The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1) (8 page)

He laughed. “Knew you’d get a kick out of it,” he said, slipping off his fins.

“I had no idea. I didn’t expect to see so much on the first go.”

“That’s reefs for you. Ecologists don’t yell about them so much just because they’re pretty; they’re heaving with all kinds of life. There’s stuff down there that hasn’t even been discovered yet.”

“Seriously?”

He shook the water out of his hair. “Oh yeah. I know it seems like we’ve been everywhere – both poles, top of Mount Everest. Even the moon. But when you look at an ecosystem like that you just
know
there’s stuff we haven’t found; Mother Nature still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve.”

“It’s incredible,” she said, still dizzy with everything she’d seen. “I don’t know how to thank you for this.”

Gabe grinned and pulled out a cooler from under the seat. “Oh, that’s easy,” he said, opening the lid to reveal a handful of beers bobbing in half melted ice. “I figured I was going to ask you out for a drink at some point, but now’s as good a time as any, I guess.”

She laughed. “Do you always take girls out on the reefs before asking them out for drinks?”

He handed her a Peroni, the label almost peeled off in the wet. “Only the ones I want to see again,” he said.

5

They could smell it a dozen or more miles away.

It carried on the wind – a fleshy scent that almost made your mouth water, until the sweetness of rot came and poked you in the back of the throat like a blunt finger, tripping your gag reflex and leaving you with no question about what it was you were smelling.

The black dog was walking.

“I heard they saw it down in the Keys.”

“Nah, man – it was here. Right here. I seen the fucker plain as daylight – paws like dinner plates, eyes like nothing you’ve ever seen on earth. Walked straight past my front door and
growled
at me. I just about pissed my pants.”

One of the younger ones shook his head. “Come on,” he said, one eye on his iPhone. “There is no black dog. It’s a fuckin’ superstition.”

“Oh yeah? Then what are you doing here?”

“Dude, how the hell should I know?” He jabbed at the screen with an impatient finger. “I can’t explain it. It’s like an instinct. Like how some things migrate, you know?” Another jab.

Charlie reached past him and grabbed a pack of baby carrots from the shelf. “Migrate?” he said. “What are you? Some kind of weregoose?”

A couple of the others laughed, but the youngster didn’t look up. Like a lot of the kids he looked dazed, blinking in the lights of the convenience store as if he had only just woken up. “Wait a sec,” he said. “I’m trying to get Wikipedia.”

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “Try ‘weird smells that make you drive to Florida’. That should be good for a laugh, if nothing else.”

He carried on through the aisles, his stomach roaring in protest as he passed by Twinkies, peanut butter cups, Cheetos and Little Debbie snack cakes. The ferocious appetite came with the moon, but he couldn’t afford the cholesterol, not at his age.

When he caught sight of himself in a mirror he saw that his cheeks were still gratifyingly hollow. Good bones. At thirty-two he was a long way from the blue-eyed golden boy he had been at twenty-five, his hair already turning tow-colored with streaks of premature gray. And sure, his teeth had never been up to Hollywood snuff, but he had the bone structure there. If you had great cheekbones you were much less likely to turn jowly.

He grabbed a couple of bags of beef jerky - for protein - and then headed for the counter. The girl behind it was a skinny little blue haired thing with old cutting scars on her wrist and the word BREATHE tattooed in loopy black letters on the inside of one arm. Her eyes were large and brown and the sight of her sloppy dark red lipstick set Charlie’s stomach rumbling again, stirring other appetites to life. Shaved, he thought. Not very well shaved, so she’d be just a little prickly to fuck, but it wouldn’t matter, because she was nutty enough to cut herself. Crazy in the head meant crazy in the bed.

“Gimme a pack of Marlboro, hon,” he said. He spotted the cool cabinet beside her and caved. “You know what – fuck it. And one of those bottles of tea. Sick of that sugarless Yankee shit I’ve been drinking.”

When she turned back the chill had tightened her nipples and he grinned at her across the counter. “I like sweet things,” he said.

She flinched at his smile the way they often did, these fucking kids with their weird notions that everyone should look like they’d been airbrushed or whatever. Like she was a goddamn picture, with her lipstick all over her teeth and her bra strap hanging off her shoulder.

