Werewolf Cop (27 page)

He was thinking: No chairs around the table. Old stains down the table's side. Old smells like these smells suffusing the wood of the walls and the racks. . . .

This wasn't the first killing that had happened in this place. This was a murder room, a place set aside for the purpose. And more than that . . .

. . . the mixture of werewolf's blood with holy water on the blade . . . transforming the blood of human sacrifice into a panacea, curing every disease, and retarding the aging process . . .

Zach's eyes flicked over the wine racks—all the racks all around him.

“Oh Lord,” he whispered, because he already knew.

He stepped to the nearest rack. He reached for it with his left hand, still holding the gun with his right because something else was here, something alive and dangerous nearby. Still keeping an eye on the room and the dead man, he felt along the edges of the rack. Tried various ways of pulling it and pressing it. Then he heard a click and felt it give.

The rack swung outward. The bodies were hanging behind it. Three of them, each in a transparent plastic bag, each hooked to a metal rod like a suit of clothes. Inside each bag, a gaping mouth showed black, eyes stared obscurely, blood smeared the plastic, gore pooled around the corpse's feet.

Eyeing the room, holding the gun, breathing hard now, Zach moved to the next rack. Pressed it. Three more bodies hung behind.

“Good Jesus.”

Four were behind the next rack. Zach kept moving around the room. Pressing the racks so that they swung out, revealing the bags, the bodies. The corpses dangled and stared through the plastic. They were men and women both. They were white and colored. Some looked to Zach like teenagers, most were middle-aged, some were old. No, not a serial killer, Zach thought. This was human sacrifice. The work of Dominic Abend—and of Stumpf's baselard.

When he had done the full circuit of the room, all the racks were open; the dead surrounded him, hanging from every wall. All those mouths open as if gasping for air inside the plastic. All those wide eyes staring as if begging for release. All that flesh and pooled viscera and smeared blood. An overwhelming array of slaughter.

Staggered by the sight, Zach slowly lowered his gun and gaped. He stood near the foot of the corpse on the center table. He checked the door that was still open on the empty corridor, then turned to the body beside it, then turned to the next body and the next, from one chamber of hanging corpses to the next and next, coming around in a complete circle until he faced the door again.

There was a living man standing in the doorway now. Zach recognized the stooped, monkish figure in his robe-like overcoat, his long greasy hair, his rat-like features: one of the gunmen who had fired on him in the Long Island City hallway. In a frantic flash, Zach thought of the Dezzy .50-cal that had nearly blown his head off. He saw the gun in the monk-man's hand. He tried to bring his own weapon to bear. Too late.

The monk fired and hit Zach dead center. Zach sank to the floor and kept sinking into a pool of tarry blackness.

22

THE BEACH HOUSE

T
here was a fire on the southern horizon. Enormous cylinders of orange flame rolled and roared across the twilit sky. Cottages and barns were crumbling in on themselves, the wood splintering loudly, the sparks exploding upward. There were screams amidst the other noises—ragged women's screams; the high screams of children—the screams dying as the people died.

Zach could see and hear it all from where he was, half a mile or so to the north. He continued trudging up the hillside, making his way toward the peak behind which the sun had set. A man stood waiting for him up there on the ridge, a man turning to shadow as the dusk deepened.

Zach knew this was all a dream, but it was also not a dream, not
just
a dream. It was also real somehow. The smell of the sere winter grass was real and the crunch of it under his shoes. The smell of smoke from far off when the wind shifted, and the bright angry life of the fire and the pitiful screaming and the pitiful way the screams ended—these were all real. Each dying woman and each dying child, Zach knew, was just as real as he was. Each was an entire inner world of tenderness and anxiety and yearning. And each was being slaughtered like a beast, cut down by the cold edge of a sword or cooked alive inside one of the burning structures, a point of view extinguished in agony, then gone. More than a dream. This was history.

Zach crested the hill. He reached the waiting man. He could make him out through the thickening nighttime: a man wearing black with a frilly white collar. Zach recognized the bald head, the long face, the sharp gray goatee of the executioner.

