Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (12 page)

“I don’t need you to take care of me!” she repeated.

But this time, she wasn’t talking to Jack.

With that, she turned and stormed to her room and slammed the door.

Only seconds after Molly went into her room, Artie appeared at the end of the bed. Jack flinched, startled, then sighed as he put one hand over his heart.

“So that went well, didn’t you think?” Artie asked.

Jack gave him the finger.

Frustrated, but knowing they needed to talk, he padded barefoot out into the hall. He jumped back slightly when the door opened and Courtney entered. Jack’s gaze ticked toward Artie, who made faces behind his sister’s back.

“Did you talk to Molly?” Courtney asked.

Jack smiled, tried not to look at Artie, and nodded. “Yeah. She’s still pretty pissed, though.”

“Can’t blame her,” his sister said. “I have no idea what you’re gonna do about this, Jack, but maybe you should have a talk with Artie. Maybe it’s time for him to move on, y’know? Spare the girl.”

Behind her, Artie’s expression went slack. No more funny faces. No more kidding around. Jack noticed that in that moment Artie’s body seemed to waver, even to fade somewhat. When he had first appeared—though of course transparent—he had been completely visible right down to his high tops. Now his spectral form seemed less defined, his body ending just below the knees in a swirl of mist.

“I’ll . . . I’ll talk to him,” Jack replied.

Courtney touched his arm. “Hey. I can’t even imagine how hard this all is for you. But I just think you need to think about what’s best for everyone. If Artie really loves you guys, I think the best thing might be for him to just leave you alone. There’s got to be something better waiting for him somewhere, right?” Jack glanced at the ghost of his best friend. Artie wore a small, sad smile.

“I’ll talk to him,” Jack said softly. “I’m gonna go downstairs and sit for a bit. Just take some time to think.”

Courtney touched her brother’s face and smiled the big sister smile she had been giving him all his life. Then she turned away, headed for the kitchen. She liked to keep a glass of water beside her bed during the night, Jack knew. He watched her pull a cup down from the cabinet in the darkened kitchen, then he headed out the door and down the stairs into the pub.

Jack went to the bar and poured himself a 7-Up from the tap, then sat on a stool. Artie settled down on the seat beside him, as though he actually needed its support. But the stool did not move, did not slide out from the bar even an inch. He wasn’t really there.

“I wanted to talk where Molly wouldn’t hear me,” Jack explained.

“I got it, Jack. I’m not slow.”

There was a bitterness in the ghost’s tone that Jack wished he could find surprising, but did not. Courtney had expressed thoughts that Jack had not even allowed into his own head.

“She didn’t know you were there.”

Artie would not look at him. “I know. But maybe she’s right.”

Jack exhaled slowly, staring at Artie. Staring through him. He could see the four beer taps beyond the ghost, and the rest of the bar beyond that. Could see right out to the street. But if he focused on Artie, right there in front of him, he could almost make himself
not
see all of that, could almost make himself believe Artie was really there.

“Maybe,” Jack allowed. “Maybe so. But that’s not a conversation for right now. Later, we oughta talk. For now, though, that thing saw me, man. The Ravenous absolutely
saw
me. I’m not gonna pretend I wasn’t scared. I want to destroy the thing just as badly as you do, but I talked to Father Mike, Artie, and he has no idea what I’m even talking about.” Artie turned toward him then and Jack had to look away from those black eyes. He could never look at those eyes for long.

“We just have to keep trying, bro. You saw what that thing does. All right, yeah, I was always pretty dubious about psychics and mediums and that sort of thing when I was alive, but at this point I’m pretty much convinced ghosts are real.” Jack smiled and shook his head. Artie grinned as well and his body became more solid, the outline of his form better defined.

“Not that I’m suggesting you call some infomercial hotline or something,” Artie went on. “But if you and me can talk, there’ve gotta be other people who can do the same thing. Maybe people who’ve been doing it a lot longer and know more about it.
Someone
on your side has to know something about the Ravenous.” Jack frowned. “I don’t get it. Nobody over there can tell you anything useful?”

Artie shrugged, put his elbows on the bar. Jack’s gaze ticked down and he saw that the ghost’s arms actually passed an inch or so through the wood. Sometimes he wished that Artie did not try to behave as if he were still alive; it made it creepier, and sadder as well.

