Bad Men (2003) (40 page)

Dupree leaned back in his chair and stretched. Chair and bones alike made cracking noises, so he stopped in midextension and carefully eased himself back toward the desk. If he broke the chair, he would have to requisition another and that would mean dealing with the jibes, because the wiseasses in supplies would assume—correctly—that his great bulk had taken out the item of furniture in question. In the end, it would be easier for everyone if he just bought his own damn chair.

He checked his watch and shuffled his completed paperwork to one side of the desk. None of it had been very urgent, but he had allowed untyped reports to pile up these last few weeks and the blizzard had given him an excuse to remain at the station house and catch up on the mundane details of speeding offenses, DUIs, and minor fender benders. The reports had also allowed him to forget, for a while, his worries about the island. The time spent immersed in the routines of day-to-day life had enabled him to put those concerns into perspective. When Macy returned, he would take a drive over to Marianne’s house and make sure she was okay. He wanted to know why she had been in such a rush to get back to Portland, and enough time had elapsed since the arrival of the water taxi to make it look as if he wasn’t checking up on her too closely. It might have been something to do with Danny, but if Danny was really sick, then Marianne would have been in touch with him to arrange emergency transportation. All in all, it was a puzzler.

He heard the main station door open and footsteps in the reception area. Dupree had asked headquarters to consider putting in a counter to section off the office from the public area, but so far nothing had been done. It wasn’t a big deal at this time of year, but during the summer, when the incidence of petty thefts, lost children, and stolen bicycles took a sudden sharp rise, there could be up to a half dozen people crowding around the office door.

He left his desk and stepped out into reception. To his right, a pretty black woman with an Afro was running the fingers of her left hand along the side of Engine 14. She wore a hooded waterproof jacket and blue jeans tucked into shin-high boots. The fake fur lining of her hood was spangled with melting snow.

“Can I help you, ma’am?”

The woman looked at him, and her eyes widened.

“My, aren’t you the big one?” said Leonie.

Dupree didn’t react. “Like I said, can I help you with something, ma’am?”

“Sure, baby, you can help me,” she said. She turned away from the engine and he saw the silenced pistol in her hand. “You can help me by taking the thumb and middle finger of your left hand and lifting that gun from your holster. You think you can do that?”

Dupree caught movement to her right as a man appeared from the shadows behind the fire trucks. He was redhaired and wrapped up tightly against the cold in a padded blue coat, but Dupree could see that he was a big man even without the padding. He too had a gun in his hand, the silencer like a swollen tumor at its muzzle, and it was also pointing in Dupree’s direction.

“Now,” said Braun. “Do it.”

Slowly, Dupree moved his hand to his holster, flipped the clasp, and drew the gun out using his thumb and middle finger, as he had been told. The two strangers didn’t tense as he performed the action and he felt his heart sink. He had only read about people like this in newspapers and internal memoranda.

They were killers. Real, stone-cold killers.

“Lay it down on the floor, then kick it toward me,” said the man.

Dupree did as he was told. The man stopped the gun with his foot as it reached him. Beside him, the woman closed the door to the station house and turned the lock.

“Who are you?” asked Dupree.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Braun. “Tell me where your partner is at.”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t fuck with me.”

“She’s out on patrol. I don’t know where she is exactly.”

“Call her.”

The man and woman moved in unison, keeping the same distance from each other as they advanced on Dupree in a ten-to-two position.

“She’s out of radio contact.”

Braun fired his gun, aiming to Dupree’s left. The shot blew a hole in the computer screen on the desk behind him.

“Why would you think I’m fucking with you, Andre? I want you to call her and bring her in.”

Dupree didn’t know if the radio was still out, but he had no plans to use it even if it was functioning again. Macy would be no match for these people if he brought her back here. The way things were looking, he was no match for them himself.

“I can’t do that,” said Dupree.

“You mean you won’t do it.”

“Comes down to the same thing. Why are you doing this?”

Braun smiled regretfully.

“You shouldn’t have fucked his wife,” he said.

He raised his gun and sighted down the barrel.

“You really shouldn’t have fucked his wife.”

Then, without warning, the lights went out.

