by P. N. Elrod
The article was about a sudden dearth of criminal defense lawyers and a rash of arson involving their offices. It didn’t take a genius to figure out most of them weren’t on vacation or visiting Aunt Mabel. Of course, the real story wouldn’t be in the papers, but there was enough between the lines to sit him bolt upright in his chair, the taste of copper in his mouth and his pulse racing like a stock car.
Holy shit. His hands turned into fists. She learns quick.
Five minutes later he was out the door, sliding through the wet neon light. He hailed a cab at the corner, sat in a fug of cigarette smoke and fogged windows, and tipped the driver too much as he climbed out on Twenty-third.
The office building was a shell of itself, yellow crime scene tape fluttering. Rookwood stood across the street with his heart in his mouth, staring at the wreckage.
Yes, a quick learner. He wondered how she’d taken care of Fann—the old boy was tricky, and even without his legs he was a formidable opponent.
So formidable Rookwood had been working the best way to get at him inside his fortress-building. The same building that was a charred shell right now.
Goddamn, girl. What did you do?
Of course the widow would have visited the offices during the day. Of course she would know the layout and have her husband’s access to the keypads, the magnetic keys, the state-of-the-art systems. Of course she’d be allowed in as the wife of an almost partner, and she’d get past the daytime bodyguards because of her scent of burning.
She’d probably come back and taken care of Fann early. He wouldn’t put it past her.
There was nothing to do here, but he poked around anyway. The reek of corruption had faded, and the Thirst didn’t tingle, warning him of danger.
He caught another cab back home. Dawn was coming up as he put his key in the lock and paused.
The door was unlocked.
Had she been waiting for him to go downtown? He hadn’t even felt someone watching.
His office held a ghost of perfume. Rich, brunette, with a tang of ash. On his desk, placed precisely in the pool of yellow light from the lamp, was a fat white envelope. He peeked in—five thousand in crisp hundred-dollar bills. And a note, on paper that smelled like her. The same clear schoolgirl hand she’d used to label the map to her husband’s grave.
Mr. Rookwood,
Enclosed please find the remainder of your fee. I hope things are even between us now. I have learned a lot since we last spoke. I think I will be continuing the work.
Sincerely,
Amelia King
P.S.Thank you.
“Goddamn,” Rookwood whispered to his empty office. “Goddamn.”
There was no reply except the rain.
Lilith Saintcrow was born in New Mexico, bounced around the world as an Air Force brat, and fell in love with writing when she was ten years old. She currently lives in Vancouver, Washington, with two small children and a houseful of cats. Her Web site is www.lilithsaintcrow.com.
GOD’S CREATURES
by CARRIE VAUGHN
Cormac waited in the cab of his Jeep, watching each car that pulled into the rest area on I-25 north of Monument. So far, none of them looked like the one he was waiting for. A lot of truckers stopped here, with a few road trippers thrown in, all shapes and sizes. McNeill would stand out, when he made his appearance.
Forty-five minutes after he was due, the aggressively souped-up pickup truck veered off the freeway and came up the lane. It had oversize tires, lights on the rollbar, a gun rack—empty for now—in the back window, and a Confederate flag sticker on the bumper. McNeill was that kind of asshole.
Cormac stepped out of the Jeep; McNeill saw him and swerved to park a couple of spots down. The guy climbed out of his truck and dropped to the ground. He was tall and stocky, wearing worn jeans and a flannel shirt over a white tee. He shoved his hands in his pockets and pretended he wasn’t cold in the winter air, but he was shrugging and tense, trying to keep warm. Cormac waited for him.
“You’re supposed to be keeping your head down,” Cormac said flatly, prodding on purpose, knowing it would piss McNeill off.
“What? My head’s down.” He looked around, frowning, appearing smug because there weren’t any cops in sight. “What’s your problem?”
“Registration sticker on your plate’s expired. That’s like waving a flag at the cops,” Cormac said, nodding toward the back end of the truck.
