The Wolfen (11 page)

They ate their food in silence, Wilson digging into his with glazed indifference. If you fed him silage, he’d probably eat it exactly the same way.

Becky was excited about the idea of getting photographs of the animals; excited and worried. The whole situation contained menace, every part of it. There was something about the way these creatures; killed—the extreme violence of it—that made it impossible to put the problem out of your mind even for a short time. You just kept turning it over and over… and Becky had a recurring picture of what they must look like with their long toes that ended in delicate pads and were tipped by claws, with their razor-sharp teeth, and their heavy bodies. But what were their faces like? Human beings had such complex faces, not at all like the more-or-less frozen expressions of animals; would these creatures also have such faces, full of emotion and understanding? And if so, what would those faces tell their victims?

“Look we just come right out and ask Dick— right? Just ask him without fooling around?”

“You mean no diplomatic subtleties?”

“Not my strong point.”

“So we just ask. Everybody’s heard rumors about the optical gear Special Services is using. Just logical that a Narcotics wire man could get his hands on it, isn’t it? We don’t have to tell him we know the stuff is classified. Maybe he’ll never even bring the matter up, just give us the damn thing and not think any more about it. That’s what I’m hoping anyway.”

But that wasn’t what happened. As soon as she opened the door to their apartment, Becky felt something was wrong. She left Wilson in the hall while she went to Dick in the living room. “Why’d you pick tonight to bring that old fart up here?” were his first words.

“I had to, honey. It can’t wait.”

“I got burned.”

There it was, as simple as that. To undercover cops like Dick getting burned meant being recognized as police officers by their suspects. “Bad?”

“Real bad. Some sonofabitch really put it on me. I might as well graduate to the Goddamn movies.”

“Dick, that’s terrible! How—”

“Never mind how, honey. Just say it was two years of work blown to hell. And I think I’ve got a shoofly on my ass, too.”

She leaned down and kissed his hair. He was slumped into the couch, staring at the TV. “You’re clean, aren’t you?” But her heart was sinking, she knew something was wrong. And the inspectors from the Internal Affairs Division knew it too or they wouldn’t have put a man on him—shoofly was what cops called other cops who investigated them.

“You know damn well I’m not clean.” He said it with such infinite tiredness that she was surprised. And he looked older, more hollow, than she had ever seen him before. “Look, let’s get drunk or something later, celebrate my early retirement, but bring Wilson in now, let him do his thing.”

“It’s not much, won’t take a second.” She called Wilson, who moved forward from the foyer where he had been standing.

They shook hands. Dick offered him a beer. They settled into the living room, the TV cut down but not off. Becky closed the curtains.

“What’s up?” Dick said.

“We need your help,” Wilson replied. “I gotta get some pictures, I need your night-vision camera.”

“What night-vision camera?”

“The one you can get from Special. The five-hundred-mil lens, the image-intensification circuit. You know what camera.”

“Why not order it up yourself?” He looked at Becky, a question in his eyes.

“We haven’t got authorization, honey,” she said. “We need it for the creatures.”

“Oh, Christ almighty, that bullshit again! Can’t you get off that? What are you two, nuts or something? I can’t get that Goddamn camera, not while I’ve got shooflies hanging from my Goddamn ears. Come on, lay off it. Why don’t you two earn your damn salaries instead of monkeyin’ around with that shit.”

“We need your help, Neff.” Wilson sat hunched in his chair, his eyes glistening like dots beneath the heavy folds of his brows. “I helped you.”

“Oh, Christ.” He smiled, turned his head away. “Oh, Christ, the favor. The great big favor. Let me tell you, Wilson, I don’t give a rat’s ass about your big favor. That’s not a factor.”

“That camera could solve this case for us, honey, get the damn thing out of our hair. We only need it for a night or so.”

“You need more than the camera, you need me to work the damn thing. It’s balky as hell, you gotta know how to use it.”

“You can teach us.”

He shook his head. “Took me weeks to learn. You don’t get it just right you don’t get any picture.”

She stared at him. “Dick, please. Just one night is all we ask.”

He frowned at her, as if asking “Is this for real?” She nodded gravely. “A night, then,” he said, “maybe it’ll be a few laughs.”

