Rafferty pulled his Magnum and ducked through the door, fully expecting Jimbo to be waiting for him. But Jimbo was gone.
The television set threw off a bluish-white glow, the only light in the room. A metal oscillating fan whirred, scattering papers. Rafferty swept his gun back and forth across the room. Jimbo could be crouched in a corner in the dark, ready to pounce on him.
Satisfied that the room was clear, Rafferty stripped off his clothes and tossed them on the floor.
He would be vulnerable while changing into his true form, but if he wanted to kill Jimbo, it was his best chance. He could do more damage with claws and teeth than with any gun.
Rafferty willed the change to come, his human skin replaced by a rough, leathery hide. He grew seven inches, bringing his height to seven feet. His muscles expanded and bulged, bringing his weight to over three hundred pounds.
It took minutes for him to become a beast. When the change was complete, he made a fist and punched a hole in the living room wall. Plaster dust puffed and chips spattered on the rug.
He howled, a low guttural sound starting in his chest and rising to a shriek. A neighborhood dog answered him.
Rafferty didn’t care who heard him. He wanted Jimbo to be shaking right about now.
The hunt began with the scent. He tilted his head back and sniffed. He smelled spoiled meat, sweat, oil, hops and barley from the beer bottle on the floor.
He ducked his head and entered the dining room. In this form, his night vision was poor. He flipped on the light switch in the dining room and a cockroach danced across the dining room table. He sniffed again, able to smell the bug, and if the bug had taken a crap, he could’ve smelled that too.
Jimbo was above him. The scent came through the ceiling.
Rafferty found the stairs and climbed them. At the end of a narrow hallway was an open door.
Blackness beckoned him from beyond the door. Jimbo had surely left it open as an invite for him to climb the attic stairs.
He stuck his head into the open doorway. Dark in here. He flipped the switch, but no light came. Had his enemy unscrewed the bulb?
He sniffed. The scent of the hunted grew stronger and along with it the smells of dust, old leather and mothballs.
The first attic step groaned as he put his weight on it.
Movement came from above.
He retreated as a heavy object slammed into the stairs from above, splintering wood. He picked it up, palming it in one hand. A bowling ball his adversary had dropped from over the railing.
It wasn’t enough to even scratch him, and Jimbo knew that. He was just messing with Rafferty, trying to rattle him.
I’ll rattle you.
He took the stairs in three strides, attempting to reach the top before Jimbo could hurl another object at him.
There couldn’t be many places left for him to hide, even among the junk. Stacks of boxes littered the attic, along with a rusted red bicycle, a copper floor lamp and an old army cot.
Rafferty proceeded to the far end of the attic, creeping down the narrow aisle between the boxes and past the chimney. The scent grew stronger.
The boxes to his right came crashing down and he deflected them with his arm.
Jimbo in his true form leapt at Rafferty, claws outstretched and ready to kill.
He backed Rafferty up, pushing against his chest and bashing him into the wall. He jabbed at Rafferty’s throat, but Rafferty got his arm in the way and smacked the clawed hand away.
Jimbo tried to bite next, opening his jaws and cocking his head at an angle, trying to get under Rafferty’s chin and bite the soft flesh at the throat. Rafferty slammed his forehead into Jimbo’s face before the old bastard could bite him, and it snapped Jimbo’s head back.
Rafferty clubbed him across the face with his forearm; Jimbo staggered, but did not fall. Jimbo rushed him again, leaping at Rafferty, but Rafferty let himself fall backward, and Jimbo sailed over him and slammed into the chimney.
Wobbly and looking drunk, Jimbo tried to stand, but Rafferty, having the killer instinct of a big cat, pounced, pinning him to the ground.
Jimbo raised his arm to protect himself, but Rafferty slapped it away.
He bit into Jimbo’s throat and ripped out a hunk of flesh. Then he bit again, hard, right through to the spine, snapping it and killing his adversary.
It was good to be king.
Harry pulled the Town Car into a small lot that divided the park in half. The lot also served the community center, a small brick building located near the picnic shelters. Matt saw an ambulance and a police cruiser parked on the grass near a picnic shelter. Sirens flashed and strobed across the shelter roof.
A group of teenage boys, some of them with skateboards tucked under their arms, had gathered near the shelter.
Didn’t these kids have a curfew?
Harry pulled into a space and put the Town Car in park. He shut off the engine, reached across Matt and opened the glove compartment.
“Excuse me. This don’t mean we’re dating.”
He took out a little .22 and a clip. He jammed the clip home, untucked his shirt and sucked in his belly. Tucking the gun into his pants, he opened the car door.
“That gun goes off, you won’t be having
any
dates,” Matt commented.
“No one likes a wiseass, you know.”
They walked toward the picnic shelter, Harry strolling casually, Matt with his hands in his pockets.
“You think that twenty-two’ll be any good against one of Them?”
Harry looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Probably not. But it makes me feel better.”
C
HAPTER
18
A thud. The ambulance door shutting?