“Most everyone who has their wits about them over here moves on before too long. So far, most of the spirits I’ve met who have been here a long time are either completely self-involved or not quite all there. Either way, they don’t pay much attention to what’s going on around them. So what I know, I know from things that have been passed down—” A long beep broke the silence in the pub. Jack and Artie both turned to stare toward the back of the restaurant, at the door that led into the kitchen. The beeping stopped and then a door slammed.

“What the hell?” Jack muttered as he rose from the stool. It was going on two in the morning.

The kitchen door swung wide and Bill Cantwell stepped into the restaurant followed by two uniformed policemen and a woman in street clothes who wore a badge on a chain around her neck.

“Bill?” Jack asked, alarmed.

“Are you Jack Dwyer?” the woman asked.

He nodded.

“Amy Pepper,” she said. “I’m a homicide detective. I’d like to ask you a few questions about Mr. Cantwell’s whereabouts the past few days.”

Homicide.
The word lingered in his mind and he stared at Bill.
Homicide.

C H A P T E R 6

The air conditioner hummed in Courtney’s window. The late-night city lights cast the room in a soft yellow glow. On nights Bill went home, she had taken to sleeping with the radio on low. Her door was open to let the cool air waft out into the rest of the apartment. Even when Bill slept over, she kept the door partially open. It wouldn’t be fair, otherwise.

Eyes closed, she let the details of the day swirl in her head and blur into one another, and it was not long before she began to drift off, an old song by the Eagles on the radio. In this twilight state between waking and dreaming, she heard the door to the apartment click open. Her eyelids fluttered but did not open. It was just Jack, she knew, finally turning in for the night.

Gonna have a hell of a time waking him up in the morning,
she thought. Then she nuzzled more deeply into her pillow. It smelled like Bill, and a smile flickered across her face as she at last fell asleep.

“Court?”

She snapped awake, eyes wide open. For a second she was not sure if she had really heard Jack’s voice, or if she had dreamed it. Then she saw his silhouette in her doorway out of the corner of her eye, and she sat up. The cotton pajama top she wore was twisted around wrong, and she fixed it unconsciously as she gazed at Jack, mind still sifting the real from the sleep world. Her brother looked more than uneasy.

“What?” she asked.

“Better put some clothes on and come downstairs,” Jack said. “We’ve got trouble.”

“Jesus,” Courtney whispered as she stared at this woman, Detective Pepper. Her gaze went instantly to Bill and she shivered. From the detective’s description of the dead man, it was obvious he had been killed by a Prowler. But Bill could not have done such a thing.
Well,
she corrected,
he could, but he wouldn’t.

Her mind whirled as she tried to make sense of it all. Even presuming a Prowler had killed the man in Bill’s trunk, the question remained, why? Why put him there.

“Who was he? The dead man, I mean,” Courtney asked the detective.

“No idea, yet.”

“Bill didn’t do this.”

“We’re not saying that he did,” Detective Pepper replied. “From the look of things, the trunk was forced open with a crowbar or something. That much I’ll give you. But the body was in the trunk of his car and we encountered Mr. Cantwell at the scene. He claims he was chasing the person who put the body in his trunk, but we have to consider the possibility that he was after the person who forced the trunk open and
discovered
it there.”

Courtney frowned and sat up straighter, smoothing the wrinkles in the pants she had pulled on quickly. “Yes, you have to consider it. Just as long as you realize that isn’t what happened. Now let me ask
you
something. How did you know to check out his car, to look in that lot in the first place? You didn’t just happen by.” Detective Pepper sat back in her chair and regarded Courtney coolly. “No, that’s true. We didn’t. We had an anonymous tip actually.”

Satisfied, Courtney nodded. “So there you are. An anonymous tip from the person who put the corpse there, the person who’s trying to cast suspicion on Bill.”

“That’s yet another possibility we have to consider,” the detective replied.

But somehow Courtney thought that Detective Pepper wasn’t going to spend too much time considering that alternative. And talking about Prowlers as yet another alternative would only make the woman less likely to listen to reason. Courtney was about to protest again when she remembered that there was at least one detective on Boston’s homicide squad who might.

“Do you know a homicide detective named Castillo?”

