The Light at the End (35 page)

Though there was cause for one. They had the identity of the Subway Psycho. The trail of bodies had led them to his door.

Now, as he headed down to the street, he had seen just about all that he cared to. It was time to dig through the files for any mention of a Rudy Pasko. Get a decent description from the neighbors. See if it matched up with the Sullivan Street killing (he was willing to bet that it did). And put out an APB. They would stake the place out, too, though there was doubt that he’d be back. It was all Brenner could do, at the moment.

He wanted to know more about the deceased, however. He wanted to know how they’d tracked down Mr. Pasko, why they’d done it, and why they’d chosen such arcane methods of self-defense. Claire Cunningham’s bedroom flashed back at him, replete with every piece of halfwit paraphernalia on the subject.
I can see one flako as an accident of Fate
, he mused.
But three, and it’s a movement.
Brenner could not, for the life of him, figure out what a big bad dude like Terrence C. Williams was doing with a wooden stake and mallet. Or how they had gotten together. Or why they’d kept all that information to themselves.

“Oh, but if you were alive,” he mumbled, addressing all three of them, “I’d interrogate the living piss out of you. I’d…” He pushed open the front door and cut himself off. There were people out there. A lot of them.

Six squad cars and an ambulance were blocking Avenue B. The police barricades were up, and patrolmen lined the perimeter. Their hands were full. Almost twenty after four on a Wednesday morning, and there were close to a hundred lowlifes, scuttling out of the woodwork for a better view of the carnage. “Jesus,” he murmured, wishing… as he often did… that the people he served didn’t make him quite so ill.

They had scooped up the hefty carcass of Mr. Williams, God rest his heathen soul. Brenner watched them load it into the back of the ambulance and scanned the crowd for reporters. None. He let out a sigh of relief and paused to fish a cigarette from his breast pocket. They’d be coming any minute, he knew. He had to have his bullshit ready.

“Detective?” Brenner turned. A young cop… rookie, name of Ellison… was walking toward him. Ellison was a serious, studious kid. A good cop. Brenner asked him what he wanted. Ellison gestured back to the street with his flashlight.

“There was a guy here a minute ago,” Ellison said. “Huge guy. 6’5” maybe. Brown shoulder-length hair. Dark beard. Dark eyes. Looked like a lumberjack or something.”

“What about him?”

“He was at the last murder scene. The Cunningham girl.”

“You’re sure about this?” Brenner lit his smoke, squinting past the flame, his eyes locked on Ellison’s face.

“No question about it. I’d know that guy anywhere. He’s pretty hard to miss.”

“Where is he?”

“He took off in a dark-colored, late-model van. It was halfway up the block, so I couldn’t see it clearly, but there was something written in big white letters on the side.”

“Terrific,” Brenner said, blowing out an unhappy cloud of smoke.
He’s one of them
, he mused.
I can feel it
. “Couldn’t see his license, I guess.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Ellison said. He looked slightly deflated. Brenner felt momentarily like a heel.

“Don’t worry about it, kid,” he said. “You did what you could. You did fine. Listen.” He thought for a moment. “Get that description down on paper. We’ll put out an APB.”

“You really think he has something to do with it?”

“What do
you
think?”

“Absolutely.” With no hesitation.

“Alright.” Brenner smiled, and the rookie beamed back. “Good job,” he added, and Ellison swaggered slightly as he moved back to the barricades.

So there are more of you, huh?
Brenner thought, dragging heavily. He cast his gaze skyward at the billowing storm clouds. It was going to rain like a son of a bitch soon, adding insult to injury. Tonight was like one big holiday in Heaven.

How many more?
he wondered.
How many more of you am I going to find?

He sighed into his smoldering Camel and tossed it.

And will any of you be alive to explain it to me?

Doug Hasken was wide awake. No trace of the shock or confusion remained. God had sent him a vision… a vision of himself… that shimmered in the air above him like a glowing grail.

