Anything Can Be Dangerous (16 page)

8.

Stuart’s house emerged out of the
murk.

Jimmy drove the stolen car right up on
the lawn and left the engine running when he hopped out and hurried
to the door. No lights glowed in any of the windows, but he pounded
on the door and franticly thumbed the ringer.

When no one answered, he kicked the
door open.

Inside, he found Stuart sitting in the
living room with a double barrel shotgun.

What remained of his head was still
dripping from the ceiling.

9.

Jimmy pushed through the police
department’s front door at ten minutes to midnight.

Deputy Vern Ferguson was eating a late
dinner behind the long counter that separated the lobby from the
offices, and Jimmy ignored the kid’s muffled commands to halt as he
tried to speak through a mouthful of ham sandwich.

“
Hey!” the young officer
shouted when Jimmy let himself through the partition.

He found Sheriff Picket sitting at one
of the desks in the open central area of the building known as the
bullpen, and even from a distance Jimmy noticed the frown beneath
his storm cloud of a mustache.

And he wasn’t alone.

A tall American Indian man in blue
jeans and a suit coat (cop casual, Jimmy called it) stood off to
the left. A roadmap of fresh cuts crisscrossed the man’s face, some
linked by dozens of black stitches that looked all too reminiscent
of the patchwork monster he’d faced at the motel. The sight stopped
him in his tracks, and he had to make a cognitive effort to refocus
his thoughts on what he’d come here to say.

“
Want me to cuff him?”
Ferguson asked from behind, but the Sheriff merely motioned for the
kid to go back and finish his food.

“
Sheriff, we got trouble,”
Jimmy said.

Pickett stood, repositioning his
pistol belt as he did. “Oh, I don’t doubt that,” he answered.
“After what you pulled yesterday—”

“
Forget that shit!” Jimmy
rushed on. “I’m the reason that dead guy disappeared from the
morgue today!”

Pickett let out a short bark of
laughter and raised his hands as if surrendering to Jimmy’s
statement. “What a surprise!” he added with sarcastic flare.
“Tossing a feller outta the john with his pants around his ankles
and stealing his phone wasn’t enough fun, was it? Ya just had to
find something more interesting! Alright, then, Cooley, enlighten
us; what the hell did you do with a half-mutilated
corpse?”

But before he could answer, Pickett’s
eyes narrowed to two suspicious slits that focused on Jimmy’s
boxers.

“
You didn’t fuck it, did
you?”

Jimmy stared at the man. “What? No!
Jesus, Sheriff, I ain’t like that; I just ate one of the
fingers—”

Pickett’s bushy eyebrows seemed to fly
off his forehead. “Christ, almighty, son! Now you’re mixed up in
cannibalism?”

Deputy Ferguson laughed through a
mouthful of his drink, expelling spurts of orange cola out his
nose.

Pickett glared at the younger officer
like an executioner with one hand on the power switch, ending the
amusement. He then redirected his attention at Jimmy with equal
intensity.

“
This is Detective
Riverwind,” Pickett said, motioning to the American Indian with the
lacerated face. “He’s the one you’re going to have to make friends
with if you don’t want to spend the next decade in
prison.”

A phone rang at the desk. Vern
answered it.

“
Now listen up, Cooley,”
Pickett continued. “If it wasn’t for the detective’s investigation
I’d can your ass right now and Judge Morton would put it on the
shelf ’till winter. So if you have some serious information—and I
mean it better be a goddamn treasure map with a big fuck’n X at the
end of it—then start talking.”

“
Hey, Sheriff!” Ferguson
said. “We just got a call from that rescue shelter over on route
nine. The neighbors say some nutjob broke into the place and hacked
up all the animals with an ax. Sounds real messy.”

“
Wonderful!” Pickett
exclaimed. “Has the whole world gone crazy?”

“
I think it would be best
if I questioned Mister Cooley alone,” detective Riverwind said. “Do
you mind?”

It was the first time he’d spoken
since Jimmy arrived, and the power of the man’s voice sent a shiver
down his spine.

Pickett waved them away. “You can have
him!”

10.

A scarred, coffee-stained table sat in
the center of the police station’s only interview room and
Riverwind gestured for Jimmy to have a seat as he closed the
door.

“
Look,” Jimmy said once
they were alone, “this is a waste of time, man. That psycho you’re
after ain’t dead! He’s walking around right now, looking for
me!”

Riverwind nodded his acknowledgement
of Jimmy’s predicament, but didn’t reply. Rather than sit down, the
man took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his
chair.

“
The ‘psycho’ you’re
referring to is a Navajo witch,” the detective explained, now
rolling his sleeves up as he talked. “My people call them
Skinwalkers because they have the power to assume the shape of an
animal to avoid our detection. Seven days ago I beheaded the one
you encountered, trapping its spirit inside its body, but the
confrontation left me severely wounded and unable to fully dispose
of the remains.”

Jimmy gaped at the man’s words,
looking to his ravaged face and recalling the coyote-headed corpse
ripping out the bathroom wall of the motel.

“
I could tell you the whole
history of how they came to be,” the detective went on, “but as you
said, there isn’t much time. All you need to know is that by
consuming the Skinwalker’s flesh, you’ve given it the power to
thwart death and seek a new body.”

“
Me!” Jimmy gasped. “But
how—”

“
Your friend Stuart
isn’t very good at keeping secrets,” Riverwind answered. “He told
me about your little scheme when I questioned the morgue staff
about the disappearance of the Skinwalker’s corpse. He mentioned
how you’d inadvertently swallowed the creature’s finger. Now it’s
using your energy, your
life
force
, to stay in our world until it can transfer its
spirit into your body.”

