Echoes of Darkness (20 page)

Officer Downs looked at him with sad, brown eyes, then over Kyle’s shoulder, toward Grandpa. “I understand you wanting to go home, Kyle, but there’s no one here right now but me and Officer Saltz, and I”—he lowered his voice, though there was no one there to hear. “I don’t really want to leave your grandpa alone with Saltz. You understand? But then, you don’t really want
him
bringing you home, do you?”

Kyle thought of the sneering officer, pictured being shut up in a car with the little cootie-carrier, for even ten minutes. The man could say a lot in ten minutes. And something about being alone with him . . .

Kyle shook his head. “No. No, thanks, I don’t want that.” He started edging around the man, sliding toward the door. “But I know the way—it ain’t far. Me and Gran—”

He stumbled over the name, hearing his grandfather moving and growling about his cell. “Uh, we walked here anyway. I can walk back. No problem, okay? I just want to go home. Okay?”

He hadn’t slipped out from under that big hand yet, and for a moment it tightened against his shoulder, and he was afraid Officer Downs was going to hold him there, maybe put him in a cell right next to Grand—right next door, and tears welled again. But then the hand slipped away, the squeeze more of reassurance than restraint, and the man sighed.

“All right. It’s not the best solution, but it’s what we have. You hurry on home, and you send your dad down here just as soon as you get there, all right? I’ll explain what’s going on, and he needs to help decide what’s going to happen, anyway. You just be careful, you hear me?”

“Yessir,” said Kyle, sidling for the door, the words coming out all in a rush. Officer Downs said something else, but Kyle wasn’t listening as he pushed through the door into the police station proper. He picked up speed crossing the big, main room with all the desks. Saltz’s voice came from somewhere off to the side, but Kyle didn’t hear him, didn’t look left or right, just kept his eyes on the doors to the street. He was moving at a run when he hit them, and they barely slowed him down as, weeping terrified tears, he sped off into the night.

Hickey Four-Legs watched as the smaller man burst back into the room outside his cage, making those man-sounds that made no sense to him.

“Jesus Christ, this is like a gift from God! Fan
tas
tic!”

“I don’t like this,” said the big man.

“What’s not to like? You have the old fool’s confession on tape, right? I mean, Jesus, he spelled the whole thing out. I noticed you never said he was in a cell or even in custody, so we can tell the chief he was in the chair out front and just got away while our backs were turned. The kid never spoke, right? Not while the tape was rolling?”

“No,” said Big. “No, I don’t think he did.”

“So?” Little said, voice almost a squeal as he unbuttoned his shirt. “It’s
perfect
.”

“I still don’t like this. He’s just a kid, and—”

“Says the one who killed Spellman in the first place.” Little was kicking off his shoes and pawing at his belt buckle.

“That was an accident,” Big said, voice rising, pointing toward Hickey Four-Legs. “It was just like he said: the kid saw me and he ran. He ran, so I chased, and things just got out of hand. We’d just spent two nights running with the pack, and you know how we get. It’s hard to think for yourself; you
know
that.” Big shook his head. “He shouldn’t have run. God
damn
it, but he shouldn’t have run.”

Little waved a hand, clad only in his boxer shorts now. “Whatever you say, Josh. But it happens a lot with you. They find the Spellman kid and start searching the woods back of your house, and—”

“You have bodies there too, remember?”

“Not any more, I don’t.” Little pointed toward Hickey Four-Legs again. “He does. Just give me ten minutes to kill the kid, then bring old snarly-and-drooly there along to discover with the body. Bang-bang, he’s dead, and we have ourselves a confessed kid-killer in the cooler downstairs when the chief gets back from Bangor.”

He stepped closer, looking up into the bigger man’s face.

“Look, Josh, this Spellman thing is too close to home. The chief, she’s a bitch, but she’s not stupid, and she’s not going to let this go until she finds someone. Either we hand her this half-breed or she might find you. And me. And I am
not
down with that.”

The two men stood side by side, looking into the cage at Hickey.

“You have any idea he was a ’breed?” said Little.

“Christ, no. But he’s seventy if he’s a day, and it sounded like he only started having the pack dreams once I moved so close. If I’d moved somewhere else, he might have just kept having the moon dreams until the day he died. Not enough wolf in him to make the change, but it’s no wonder his mind snapped.”

“Lucky for us.” Little looked at the clock on the wall. “It’s been long enough. He’s away from the station, at least.” He bent and stripped off the boxer shorts. “Just open that door and give me five minutes, okay?”

He bent, hunched, and a cracking like the snapping of dry sticks filled the air as his back bowed, his legs twisted, and a scent like wet dog exploded into the room.

“God,” said Little, a tone of terrible longing slipping out around a mouthful of lengthening teeth, “I hope he
runs
!” Fur sprouted across his skin in widening ripples as he fell to all fours. Claws scrabbled for a moment at the hard, tiled floor, and in his cage, Hickey Four-Legs pressed himself against the wall farthest from the bars and whimpered, eyes wide.

Big stepped away from the large black wolf that stood, chest heaving, in the middle of the corridor. He pulled the door open, and with an eager growl the wolf streaked out through the police station, nostrils already flaring as it seined the air for the bitter, yellow scent of the boy’s fear.

The scent of prey.

Big left the door and walked back to the bars of Hickey Four-Legs’s cage.

“I don’t know if you can understand me,” he said. “I hope part of you does, somewhere in there. I actually admire what you were trying to do, turning yourself in like you did. Trying to do the right thing, set an example for Kyle. And I’m . . . I’m touched by what you were telling the boy, there at the end. And I think you were right: a man does what’s right.”

