Her house was only a minute away by car, at the other end of the snaky Circle Moon Drive, so she was almost there.
In the speakers, Eric Woolfson sang about how time was flowing like a river to the sea.
She shut it off in midsentence, one of her favorite songs, but suddenly afraid of its irony.
Chapter Eighteen
Martin
The Days Inn just outside Eagle River had one dingy little room left and he took it, stale smoke and all, sweat still clammy on his back and the wet spot inside the front of his pants congealing in a cold, smelly mess that both aroused and disgusted him.
He needed a shower. Then he needed a drink or two. He’d passed a half-dozen cowboy-type bars. Apparently, Up North meant redneck, if the number of muddied Rams, Rangers, and Silverados meant anything. Maybe what he needed was right here, and maybe this would be the best way—and place—to do it. Now that there was somebody else in the cop’s life it meant a bit of a detour, but that was okay. For Martin, the journey was going to be every bit as wonderful and exciting as the destination.
He put the Smith &Wesson on the bed as he stripped. It would have been too easy. Just like sitting outside that cop’s house. Why do anything the easy way? Where was the fun in that?
What he really wanted, Martin realized, was to kill the freak while making sure he knew why. Martin wanted to see the freak do his wolf thing, if it was real. If Caroline hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. No, she believed it, and after reading her words, so did he. He knew exactly what he needed.
He hummed some song in the shower, a melody he’d heard that evening out of Lupo’s stereo that he couldn’t get out of his head.
Lupo
If it is Martin Stewart, he knows everything about me. My condition. Everything.
Caroline had written about it, and her journals had disappeared. He’d wondered at the time who had taken them and worried about it. Now he knew.
Jessie Hawkins. Could he love someone without hurting her? Without killing her, as he had Martin’s sister?
He decided to break off anything that might be happening between him and Jessie, for her own safety.
He would tell her tomorrow. Right now, he had other responsibilities.
The moon called from far away.
The Creature began to surface.
His body changed, and he let it.
Klug
Wilbur Klug had been waiting for Kenny for an hour. He was on his second beer, almost ready for a third, and he contemplated taking his anger out on one of the waitresses. Suzie was her name, if you bothered to read the plastic tag she wore pinned to her left breast. He flashed for a second on what he could do with that pin on soft, creamy flesh. Her nipples stretched out the t-shirt nicely. He must have been staring because she caught him at it, her eyes widening at his brazen leer. Give me five minutes, Suzie-Q, and you’ll see what I been savin’ for you. He raised his bottled Bud in her direction and the fake toast settled her enough that she gave him a half-smile and went about her rounds, stopping at a large table of drunken frat boys.
How did the wench know I wasn’t asking for another beer?
Wilbur stared at the strapping young men, taking the measure of each. That one was overfed. The greaseball next to him was a pretty boy. The third guy was muscular but clearly weight-room muscle-bound—he’d fold in thirty seconds flat. The thin, Irish-looking guy next to him seemed deceptively calm—he’d fight dirty and with little regard for himself. Wil figured the guy’d go five minutes before a broken limb would shut him down. The fifth guy was a wide boy who probably carried some sort of concealed weapon—a boot knife, a set of knuckles—but he wouldn’t know how to use it. Wil fingered his own Bowie knife belt and remembered the look on the late Phil Carson’s face as the slightly curved blade had sliced open his belly like a scalpel parting salted lard. That was a moment you wanted to remember forever, to call up whenever you were down. He loved the way old Phil’s tight little fists had become splayed hands as he tried to hold his greasy guts inside his split belly, while the blood seeped like petroleum through his fat fingers. Wil had told Buck about that and enjoyed Buck’s jealous rage at having missed it. Wil imagined himself giving the fifth guy here the same business. They had some dumb bastard from Rhinelander in the slammer for Phil’s bye-bye, and last Wil had heard, he was being passed around for more than just tea parties. Wil laughed at the notion of the wrong guy getting the shaft while getting shafted.