So he agreed, just like that. She wished she felt more than grateful, but she didn’t. His anger and tiredness made her wish to hell that she would not have to spend the rest of this night with him.

She showed Wilson to the door. “See you at headquarters,” she said as he pulled on his coat. “Eight o’clock?”

“Eight’s fine.”

“Where are you going now, George?”

“Not home. You’re crazy to stay here, as a matter of fact.”

“I don’t know where else I’d go.”

“That’s your business.” He stepped out into the hallway and was gone. She started to wonder if she would ever see him alive again, then stopped herself. Not allowed. She turned, took a deep breath, and prepared to face the rest of the night with her husband.

They were hungry, they wanted food. Normally they preferred the darker, desolate sections of the city, but their need to follow their enemies had brought them into its very eye. Here the smell of man lay over everything like a dense fog, and there was not much cover.

But even the brightest places have shadows. They moved in single file behind the wall that separates Central Park from the street. They did not need to look over the wall to know that few of the benches that lined the other side were occupied—they could smell that fact perfectly well. But they also smelled something else, the rich scent of a human being perhaps a quarter of a mile farther on. On one of the benches a man was sleeping, a man whose pores were exuding the smell of alcohol. To them the reek meant food, easily gotten.

As they moved closer they could hear his breathing. It was long and troubled, full of age. They stopped behind him. There was no need to discuss what they would do; each one knew his role.

Three jumped up on the wall, standing there perfectly still, balanced on the sharply angled stone. He was on the bench below them. The one nearest the victim’s head inclined her ears back. She would get the throat. The other two would move in only if there was a struggle.

She held her breath a moment to clear her head. Then she examined her victim with her eyes. The flesh was not visible—it was under thick folds of cloth. She would have to jump, plunge her muzzle into the cloth and rip out the throat all at once. If there were more than a few convulsions on the part of the food she would disappoint the pack. She opened her nose, letting the rich smells of the world back in. She listened up and down the street. Only automobile traffic, nobody on foot for at least fifty yards. She cocked her ears toward a man leaning in a chair inside the brightly lit foyer of a building across the street. He was listening to a radio. She watched his head turn. He was glancing into the lobby.

Now. She was down, she was pushing her nose past cloth, slick hot flesh, feeling the vibration of sub-vocal response in the man, feeling his muscles stiffening as his body reacted to her standing on it, then opening her mouth against the flesh, feeling her teeth scrape back and down, pressing her tongue against the deliciously salty skin and ripping with all the strength in her jaws and neck and chest, and jumping back to the wall with the bloody throat in her mouth. The body on the bench barely rustled as its dying blood poured out.

And the man in the doorway returned his glance to the street. Nothing had moved, as far as he was concerned. Ever watchful, she scented him and listened to him. His breathing was steady, his smell bland. Good, he had noticed nothing.

Now her job was over, she dropped back behind the wall and ate her trophy. It was rich and sweet with blood. Around her the pack was very happy as it worked. Three of them lifted the body over the wall and let it drop with a thud. The two others, skilled in just this art, stripped the clothing away. They would carry the material to the other side of the park, shred it and hide it in shrubs before they returned to their meal.

As soon as the corpse was stripped it was pulled open. The organs were sniffed carefully. One lung, the stomach, the colon were put aside because of rot.

Then the pack ate in rank order.

The mother took the brain. The father took a thigh and buttock. The first-mated pair ate the clean organs. When they returned from their duty the second-mated pair took the rest. And then they pulled apart the remains and took them piece by piece and dropped them in the nearby lake. The bones would sink and would not be found at least until spring, if then. The clothing they had shredded and scattered half a mile away. And now they kicked as much new snow as they could over the blood of their feast. When this was done they went to a place they had seen earlier, a great meadow full of the beautiful new snow that had been falling.

They ran and danced in the snow, feeling the pleasure of their bodies, the joy of racing headlong across the wide expanse, and because they knew that no human was in earshot they had a joyous howl full of the pulsing rhythm they liked best after a hunt. The sound rose through the park, echoing off the buildings that surrounded it. Inside those buildings a few wakeful people stirred, made restive by the cold and ancient terror that the sound communicated to man.

