normally one-sided and easy and flat.

  The old Sophie would hitch her chin and act indignant. The old Sophie would fumble with her gun, go lobster red, and eat an entire sleeve of marshmallow pinwheels.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say to you, Alex.”

  When I was little, I told everyone that my father was a solider, off fighting in some foreign war. I had an image of him in my mind—he had my unruly, curly red hair and his lips set hard in that weird, straight-line way that mine did. My eyes were my mother’s—though in my memory hers were more distinctly emerald—but everything else that was weird or off or laughable about me came from my father and all of it was admirable and distinctive and inhe
rited from a man who was a hero. A man who saved people by the country-full, who put himself in danger every day because he knew, inherently, fundamentally, what was right.

  He never faltered.

  He would come back for me one day and I wouldn’t have to wonder if it was him because he would know me by my looks, my mannerisms, because so much of me was so distinctly him.

  I told myself this story over and over again before I fell asleep, so often that I believed that even if the details weren’t exactly right it was mostly true—I was like my father and my father was a good man.

  And then the whispers—hushed, murmured, caught on the wind—started. My father was bad. Was evil. Was the reason that people died, killed, murdered, tortured. I wasn’t anything like him.

  But as I drove away with Alex leaning against his car watching me go and three women murdered, destroyed, cooling in the morgue, I began to wonder if I was just a little bad, too.

  If I didn’t have faith in Sampson.

  If I let these women die just because I wanted to be right.

  Or because I just didn’t care.

  I was standing in the hallway outside of my apartment, staring at Will’s closed door. I extended my fist to knock and then dropped it down to my side again. What am I supposed to say to Sampson? I wondered as I gnawed on my bottom lip. “Hey, Sampson, so glad to have you back. And I really am doing everything I can to get you reinstated as head of the UDA, but first things first: have you been ripping human beings apart limb by bloody limb? Just checking.”

  My stomach had been a tight knot since we left the house in Pacific Heights. When Alex left me in the monitor room I steeled myself, and eventually followed him into the living room, where I was sure I would be able to easily explain away everything we had seen on the tape: the blob was a rightfully pissed-off gorilla who had escaped animal testing at the Mars factory. It was a steroid-infused Chihuahua left over from a Mexican drug lord. Perhaps a shaggy-legged holdover from the Manson family.