Ghouls (24 page)

Officially, only sixty-six pounds of on-carry freight per man were allowed on any MAC flight, though an additional ten pounds were allowed to slip by if properly tied to the duffel in a standard G.I. string bag. It was from this that customs had confiscated the only things from Sanders’s air baggage: deodorant, shaving cream (aerosol cans were not permitted in any military air freight compartment), a lizard-skin wallet, and his set of Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knives. All lost without consequence.

Bored, Sanders opened the door and stood wide within its frame, looking out. The night air rushed him and seemed heavy with dank, sweet scents. From all around came the anapestic calls of crickets. Darkness had settled fully now, a murky deceptive dark which he’d noticed frequently since coming back to the World. The moon was smeared by clouds to just a faint blur overhead; he could hardly tell the sky from the
woodline
on the other side of the highway. The sign at the end of the parking lot burned GEIN’S MOTEL in hot blue neon. He peered at the sign strangely, as if someone might be hiding behind it.

The danger was easy to see. At least he hadn’t lost all his operational foresight. He would need a good weapon before he began, and that might require a favor. There were many favors owed, though, and Sanders thought of May 1968, Delaware Offensive,
Quang
Tri Province, and a good, good friend named Jack Wilson. It was time to cash that favor in. He remembered well the whoosh-tick-bam of Soviet-made wire-guided rockets as they impacted Detroit
steelplate
.

Inexplicably, the word
ghala
came to mind, and with it a chill bolted up Sanders’s back to his brain. He yielded to the dark thoughts and wondered just what he might be getting himself into for the sake of curiosity and an uncollected debt.

— | — | —

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Kurt walked cheerily into the kitchen, for once at grips with his “five days suspension without pay.” He’d get over it. Bright morning light blazed in through the sliding door. Melissa was seated on a stool at the counter, talking on the phone. As she spoke, though, she spun smoothly on the stool and watched Kurt advance toward the coffeepot.

“Just make sure you’re in the house by sunset,” she was saying. There was a pause, a matter-of-fact nod, then she continued. “Oh, sure, tent stakes will work. Broom handles, pool sticks—anything, just as long as it’s made of wood.”

Kurt poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup and reluctantly held it to his nose.

”Uh huh,” Melissa went on. “Just hold a mirror up to her face. If there’s no reflection, then you’ve got one… Okay, yeah. Garlic works, too, but not as good as a cross… Sure, sure, I’ll see if I can.” Then she hung up and stared widely at Kurt.

“Is this coffee fresh?” he asked.

“Yep. Just made it”

Kurt took a sip and immediately spat it into the sink.

“Fooled you.” She giggled impishly. “Some people will believe anything.”

“
Buttbrain
,” he said. “Who was that on the phone?”

“Jenny. She thinks her sister is one.”

“One what?”

“One of the vampires.”

“And I suppose she’s gonna drive a tent stake through her sister’s heart.”

“Only if she doesn’t pass the mirror test.” Melissa turned again on her stool as Kurt went to get his keys off the kitchen table. Grinning, she said, “I guess you’re gonna go do some job-hunting today, huh?”

“What?”

“Job hunting,” she repeated. “Everybody’s heard.”

“Melissa, what the
fu
— What the heck are you talking about? Why would I need to go job hunting?”

Her grin widened to the extent of perversion. “Well, I heard that you got kicked off the police department for crushing Lenny Stokes’s head with a croquet mallet.”

Kurt looked at her, his eyes drooping. “Who told you that?”

“Jenny. The whole town’s talking about it.”

“I can always count on the Tylersville grapevine to get the story straight. Jesus.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not true,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to mimic her voice. “I was suspended for five days, not fired. And I didn’t crush his head with a croquet mallet, I punched him in the face.”

“Why?”

Kurt’s cheeks were beginning to redden. “Because he’s a
pri
— he’s a
coc
— Because I felt like it, that’s why.”

Melissa seemed disappointed. “You mean he’s not in critical condition?”

He shoved the question away with a groan, the conversation now thoroughly corroded. Melissa continued to revolve on the stool, her arms crisscrossed between her legs. “
Wanna
do me a favor?” she asked.

“No.”

“Drive me and Jenny to
Foos
Fun?”

“No.”

“Come on, please…”

“No, Iy">

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“Out of range of your mouth!”

Kurt blew out of the kitchen, feeling unbearably cramped. Melissa pouted at him from her stool, probably aching to release cuss words. Kurt left the house as if yanked by an invisible tether.