“Am I dead?” Zach murmured to him. He remembered the rat-faced monk who had shot him in the wine cellar.

“No,” the executioner said. He gestured down the other side of the hill with his open hand. “
They
are dead.”

Zach looked and saw a vast field of winter trees with hanged men dangling from their branches. The black dead figures—the trees and the suspended bodies—were starting to blend with the gathering darkness.

Zach stood appalled: all those strangled inner worlds—their longings and their speculations, their love for their mothers and the way cherries tasted on their tongues—flung into the pit of nothingness like so many handfuls of sand tossed down a well. All those lives.

He shook his head, heartsick. “I have my own soul and my own sins,” he said. “I can't mourn for everyone.”

The vision—the village in flames, the orchard of hanging corpses—threatened to engulf him. He was drowning in the horror of it. He had to get out, but he couldn't. He was unconscious, he realized. He had been drugged—that was the problem. He fought to wake up. He struggled toward the surface of reality. Whatever waited for him there, he thought it had to be better than this.

But he was wrong about that.

He broke, gasping, into the light of the present. Chained to a metal cot. Lying on a bare mattress. Face and hair sticky with his own vomit. Thighs burning from his own urine. He was wearing nothing but his sodden jockeys. He was cold. He was sick as hell.

He groaned, tried to curl up. Chains rattled. His wrists and ankles were manacled. There were burns on his sternum. His neck ached. That weird little monkish rat had shot him with a stun gun, not the .50-cal, then plunged a syringe into his neck as he lay helpless. Shocked him first, then drugged him.

Where was he? How long had he been here? He twisted his head, trying to see. He was in a small bare room, white walls, wood floors. One door—closed. Heavy curtains on the one window. A skylight showed a square of high leaden sky, no trace of sun. It was much darker than before. Looked like a storm coming. It was chilly too. The chill had eaten into him. He remembered that the monkish, rat-faced killer had come in here at least once, maybe twice or even more—come in and casually jabbed another syringe into his neck, keeping him down.

He'd been here quite a while, in other words.

He was nauseous and uncomfortable in his own filth. His head was swimming in the smells of piss and puke. His eyes sank closed and he spun down woozily into the dusk vision again: the burning village, the screaming women and children, the orchard of hanging men. He could smell the grass and the smoke. His eyes flashed open as he fought back to the surface. The room reeled around him.

Blinking hard, he made his mind work, his cop mind. He tried to put the pieces together. The monk must've hidden in one of the crannies in the wine-cellar corridor. Did he and Zach just happen to be there at Sea View at the same time by coincidence? Not likely. Had the monk been waiting for him? Maybe. Maybe he'd been tipped off by Goulart. Or maybe he'd been waiting for someone else, and Zach was just the one who happened to show up.

And now . . . well, now it was going to be bad. Death was the best-case scenario. The worst? He remembered Johnny Grimhouse, flayed and mutilated with the giant waterbugs feeding on him.

Not much chance of getting out of here, but he had to try.

He twisted to get a better look at his chained hands. . . .

That was as far as he got. The door opened. The monk came in. This was Zach's first clear look at him. What had seemed like a robe before was, he saw now, just a heavy black overcoat, weirdly tented under the man's stooped shoulders. The stringy, greasy hair framed a preternaturally thin face, sharp nose, reddish eyes. Zach looked into those eyes and saw the sadism of slaves and true believers. Clearly, this was Abend's acolyte down to his soul. Zach's heart sank. A man like this—he would just love to lay the hurt on the infidel, to take revenge on the heathen for being free of the chains of devotion he himself was bound by. Zach just had time to think this—then he saw the stun gun in the bastard's hand and thought,
No, don't!
and then the monk shot him again.

The other gunman, the goateed Satan lookalike, was right behind the monk. The two men went to work around Zach's twitching body. They loosed his chains from the cot frame. Then, the monk at his shoulders and the devil at his heels, they carried him through the door as he spasmed and choked on his own drool. Clouds swam over Zach's mind as the monk and Satan hauled him into a broad empty room. Vaguely he made out white walls and a huge picture window with a view of ocean heaving beneath the ominous and stormy sky. Muttering instructions to each other in chittering insectile voices, the thugs hoisted Zach upright. They chained his wrists to an iron chinning bar that was wedged into the top of an open doorway. They chained his ankles to a bar wedged into the doorway's bottom. Zach stood there slack-kneed, head hanging, blinking stupidly at the view of the sea.

