God of the Dead (Seasons of Blood #1): A dark paranormal crime thriller novel (7 page)

Vito turned and then went into the office to get the discs. He’d already burned an extra for the cops that had been here the night of the attack and had made another besides, and why not? He would need one for the insurance company likely as not, and in the back of his mind he’d probably just known the pigs would manage to fuck it up. As he unlocked the cabinet in his office where the discs were kept Vito wondered again if the kid needed a lawyer. Left to the devices of these shit-heels, he’d probably end up getting the fuckin lethal injection of having the
coglioni
to defend himself.

Vito grabbed the DVD the
stronzo
pig was after and went back to the counter, handing it over. Quidman took it from him without a word and left.

“You’re welcome, Detective Fuckbag,” Vito mumbled as he watched the guy walk out the door.

* * * * *

The man who wasn’t Detective Quidman tucked the DVD in one of the many pockets inside his coat as he walked around the corner of the gas station and hopped on his Harley, riding back to his motel.

Lancaster? Could that be right? The kid had to be a Munroe. He’d never heard of the wrong person being attacked before, not even this early in.

Back at his seedy motel, he popped the disc into the player that had probably only been used for porn flicks up until now. He used the fast forward until he found what he was looking for. He only needed to watch the entire scene once but replayed it over and over. Though he recognized something the kid’s lineage in his face—something in the nose, perhaps--this was of small consolation. It didn’t matter if it was on video, he could spot one of them anywhere, and this was one of them, this man—this
thing
—walking through the doors of the gas station, attacking the kid.

“Damn,” he said. “It’s happening again.”

* * * * *

John walked to the break room and poured himself a cup of the road mud that passed for coffee around the station house. He wanted a donut but there was nothing left in the box but crumbs.

“Buncha animals,” he muttered. He didn’t know how some people could be so damn inconsiderate.

He took a sip from his cup of Hi-Test and turned his mind to other things, mainly to AJ. He seemed like a good kid, especially compared to most of the smart-ass degenerate punks he came across in a day’s work.

John frowned, thinking of how shell-shocked the kid had seemed when he’d been brought into the station again tonight, this time over the woman that had attacked him.

What John’s mind kept turning to, though, was the way AJ’s face had collapsed when he heard the guy that had attacked him was DOA. But John could relate; in his 15 years on the police force, he’d only fired his gun twice on duty. He killed a man with one of those bullets. Sure, the guy was a junky and a murderer, but John had lost a lot of sleep after that little incident.

Had that been remorse, though, or disgust? The mess had been horrible, a .44 will make a skid mark of the human head from six feet away.

John tried to shake the memory of that shaved head exploding like a rotten melon and took a sip of coffee. He wondered how the kid would sleep tonight? AJ had looked exhausted when John had seen him out to another squad car so he could be driven home, and the kid had mentioned having something at home to help him sleep. John hoped the kid had taken it and gotten some rest.

John checked his watch. 8:30 A.M. As he turned to head out of the break room, a rookie patrolman hurried around the corner and ran into him, spilling the last half of John’s coffee.

“Ah son of a bitch!” John chucked his crumpled paper cup at the new recruit.

“Sorry, sir!”

“Why dontcha pull your head outta your ass and watch where you’re going?”

“I was told to come and find you, sir, high priority.”

“Who wants me?”

“The guy from the coroner’s office needs to see you.”

“Which one?” Irritation burned in John’s mind as the coffee burnt his arm.

“Huh?”

“
Which office
? The headquarters or the temp unit next door?”

“Oh. N-next door,” the uni said.

Something sunk inside Lubbock’s chest and he struggled to shake the heaviness that had stolen over him.

“We didn’t lose another fuckin’ body, did we?” John asked.

The uni ran his hand over his face. “Isn’t that a shit-show? Thank
god
that happened to County and not us. But no, no, sir, he didn’t say anything about a body. You hear the hospital morgue had one taken?”

“Yeah I heard that,” John said. But then, with what had happened at the end of the Bowden case, John had to wonder…

“Some shit I just don’t think I’ll ever understand,” the uni was saying. “This is one of them.”

“Yeah, sure is,” John said. “Look, be more careful, huh?”

“Yes, sir, sorry about the coffee.”

“Yeah? Good. You can clean it up.” John headed next door, finding each step a little harder to take than the last.

Open and shut, remember
? John thought.
Open and fucking shut.

By the time he got next door the coffee had cooled and left his sleeve was cold and soggy.

John walked through the door and saw Paul Diamond, head of the temp unit. He was a short, round man with a balding head and thin, rimless glasses. He possessed a certain instinct that would have made him a great detective, but why he chose to spend his entire working life in the company of dead people, John didn’t know.

John forced a smile he absolutely did not feel to his face.

“Ay, Paulie!”

Paul squinted through his glasses. “Hello, John. How are you?”

“Ah, good, Paulie. How’s things?”

“Well, I’ve run across something very, very odd. Of course, it could be some kind of
clerical
error, which is most likely the case. But in the event that it’s not--”

John was thrown. Normally Paulie started in on him about some kind of bullshit or another, the guy was an encyclopedia of the worst jokes you ever heard; it was rare the guy went straight into business mode.

“Whoa, whoa, Paulie. Take it easy, huh? I wanna get outta this coat and into a shot of Wild Turkey.”

“Ah, yes, how…hard boiled of you. Come here.” They went to a table where a body lay, covered by a black, plastic sheet. Paul pulled it down to the stiff’s waist. “Do you know this fellow?”

“Yeah I know him. He’s the guy who got whacked at the gas station yesterday morning. Busted with a ball bat.”