Then they went to a tunnel they had slept in these past four nights and settled down. By long-learned habit they slept in the small hours of the morning when men mostly did not stir. During daylight, man’s strongest time, they remained awake and alert and rarely broke cover unless they had to. In the evening they hunted.

This traditional order of life went back forever.

Before sleeping the second-mated pair made love, both to entertain the others and to prepare for spring. And afterward the father and mother licked them, and then the pack slept.

But they did not sleep long, not until the hour before dawn as was their custom. This night they still had something to accomplish, and instead of sleeping through the wee hours they left their hiding place and moved out into the silent streets.

Becky listened to the phone on the other end of the line ring once, twice, three times. Finally Wilson picked up. He had gone home after all. “Yeah?”

“You OK?” she asked.

“Yes, Mama.”

“Now now, don’t get sarcastic. Just bedchecking.”

He hung up. The thought of slamming down the phone crossed her mind but what
good would it do? She returned the receiver to its cradle and went back into the
living room. Dick had not heard her and she paused behind him. Sitting slumped
in his chair he seemed smaller than life—diminished. She would have to do
everything she could to help him defeat the investigation. She had to; by simply
being his wife she was implicated. “You knew he was getting extra money,” they
would say. “Where did you think it was coming from?” And there could only be one answer to that question.

It wasn’t that she minded helping him, either. He had been a good husband for a long time and she supposed that what was happening between them was very sad. The trouble was she didn’t care. The intimacy that had once united them had died through inattention. Where once she had been full of love there was now just stone boredom. There wasn’t even a sense of loss. Or maybe—just maybe—there was a sense of loss, for a love that had never been real.

She had to ask herself, if a love can die like this, was it ever real? She remembered the long happiness of the past, the happiness that had seemed so eternal. When they had gone sleigh riding up in the Catskills five Christmases ago, the love they shared had been real. And in the hard times before she was a cop, that love had been very real indeed. It wasn’t just that Dick was a good lover, it was that he was a partner and friend of a deep and special kind. “You’re beautiful,” he would say, “you’re wonderful.” And it had meant more than the physical. Maybe the waning of his enthusiasm was inevitable as she reached middle age. But his enthusiasm wasn’t the problem, it was hers. Try as she might she could not love Dick Neff anymore.

Wilson waited five minutes to be certain she wouldn’t call back. The phone didn’t ring again. His rudeness had evidently made her mad enough to ignore him for the rest of the night

Fine. He went into his bedroom and unlocked a chest he kept in his closet.
Inside were a number of highly illegal weapons—a sawed-off shotgun, a WWII
vintage BAR in working order, and an Ingram M-11 Automatic Pistol. He pulled the automatic pistol from its case and got a box of shells. Carefully he worked the pistol’s action, then hefted it in his hand. Its balance was a pleasure to feel. It was unquestionably the finest automatic handgun ever designed, lightweight, sound-suppressed, with a 20-round-a-second punch. It was not designed to frighten, slow down, or confuse, but purely and simply to kill. One bullet would blow a man’s head apart. The best automatic weapon ever made. The fastest. The most murderous. He opened the ammo box and snapped a clip of the special .380 subsonic velocity bullets into the gun. Now it was heavier but the balance hadn’t changed. Only three and a half pounds of weapon, it could be hefted nicely. And aimed. The sights were precise. For a handgun, its range was almost incredible. You could shoot a man at a hundred and fifty yards with this weapon. A burst of three or four bullets would get him even if he was on the run.

He laid the pistol on his bed and put on an overcoat he rarely wore. When it was on he dropped the M-11 into a pocket which had been especially tailored to fit the nine-inch pistol. Wilson had had the coat modified when he had acquired the pistol. The pocket carried the M-11
almost invisibly. Despite the size and weight of the pistol only a careful
observer would note that he was carrying a piece at all. His hand felt the
weapon in his pocket, his thumb triggering the lever that moved the mechanism
from safe to fire. A single press of the trigger could now deliver from one
bullet to a full clip in a matter of seconds. Good enough. Now he got out his
winter hat, old, wrinkled, perfect for both protecting the head and hiding the
face. Next the shoes—black sneakers, surprisingly warm with two pair of socks,
surprisingly agile even in the snow. They had been winterized with a
polyurethane coating, and the soles scored to provide traction. The sneakers
gave him the advantages of quiet and quick movement, most useful on an icy
winter night. The last item was a pair of gloves. These were made of the finest
Moroccan leather, softer and thinner than kid. Through them he could feel the
M-11 perfectly, almost as if the gloves weren’t there at all.

