"Good choice. I'm glad to hear that you're
not completely cynical."
George leaned forward and tried to duck his
head underneath the steering wheel. Not a chance. There simply
wasn't room.
"If you pop the trunk, I'll see if I can find
a flashlight," said Lou.
"It's not the light." He opened the door.
"Keep watch. Let me know if somebody's coming.
"Will do."
George got out of the car and crouched down.
There were several wires beneath where the panel had been. The
shadow of the steering wheel made it hard to see their colors, but
he didn't want to admit to Lou that he really could use a
flashlight.
His cell phone rang. "Aw, crap."
"Is it Ricky?"
George pulled the cell phone out of his
pocket. The shell was cracked, but it still seemed to be working.
He flipped it open. "Yeah, it's him."
"Want me to talk to him?"
"Nah, I've got it." He punched the "talk"
button. "Hello?"
"George! Who do you love?"
"Right now I pretty much hate everybody."
Ricky chuckled. "Aw, don't talk like that.
I'm about to become your very best friend. Even though you're
heterosexual, you're going to want to make sweet love to me. I'll
turn down your advances, but you'll be insistent, and
finally--"
"Will you get to the point?"
"If you're going to act that way, maybe I
won't."
George found the two red wires he needed. If
he had a pair of wire strippers, this next part would take a couple
of seconds, but he'd have to use the claw hammer, which was going
to be a bitch.
"Ricky, just tell me the good news," George
said.
"He has good news?" Lou asked.
"Salvation is near. Werewolf
Hunters Incorporated--that's not their real name, that's just what
I'm calling them--is in the area. I don't think they have an actual
name, or if they do nobody told me, but they are armed to the
frickin' teeth and that werewolf is
toast
, baby!"
George scraped the claw of the hammer against
the first red wire. "They're going to kill it?"
"No. I guess I didn't mean
'toast' like
toast
,
y'know, dead. I just meant that they're gonna catch it. Then we'll
throw it back in the cage, get it to Dewey, and everybody can kiss
and make up."
"Ah."
"You should be a lot happier than you sound.
What's wrong? Did you kill the werewolf? Please tell me you didn't
kill the werewolf."
"No. But there was a...uh, slaughter."
"What?"
"He murdered a bunch of people."
"How many is a bunch? Fifty?"
"No. Nine or ten."
"Nine or ten? He killed nine or ten
people? Aw, shit, the cops are going to be crawling all over
this!"
"And he mauled two cops."
"Mother fuck!"
"I'm sorry."
"Y'know, I actually had two minutes of
happiness where I thought everything was going to be okay. That's
what I was thinking: 'Wow, this was a bad scene for a while, but
help is almost there and everything will be fine. I'm sure my good
buddies George and Lou won't screw things up any worse than they
already have, right? Oh, no, they're professionals, they won't
cause me to have to chug down any more Peptol Bismol! It's all
wonderful! Life is ducky!'"
The claw hammer was sort of working, but not
efficiently, and George was scraping carefully to avoid
accidentally cutting the wire in half. "I'm really kind of busy
right now," said George.
"Busy?
Busy
? Are you seriously trying to tell
me that you're too busy to talk to me?"
"Will you please get to the point?"
"I need you to punch this address into your
GPS. Are you ready?"
"We don't have the GPS."
"Why the fuck don't you have the GPS?"
George saw no reason to
confess
everything
that had gone wrong. "It broke."
"Well then somehow you need to find
7151 Pegg Avenue. Two G's. It's just a parking lot. The Werewolf
Hunters Incorporated are on their way over there, and they need all
of the information you've got. Everything you can tell them about
his powers so that they don't get screwed like you did."
"All right." The hammer slipped and George
cursed.
"They'll move the cage to their own van, and
you can ride along while they recapture him."
"Ah."
"What?"
"We lost the cage."
"Explain."
"He stole the van."
"Please tell me I didn't hear you right.
Because otherwise I'm going to have a nervous breakdown."
"The werewolf stole the van, okay? What do
you want me to say?"
"I want you to say any goddamn thing but 'The
werewolf stole the van!' Are you in league with him? Is that what's
going on? Have you formed some kind of werewolf alliance?"
"No, we just lost control of the
situation."
"You owe me one punch, George. When you come
back here, I get to punch you in the stomach, as hard as I can, and
you can't hit back. Same thing with Lou. One punch for each of
you."
"Fine." George had finally stripped the first
wire, and started on the second.
"Somebody's coming," Lou whispered.
George immediately dropped the hammer, got in
the car, and shut the door, trying to behave in a casual and
completely non-suspicious manner.
"I just can't believe this," said Ricky. "I
thought I was going to deliver good news, and we'd laugh, and
there'd be some homoerotic banter, and I'd get to go home. You
realize that you're basically unemployable at this point, right?
Who's going to hire thugs who messed up like this? You'd better get
a real social security number, because you're going to be flipping
burgers for the rest of your life."
"I understand that." George discretely
looked over his shoulder. A well-dressed couple stood by their car,
talking.
"And I don't mean that you're going to be
flipping burgers at a classy place. You're going to be flipping
shit burgers at a rat-infested restaurant where everybody in there
is a fat redneck and you have to wear some kind of dumbfuck uniform
and a zit-faced teenager barks orders at you all day. That's your
future, George!"
"Can we do this later?"
"And you'll probably get food poisoning just
from the fumes of the crap you have to cook! You'll have your
stomach pumped, and the doctor will say 'Oh, shit, it's cancerous!'
But it won't be the good kind of cancer that you can get rid of
with chemotherapy, George, it'll be the kind where your whole body
decays inside, where your guts turn into this big goopy blob of
rot!"
"I think I should hang up now."
"Yeah? Well, I think you
should
not
. Are you
on your way to 7151 Pegg Avenue yet, you jerk-off?"