Hours earlier, when he’d returned to the office, Allan had promptly set him down on the couch, shoved a beer into his hand, and embarked on a lengthy explanation. The beginning of it had been lost on Doug; he
had
been very nearly in shock then, his mind an old piece of Silly Putty that no longer retained images. But by the end of his second beer, just before he’d lapsed into welcome unconsciousness, it had started to come clear.

Then had come the dream, and the vision.

Now Doug was wide awake, sitting upright on the couch, his full attention on the three solemn figures at the switchboards. The time was 4:05.

“That was Joseph,” Allan told Jerome, the mute receiver still dangling limply from his hand. His words were faintly slurred. “He just went over to Rudy’s apartment. The police were there. He says that Armond and T.C. are dead.”

“Oh, my God,” Jerome muttered. Josalyn stared at the wall, dumbly shaking her head. All three of them looked like they’d just undergone electroshock therapy: pie-eyed, pasty-faced, slack and moist as unbaked dough.

Doug could sympathize. He’d felt exactly the same way himself. But his shock was over now. The vision had replaced it. Watching them, he knew all the things that they were unable to say:
three dead, only three hunters left, three dead and it’s all been for nothing, we’ll never find him, we blew it, it’s over
. The air thrummed with the force of their despair.

But Doug knew better.

Quietly, he slipped on his skates. The others were unaware of him, locked in their own silent universes of grief. He laced up quickly, pausing only a moment to check out the series of cracks and holes where Rudy’s fingers had snapped through the hard plastic of his shin guard.
God, he’s strong
, Doug thought.
It won’t be enough to save him, but God damn if he isn’t strong
.

On the checkout counter, a small cache of tools and weapons was neatly displayed. He stood, shouldered his messenger bag, surreptitiously rolled over to the counter, and deftly palmed four vials of Armond’s holy water.

Then he rolled over to the door, glancing over his shoulder as he did so. They were all looking at him now; whether they’d seen him lift the holy water or not, he didn’t know. When they found out what he was doing, he felt sure that they wouldn’t mind.

“See ya later,” he said. Allan nodded vaguely, Josalyn and Jerome didn’t even respond. He went out the door.

Five minutes later, he dropped a dime in the slot and punched their number. “I’m on the street,” he said, “and you have my beeper number. By six o’clock, we’ll have him. I promise.”

*

“GODDAMITALL!” Rudy bellowed, staggering backward, bringing one hand up belatedly to cover his eyes. “BASTARD! YOU BASTARD!” The words ricocheted madly against the shuttered windows and row-house walls, echoed and boomed down the length of Delancey Street.

He was standing at the mouth of the subway stairs, shuddering with helpless rage and mounting apprehension, wishing that he had Armond here to kill, again and again and again.

White light beamed up at him from the pavement at his feet. Two five-foot strokes of blinding radiance, in the shape of a cross.

The last three subway stations had been the same.

“YOU BASTARD!” Rudy howled one last time before limping away. The enormity of the old man’s farewell effort was dawning on him now. If all the subways were sealed off, and he couldn’t go back to his apartment, then…

What am I gonna do?
his mind whined at him like a spoiled brat in a toy store.
The sun’s gonna come up in an hour or so, and I’ll be stuck out here, and
…

He had traveled less than twenty yards when the lone figure came whipping around the corner behind him, moving so quickly that he didn’t even have time to place the sound, he didn’t even have time to react…

…as the steady whir and pock-pock-pocking of hard little wheels against the pavement closed in on his left, and an unfamiliar voice shouted, “Rudy!” in his ear, and he turned toward the sound…

…just in time to see the thin stream of dancing fire dots writhing in midair like a dying snake as it whickered toward him. A scream began to form in his throat. His right hand came up, once again, to shield his eyes…

…and then he
was
screaming, a raw full-throated trumpeting of unspeakable pain, as the holy water made contact with his flesh.