As a final precaution he took out the pistol and removed fingerprints. Not even a gold shield policeman goes around printing up a weapon like the Ingram. There isn’t anything in the rule book about policemen carrying machine pistols, but that’s only because there doesn’t need to be. You need a special permit to own one, and permission to move it from one premises to another. As far as carrying one around in the street fully loaded, that is illegal for policeman and civilian alike.

He replaced the M-11 in its pocket and stood for a short time in the middle of the room. Mentally he checked himself out. He was ready to move. Too bad his plan to de-scent himself had been wishful thinking. Now the
M-11 was really his only advantage. That and the fact that hunters aren’t used to being hunted. Or at least he hoped they weren’t. His logic seemed strong—how suspecting would a human hunter be if the deer suddenly turned on him, or a lion if it was attacked by a gazelle?

While he saw the danger of what he was doing he nevertheless felt that he had to act to give Becky some kind of a chance of survival. She deserved to live, she was young and strong; as for him he could take a few chances. And it was a hell of a long chance he was taking. The thought of being killed—by things —made clammy sweat break out.

But he knew that he and Becky had to have help if either of them was going to live much longer. And to get the kind of support they needed, they had to have a specimen. Irrefutable, undeniable evidence that would force Underwood to act, to assign this problem the kind of manpower it demanded.

Wilson was going to get that evidence if he could. And if he got killed trying—oh. God, he wanted to live! No matter how old, how beat-up, he still wanted to live! But he was going after a carcass anyway. Had to.

He left his apartment after making sure all the lights were on. He triple-locked his door and moved quickly to the rear of the dim hallway, where a fire escape was barred by an accordion gate. He unhooked it and pulled it back, then raised the window and stepped into the winter night. He took some putty out of his pocket—carried for just this purpose—and pressed it into the locking mechanism so that when he closed the gate again the latch fell into place but could be raised if you jiggled it just right. If you yanked at it or shook it hard the putty would give way and the lock would secure itself. Then he closed the window and moved his bulky body down the ice-covered fire escape to the street.

The snow was becoming heavier. Not good, impeded his vision but not their sense of smell. Perhaps the muffling effect would reduce the acuity of their hearing a little.

He put his hand in his pocket, closing his finger around the trigger of the
M-11. It was a mean weapon, designed for anti-guerrilla work, the kind of police work where you killed it if it moved. Right now it felt good. It was the right pistol for this hunt—the bullets would knock a man ten feet. A hundred-pound animal should go considerably farther.

He set out to find his quarry. He reasoned that the creatures would be more likely to hit Becky first because she was younger and presumably stronger, therefore more dangerous to them. Wilson, slow, old, sick, would be second in line. His theory was borne out by the fact that they had gone to such great lengths to get to Becky and had left him pretty much alone. Of course they had come in the basement window, Wilson was well aware of that. He had left it ajar as an invitation. His dusting of the basement of the rooming house last night had revealed two sets of pawprints as distinctively different as human fingerprints. They had gone up the basement stairs to the door. There were marks on the lock where they had tried to spring it with their claws.

But they had reserved their best effort for Becky, of that he felt reasonably sure. If he was wrong, if they were around him now… with luck he would take a few with him.

He walked through the deserted late-night streets with his hand in his pocket clutching the
M-11. Despite the gun, he kept close to the curb, away from any trashcans and shadowy entranceways, out from under overhanging fire escapes. And every few steps he stopped and looked behind him. Only once did he see another human form, a man bundled against the snow and hurrying in the opposite direction.

When he reached the lights of Eighth Avenue he felt much better. He was safer out here under the bright sodium-arc lamps, with the passing cars and the more frequent pedestrians. Somehow he felt more anonymous taking the bus, so he waited at the bus stop instead of hailing a cab. Ten minutes passed before a bus came. He got on and rode it far uptown, to Eighty-sixth and Central Park West. Now all he had to do was cross the park and he would be in Becky’s neighborhood. Upper East Side cardboard box neighborhood…
well, if that’s what she liked…