Doug Newton was sitting downstairs in his favorite chair when the power died. His first reaction was that of most people on the island: he reached for a flashlight so he could check the fuse box. When the flashlight wouldn’t work, he went scouting for candles, eventually finding a pack of tea lights behind the spare bulbs in the kitchen cabinet. He dropped a tea light in an ashtray, lit it, then took a second candle and placed it on a saucer. His mother would be frightened if she woke and found that her TV wasn’t working. She liked the light from the tube, found it comforting. Her greatest fear, Doug believed, was that she might be alone when she died, and she would rather die with Nick at Nite than nobody at all.

Doug had just begun to climb the stairs when the candles flickered slightly and he felt the blast of cold air: a window was open. At the same instant a shuffling sound came from above, then a tapping that sounded like small bare feet running on boards.

Finally, he heard his mother cry out.

Doug knew that the cops, with the possible exception of Joe Dupree, hadn’t believed him when he’d told them about the little girl. Hell, Doug wasn’t too sure that he believed it himself, but he’d seen it and he was pretty certain his mother had seen it too, although she later convinced herself that it was just a dream. Ever since then, as he had admitted to Dupree, Doug had kept a pistol by his bedside and a loaded shotgun beside the hat stand in the hallway. He put the two tea lights down on the hall table and picked up the shotgun. Light filtered through the small square window at the first landing as he ascended the stairs, but he didn’t really need it. Doug knew this house: he’d been born here, lived here, and would die here, if he had his way.

His mother’s room was the second on the right. The door was slightly ajar, as it always was, and Doug thought that he could see shadows moving against the wall. From inside came the sounds of thrashing, and what might have been his mother softly whimpering.

Doug hit the door at a run, the shotgun at his shoulder.

The sheets had been thrown back from his mother’s bed and lay piled on the floor. Snow was blowing in through the open window, the flakes billowing and colliding with one another before falling gently on the carpet. The Gray Girl crouched over Doug’s mother, her mouth pressed against the old woman’s lips, while his mother’s thin arms and skeletal hands pushed at her, trying to force her away. Her hands caught in the folds of the Gray Girl’s gown, which appeared to move independently of the limbs it concealed. It seemed to be part of the girl, as though her body had fused with the shroud in which she had been interred, creating a new skin that hung over her arms like wings.

As Doug entered, the Gray Girl disengaged herself from his mother and swiveled her head in the direction of the intruder. He saw then that she was old, desperately old, a child in form only. Her hair, blond from a distance, was now clearly silver-white. Her cheeks were sunken and Doug perceived bone protruding through the parched skin below her eyes, which were entirely black. Her mouth was strangely rounded and Doug was reminded of a lamprey, a creature designed by nature to adhere to another creature and draw the life from it. Beneath the girl, he saw his mother’s face, her lips trembling and tears falling from her face. Her breathing was barely audible, and as Doug moved toward the bed, the light faded from her eyes and he heard the rattle in her throat as she died.

The Gray Girl hissed at Doug, and he saw the rage in her black eyes at what Doug had done, the distraction of his presence depriving her of that which she sought. Her hand reached out, her fingers little more than bone wrapped in tattered parchment.

And Doug fired.

The force of the blast blew the Gray Girl from the bed and tossed her against the wall. She rolled when she hit the floor, then rose up again and stood before him, framed by the window. The shot had torn holes through her gown and the skin beneath, but no blood came, and there was only a smear of gray tissue where she had struck the wall. She stood and regarded Doug with a malevolence that made him want to run and hide, to curl himself up into a ball in a closet until she went away. For an instant, Doug pictured himself cocooned, listening in the darkness, then hearing the pad of those feet as they approached and halted before his hiding place, the door being drawn slowly open as—

Doug fired again, and the gray child disintegrated into a cloud of moths.

The room was filled with snowflakes and insects and broken glass, and the sound of Doug Newton crying for his dead mother, and for himself.

