He jammed a gun barrel into my eye. I was dead. I knew it. It was a feeling like falling helplessly, endlessly—down and down, raging, grasping, terrified, helpless forever.
But then, in a harsh rasp, the killer said, “No—too quick.” Grinning, eyes gleaming. He pulled the gun away from my face and jammed it into my groin for a fatal gut shot.
In that quarter second, as he shifted the gun, I drove my thumb into his throat.
He gagged. I hurled him off me. I rolled to my feet as he crashed into a low dresser. I rushed at him. He was already clawing at the dresser-top, pulling himself up, twisting to train the gun on me again. He’d never dropped the damned gun.
Furious and frightened and in a world of blood-red pain, I kicked at him, screaming. I went for his wrist. My foot hit. The gun flew out of his hand.
The train lamp glared bright white. The train whistle shrieked. The house shook and rattled as the freight rushed toward it. I grabbed the front of the skull-man’s shirt with my left hand and drove my right fist at his face. Then the freight went past and the glare went out. The light went strobic, flashing by. The skull-faced killer blocked me in that pulsing flicker. He struck back, the blow silent in the deafening roar of the passing train. He launched himself at me and then we were locked together, falling, clawing, wrestling on the quaking floor of the quaking room. In the swallowing vortex of shadows, I saw his grinning death-head glow. I felt the power in his sinewy arms as he tried to pull free of me and I tried to pull free of him and strike him dead. I cried out in pain as we rolled over and the gash in my side tore wider. My cry was buried under the train noise and the train whistle answered with a stuttering blast that seemed to engulf us. I felt the killer’s hand go under my arm. He was reaching for my gun. I grabbed his wrist. The weapon came free of its holster. We wrestled for it. In a final shock of strength against strength, I bent his wrist. The Glock fell spinning into the spinning shadows and flickering light—and in that same shock we broke away from each other, rolled away from each other, leapt to our feet, face-to-face in the noise and the vibration and the vortex of darkness.
I was gasping for breath. My face was twisted with pain. I was expecting him to attack again. I was crouched and ready. Losing strength. Sagging. Afraid to die, expecting it. I could see him clearly, his face so white it seemed to glow, his eyes so wide they seemed as bright as his face, and brighter. His whole deathly presence seemed to stand at the still center of the rushing noise and pulsing light.
In the next moment, with startling suddenness, the freight went past. The light went out. The noise diminished swiftly—faded swiftly and was all but gone.
In the shocking quiet afterward, I heard—we both heard—the distant wolflike howls of sirens: the cruisers and ambulance on their way.
The skeleton-man cocked his head to listen a moment. Then, instead of attacking, he stepped back quickly into deeper darkness. His voice trailed out of the shadows in a rasp.
“Next time, I’ll make you beg to die,” he said.
I hesitated only a second. Weak and frightened as I was, I didn’t want to live with that, didn’t want to spend my days waiting for him. I cursed and charged into the shadows after him.
But he was nowhere. He was gone.
Gasping for breath, clutching my side with one hand, reaching out to feel my way with the other, I staggered across the room. I banged my thigh against a chair and shouted with pain. But I pushed forward. Hit the wall. Found the light switch. Turned it on.
The place had been ransacked. Furniture overturned. Sofa and chair cushions sliced open, the stuffing on the floor. The closet was opened and jackets and junk had been yanked out of it, strewn everywhere. Drawers had been pulled from bureaus and tables, the contents dumped. I could see more chaos through the kitchen door: utensils and boxes splayed across the counters and the floor.
I was too dazed to wonder much what the killer had been looking for. I just stood staring at the mess, leaning against the wall, trembling. I could still feel the killer’s hands on me, was still reliving that falling, helpless moment when he’d stuck that gun in my eye—and still trying to make sense of the fact that I had left him on the porch, that I had left him there dead, and he had still been inside, waiting for me . . .
It hurt to move but I had to find out the truth. I kicked through a pile of clothing on the floor and went to the door. I heard the sirens growing louder outside. They grew even louder as I pulled the door open.
There he was. The skull-man. The same man. Crumpled on the porch. Dead. Of course he was dead. He had to be.
I stepped out onto the porch and stood over him. Looked down at him. Shook my head. A man who was dead but wasn’t dead. A woman who was alive but wasn’t real. I couldn’t think about it anymore right now. I couldn’t think about anything. Samantha had to have the answer. Samantha had to
be
the answer somehow.
They’re coming after us
.
Somehow she had known.
I looked up and saw the red and blue glow of the approaching cruiser lights. The cars themselves were still out of sight around the corner. Exhausted, I stepped heavily over the body. I moved to the porch stairs. Holding on to the banister, I lowered myself carefully until I was sitting on the top step. I put my face in my hands, blocking out everything—Samantha, the killers, all the insanity of the night—everything.
I was sitting like that when the first cruiser pulled to the curb.
“You’re making it sort of tough for me to get any sleep,” said Grassi.
He stood on the porch behind me, looking down at the dead man. When he glanced back at me, I could see that his eyes were clearer than they had been at the hospital. The night’s booze must have been wearing off. With a sigh, he reached into his back pocket, started to tug out a pair of white rubber gloves. Hannah from EMS was kneeling beside me, cutting the shirt away from my wound. Hannah was a short girl, all breasts and butt. Pretty face, the color of chocolate. Kind, wary, sardonic.
“This what he cut you with?” Grassi said.
I flinched, looking over my shoulder to see the knife. A Ka-Bar Baconmaker. A nasty killing tool. I didn’t bother answering. I knew Grassi was just asking to ask.
“You don’t know him,” he said.
I shook my head. “No. Or the other guy.”
“There was another guy?”