The first drop struck him on the left ear lobe. It sizzled and smoked like bacon grease, eating away half the lobe, leaving the other half to dangle and flap in the breeze. The second drop burned a canker sore in the corner of his taut upper lip. The third drop bored a hole in the bridge of his nose, exposing bone. The fourth, fifth, and sixth put round, shimmering rings on the fingers of his right hand. The next eight tattooed an oozing daisy chain down the length of his forearm. The rest whistled harmlessly off into space.

Nothing… not even dying… had ever hurt so much. Rudy yodeled and pinwheeled sideways, slamming into a wall, not even feeling it. The agony didn’t stop on impact; it seemed to eat its way inward, twisting and mangling the soft tissue beneath like a soldering iron. He waved his right hand wildly, as if it were on fire, and black putrescent drops sprinkled the pavement.

He was only dimly aware that the roller-skating messenger of death had turned around and doubled back toward him.

He was the Doug Hasken of the dream: an avenging angel, smiting the unrighteous with a chain of shimmering gold. The wind roared in his ears like the voice of God, urging him onward, cheering him in his moment of glory as he power-skated toward the tortured figure of the evil one. The first vial was spent: he dug into his bag for another and uncapped it easily.

Rudy looked up at him then, with those baleful red eyes, but this time Doug was unimpressed. This time, he knew what he was up against. This time, he knew what he was. And in the war between Darkness and Light, he knew which was the stronger.

Rudy stumbled forward in a feeble attempt to rush him. Doug almost laughed, seeing the desperation in the move. He emptied the second vial of holy water in a clean arc that sliced Rudy at gut level. The vampire doubled up, screeching like a stuck pig.

Doug wheeled around smoothly, dropping the second vial and pulling out a third. He didn’t bother to uncap this one, wrapping his fist around it instead as he closed it once again.

“This ones for all the people you killed!” he yelled, letting loose with a vicious sidearm throw.

All through his spotted high school career, Doug Hasken had been Dallastown High’s premier relief pitcher, with an unbroken string of thirty-two hitless innings culminating his senior year. Everybody expected great things from him, especially Coach Stambaugh, who always claimed that Doug’s fastball could “scare piss out of the devil.”

Coach Stambaugh would not have been disappointed. The vial shattered on the crown of Rudy’s head, soaking his scalp. The greasy blond hair began to crackle and shrivel and glow like a pile of burning twigs. Rudy screamed and fell, frantically clawing at the top of his head. Then a fresh note of horror came into his voice, and he stared disbelieving at the bubbling, blistering palms of his hands.

Doug circled in for the fourth and final time, uncapping the last vial of holy water as he moved to within a foot of Rudy’s prostrate form, hoping to hit him in the eyes this time, leaving a blind and helpless creature for the hunters to polish off.

“And this one’s for…” he started to shout.

That was when Rudy leaped forward, one still-sizzling hand latching hold of the strap on Doug’s messenger bag, sending the messenger on a crazy tailspin even as the strap broke and the bag collapsed to the pavement. Doug hit the curb and landed flat on his face, the loud snap of his nose breaking shadowed by the terrified chorus that screamed between his ears. There was a white-hot moment of blindness and pain; then he was staring at the sidewalk, at the growing pool of his own blood, and the sight jerked him back into motion.

Rudy was crawling toward him now, staggering with effort to his feet. Doug rolled over, got his legs under him, then maneuvered up onto his wheels. Rudy lunged forward, tickling the air around Doug’s ankles as the latter pushed away, legs pumping madly, pushing like he had never pushed before.

Doug Hasken was up to 15 mph when the pair of hand-holding faggots rounded the corner onto Delancey. Doug instinctively swerved to avoid them, realized his mistake too late, sucked his last breath of air just as the stairway to the Delancey Street station yawned before him like a dragon’s mouth and swallowed him darkly, wheels spinning on empty space, body firing headlong toward the cold concrete below.

He hit the far wall at something like 12 mph. His head pulped like a melon. His ribs turned to shrapnel that acted upon his vital organs like a shredder, ripping them to tatters. He stuck to the wall for a horrible split second, then smacked down on the floor like a cold sack of shit. Beyond the first second of pain, he didn’t feel a thing.