Nancy Tooker was descending warily to the kitchen to get some food for her sister and the dogs when the lights went out. She was a big woman, as Officer Berman had not failed to notice, and once she missed her step, there was no way that she could keep her balance. She tumbled awkwardly down the stairs, striking the slate floor hard with her head and coming to rest with a sigh. Her sister cried out her name, then used both the wall and the stair rail to support herself as she descended to Nancy’s side. After a moment’s hesitation, the dogs followed.

There was blood flowing from a wound in Nancy’s head. A shard of bone had broken through the skin of her left arm and her left ankle was clearly broken. Her breathing was very shallow and Linda feared that her sister had done herself some internal damage that only a hospital could ascertain. She went to dial the station house number, but the line was dead. She switched the phone off, powered it up, then tried again, but there was still no tone.

Linda ran to the living room, where she removed the cushions from the armchairs and couches, and did her best to make her sister comfortable. She was afraid to move her, and wasn’t sure that she could have even if she’d wanted to, for Linda was sixty or seventy pounds lighter than her sister. Instead, she gingerly raised Nancy’s head and slipped a cushion beneath it, then tried to do the same for her arm and ankle. During the whole operation, Nancy moaned softly only once, when Linda placed a pair of cushions beneath her leg. That worried Linda more than anything else, because moving that leg should have hurt Nancy like a bitch. She went to the hall closet and removed all the coats she could find, then laid them across her sister to keep her warm. Their nearest neighbors were the Newtons, just on the other side of Fern Avenue. If she could get to them, she could use their phone, assuming that the problem with the phones hadn’t affected the whole island. She didn’t want to think about what might happen to Nancy if that were the case. Someone would just have to drive over to Joe Dupree and tell him what had happened so he could call for help from the mainland.

She leaned in close to her sister, stroked her hair from her eyes, and whispered to her.

“Nancy, I’m going to go for help. I won’t be gone but five minutes.”

Linda kissed her sister’s brow. It was clammy and hot. She stood and shrugged on her own overcoat. At her feet, the dogs began to turn in circles, alternately barking and whining.

“No, you dumb mutts, this isn’t a walk.”

But the dogs weren’t following her to the door. Instead, they were moving back from it. Max, the German shepherd, went down on his front paws, his tail between his legs, and began to growl. Something of their fear returned to Linda as she looked back at them.

“The hell is wrong with you both?” she asked.

She opened the front door, and the Gray Girl pounced.

For a moment, there was confusion in the station house. The blinds had been drawn in Dupree’s office and the heavy cloud cover meant that there was no moonlight. With the loss of the street lamps, the small station house was suddenly plunged into darkness. The suppressed guns spat softly, but Dupree was already moving. Braun and Leonie heard a door opening in the far-right-hand corner of the office. Both fired toward the sound.

“Go around,” said Leonie. “Don’t let him get into the woods.”

Braun ran into the street, then hung a left and made for the rear of the station. Silently, Leonie advanced toward the back room. Her night vision was already improving and she could see the shape of the doorway ahead of her. She stopped to the right of the frame and listened. There was no sound from inside. Leonie crouched down and risked a glance inside. She saw a big water tank with a small generator behind it. Oilskins were hanging from hooks on the wall. There were two lockers, one of them open. Beyond them, the back door stood ajar and snow was already beginning to cover the floor.

Leonie moved slowly into the room. To her right was a narrow gap between the tank and the wall. The open mouth of a pipe was visible in the gap. Leonie paused for a moment and the pipe belched fire. She heard the bellow of the shotgun as her being ignited in pain, and then a voice was calling her name. Braun. It was Braun. She tried to speak, but no words would form. She felt herself sliding down the wall.

“Bra—”

There was blood in her mouth.

“Br—”

The monstrous form of the giant emerged from the shadows in the corner of the room, the very darkness come to life. There came the sound of another load being jacked, but already she knew that he would have no call for it. Leonie’s fingers brushed the gun upon the floor beside her, and she was no longer dying in an alien place. She was a young girl walking across a patch of waste ground, the revolver like a warm hand upon her belly, spreading tendrils of heat through her body and filling her with pleasure and power. She felt a great pressure build inside her, pain and remembrance intertwining like lovers in her mind. Her lips parted in a kind of ecstasy, and her eyes closed as the life left her body, her final breath briefly catching in her throat before at last it found its release.