Donna saw faces through a haze. It was like looking up at someone from the bottom of a pool. They shimmered.
She felt weak, her head throbbing, and she vaguely remembered her head slamming against the porch deck. Her arms and legs trembled, her stomach swirled and her back felt as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it.
The siren howled and the ambulance began to move. The faces became blurred and faded out.
She was on an elevator. The floor light indicators flashed ten, eleven, twelve. It stopped on twelve and a pretty blonde in hospital scrubs stepped into the elevator.
“Thirteen, please,” the woman said, smiling at Donna.
The elevator stopped at thirteen and the woman in the scrubs stepped off the elevator. She looked over her shoulder at Donna.
“You’re going to be surprised. He’s doing so well.”
She knew the hospital was Buffalo General, for she recognized the sandy carpet in the elevator. That, and the button for the ninth floor was missing. She had always taken this elevator when ...
When she came to see Dominic.
The elevator stopped at the fourteenth floor (she couldn’t recall pressing any buttons). She got off and made a right, then a left. Dominic’s room had been 1420. The hallway seemed longer than it used to, as if it would take hours to reach the end. The halls were empty save for a laundry cart and a lonely IV stand.
She entered Dominic’s room to find the bed made, the sheets crisp and white. There was a note on the pillow, written on yellow steno paper and folded horizontally.
It read “Sweet Thang” on the front. Dominic had called her that whenever he knew she was mad and he was in trouble. It usually managed to get a smile out of her, even when she was so mad she could have strangled him.
She unfolded the note.
Look behind you.
She turned around and stood face-to-face with Dominic Ricci.
“My God. You look great, Dom.”
“Thanks.”
He looked healthy, his skin a glowing olive color, his hair shiny. The strong jaw was there, the deep brown eyes, the smile that had slain her the first time he had flashed it. Nothing like the Dominic who had weighed eighty pounds when he died. Before cancer claimed him, Dominic’s skin had been waxy and stretched over the bones. His cheekbones flared out, like they might pop through the skin. He had been too weak to have his hair washed, and the lush head of hair he once had became stringy and greasy.
But here was the old Dominic, untouched by disease.
“Hey, sweet thang.”
“Where are we?”
“I’m dead. Where are you?”
“But your face, your appearance. The cancer’s gone, right?”
“It’s never gone, sweet thang. Ask anyone who’s had it. It stays with you, even when they tell you it’s gone. In your mind, sweet thang.”
Dominic only called her “sweet thang” when she was mad or when he was trying to jolly her out of a bad mood. His use of it started to bother her, because this wasn’t like the old Dominic.
“Am I dead too?”
“No. Not yet. Do you burn?”
“Do I burn?”
When she had first seen him, she wanted to throw her arms around him and squeeze, cover his face with kisses. Now she wanted to be away from him. He was acting weird, not like the man she knew.
“It’s coming back, sweet thang.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“The rot’s coming back.”
The skin near the corner of his eye became brown and bumpy. The patch of brown started spreading, becoming darker and turning black. It made its way down his cheekbone in a tributary until it reached the corner of his mouth. It was like watching time-lapse photography. The side of his face looked like a rotten banana in a matter of seconds.
He took a step toward Donna. She backed up.
Dominic brought his hand to his face and poked a hole in the rotting skin with his index finger. He hooked the flesh and pulled, his cheek ripping.
Donna backed up farther, stumbling onto the hospital bed.
His eye was visible in the socket. His cheekbone gleamed and maggots squirmed from the open ruin that was his face.
Donna heard herself yelp, an involuntary sound.
Dominic came closer.
“Get the hell away from me!”
The floor near her feet exploded open, sending pieces of tile ricocheting off the walls. She looked down to see flames burst out of the hole. They licked at her pants, raced up her leg. Her legs and lower back were on fire.
A clawed hand reached out of the hole, gripping her flaming pant leg. It dragged her down. She reached for the sheets on the bed, trying to keep herself from being pulled into the pit. The flames scorched her as it took her down into the fiery hole.
The thing that had been her dead husband put his hand over her face and pushed her down into the hole. His hand felt like a rubber glove filled with ice cubes. She felt herself draining, slipping away. She closed her eyes, the glow of the flames visible through her eyelids.
She opened her eyes again. The overhead light hurt, and she squinted.
The paramedic popped his head back into view, fuzzy at first and then clearer. His head was shaved bald, and a Fu Manchu mustache covered his upper lip and grew down the sides of his mouth like some crazy shrubbery.
“Hang in there. We’re almost at the hospital.”
The siren cut out and the ambulance slowed. As the paramedic opened the rear door, the world spun and she passed out into oblivion once again.
Matt and Harry brushed past the teenagers. The cops had wrapped police tape around the shelter’s support beams. A sheet-covered corpse lay on the picnic table. Whoever covered it had done a sloppy job, because a hand with lavender-painted nails hung limply over the side of the table.
A police officer, a lanky guy with a comb-over, shouted at the crowd to disperse. Nobody moved.
