Ghouls (33 page)

“Open the bag,” the voice said.

“No.”

“Open it.”

“I’m not opening a goddamned body bag!” Kurt shouted.

“Open it,” the voice repeated, but now it was fading away. “Open it. Open the bag.”

Suddenly Kurt’s hand and ear and chin were wet. The phone was oozing blood. He threw it down in disgust, frantic to wipe off his face.

The dream had seeped into him now. He knew what he must do. He turned to the bed and looked down at what lay there.

“It’s Vicky,” he whispered to the dark. “I know it is. Stokes has murdered her.”

Trembling, his fingers touched the zipper’s metal tab. Again he was aware of the mad, rapid ticking he’d heard earlier in the den. With a gentle rasp, the zipper parted smoothly, and the sides of the bag fell away.

“Please don’t be Vicky,” he said. He shone his flashlight into the bag.

But it wasn’t Vicky at all. The gray, dead face which looked back at him was his own.

««—»»

Kurt felt blasted through layers of another dimension. The soaring motion shook him, threatened to shake him apart; but then as the velocity increased, his consciousness emerged, as if from a lake of sludge.

Gaseously
, a face formed. It was small. He heard: “Kurt! Kurt!” and knew that the face belonged to Melissa. The real Melissa. At last, the nightmare was over.

“You can stop shaking me now,” he said. He didn’t know whether to hug her or kick her in the behind. He lay in the bed as if dropped from a great height. “I’m awake, or at least I better be.”

“What happened?”

“A real brain-broiler of a nightmare, that’s all.”

Melissa crouched by the bed. He felt relieved; she wore a dumpy pair of pajamas rather than the nightdress of the dream. And he was pleased to see she didn’t have a cigarette in her mouth.

“I’ll bet they heard you all the way from here to Bowie,” she told him.

“What?”

“You were screaming.”

“Come on, I was not.”

“You were screaming bloody murder. I was almost afraid to come in. It sounded like someone was doing a number on you with a blowtorch.”

Kurt refused to believe it. “I wasn’t screaming—men don’t scream. You’re lying, as usual.”

“Believe what you like.” Now she was giggling at him. “I told you those Mexican TV dinners give you bad dreams. But do you listen?”

“What time is it?”

“Way past two.” Grimacing, she looked at her hands and wiped them on her pajamas. “Gross. You’re all icky.”

“I probably lost ten pounds in sweat.”

THUNK, THUNK, THUNK

Kurt and Melissa looked at each other.

“Someone’s at the door,” she whispered.

This was too much, too soon. The
thunking
was the same. “Be a sport and—” but he stopped short. He would not recite the dream verbatim. “Go see who it is,” he said.

“No way. I’m not answering the door in my pajamas.”

“Please. As a personal favor to me, just go answer the door. I’ll give you a dollar.”

“Forget it. Only nuts knock on doors at this hour. It could be some escapee from St. Elizabeth’s… It could be
Hinkley
.”

“You’re the nut,” he concluded. “I hope it’s the stork, coming to take you back.”

She gripped his shoulder, fretting. “But it could be one of the vampires!”

Kurt got out of bed. “Do they make corks big enough to fit your mouth?” He headed for the hall.

“You’re not going to answer the door in your boxers, are you?”

“Why shouldn’t I? It’s not the pope or the President. They came last week, didn’t they?”

“What are you taking
that
for?”

“Taking what?” he said. He was holding his service revolver; he’d taken it off the nightstand without even realizing
it.
“Impulse, my dear. If you’d had the dream I just had, you’d understand.”

Kurt went out and down the staircase, thinking that the only thing funnier than a man walking down the stairs in his underwear was a man walking down the stairs in his underwear with a gun.

In the foyer, he held the pistol behind him. He could feel the steel’s cold through his shorts. He opened the door a crack and wilted.

Chief Bard walked in. He held a large carry-out coffee and wore clothes that looked slept in. “Don’t dress up on my account,” he said.

“Sorry, Chief. If I’d known it was you, I would have put on my polka dots.”

“Quit yammering and get your suspended ass in gear. We’ve got to hustle.”

“Hustle?” Kurt said. “To where?”

“South County General. We’re meeting Glen at the body shop.”

“What the hell for?”

“I don’t know. The prick called me up a little while ago, said he found something at Belleau Wood.”

“Shit, Chief. I don’t want to go the morgue.”

“Well you’re going anyway,” Bard said. It had already been decided. “I’ll be damned if I’m going there alone at this hour.”

Kurt realized he had no choice. Defying Bard was equivalent to defying King Neptune. “Let me put some clothes on.”

“You can go nude for all I care. Just hurry the fuck up.”