“And I don’t give a fucking cent to an illegal government.” He pulled himself straighter, as if he were daring Cormac to make a big deal out of it.
Yeah, McNeill was one of those. Didn’t seem to care that the cops wouldn’t get you on the weapons stockpiles or the conspiracy charges. They nailed you on back taxes and traffic violations. You covered your ass on the little things as the price of doing business. But that was why McNeill was a go-between and Cormac did the heavy lifting.
“What’s the job?” Cormac said.
He’d gotten a call two days ago. A rancher he’d worked with before had some trouble—Cormac’s kind of trouble. They both knew McNeill, who spent a lot of time traveling around the state, so he sent McNeill with the details you didn’t talk about over the phone and the down payment. McNeill didn’t know what exactly Cormac did. He probably assumed he was some kind of hit man.
Which was mostly true.
McNeill went back to his truck and returned with a manila envelope, which he handed to Cormac. He took only a brief look inside, finding a page of description and a business-sized envelope, thick with cash. There’d be ten hundred-dollar bills. He wasn’t going to count it out in the open, but he did pull out a bill and hand it to McNeill for payment.
“Thanks,” McNeill said, shoving the hundred in his pocket. “Good luck, man.”
Cormac had already turned back to the Jeep.
He arrived at Joe Harrison’s ranch in Lamar early the next morning. The old man was waiting for him on the front porch of the ramshackle house. The two-story building was probably close to a hundred years old. It needed a new roof and a coat of paint at the very least. But with a place like this, any extra money the family earned went right back into the ranch. The barns and fencing would get repairs before the house did.
“Thanks for coming,” Harrison said as Cormac left the Jeep and walked down to shake his hand. The rancher was in his sixties, his face furrowed and weathered, tough as leather from spending his life raising cattle out here. The kind of guy who was more at home with barbed wire and baling twine than a comfortable chair and a TV set.
“Let’s take a look,” Cormac said.
Harrison opened a gate in the fence, and they rode in Cormac’s Jeep, straight across the prairie for about three miles. Harrison navigated by landmarks, pointing to show Cormac the way.
“There, it’s right there,” Harrison said finally, and Cormac stopped the Jeep.
Harrison led him to a spot where stands of scrub oak followed the contour of the hills, bordering the open plains. A carcass lay here, partly sheltered by the wind, flattening the grass. About a week old, Cormac guessed. The steer, a typical rust-and-cream-colored Hereford, had been savaged, its gut ripped open from sternum to tail, its face and tongue torn out, its throat flayed. Scavengers had been through since then—scraps of hair and bone radiated out from the remains. Most of what was left was leathery skin and hair over a rib cage and a leering, ragged skull.
“The second one’s about a mile that way,” Harrison said, pointing again. “And we had another one just last night.”
They returned to the Jeep and drove east a mile or so. Cormac didn’t need directions this time; he spotted the vultures circling overhead. When he pulled up near the spot, a pair of coyotes ran off, then hunkered down in the long grass, waiting to return to their meal in peace.
The other carcass had been dried out and picked over; it hadn’t smelled like anything. The rotten, bloody stink of this one hit Cormac as soon as he left the Jeep.
“The others looked
just like this one?” Cormac asked Harrison, who nodded. The rancher winced, turning his face away from the stench.
This one had been gutted like the other. Savaged, but not eaten. Guts and organs spilled out, pink flesh glistened on bones. The scavengers had had a meal handed to them. The weather was too cold for flies, which would have been swarming.
This was why Harrison had called him. They weren’t dealing with a predator that killed because it needed to eat. This was a pure killer, and it was only a matter of time before it attacked someone. Cormac had seen this pattern before. A beast like this might start out with the best of intentions. It might flee to a distant wilderness, where it would kill a few rabbits or maybe a deer with no harm done. But then it would start to slide. It couldn’t stay away from civilization forever. It would still have the bloodlust, but it wouldn’t bother fleeing. Inhibitions would fail; it would struggle to keep from hurting anyone, but someday it would slip. It would attack livestock. Then it would finally give in to instinct and kill the human beings it hated because it was no longer one of them.