There was a warm wind blowing in the parking lot, wafting the carrion breath over them all. A couple of old timers – bike kuttes, white streaked beards – were talking as he passed.

“...well, there’s the boy, I guess...”

“...that fatass kid? He even old enough?”

“About twenty, I think.”

The geezers spotted him and stopped talking. Charlie bared his yellow fangs at them and strolled on by. They looked guilty as shit at being caught out gossiping, or maybe it was because of the ill-concealed excitement in their tone.

He turned on his heel and yelled back to them. “Smell that?” he said, breathing in a mouthful of heady-sweet sickness. “Huff it on up. That’s the wind of change, fellas. Wind of change.”

Charlie laughed, spun around and kept on going. Change. Such an exciting word that that asshole in the White House had managed to wring two fucking terms out of it. Tell people that the world is about to somehow shift and heave under their feet and watch them scurry around like ants. Nobody wanted to admit it, but there was a fiesta atmosphere in the air, adrenaline flowing like champagne fizz, quickening tongues and bating breath. Big news. Big change.

He found Grayson waiting by the truck, sad-dog brown eyes behind Buddy Holly glasses, a cigarette held between knuckles that already had the tell-tale bunchy look of early arthritis. Turning was hell on the bones.

“So?” said Charlie. “He dead yet?”

Grayson blinked. “Did I ever tell you how much I appreciate your sensitivity to social atmosphere?” His British accent struck a discordant chilly note in the swampy Florida air.

“Says the man catching a deathbed smoke break,” said Charlie. “You just left Reese alone in there with him?”

“They were having a moment. Father/son stuff.”

Charlie shook out his own pack of smokes, flipped one round upside down. For luck. For what that was worth. “If it was anyone but Reese,” he said. “I’d suspect the kid of holding a pillow over the old man’s face.”

“Please. Reese might not be the sharpest crayon in the box but he’s not
that
fucking stupid.” Grayson looked out across the parking lot at the assembled bikes and trucks and shitbox cars. “Jesus, look at all of them.”

“Lyle was...is...a respected guy.”

Grayson arched an eyebrow. “Respected? Or feared?”

“Potato, potahto.” Charlie rested his cigarette on his lip as he lowered the tailgate. Smoke billowed up into his eyes, stinging. “It’s not too late to call the whole thing off.”

He lugged the toolbox off the back. The lid was rusted and the handle in danger of falling off, but he knew the things inside gleamed like treasures. He had spent hours sharpening the blades, sometimes going so hard at it that tiny sparks danced off the edge of the metal. Beautiful clean edges, so sharp that you could touch them to skin and not even know you were cut until you saw the red trickle out.

“I bought a new couch,” said Grayson, seemingly apropos of nothing.

“Okay?”

“It’s a nice couch. Italian leather. And I was thinking of retiling the kitchen.”

“Mazeltov,” said Charlie. “What’s your point?”

“My point is that I like my life,” said Grayson. “Or at least I don’t hate it nearly as much as I used to. You just wait – when you get to my age you’ll start measuring happiness in terms of comfy chairs and indigestion remedies.”

“Nope. When I’m your age I’ll be dead. If this all goes south then I’m going down to Islamorada to hook up with some old smuggling buddies and to drink myself to death on umbrella drinks. You know – with fuckin’ pipecleaner flamingos and shit.”

Grayson frowned, notching the line between his eyebrows deeper. “Ever the optimist.”

“That’s me,” said Charlie, stamping out his smoke and heading for the motel room door. “You gotta look on the bright side.”

“Yes, because it’s always a barrel of monkeys when a mad dictator croaks. The power vacuums, the infighting, the pretenders to the throne circling like vultures. Not to mention the extremes of lawless violence. If we’re really lucky we’ll only end up shot in a basement like the Romanovs.”

The smell got stronger as Charlie approached the door. Number seven, a lucky number that wasn’t doing anyone inside any favors, not if the smell was anything to go by. It was close now; there was a poison tang to the smell of blood that said Lyle’s kidneys were shutting down, if they hadn’t quit already.

Reese opened the door. The first thing Charlie thought was that the geezers had been wrong; there was no way Reese was anywhere near twenty. The kid hadn’t shaved in days and was showing a dumb, downy adolescent beard. There was a rosy rash at one corner of his mouth that just served to highlight the still pink, fresh scars of recent acne all over his anxious, flabby little face. He looked all of about sixteen years old.