“
So how the hell do we stop
it?” Jimmy asked. “I mean, you can stop it, right?”

“
There are two options,”
the man answered. “One is to completely destroy its physical form,
either by force or simply by waiting until the creature’s body
decomposes to the point of being useless. The only problem is that
you’re now linked to the Skinwalker by the same magical bond that
reanimated it, which will allow it to follow you wherever you go.
It will anticipate our moves.”

“
Great! So it could be here
any second?”

The man nodded.

“
What’s choice number
two?”

“
I cut off your
head.”

Jimmy blinked. “What?”

Riverwind reached behind his back and
pulled out a knife large enough to reflect Jimmy’s whole face in
the blade. It glinted in the light of the overhead
fluorescents.

He jumped to his feet. “You can’t kill
me! You’re a cop!”

“
Decapitation is a proven
method of separating a host’s spirit from his life force. You and
Mister Wyllie have left me no choice.”

Jimmy shivered as a sudden pang of
understanding ripped through his brain. “You killed
Stuart!”

“
An act of necessity,”
Riverwind admitted. “I had to be sure he wasn’t lying about which
one of you ate the finger.”

You stinking motherfu—”

The detective slashed, and Jimmy leapt
backward. He dodged death by scant millimeters, but the tip of the
blade still managed to plow a red trench across the skin of his
chest.

Jimmy dropped back in his chair and
kicked upward as the wild-eyed detective lunged over the table.
This time Jimmy was faster. His heel slammed into Riverwind’s face,
popping loose a score of fresh stitches and peeling back a section
of cheek.

The man roared in pain, clutching the
wound.

Jimmy ducked under the table and
scrambled to the door, throwing it open as six consecutive gunshots
blared through the building.

He froze in the doorway.

Across the main room, past the
bullpen, the Skinwalker rammed the front desk, demolishing the
boards like a runaway wrecking ball. Pickett stood less than ten
feet away, frantically reloading his sidearm.

The creature reared up on the hind
legs of a horse, displaying the new additions it had made to its
body. Jimmy recalled Vern’s mention of an attack at the nearby
animal shelter, and he now knew the fate of those various
creatures.

Or parts of them, anyway.

The Skinwalker had transplanted its
torso onto the body of a horse, looking like a mythological Centaur
out of the nightmare of a mental patient. Four new arms sprouted
from its sides, each freshly skinned and glistening with red
muscle. Two of those newer appendages looked to be human, but the
last set clearly came from something much bigger.

The monster’s coyote head snarled, now
topped with deer antlers and flanked on each side by the heads of a
mountain lion and a goat. Each scanned the room independently from
the other, seeking new prey.

Deputy Ferguson emerged from the
rubble of the desk and squeezed off five shots from his service
pistol before the creature turned and struck out with its powerful
hind legs, shattering his skull. Blood sprayed the wall.

Jimmy watched it happen with a
dreamlike detachment, unable to react even when the beast plunged
two of its hands into the deputy’s chest and tore open his
ribcage.

“
Move your ass, Cooley!”
Sheriff Pickett shouted.

Jimmy flinched at the force of the
man’s voice, glancing over his shoulder in time to see Riverwind’s
knife hack into the doorframe beside him.

The detective surrendered the knife
where it imbedded in the wood and grabbed Jimmy by the hair,
yanking him backwards even as his other hand drew a gun and fired
three shots into Pickett’s chest.

The Sheriff collapsed into a
heap.

The Skinwalker roared.

Then Riverwind hauled Jimmy back into
the interrogation room, slamming the door shut as the monster
charged forward.

Jimmy grabbed for the knife when he
passed it, managing to pull it from the doorframe, but Riverwind
preempted his action and slammed the pistol-butt down on his
wrist.

The knife clattered to the
floor.

“
Now we end this!” the
detective declared.

A moment later, the entire forward
wall of the room bowed inward, shattering the sheetrock and
splintering the wall studs. A hand tipped with eagle talons punched
through the door paneling, snaring a hunk of Riverwind’s skin
before he got clear.

The detective howled in agony, losing
his grip on Jimmy’s hair as he strove to slip free of the hooks in
his back.

Jimmy elbowed the man and made his
escape, scooping up the knife when he did.

He spun around to face the trapped
Navajo officer.

“
Kill yourself!” Riverwind
hissed.

The door to the room and most of the
wall had fragmented into a spider web of destruction, and Jimmy
watched as a furless bear’s paw reached through one of the cracks
and clutched the man’s face, instantly crushing his lower jaw into
a handful of mush.

Jimmy stumbled away from the
spectacle, shivering with terror when he saw that the man’s eyes
still gazed with awareness. When the creature released him,
Riverwind raised the gun to his head and ended the pain.

The entire building seemed to shudder
as the monster pressed forward.

Ceiling tiles rained to the
floor.

Jimmy edged into the corner of the
room as he watched the wall crumble, knowing he only had a matter
of seconds before the creature exploded inside and did whatever
pervoid mystical bullshit it wanted to do with him.

Which left him only one
choice.

He reversed his grip on the knife and
stabbed it into his stomach.

Outside, the Skinwalker bellowed with
rage. Jimmy closed his eyes, blocking it out, then suddenly saw an
image of himself in his mind, viewed from the other side of the
door, as he plunged his hand into the wound to search for the
finger.

An alien world of pain exploded inside
his abdomen, and he had to reopen his eyes to be rid of the
Skinwalker’s viewpoint when a pale blob of intestine slipped out
past his wrist.

Darkness began to creep into his
vision as his questing fingers slid over the rubbery landscape of
his insides, encountering internal juices that felt too hot to be
healthy.