Cormac had to find the thing before that happened. Full moon was still a week off, but that didn’t matter when one of them went bad. They could change anytime they wanted and did mostly when they lost control.
“You have any idea who’s doing this? Anybody notice any strangers around here? Someone who might be camping out? Or has someone in town started acting funny?”
“If I had any idea who it was, I wouldn’t need to call you,” Harrison said, frowning.
Cormac stepped around the kill, looking for tracks, for the pattern of wolf pads as big as a man’s face, with the matching puncture marks of claws. The winter had been dry so far, and the ground was rock hard. He might not have seen anything among the carpet of dead grasses, but werewolf claws were sharp, and he found the little holes in the ground, as far apart as his spread hand. He threw his keys to Harrison. He’d left his rifles in the vehicle but had a semiautomatic handgun in a shoulder holster, hidden under his leather jacket. “I’ll meet you back at the house.”
“What did you find?”
“Give me the afternoon, I’ll let you know.”
Harrison drove off in the Jeep, and Cormac followed the tracks.
The wolf could have run for miles. Cormac might be hiking all day—or at least as long as he could keep following his quarry. But for the first couple of miles the trail was clear; he found prints from one stride to the next, and on. The thing was headed in a straight line. Straight for home.
He reached the edge of the property, where Harrison was waiting at the Jeep. Cormac waved at him and kept going. The immense wolf tracks followed the ranch’s dirt driveway, then paralleled the highway, back toward town.
So it was someone from town, not some recluse cut off from civilization. That made it worse. This was civilization gone amuck. A werewolf could only follow instinct, which would drive it back home, wherever that might be. A monster might kill its own family and not even know what it did. Cormac had to find it first.
Brick-dry prairie along the highway gave way to empty, weed-grown lots, dirt roads, then cracked pavement, then sidewalks. Weeds gave way to lawns and welcoming rows of houses with porches, screen doors, and family cars outside. This all gave Cormac a sense of foreboding, because he was still following the same tracks, sparse now but sure in their direction: the puncture marks of claws in garden soil, torn-up tufts of grass. He’d lose the trail on pavement but find it again after hunting along the margins of lawns. The trail was straight enough that he wondered if he’d find a man at the end of it, staring back at him with a wolf behind his eyes.
What he found, when the prints and claw marks ended, was an oblong of pressed earth against an old brick building—the kind of shape a person might have made if he’d curled up and gone to sleep right here. The building was big, three stories, probably built around the turn of the last century. It might have been a schoolhouse. Why had the wolf come here?
There were no human footprints to follow; the distinctive claw marks had disappeared. Finally, he lost the trail.
He expanded his search, took in the area. The tall brick building seemed to be the center of a complex. One of the other buildings was definitely a school, like the kind built in the 1960s—low, one story, a flat roof, a grid of windows. Construction paper artwork was hung on the windows in one classroom.
Across a lawn stood another antique building, this one with a high, peaked roof—a steeple with a cross on top. He went around to the front and read the stone marker there: Saint Catherine’s.
This was a Catholic church and school.
He preferred the jobs where the wolf was an outcast who fled to the wilderness—no witnesses.
At the end of this, he’d have to kill someone. There’d be a body, and the cops didn’t take “He needed killin’ ” as an excuse. He could try to tell them the thing was a werewolf, but the end result wouldn’t be much different. Prison, psych ward, same thing.
The fewer people saw him lurking around, the fewer people he talked to, the better. He needed to keep it so that the people who did spot him wouldn’t be able to point the cops at him. When the body turned up, Harrison wouldn’t turn him in. Harrison understood.