“Inside. After I called you. He tried to kill me too.”
Grassi looked at me, the white teeth flashing. “You’re messing with me, right? There were two of them?”
I let out a groan as Hannah put pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding. “We gotta take him in, get him sewn up,” she said up at Grassi.
Grassi nodded. But he said, “You’re serious about this. There was another guy.”
“Yeah.”
“Is he dead too?”
“No. He got away.”
The colored lights of the cruisers at the curb played over the front lawn, over the porch steps, over me. Inside the house, deputies were moving past the windows. Deputy Stinson was on the front walk, thumbs hooked in his utility belt, guarding us all.
“You get a look at him? This other guy?” Grassi said.
“Yeah,” I told him. “He looked just like this guy.”
“Like this guy?”
“Exactly. Only alive.”
Grassi tilted his head, looking down at the killer. “Looks like a . . .”
“Skeleton,” I said.
“He does, doesn’t he?”
Hannah looked too, out of curiosity. “Look at that. He really does.”
Grassi started to work the rubber gloves on over his hands.
“I figure they were brothers, maybe even twins,” I said.
“You’re joking, right?”
“That’s the only sense I can make out of it. Skeleton Two was inside tossing my house while Skeleton One waited out here to kill me.”
“Pretty confident of the skeleton boys, splitting up like that,” said Grassi.
“They were skeleton professionals. The way they fought . . . They were ex-military—something. Ah!” I let out a shout as Hannah pressed hard against my wound.
“Oh, you are such a crybaby, Champion,” she said. “It’s not that bad.”
“I’m sure it’s fine on your side of it,” I told her.
Grassi crouched beside the body. Started to go through the pockets, as I had. “A skeleton military,” he murmured. “I saw a movie like that once.”
I said to him, “They were expecting Skeleton One to gut me with the Baconmaker—quiet, don’t wake the neighbors. I figure Skeleton Two inside heard the gunshots. Knew something had gone wrong, but didn’t know which of us was still standing—me or Brother Skeleton.”
“Must’ve assumed it was Brother, seeing how confident they were,” Grassi said. He had found the wallet now.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. But he’s a careful skeleton. He creeps from whatever room he’s in to the front parlor, gets there just as the front door is opening.”
“Then you walk in, and he knows his brother is dead.”
“And he becomes perturbed.”
Grassi chuckled. “Perturbed.”
“He had me, I’ll give him that. He could’ve blown my head off. But he wanted to make me suffer.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“No-o,” said Hannah. “We
love
Champion.”
“Hey,” said Grassi, making me look his way. He waggled the killer’s wallet at me. “How come there’s blood on this?”
I shrugged. “I looked at it. I was curious to know who wanted to gut me.”
“Not exactly protocol there, boy-o,” Grassi said. His easygoing friendliness was all make-believe. He was looking over his shoulder at me and I could see his eyes were not friendly at all.
“Sorry.”
“Yeah. ’Cause you knew you’d be put on leave, didn’t you?” He went through the wallet. “John Jones! Gimme a break.”
“There’s a cell phone pants pocket left,” I told him.
“Oh, yeah? What’s in that?”
“You’re the inspector. Inspect it.”
“All right,” said Hannah. “Playtime’s over. I gotta take this young man in and get him sewn up.”
Grassi had his back to me again. Vulturing over the corpse. Bringing out the cell phone now. “Before you go, I just want to make sure I have this straight. A floater washes out of the mighty Hudson River in a town no bigger than a gnat’s asshole.”
“Inspector Grassi, may I remind you there’s a lady present,” Hannah said. “Come on, baby, stand up for me.” She draped my arm over her shoulder to help me off the stairs.
“And the detective who happens to be in this gnat-ass-town fuh—excuse me, sweetheart—
banging
his waitress girlfriend actually
knows
this floater on sight. He recognizes her.”
I would have responded here, but the effort to haul myself to my feet, pulling on the porch banister with one hand, bracing myself on Hannah with the other, took up all my attention.
“And later the same night, this detective returns to his home in the next town over,” Grassi went on. “And holy cannoli, what do you know? Two skeleton twins are waiting on his porch to kill him.”
“Only one on the porch . . .”
“One inside tossing the place. Which raises that whole issue: They’re looking for something. What’re they looking for?”
“Don’t know.”
“No clue.”
“None.”
Grassi stood up, tapping the killer’s cell phone against his palm. “Let me ask you something, Champ-man,” he said. “If I told you this story, would you believe me?”
If you told me this story, you’d probably be lying, you wife-beating piece of shit
—that’s what I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “Well, it’s a mystery, Grassi. That’s why we have detectives.”
“Right. Right.”
“Like I said at the hospital: Samantha—the floater—her showing up here . . . it can’t be a coincidence. Me being at Bethany’s, right around the corner—maybe
that
was chance. But aside from that, she had to have been looking for me.”
“And Dead Skeleton here and the Skeleton Who Got Away? Are they a coincidence?”
“Look, I just . . .”
“. . . don’t know—right—no clue.”
“Come on, Champ,” Hannah said. “I can’t hold you up forever.”
But I hesitated. The red and blue lights played over me as I stood on the porch stairs, as I clung to the banister and to Hannah.
“Look,” I said to Grassi. “I think she was trying to warn me.”
“Who? The girl?”
“Samantha, yeah. She said something to me.”
“She said something? You didn’t mention that.”
“It was so soft, I wasn’t sure.”
He cocked his head, gave me a look.
“I think she said, ‘They’re coming after us,’” I told him.
“What’re we, making this up as we go along? You just add stuff as it comes to you?”
“I’m just telling you. When Samantha regains consciousness, we’ll go in there . . .”