"I'm hotwiring a car."
"Oh. Need me to talk you through it?"
"No."
"Did I tell you about when I hotwired this
guy's car and drove it into a lake?"
George hung up on him. The couple finally got
into their car, started the engine, and backed out of their parking
space. As they did so, their car scraped against the one next to
it. They stopped.
"You have got to be kidding me," George
muttered.
The man got out of the car to inspect
the damage. He ran his finger along the spot where the two vehicles
had scraped against each other, looked nervously at George and Lou,
did a double-take at their grotesque appearance, then hurriedly got
back in his car, backed the rest of the way out of the space, and
sped away from the restaurant.
George opened the door, returned to his
previous position, and began to strip the second red wire. His
phone kept ringing, but he ignored it.
"Are they going to exterminate us?"
Lou asked.
"It doesn't sound like it."
"Well, that's good."
"Yeah. They want us to tell the
reinforcements everything we know about Ivan."
"Should we do it?"
"Tell them about him?"
"No, meet up with them."
"I don't know. Ricky was having a meltdown
yelling at me, so I doubt that he was trying to be sneaky about
anything. I think we'll get our asses chewed out--and for what it's
worth, I'll make sure I take the heat on that--but I don't think
there's any reason for them to kill us."
"What about pure anger?"
"What I mean is, we won't give them a reason
to kill us. We'll just make sure we don't give up all of our
information right away. Keep ourselves needed."
"Are you sure that'll work?"
"Do you want to spend the
rest of our lives as fugitives from the law
and
from other criminals?"
"I guess not."
George finished stripping the second wire. He
wrapped the two stripped wires together. "I'm going to let you make
the final decision on this one. My choices today haven't worked out
so well."
"I don't know. We should at
least return the case of money, so they'll stop looking for
us
eventually
."
The phone had gone to voice mail three times,
but Ricky kept calling. George pressed "talk." "Give it a rest,
will you, Ricky?"
"What happened to the girl?"
"What girl?"
"Don't be coy with me. The girl you had with
you. Did you create a Wikipedia page for our whole operation and
drop her off at the CNN studio?"
"The werewolf killed her." George assumed
that the lie would be exposed before too long, but for now he just
wanted Ricky off his back.
"Well, that's one good thing to come out of
this. Didn't I tell you not to hang up on me?"
George stripped a brown wire. Now that he'd
gotten some practice with the claw hammer, the process was going
more smoothly. "We got disconnected."
"The hell we did. Did you finish the car
yet?"
George touched the brown wire to the red
wires. The engine roared to life. "Just got it."
"I could've done it in half that time."
"Can I hang up now?"
"Are you going to 7151 Pegg Avenue?"
"Yes."
"Are you going to create any more disasters
on your way there?"
"No."
"Then you can hang up.
Jerk."
CHAPTER TWENTY
An Unpleasant Conversation
And, just like that, Michele was screwed
again.
Honestly, it wasn't all that
surprising that Ivan had snatched her, but she would have expected
it to be when she was being stupid and hanging around the tavern,
not when she was being smart and going to the hospital.
They'd been driving for a few minutes. Ivan
hadn't said anything, though she caught him glancing at her in the
rear-view mirror several times, and she made no effort to start a
conversation. Thus far she'd successfully forced herself not to
cry. He could carve the entire Bible into her skin before she'd
give him the satisfaction of watching her cry.
She wouldn't beg, either.
There was nothing she could do about the
trembling, though.
God, she was scared. She
didn't want to die. She considered lying and telling him that she
was pregnant, to see if she could appeal to some tiny shred of
goodness, but she didn't think he had any. He'd probably
love
it if he thought she
was pregnant. She could just hear him: "Oooooh, then I'd better
save your belly for last!"
She adjusted her position. Her only solace
was that he'd have to open the cage to kill her, at least if he
wanted to do it with his teeth and claws, and she'd have an
opportunity to escape.
"How are you holding up?" he finally
asked.
"I'll be honest with you: not so well."
"Oh, I don't know about that. You can still
talk, can't you? A lot of my prey gets so scared they can't even do
that."
"Then I'm honored."
"You should be. Mute people just aren't much
fun."
"Are you going to kill me?"
"Do you think I should?"
"No."
"Why not? Appeal to my sense of reason."
"I never did anything to you. I tried to help
you."
"I don't recall that."
"I guess I was being too subtle, then. We
were both victims."
"Correction. I was no victim. I had George
and Lou exactly where I wanted them the entire time. There's
evidence of this back at the tavern we just left. How many people
do you think I killed? Guess."
"Six."
"Higher."
"Twelve."
"Lower."
"Ten."
"Lower."
"Nine."
"This is going to take all night," said Ivan.
"I killed seven people. Murdered two people earlier today, for a
twenty-four hour total of nine so far. Messed Lou up in a big way.
Shredded two cops. Got a lady shot. Let two people go on purpose,
and believe me, that's the only reason they're not dead."
"What about George?"
"I didn't kill him yet."
"Why not?"
"He comes later. Got to save the good stuff.
Are you impressed by the seven people I killed at the tavern?"
"Sure."
"I think you're just
humoring me. I'll bet
you've
never killed nine human beings in a day. I bet you
haven't even killed two. Am I right?"
"You're right."
"You know what sucks about the number nine?
It's not a monumental number. Nobody celebrates the ninth
anniversary of something. It's all about those nice round numbers.
That's what people like. If I went around telling everybody that my
body count for today was nine, they'd be amazed by my awesomeness,
of course, but they'd feel that something was missing. It just
wasn't quite at the next level. You can't really have a party for
nine. Do you see what I'm saying? Can you think of any possible way
for me to fix my little quandary with the whole number thing?"