Paul frowned. “Very peculiar.”

“What? What’s the problem here?”

“Well,” Paul said, pushing his glasses up again. “This is the guy you thought was on maybe PCP, meth, something? Said he withstood getting hit in the head with a wine bottle, and once with a bat, before finally dropping after being struck with the bat a
second
time, right?”

“Right,” John said. “You get the tox-screen back on him yet?”

“So, I
know
this guy took some damage,” Paulie said, ignoring John’s question. “His skull is fractured in three different places. Come here.”

John stooped closer to the body as Paulie lifted the head, turning it as he spoke.

“This here, along the back, you can feel a hairline fracture, I even did an X-ray to be sure. This is from the wine bottle. There were still bits of glass in his hair and the skin had split open. No blood, though. Weird, right?”

John was about to object but then stopped. That
was
strange; normally a head wound would absolutely gush.

“Again here,” Paulie said, indicating the side of the corpse’s head. “The second fracture, this being from the first strike the kid—what’s his name?”

“AJ,” Lubbock said, his voice papery and thin.

“This is where AJ hit him the first time with the bat. You can see his skull is dented here, even. Then we have the coup de grâce, the killshot. Again, split the head open. Split his fucking
skull
open, a little. No blood.”

Lubbock felt the world grey out a bit before the color swam back in. He had missed this.
How
had he missed this? All of them: him and the cops at the scene. The EMTs hadn’t said anything, either.

Did you miss it, though
? John asked himself.
Did you miss it or did you
ignore
it?

“Then we have the tox-screen,” Paulie said.

“Y-yeah?” John asked. “What’d that look like?”

“Heroin.
Only
heroin. No meth, PCP, bath salts, not even a fucking Adderall. Absolutely nothing that was an upper, nothing would explain how this guy could sustain two blows to the head that were hard enough to fracture his skull, and nothing to explain why those wounds didn’t bleed, either. We’re not talking just a little heroin, either. A lot. Even considering the guy’s tolerance, what he had in him was enough to kill him twice, maybe three times over.”

John thought of that traffic camera footage: three minutes of motionlessness, followed by a giant seizure, then sitting up as though he were being pulled by strings.

“And this isn’t even all of it,” Paulie said. “Come here.”

John followed Paulie to another table, where Karen Rosenthal was laid out.

“Similar situation with her,” Paulie said. “Gunshot through the lungs, right? No blood.”

“She was covered in blood,” John said, though to him his own voice sounded far away.

“Sure, all from her wrists. Nothing in the wound, no blood in her
lung
. Not to mention the
lividity
, John. You said when you got there, she was face down, yes? No one had moved her?”

Lubbock didn’t answer verbally, didn’t seem capable of it. He shook his head.

“Lividity starts thirty minutes
after
de—”

“I know fuckin’ lividity, Paulie!”

“Of course, right. Sorry. But to get to
this
point…I mean, after six hours or so, the blood vessels begin breaking down, but any time before then it would have been altered, at least a little, by the position you found her in.”

“What the hell you sayin’ here, Paulie?”

Paul sounded exasperated when he spoke, the way a teacher might sound after a day of explaining an extremely simple lesson to an extremely simple child.

“I’m saying she’d been dead for
at least
six hours before she was shot, John. Probably closer to ten.”

No way, John thought. All these stiffs finally drove Paulie right outta his skull.

And yet, he knew the same things about lividity that Paulie knew. Not the intricacies, of course, but the basics. Of course he knew the basics.

John’s head swam and he was suddenly very glad there had been no donuts left earlier. He wasn’t entirely sure that they would stay where they were supposed to right about then.

“Sweet Son of Mary, Paul. What the hell is going on?” John looked down at the woman on the table, a body that had walked into AJ’s apartment and tried to choke him out, and all this
at least
six hours after to bleeding to death in her tub, according to Paulie.

Not just according to Paulie
, Lubbock thought.
You knew this shit the first time you saw her.

John leaned in a little closer, looking Karen Rosenthal in the face; her skin was pale, her nose a perfect, straight line.

Then her eyes popped open.

“Oh what the f--”

Her hand shot up and stopped the words in John’s throat.

“Holy shit!” Paul yelled. He backed away quickly, falling down and pissing himself.

Both cold hands clamped around John’s throat and squeezed with an unbelievable strength, the fingers digging into his flesh. “AJ Mmmm...Munroe,” a dead voice spoke. Then it began to laugh.

John reached into his shoulder holster and pulled out his gun as he gagged, pushing the barrel into the eye of this thing that should not be, and pulled the trigger.

The sound was deafening in the small, tiled room. It echoed again and again, although neither man could hear it above the high-pitched buzz that invaded their ears.

Dry chunks of dead scalp and skull were scattered on the table and across the floor, but there was no blood. Not a single drop. The hands around John’s throat tightened ever so slightly before the corpse thumped back down onto the table, lifeless once again.

* * * * *

John sat in a chair outside Chief Harris’s office, a cup of coffee in his shaking hands. His throat hurt, his voice was scratchy when he talked.

It couldn’t happen
,
he told himself.
It just did, asshole,
he argued back inside his head
.

It was now almost 8:00 A.M. and John was bone-weary. All he wanted was to drink a shot of whiskey or four, and go to bed. Was that really so much to ask? He looked around the station house. Utter chaos. No one really knew what had happened, or what to believe, except for John, Paul, and Don Harris, Chief of Police. Everyone else was told some half-crocked story that the woman had been unconscious when they brought her in and came up on them during the examination.