Big bowed his head for a moment, and something within him cracked like a dry stick. His chin came up, and he looked in at Hickey Four-Legs with eyes suddenly gone red, as the wet dog smell grew stronger.

“Unfortunately for Kyle,” he said, gravel and bass suddenly filling his voice, “we’re not men.”

Hickey Four-Legs growled at the man-wolf-thing in front of him, straining back against the wall in fear as its nonsense sounds washed over him, baring his teeth in a threat born of terror. But as he snapped and snarled and tried to raise up non-existent hackles, tears finally rolled down the old man’s cheeks to spatter the floor beneath his feet.

ONE SOCK, TWO SOCKS

“Oh, for the love of God!”

Larisa flailed about uselessly with one blue sock. The rest of the laundry was already in the basket sitting atop the dryer: clothes and underwear folded neatly, socks rolled together in pairs, all but the blue sock in her hand.

She could not find its mate.

“There were
two
blue socks in there,” she nearly shouted into the open dryer, bending to take yet another look into its empty drum. “I had to unroll the pair when I put them in the washer!”

She snatched up a clean, rolled pair of tube socks from the top of her basket and waved it at the open machine as if it could see and hear.

“They were rolled! A pair! What the hell do you do, eat them?”

The dryer sat motionless, not deigning to make the slightest response.

“I know it’s you.” She indicated the nearby washing machine. “
That
one gives back everything.
You
, on the other hand, apparently charge me something each and every time I use you!”

A part of Larisa felt pretty silly standing there yelling at an inanimate thing. The rest of her, though, was eaten up with annoyance over the missing sock.

She flung the lonesome blue sock on top of the folded clothes and snatched up the laundry basket. “I’ll
prove
it’s you! You can’t seem to help yourself. Wait here—I’ll be right back.”

Larisa stomped up the stairs in a way she hadn’t done since she was about six years old. A few minutes later she marched back down those stairs clutching a half-full laundry basket. She put the basket back on top of the dryer and spun the washing machine dial to
Light Wash.

“Right! Here’s the deal.” She pulled a rolled pair of socks from the basket and separated them. “I have here ten pair of socks. Ten pair. That’s twenty socks. I’m counting them, and washing them. Nothing but them. Let’s see how many socks I get back!”

She counted each of them aloud as she dropped them into the rapidly filling washing machine. “. . . Nineteen, twenty. There: ten pair.”

She backed across the laundry room toward the chair against the wall as if afraid or unwilling to take her eyes from either machine.

“There. Let’s just see what happens.”

Thirty minutes later, the washing machine’s buzzer sounded and the machine itself shuddered to a silent halt. Larisa opened it up and started counting wet socks back into the basket.

“. . . Nineteen, twenty. There, you see?” She pointed an accusing finger at the dryer as she nearly shouted. “I got back what I put in. Now let’s see how
you
do!”

She counted all twenty socks into the machine, speaking aloud again, though whom she was actually talking to was a mystery, even to herself. She slapped the front of the dryer closed and gave the knob a somewhat savage twist, choosing a twenty-minute timed dry. She backed toward her chair once more, eyes glued to the quietly roaring machine. She stayed that way, nearly unblinking, for the entire cycle.

When the dryer’s buzzer went off, Larisa was yanking the front of the machine open before the internal drum had even come to a halt. She put the basket on the floor next to the open door and began counting warm, dry socks into it.

“. . . Eighteen, nineteen—son of a
bitch
!”

She stared into the empty dryer, looking for sock number twenty, but saw nothing but the white enameled surface. She dumped the socks out onto the top of the dryer and recounted them into the basket, just in case she had miscounted.

Nineteen.

“Son of a
bitch
!” she repeated, standing helplessly for a few seconds, then her jaw muscles bunched as she clenched her teeth in frustration.

“No way. It
has
to be in there somewhere. It’s just not
possible
!”

Bending low, she thrust her head and shoulders into the open machine. She swept her hands about the rear of the dryer, checking that nothing was stuck to the back of the three agitator vanes built into the drum. Her voice sounded hollow inside the round metal box.

“This is impossible. It
has
to be in here. They
all
do! I’m going to find out where they go, even if I have to take you apart!”

At her words the drum suddenly went into motion, spinning a half revolution clockwise; since Larisa was bracing her hands on the inside of the drum for balance, she spun, too. As her upper half twisted around, her legs followed suit until she fell, landing on her side on the inside of the open dryer door. The drum gave a kind of lurch, and seemed to Larisa to lengthen and gain depth. At the same time the door beneath her hips gave a sudden heave upward, causing her feet to actually leave the floor. She felt herself slide further into the machine, further than she thought possible, the edge of the opening actually catching her at the back of the knees.

She inhaled to scream and almost choked on the air as the back of the drum opened right before her eyes. What was revealed was
not
the wall behind the dryer, but instead what looked like a tube or tunnel, sloping downward and out of sight. The drum gave another
lurch
, the door gave another
heave
, and Larisa found herself bodily sliding down that tunnel. It was a
pinkish-red, and to her hands it felt warm, wet, and slippery . . . and
resembled nothing so much as a huge throat. There was another shuddering lurch and her headfirst slide picked up speed. Her breath finally came out in its intended scream, but it was far too late.

The dryer door closed behind her.

From the top of the stairs, her husband’s voice floated down.

“Hey, honey? Have you seen my other blue sock? I can only find one here. Honey?"