His dream, his glimmering vision, hadn’t shown him how it would end.

God’s funny like that.

The faggots had taken off running, the way they came. A wise decision. If Doug’s kamikaze plunge hadn’t been enough, the sight of the red-eyed thing before them was enough to send them hightailing it back to SoHo.

Rudy, for his part, was cackling with a twisted, savaged sort of glee. The pain was still there… the pain showed no sign of diminishing, as yet… but his eyes were intact. And though he couldn’t get close enough to the subway entrance, couldn’t see through the barrier of hateful light, couldn’t actually go down the steps and play havoc on the corpse of his tormentor, he had seen the nosedive. He’d heard the crash.

It made him happy.

He began to rummage through the contents of the messenger bag. He saw the clipboard, the blank manifests upon it. They didn’t mean anything.

Then he saw the beeper, and something clicked unpleasantly in his head. He dug into his pocket and pulled out Armond’s beeper, held the two of them up side by side. They were identical.

Then he found the pad of messenger receipts. With the words, Your Kind Of Messengers, Inc., spelled out in bold letters near the bottom. Below that, an address. And below that…

A phone number.

“
Ah
,” he hissed. And again: “
Ahhhh
.” His smile lit up his whole face, crazily, the color of the cold moon above.

Then he rose, taking the receipt pad with him, leaving the rest on the sidewalk behind, and moved away from Delancey Street on Essex. He wanted to put a little distance between himself and the scene of the crime.

And then he wanted to check on something.

At seven minutes to five, one of the customer lines on the switchboard went off. It was the first time that a call had come in on that line since the hunt began, some nine hours before. Allan was in the process of nodding out and if Josalyn hadn’t been in the grip of a powerful yawn, eyes squeezing down to slits, she probably wouldn’t have reached for it.

But she was, and she did. Just as she pushed down on the button, the yawn ended. She saw what she was doing. The fleetest stirring of dread and confusion prickled at the base of her skull, and then she was saying “Hello?” into the receiver.

No answer. Silence, like a void at the other end of the line.

“Hello?” she repeated, and the cold fear welled up again, huge this time. “Is anybody there?” she blurted, instantly wishing she hadn’t, a voice in her head saying
hang up the phone, why didn’t you hang up the phone, hang it up
…

“Josalyn?” Jerome said, coming up behind her. She barely heard him: no more than a ghostly echo of the voice coming over the phone.

“
Josalyn
,” he whispered, drawing out the word, running his tongue along it playfully. “
Well, isn’t this a wonderful surprise
.”

Now it was the
other
end of the line that had gone silent, graveyard-still. Rudy beamed wistfully at the cold plastic receiver in his hand, as if she could see him through it.
Maybe she can
, he thought. He suspected that she could at least feel it. He dearly hoped so.

“
I’m smiling
,” he informed her, just to be sure. “
I’m smiling because I’m so happy. I’m so happy because I know where you are now. And nothing can stop me from coming for you.
”

“R-Rudy… ?” her voice came whining out at him, trembling in the upper register, threatening to unravel like a poorly knitted scarf.

“
Yes, my darling
,” he breathed, then giggled. “
Soon. Before you have a chance to run. Too soon, we’ll be together.
”

She started to cry. A wonderful sound.

“
Forever
,” he cooed. “
Won’t that be nice? Our last night together will never end. It’ll just go on and on and on
…”

Then he blew the receiver a kiss, chuckled softly into it, ripped it out of the phone, and dropped it to the pavement. He gave it a little kick, sent it skittering into the gutter.

In less than an hour, the sun would come out. Already he could feel its approach, prickling his cold flesh with the faintest intimation of heat, like the first hint of a mounting fever.

But the office was only eight blocks away. Maybe less.

Quickly, he staggered west on Stanton Street. Heading toward Spring Street, and the deepest darkness before the dawn.