“Wonder where the medical examiner is?” Matt said.
“Maybe he’s on his way.”
Matt noticed with distaste that blood had seeped through the cracks of the picnic table and pooled on the concrete pad.
“Looks like quite a bit of blood,” he said.
“Sheet’s soaked with it,” Harry agreed.
The ambulance crew stood in front of their rig, gurney at the ready. One of them had a big duffel bag with a white cross on the side of it draped over his shoulder.
Medical supplies, no doubt, although they wouldn’t need them. The victim was long dead.
The two paramedics looked confused. They both kept looking around, perhaps waiting for the medical examiner to arrive on the scene. The whole thing looked awfully loose and sloppy. No other officers on the scene, no medical examiner, nobody being questioned as to what they saw.
Somebody called the police, and yet it didn’t look like a report was being taken.
“I heard the cop tell the ambulance crew it looked like there were bite marks on the body,” someone said from behind Matt.
Matt turned around to see where the voice came from. Its owner was a pudgy kid, maybe seventeen. His belly hung over the waist of his cargo shorts.
“What did you say?”
“About what?”
“Bite marks.”
“Oh. The girl told the officer and the officer told the medics that it looked like there were bite marks on the body.”
“What girl?”
“The girl who found the body.”
“Where is she?”
“Over there. By the police car,” he said, pointing to the cruiser.
“Thanks. Harry ...”
“Here comes the cavalry.”
Another police cruiser pulled up onto the grass, its siren blaring.
“The kid behind us told me there were bite marks on the body,” Matt said.
“Did he see them?”
“No. The girl who found the body told the cop that.”
“Where’s the girl?”
Matt stood on his tiptoes to look over the crowd. He saw a blond girl of about fourteen leaning against the car. She wiped tears from her face with her shirt.
He wanted to find out what she’d seen. The cops would be busy with the crowd and the crime scene, so Matt had an idea.
“Let’s go talk to her,” he said.
“And the cops?”
“They’re preoccupied. She’ll give us the best information.”
The red-haired cop who’d pulled up in the cruiser hitched his belt and approached the ambulance crew. After a word with them, the crew got in the ambulance, backed it up and drove away. That was weird. How were they planning on getting the body to the morgue?
The red-haired cop approached the balding cop at the shelter.
“Now’s our chance.” Matt tugged at Harry’s sleeve and they walked over to the girl.
Matt and Harry approached the girl. She leaned against the rear of the police car, arms folded across her chest. Mascara ran down her cheeks, and even in the dark Matt could make out the redness in her eyes. Her bottom lip quivered.
Matt wished he had a tissue to offer the kid.
She had on a pink T-shirt cut so that her navel showed. A pair of in-line skates lay on the ground at her feet. She had a thousand-yard stare going, her big blue eyes looking right through Matt and Harry.
He felt like a shit heel for what he was about to do, but he had to know about the wounds on the body. “Can we talk to you?”
Matt waited a few seconds and asked her again.
She snapped out of it, her head twitching like a person coming out of a bad dream.
“Who’re you?”
“Detectives Rand and Wilks. Lincoln Police.”
“Oh,” she said.
Matt wanted to breathe a sigh of relief. If the girl hadn’t been in a state of shock, she might not have bought the fact that they were detectives. She might see that neither one of them had a badge clipped to their belts.
“What’s your name?” Matt asked.
“Sally Perski.”
“Where were you headed when you found the body?”
“Home. I was going home from my friend Laura’s house.”
“Did you see or hear anyone? Was there a struggle?”
“Yeah. Three of them. Lights started coming on in the houses and they ran. Then there were sirens.”
“Did you get a good look at anyone?” Harry said.
“They were big, I remember that. And ... That was it, just big.”
Matt sensed she wanted to say something else. “And what? You were going to say something else, Sally.”
“You’ll think I’m weird.”
“Try me.”
She looked back and forth from Matt to Harry, maybe trying to gauge if she could trust them.
“They looked like animals. Only they walked on two legs.”
She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“Where did they go?” Matt asked.
She pointed to the six-foot chain-link fence that separated the houses from the park. “They jumped the fence and ran through that yard.” Sally craned her neck to look past Matt. “Where’s you guys’ car? I didn’t see you pull up.”
Harry broke in quickly. “We’re plainclothes, honey. Our car’s unmarked.”
She might be coming out of the shock, Matt thought, ready to notice that their impression of detectives was not exactly Dennis Franz quality. They might only get in a few more questions before she realized they weren’t cops. Speaking of which, Matt glanced over to the real ones at the shelter.
The balding one was taking names on a notepad, and the red-haired one was busy peering under the sheet. He stepped right in the pool of blood on the concrete. Matt didn’t know much about crime scene investigation, but he did know that the cardinal rule was don’t touch anything. The redhead was butchering the scene.
Harry said, prompting the girl, “So these people ran. Then what happened?”
“I went to see if I could help the person under the shelter. The one they attacked. And ...”