* * *

Castillo groaned as he came awake with a start. His eyes opened and he sighed as the cell phone on his nightstand trilled a second time. He snatched it up even as he glared at the luminous numbers on the clock.

2:27 A.M.

He had been asleep for a little more than two hours.

“Yeah?” he rasped into the phone.

“Jace, it’s Pepper.”

“My shift was over hours ago, Pepper,” he grumbled.

“If you say so. Do you know a woman named Courtney Dwyer? Owns Bridget’s Irish Rose on Nelson?”

“Yeah?”

“We’ve got a DOA down here. The Dwyer woman asked me to call you. But it’s my case, mister.”

Castillo could hear the pique in her voice, but he paid no attention to it. The second she had mentioned Bridget’s, he grabbed for his jeans and was pulling them on, phone clutched between his shoulder and jaw.

“Sorry, Pepper,” he told her. “Not anymore.”

“What?”

“If you have an issue with it, talk to the lieutenant,” he said as he pulled socks from his drawer, glancing around in search of his shoes. “I’ll be there in fifteen.”

“You know we’re going to be useless in the morning,” Jack said.

From the table in the middle of the pub where he sat with Courtney while the police continued to question Bill, Jack could just barely see the clock behind the bar. It was a few minutes past three. Molly still slept upstairs, and so they had been careful not to wake her.

“We might have to send Molly to the fish market in the morning,” Courtney said tiredly.

Yet in her eyes Jack saw the worry that weighed upon her now. He knew she must be asking herself the same questions he was. Or at least the one overriding question that boomed in the back of his head. Not who, or what, but why?

“I’ll go,” Bill said. “I can go to the market, then sleep in the afternoon and still take the dinner shift.”

Courtney nodded. “We’ll work it out.”

A long silence ensued. After another minute Jack rose to get himself another soda from behind the bar. He had not gotten very far when there came a rap on the frosted glass of the door. A dark silhouette stood outside. He glanced quickly at Detective Pepper, who nodded in assent, and then he strode over to disarm the security system and unlock the door.

Jace Castillo stood on the sidewalk. The street outside was completely silent, the storefronts all dark, most of the windows unlit as well. Only the wan illumination from a few street lamps and the dim glow of distant city lights alleviated the darkness, and they made the night look surreal.

“Jack,” the detective said cautiously.

Jack stepped back to let the man enter. Castillo was fortyish, about six feet tall, and slim. From previous conversations, he knew that the man was a combination of Irish and Puerto Rican, and the mix had been good to him. Both Molly and Courtney had commented before about how handsome the detective was. Jack wasn’t so sure about that, but he had to allow that the guy had that dark, George Clooney thing going on.

Castillo glanced curiously around the pub as he walked to the table where Detective Pepper sat with Bill. When he seemed to find nothing remarkable about the place, he gazed at the other detective.

“I’ll take it from here, Amy.”

Pepper frowned deeply, angrily. “I want to know what this is about, Jace. I may be new to the division, but not the department. I don’t like the smell of this.”

Castillo fixed Pepper with an admonishing glare. Jack figured he didn’t think it was a conversation they should be having with civilians in the room, never mind the uniformed officers who stood there. It was a lesson he and Courtney had learned a long time ago. Never argue in front of your subordinates.

“What you’re told or not told is up to Lieutenant Boggs, not me,” Castillo told her. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like you all to clear the room.”

Silent but fuming, Pepper stood and led the other officers back through the kitchen and presumably back out into the alley crime scene. When they had all gone, Castillo studied Bill, then glanced at Jack and Courtney.

“Talk to me,” he said.

Courtney did not smile. “Maybe you’d better have a seat.”

Castillo crouched down and studied the marks where the trunk had been forced open. Probably a crowbar, he figured. He touched nothing as he took another look at the remains in the trunk. It looked too damn familiar. Over the years he had seen a lot of bodies like this, most of them just a few months before, when Owen Tanzer’s pack had slaughtered more than a dozen people in the city, including a local organized crime capo. The fallout from that was still taking place. It was one thing to tell an average civilian that a murder was unsolved, or that their spouse simply disappeared and has never been found. Quite another to keep mob leaders from killing each other in vengeance for something none of them had anything to do with.