Then something seemed to strike him from within himself: a living bolt of blackness. A crash of desolation, a flashing shock of death beyond despair. He remembered this feeling—he remembered the terror of it—from the hallway in Long Island City.

He knew that Dominic Abend was coming.

Now, sure enough, he heard the approach of slow footsteps. Hard boot heels on wood. Zach shook himself like a dog throwing off water, stiffened his legs under himself, trying to get his body more or less upright, trying to get his brain clear, trying to prepare himself for the meeting.

He was not prepared. He could not have been.

Dominic Abend was no longer the man from the photograph of Times Square on New Year's eve. He was not even the man who had summoned the giant roaches in the hallway in Long Island City. Something awful had happened to him since then. Zach recognized the large powerful body in the long black coat, recognized the shaved head, the bulbous nose and thin lips. But his flesh. . . . The flesh of his cheeks was darkening and wrinkling in patches. It was drawing tight so that the man's eyes bulged bizarrely and his teeth, no matter what his expression, were bared. An unmistakable smell of rot was coming off him. He was decaying, Zach realized. He was moldering even where he stood.

Zach's gaze dropped to the sword Abend was holding down by his side, the naked blade pressed against his pants leg. A fearful sight. Zach had to fight off the awareness of his own nakedness and vulnerability. But he had seen the body of Johnny Grimhouse. He knew what was coming.

With effort, Zach lifted his heavy head and met the killer's eyes. Looking at the photographs, he had always imagined that those eyes would be knowing and cruel. But bulging the way they were, with the skin around them black and sunken, they just seemed weirdly bright and full of a wild preternatural terror.

Abend came to stand in front of Zach. Zach could hear the phlegmy breath of the monk standing to the right of him, the doggish pant of Satan to his left, both of them eager with anticipation of what was coming.

Abend looked the chained cop over casually, without much interest. Zach swallowed hard. He was afraid.

“You are the lawman, yes?” Abend said briskly—he had a thin voice with a German accent. “You are the one they call the Cowboy. Adams.”

Zach nodded. “I am.”

“Extraordinary Crimes, they call your people, correct? Task Force Zero?”

“Yes.”

“And I am Dominic Abend, the one you are all looking for.”

“I know.”

“Congratulations, then. You have found me. Hm?”

“Yes.”

Abend smiled a little at the irony. “You went to Germany, did you not? To talk to the Dankl woman.”

A thought occurred to Zach, and he spoke it. “Did Goulart tell you that?”

Abend seemed to appreciate the question. He nodded at it. He said “Hm!”

Then he sliced Zach's chest open.

It was a move so swift, Zach barely saw it—barely even felt it until it was done. Without warning, Abend brought the sword across himself and whipped it backhand over Zach's breasts. The blade dug deep and ripped a gash from one side of Zach to the other. Zach's head flew back and he screamed in agony. As he sank forward in his chains, a thick line of blood bubbled out of the wound and spilled down over his abdomen.

“I will ask the questions, yes?” said Abend quietly. “You went to Germany and talked to the Dankl woman, is this correct?”

Zach shuddered and sucked in air through his teeth, fighting down his sobs of pain. His head hanging, he coughed wetly, stupidly watching the blood run over him. The violation of his flesh had hollowed out his spirit on the instant. He felt as if liquid fire had been splashed over his torso, wounding him so deep he'd never heal. Terrified that Abend would cut him again—and he knew he would cut him again—he tried to answer the question before the killer grew angry. He only just managed to gather enough strength to nod and gasp, “Yes. Yes.”

“And so you know about the baselard, in other words,” Abend went on at once.

“I do,” Zach groaned. “I know about it.”

“But of course, you don't know where it is, do you? No, or you wouldn't have been out here at Sea View. You talked to Angela, realized she was lying, came back to talk her again, so on and so forth, yes?”