The fifth guy, obviously drunk, reached up and touched Suzie-Q’s breast as she zipped by. From across the room Wil heard her gasp and saw her step back, fist poised overhead. The guy laughed and waved her off to gales of laughter from his crew. Wil glanced at his watch. Kenny was very late, but maybe he could amuse himself for a while. He drained the rest of his beer and straightened, scraping his chair back. Anticipation coursed through his veins and he allowed himself a moment to enjoy it—lust mixed with adrenaline. Blood pumping so strongly to his limbs that muscle and sinew seemed to sing with the tension. Wil felt his neck and shoulders tighten and the bulge in his groin grow, as if a beautiful buck had just ambled into his crosshairs. He wished this moment—this first bodily preparation for battle—would last forever. It was more intoxicating than any brew or distillate.
By now Suzie had returned with another pitcher of pissy beer, and the fifth guy took the opportunity to torment her again, this time pinching her buttocks and lifting her apron to examine her muscular and well-shaped thighs and buttocks. He laughed the wide-open-mouth laugh of the bully, the slow-witted kid who shakes down the weak and frail for their lunch money. He showed his horse teeth when he laughed, looking around with beady eyes for the approval he needed. His buddies gave it to him while others in the room concentrated on ignoring him lest his wrath turned on them.
He was just like Wil, except Wil was smarter. And on home ground. And Wil didn’t appreciate the competition. No fuckin’ way, college boy. Wil headed for the kids’ table and seemed to materialize there, bottle held innocently in hand. One second there was no one, and the next there he stood with a smirk on his face.
“Hey, man,” Wil said softly, “I think you’re bothering the chick.”
The tormentor was facing away at that moment, and it took him a few seconds to turn and stare at Wil. His lips formed a sneer. “Take a hike, Helen,” he said. Then he turned to his little group and put a hand on his forehead. “Not tonight, honey, I have a headache.” He laughed so hard he splashed spittle all over the table. One of his friends gushed out beer and let it spill all over his shirt. Mirth was their middle name.
Without a warning or a moment’s hesitation, Wilbur slashed the beer bottle across the back of the frat boy’s head hard enough to shatter it, then raking it back just as quick as a blur so the jagged shards would do their thing in the back of the jerk’s skull.
The frat boy screeched and blood flew as the bottle completed the arc of its return trip and gouged flesh and bone from the boy’s skull, and then Wil was jabbing the glassy remains in the face of the overfed one, who crumpled with a snootful of glass, bone, and teeth while his fat fingers tried to hold his face together as blood squirted between them. Wil was turning to face the rising bodybuilder type before anyone noticed that he’d sucker-punched Pretty Boy and nearly downed him with nary a whisper. When the bodybuilder presented a wide enough target, Wil’s pointed and steel-toed motorcycle boot shot out and put a major hurt on the muscleman’s groin. The dude dropped like a sack of rotten potatoes—with a splat in the blood-beer-bile-bottle combo below—and then it was just the Irish lad and the original bully, who’d managed to ignore the gore oozing from the back of his own head (tells you where his brain ain’t!) and was now gathering himself for some kind of defense. Wil dropped the remains of the Bud-swill bottle and reached into his back pocket for the special length of carved pool cue he kept there. It was cut down to about twelve inches and years ago he’d lovingly embedded four rows of lead shot in the compass points of the last
five inches, so that when he swung it at the Irish lad—who proved his loyalty and stupidity both by advancing without recon—the weight took out half a jawful of college-boy teeth in yet another gush of blood and, this time, puke.
Then he was facing the original bully, the fifth guy, the guy whose horse teeth reminded Wil of—well, horses. Fuck this, he thought. Time to end it. The guy roared once, his voice full of pain and rage—or outrage—and charged Wil, who neatly sidestepped and watched as he flew past in a blur of blood and windmilling limbs to land on the filthy beer-encrusted floor. Wil stepped up immediately behind him and planted a booted kick in the guy’s lower back, putting his entire weight into it almost as if kicking a field goal. The guy screamed in pain and half-crawled, half-rolled away from Wil’s foot, scampering over the blood- and debris-covered floor to the side of the room.