Kurt trudged back upstairs. Melissa stood tensely in wait. “Let me go, too, Kurt,” she pleaded.
“Please.”

“The only place you’re going is to bed.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Get out of my way,
Roachface
.”

“I
wanna
go to the morgue!”

“You’re a morbid little animal,” he informed her. He pushed the door to and pulled on his clothes. “I’ll stuff you in the toilet tank if you don’t
shut up and go to bed!”
That was that, but would she really fit? He slipped his off-duty
22
into his pants pocket, then went back down and left with Bard. Melissa did her twelve-year-old best to slam the door behind them as hard as she could.

They drove in Bard’s big T-bird. A light rain began as they turned off 154. It misted the windshield and made Route 50 shine like oil.

“Where’s Higgins?” Kurt asked.

Bard scowled at him. “Working your shift, remember?”

“Oh. Right.”

Kurt told the chief about his dream, hoping to exorcise it from his mind. Bard laughed uproariously at him, which lessened the severity of its effect, and that helped. “Don’t feel bad,” Bard said, as if to offer solace. “Nightmares are an occupational hazard for cops; it’s a curse that comes with the tin. One time I dreamed I was in bed with the best-looking blonde I’d ever seen. I mean, this girl was so beautiful she’d make Marilyn Monroe look like pimples on a gorilla’s dick. And this broad’s begging for it, right? She’s begging me to let her have it with the hoagie, but in the course of things, I come to find out that she’s got two vaginas. One was too small for me to get my hose in, and the other was full of gravel. I’d love to hear what a head
doctor’d
have to say about that one.”

Kurt winced.

“So who was the chick on the phone?” Bard asked.

“Beats me.”

“How about the skinny dude who left the body bag on the bed?”

Kurt’s throat tightened. “Swaggert, I think.”

That brought silence. Bard rolled down the window and spat, perhaps not wanting to reveal that the topic of Doug Swaggert inspired unease. Down the road, he said, “It’s fear.”

“What is?”

“The dream you had. The nightmare. It’s job-related fear, fear of violent death, fear of the unknown. That’s what a head doctor would tell you.”

Kurt smiled. “Since when are you a head doctor?”

“Hey, I took a psychology class in high school once. I know about these things. Fear is nothing to be ashamed of, it’s normal for those in our line. These days, a
cop’d
be crazy
not
to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid of death,” Kurt said. “Simply because I’ve got no intention of dying anytime soon.”

“Consciously, you’re not. But dreams are
un
conscious. It’s clear as day, I’m not blaming you. You’re afraid that you’re going to find out what happened to Swaggert, and you’re afraid that when you do, it’ll be too late.”

“You’re right, I am afraid,” Kurt said. It was a sudden, otherworldly response. “I’m scared shitless.”

“You and me both.”

Kurt lit a cigarette. Smoke gushed out of his mouth like an escaping spirit. “So level with me, then. Are you convinced that Doug’s dead?”

“Dead and buried. Murdered by stoners for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And ten to one his
body’ll
never be found, so we’ll never know exactly what went down. That’s the worst part, if you ask me. Never knowing.”

Kurt pictured Swaggert being buried in the woods by faceless men. He could hear the bite of the shovel.

“But what can you expect in this world?” Bard blabbed on. “The shit we see is nothing, it’s like a
lunger
in the ocean. We’ve got heroin rings in elementary schools now, child-pornography clubs, cyanide in your Halloween candy, and snuff films in New York for a hundred bucks a show. We’ve got day care centers in California where they sodomize four-year-olds, and we’ve got people in Texas digging up corpses for death orgies. So you tell me, what can you expect?”

“You should write inspirational books, Chief.”

“It’s a freak show.” Bard chuckled abruptly. “The whole fucking world is a fucking freak show.”

««—»»

They parked on the emergency-room side of the hospital. The front lot was scant with police cruisers and EMT trucks. The atmosphere here induced slow steps; they approached the high, lit building as though it were a slaughterhouse. Rain dotted their shoulders and heads. Out front, a county cop was arguing with a younger municipal officer. “It’s your 81, punk,” county said. “The potato chip factory is
your
jurisdiction.”

“Yeah, but
you
hogged the call,” the young cop accused. “You county crotch-heads are all the same. Always punting the work to someone else.”

“Town clown.”

“Fish sticks for brains.”

“Get fucked, punk.”

“I get fucked every night. Don’t believe me? Ask your mother.”

Kurt and Bard laughed. They’d heard it all before.

Double doors opened at the touch of their feet. A track line of exploded drops of blood veered right, toward the ER. The light in a candy machine flickered irregularly on and off, on and off. Glen
Rodz
rose from his seat in a small lobby on the left. He looked shell-shocked.