Cormac walked along the street, passing the school’s grounds and trying to get a feel for the place. He walked by only once, normal, as if he had someplace else to be. Several buildings made up the complex, including a couple of homey brick blocks that seemed to be dorms. Around back was a sports field, and a group of girls in matching gray sweatshirts and green sweatpants played soccer. Maybe aged fifteen to seventeen. So, girls’ boarding school, high school. It was a Saturday; they wouldn’t be in class. There looked to be a couple of adults out with them, women in sweatpants and jackets. During the week there’d be teachers as well and a priest and staff for the church. They’d live on campus, too. In fact, behind the church he spotted what must have been the rectory, a small, square clapboard house attached to a meeting hall.
The werewolf could be any of them. A hundred possibilities, at least. He didn’t know where to start.
When he was done with his quick survey, he cut back a couple of blocks, made his way to the highway again, and returned to Harrison’s ranch. Dusk was falling.
Joe Harrison must have seen him coming through a window and met him on the porch.
“You get it? Is it dead?” Harrison said.
Cormac didn’t nod or shake his head, didn’t say yes or no. “I’m working on it. Wondered if you could tell me anything about the Catholic school up the highway.”
“Saint Catherine’s? It’s a reform school. All girls. Full of troublemakers.”
“Really? I didn’t see any fences.”
Harrison chuckled. “Look around. Where are they going to run off to?”
“I tracked your killer there,” Cormac said.
“You think it’s one of them kids?” The rancher donned an eager, hungry look.
Cormac frowned, hoping it wasn’t. He didn’t want to have to go shooting a kid. “I guess I’ll have to find out.”
Harrison shook his head. “Wouldn’t that just figure?”
“You know about any rumors, any suspicions about anyone there? Hear about anything odd?”
“They’re Catholics,” he said with a huff, as though that explained everything. “You know somebody’s always talking about the priest there, if you want rumors.”
Cormac rubbed the back of his neck and looked to the distance, to the flat horizon. The sky was deep blue, turning black with the setting sun. “That’s not a lot of help.”
“I’m just telling you what you asked for. Hey, how long’s this thing going to take? When am I going to be able to let my herd graze again?”
“I’ll let you know when it’s done. By the full moon for sure.”
“That’s a week away.”
“Sure is. But I’ll finish when I finish.” He turned away.
“I wish Douglas was here workin
g on this,” Harrison called after him.
Douglas was Cormac’s father. Harrison had known him—that was how he’d known to call Cormac.
Cormac didn’t slow down. “Yeah. Well. You got me instead.”
He kept watch on the ranch through the night; the werewolf might return to where it had found easy pickings before. Harrison had penned up the cattle since last night’s attack, and the animals crowded the corrals, milling and murmuring unhappily. Cormac kept walking the plains around the ranch house, covering half a dozen miles over the course of a couple of hours. He didn’t see anything. He didn’t even get that crawling feeling on his neck, as though something were watching him. It was just another cold night.
In the morning, he reclaimed his Jeep and found a ratty motel at the edge of town, where he talked the desk clerk into letting him have a room early. The clerk gave some bullshit about the rooms not being clean, but Cormac counted only three cars in the lot and at least two dozen rooms. Places like this didn’t have check-in times, he told the guy, and paid cash in advance.
He brought his weapons case into the room and looked over his collection one more time. A revolver, two semiautomatics, a shotgun, and a pair of rifles. The revolver was mostly to show off. He wore it when he needed to cop attitude, when a potential client expected the tough guy, the Old West gunslinger. And the boxes of ammunition for each of them: 9 mm silver rounds for the semis, silver filings in the shotgun shells, and so on. If he couldn’t take down the quarry with this, he likely couldn’t take it down at all. He’d never needed more than this. He also had a Bowie knife with silver inlay. The bone handle was worn. His father had told him it had belonged to his grandfather. His family had been doing this a long time, apparently.
He couldn’t be sure; his father hadn’t finished telling him all the stories when he’d died, when Cormac was sixteen. Harrison was right: it ought to be his father out here doing this.