Wil didn’t bother to follow. Only a few patrons had stood to watch the fight, one-sided and brief as it was, but most of the clientele had watched from their seats. Wilbur Klug had a bit of a reputation in the department of kicking college butt, as Buck Benton once put it—a reputation that more college kids should have heeded before placing him in the position of proving it, Wil thought. Problem was, no one knew which drinking establishment might be the recipient of Wil’s attentions, and those college kids who learned about him during one of his sessions invariably never returned to any local watering holes.
Somebody bought him a beer. When Kenny finally showed up, he was just in time to see damaged or groggy college kids taking themselves very quickly out the door, heading for campus health services for stitches and plenty of gauze. They wouldn’t be back tonight.
No one had called the sheriff. Wilbur Klug’s occasional outbursts were considered to be for the common good—after all, they served as an outlet valve for his aggressions. College kids from the nearby state extension school were barely tolerated, so the occasional beating went unnoticed. Now college girls, however, found themselves welcome just about any time and rarely witnessed Wil’s kind of public purge. Had his friends Buck and Kenny been present, they might well have given the college boys a little more of their hospitality; but as it was, Wil was thirsty and alone, so he let them off easy.
He grabbed the Bud and guzzled it. Free beer was free beer.
Kenny nodded apologetically. “Sorry I missed it all, Wilbur! I’da kicked me a little college butt too.”
“Sit the fuck down and let’s us figure out a way to break Buck outta jail, Kenny. No bullshit.”
“Break him out? You nuts?”
Wilbur chugged beer and tried to put into words what had occurred to him. It was difficult, because the key to his earlier thoughts happened to be the fact that Mrs. Klug was now chopped into white, roast-size packages stored in his venison freezer in the basement. Bits of bone and flesh were still wedged under his nails. He had burned out the small chainsaw halfway through the job and put his hacksaw set to work, then he’d buried the tools out in the vegetable patch. There were a couple more recently dug holes in the vicinity, but he’d checked and they seemed to have held up pretty well over the winter. It really was time to get the hell out of Vilas County; if only because his tale of Shelly’s departure wouldn’t hold more than a few days.
She’d fought him when he went back in to reclaim his new prize. She’d kicked and scratched and threatened to call Sheriff Bunche if he went near her, which of course infuriated him no end and pretty much meant he had to subdue her. Shelly’d grown up tougher than most, but he would not be denied and he’d taught her the lesson again and again, not realizing until it was too late that one time he had held his hands around her neck too long. By then the bruises had begun to come up, and he’d had no choice. No choice at all. Well, they wouldn’t look in his venison freezer for a while.
He’d had a grand plan—the three of them could have masterminded a small crime wave, given what he knew about where several local businesses kept their petty cash stashes.
He’d been in the middle of fantasizing about how he and Buck and Kenny could avail themselves of his knowledge when the unfortunate accident with Shelly forced him to rethink portions of the plan. And then Kenny’d called with news of Buck’s arrest, and the weekend’d gone to hell before it had really started. He had wrapped his blood-flecked, meaty hands around the phone while talking to Buck, and had figured that part of his plan was now shot. But not all of it. They could still handle the cash stashes once Buck was free. The only thing was, they couldn’t follow his original plan and stay, no sir, his stupid fuckin’ wife had seen to that. Getting herself killed had put a major damper on his plan, but maybe it also gave him the opportunity to split this backwater and find more suitable digs elsewhere.
Now he tried carefully to put his ideas into words for Kenny, not the sharpest knife in the block, sure, but they’d bullied their way through grade school and a prolonged tour of duty in high school, and frankly no one else would have listened and obeyed half as well.
“Wil said, “Buck and me—and you—we been here all our lives. We spend our money here, fuck our women here, drink our beer here, and do what all else here, and nowhere else. I figure it’s time we moved on, but first we need some capital. Buck knows a couple places we can get that capital, and so do I. Then we can head outta here and start over somewhere else.”
Kenny had drunk some beer and listened to the grand plan, and Wilbur could see that he wasn’t all the way happy about how things were going. That was too fuckin’ bad.
“What about Shelly?” Kenny asked with a whine.