“Oh my God,” he said, fresh tears welling in his red-rimmed eyes. “Oh my God, you weren’t
kidding?
”

“Everything’s going to be all right,” said Grayson, changing his tune as he placed a calming hand on Reese’s shoulder.

“What’s in the box?”

“Just some things - ”

“ - things? I’m not doing it, Grayson. I won’t and you can’t fucking make me...”

Charlie tuned Reese out with a practiced ear. The smell of imminent death was now so strong he could hardly see straight.

Lyle was on the bed. Someone had put a blue plastic sheet over it to protect the covers, towels draped on top to absorb whatever came out of him when the moment came.

“He’s blind now,” said Reese, in a voice like he couldn’t believe this was happening. “He couldn’t see anything yesterday and then he said ‘I’m done,’ and that was the last thing he said.”

Charlie approached the bed. There was blood crusted at the corners of Lyle’s mouth; Reese said his teeth had been falling out. The near skeletal figure on the bed was wearing a stained old t-shirt and a pair of checked pajama pants, neither of which did anything to hide the angles of his bony, broken frame. He had been a big man once, both physically and by reputation, holding the neighboring packs in check by threat of violence and murder. The mad dictator, Grayson said, and Charlie thought of those smashed palaces in Iraq and Libya, tacky as shit like Lyle’s old place, with that coffee table that was just a sheet of smoked glass somehow balancing on the tits of three gilded plaster mermaids.

God, Lyle had loved that that fugly-ass house, right up to the point where he could no longer stand to be in it any longer. No wonder everyone was talking about the Black Dog; the whole thing had been straight up spooky. First there was the smell, then the toilets started backing up and flies started appearing from nowhere, until by the end they were swarming so thick on the insides of the window panes you could hardly see out. Before that Lyle had gone round the house with a sledgehammer, smashing lumps out of the plaster and the Spanish tiles he’d once been so goddamn proud of, screaming that he was going to find whatever dead thing in the crawl space that was causing all of this.

“It’s a goddamn possum,” he’d said. “Or a fucking cat. Y’all quit looking at me like I’m
cursed
or something.”

Only he was, and they all knew it. He’d messed with the wrong wolf witch.

Charlie touched Lyle’s hand. “Hey. Lyle. It’s me. Charlie.”

Lyle’s breathing didn’t even change; it kept to the same steady, snoring rhythm as before. His skin was clammy and cool, and when Charlie lifted his hand to take his pulse, the hand had a strange weight all of its own, like a foreshadowing of the dead weight it would be in a matter of hours. Or maybe even less.

“He can’t hear you,” said Reese.

Dammit. There’d be no final whispers, no satisfaction in telling Lyle just
why
he’d suffered this way. And like Gloria had always said, without the why there was nothing. Just a dying man hanging onto the last rags of life. “No,” said Charlie. The inside of his ribs felt scooped hollow, his stomach the same lead balloon it had been when Lyle had told him just what was on the end of that fork. “I think he’s in a coma.”

“Oh my God.”

“Reese, quit saying that. It’s not going to help.”

Reese let out a loud, snotty gasp. “Help what?” he said. “Nobody can help. My dad is dying and nobody’s doing a damn thing. They’re just circling the place like buzzards. They won’t even let me take him to the hospital.”

“Yeah, that’ll work,” said Charlie, not for the first time wondering just how the hell they were going to pull this off. The kid was spoiled, soft, and so out of touch that he even thought the hospital was an option. “They’ll poke him around and ask how he got like this in the first place. You really want to answer those questions?”

Reese wiped his nose on the back of his wrist. Grayson handed him a tissue. They stood there for a moment, all listening to the rasping sounds of Lyle’s dying breaths, all caught up in their own private thoughts. None of them pleasant. Things had started to fall apart as soon as the news got out that Lyle was sick. Fights, robberies, kids testing their mettle. So far nothing awful had crawled out of the Okefenokee, but it was only a matter of time.

Lyle made a gurgling sound. His mouth fell open, exposing a pale brownish tongue and the bloody dark sockets where his back teeth had used to be. Charlie watched, amazed to find that he felt nothing. The mean glee of watching Lyle flail around the house with a hammer felt like a dizzy childhood dream. This was real. Cold, flat, and finished.