“Shelly’s gone. Left me. Headed back home, far’s I know. I don’t give a good fuck, you know? I took a lotta shit from that woman, and I ain’t sad a’tall to see her headin’ for the horizon. I’m a free man, Kenny! And when we get Buck out, then we’re all gonna be free. We get enough cash, I’m thinking we head for Chicago first, then New Orleans. Think of all that titty hangin’ out during Mardi Gras. You seen that Cops special, ain’t ya?”
Kenny nodded and Wil could see how he was considering it, wrapping his head around it. Kenny would go along.
“Or, hey, we could head for Canada. The mountains. Never find us there! Yeah, the mountains…”
“I don’t know, Wilbur,” Kenny said. But his voice was shaky He’d never let his friends leave him behind. He had nothing else.
Wilbur chugged his beer and smiled. Maybe things were looking up after all.
Martin
The man was a one-person dynamo. There was no describing it. It was like a scene from that old seventies flick he’d once seen in the Institute—what was it? Billy Jack? In which the guy went wacko on a group of bad guys and kung fu-ed them into blubbering idiots because they just made him “go berserk.” Martin had come into the North Woods Bar and eaten an incredible double cheeseburger while seated at the long wooden bar. The burger was loaded with grease and fried onions, and Martin had squirted a huge amount of mustard all over it. It was heartburn in a basket, but it had taken the edge off the empty-stomach gnawing he’d felt ever since seeing the freak cop and the woman making out like children. They had what he wanted, what he once had, and now he was an empty vessel all because of Lupo. The weight of the .44 was comfortable in the concealed holster, and the weight of the greasy bar food seemed to compensate for the emptiness inside, at least for a while.
He’d been about to move on to some other dive when he’d noticed the college kids bothering the waitress at about the same time he noticed the mountain of a man across the room.
He’d stared at the waitress himself, seeing that all her lips needed was a heavy coat of classic red to break out her fragile features from the delicate porcelain skin. She reminded him a bit of his Nurse Dievers, and he flashed into a fantasy about her—better yet, the two of them—locked in a smeary embrace. Then there’d been some sort of a barometric pressure change in the place and he’d felt the air alter around him as the guy approached the kids and, seconds later, laid them all out without even breaking a sw
eat. Martin had seen some amazing brawls at the Institute, and he enjoyed this one. He asked the bartender about the big guy and got only a name and an elaborate shrug. Afterward, Martin sidled to an empty table near the man and his jumpy friend, a raggedy-looking wino type whose nervous eyes roamed all around.
The big guy had a look in his eye that reminded Martin of his father’s sadistic glee as they played their games. He shivered, though he couldn’t tell if it was fear or expectation.
Martin heard enough of their conversation to allow himself a smile. It was serendipitous, coming here. He felt the pieces falling into place.
Klug and Kenny
At first the bland-looking city guy who came up suddenly looked like a cop. In fact, Wilbur thought he saw the outline of a piece under the quilted jacket. His hair was too short, too neat. He seemed both square and twisted at the same time, but it was the eyes that gave him away. There was nothing but emptiness there.
Wil saw himself reflected in the stranger’s eyes. This guy’s no fuckin’ cop.
“Gentlemen,” said the stranger. “Are you by any chance looking for employment?”
Wil stared a moment longer. “Might be. What kind of employment?”
He slitted his eyelids. The stranger had seen him dispose of the queer quintet, but he didn’t seem intimidated, and that was interesting. His eyes were blank—as blank as his overall appearance. He could have melted into a wall.
“My name is Martin Stewart. I have a proposition for you.”
“Sit,” Wil said. “I’m listenin’.”
The conversation lasted over an hour. Empty beer bottle ranks took up the table’s center. Some of what the Martin dink said was strange and kinda funny. But he had money, one thing Wil figured he himself was too short of now, given his situation, and the story included a couple perks that he might find interesting. Mighty interesting indeed. And all they had to do was off a city cop, and hunt this wolf the guy was obsessing about. Yeah, he said the guy was the wolf, but obviously that was bullshit made up to get them interested. Wilbur didn’t need any of that crap to know he was seeing an opportunity better than the string of robberies he’d planned. No, this was better because there was a chance they could pry some of this Martin fella’s cash from him, too, along the line.
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