The little that remained of his mood collapsed completely once he was outside. The sky dulled to a wash of gray, clouds mounting suddenly, and he shivered at an even more sudden chill; he was beginning to think that God had decided to extend winter at the last minute, for laughs. Starting the Ford, he pictured Vicky pale and battered in her hospital bed. He wanted to go there now and see her—
Shit on Bard and his busy work, I’m not even getting paid
—but that would be more irresponsibility, and he’d been irresponsible enough lately. Had belting Stokes in the face really been worth it? He rubbed his knuckles and smiled.

The beltway clicked by in a long, empty blur. He hoped the radio might disengage his thoughts, but the stations drifted maddeningly in and out of static until he was forced to click it off. In stages, the day seemed to darken as he drew closer to Reisterstown Road. This town depressed him, worse than Baltimore. Soon he spotted the sign PIKESVILLE BARRACKS and the immense lot filled with the new flesh-colored cruisers. Kurt had liked the old pale yellow state cars; this new color, designated supposedly to make the cars less conspicuous, stepped well past the bounds of ridiculousness. Perhaps next they’d change to flesh-colored uniforms, too—a nude police force.

Maryland State Police Headquarters reminded him more of a college campus than anything else. It was a condensed quadrant of land surrounded by buildings of varying style and age. He spotted the helipad, the fuel unit, and a steel skeletal radio tower whose peak was lost in the sky’s murk. Mist and rain clung to his face, deepening his annoyance. From one facade to the next, he found himself wandering, until he noticed a transom plate which read CRIMINALISTICS.

Inside, a preposterously large state trooper stared at him from behind bulletproof glass. Kurt’s street clothes made him feel uneasy in this regimented, spotless place; the trooper continued to glare until Kurt produced a badge and ID and stated his business.

Baritone instructions led him to an echoic far wing and a door of lacteal glass labeled POROSCOPY. Kurt entered, balking, and at once detected sharp chemical scents and something sooty. Ranks of glassware racks divided the room into sections; it brought back memories of tenth-grade biology class, and a teacher whose nickname had been “
sweetlegs
,” with good reason. High shelves of graduates, Erlenmeyer flasks, and Pyrex beakers glinted immaculately. To the right, a flank of cabinets and more signs: XYLENE, ANTHRACENE, SILVER NITRATE, LAMPBLACK. Mysterious machines on dollies crowded the other side of the room; the hatch of a
Mosler
arc furnace hung open like a mindless, obscene mouth. Through the room’s two meshed windows, dumpsters hulked en masse, and a tall, brick incinerator slowly oozed black smoke. Kurt lit a cigarette in the blue flame of an unattended Bunsen burner.

“There’s no smoking here” came a reedy, toneless voice behind him. Startled, Kurt turned to face a
deviantly
thin woman in a lab coat which seemed large enough for someone twice her size. Her hair was flat ashen brown and hung nearly to her waist; he doubted that she weighed a hundred pounds. In one hand she held a polycarbonate clipboard, and in the other a fat camel’s hair brush.

“But that’s all right, I won’t tell. I don’t trust a cop who doesn’t smoke.” Her voice droned, vaguely sexless, like a minister with sinus trouble; her brittle smile somehow intimated a subtle depravity. She set the clipboard down carefully and donned a pair of unbecoming glasses. “You’re the guy from— what?—Tylersville, is it?”

“Right. Kurt Morris.”

She extended her hand, which Kurt shook. It was like shaking hands with a glove full of ice water. “I’m Jan Beck,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.”

Let’s not be hasty,
he thought. “I came to pick up the evidence report on the stuff the county sent you.”

She gave a vacant chuckle that made Kurt’s scalp shrink. He sensed something abstrusely disturbing about this woman—her benign appearance and manner seemed a camouflage net for something atrocious. She made Kurt wonder about Melissa’s obsession with vampires. “Yes, the evidence report,” she said. “Let’s just hope you have a versatile sense of humor.”

“Why? Problems?”

She grinned, and Kurt found himself contemplating the length of her
cuspids
. “I’ve seen funny things in this business,” she said, “but I’ll let you be the judge.” Absently, she coiled a tress of hair around her finger; the finger was white, like bone. “I’ll give you the dull stuff first… Whenever we get something that involves a missing police officer, we tend to suspect the very worst, and spend a little extra time on the preliminaries. Fortunately, the level of decomposition on the hand wasn’t severe—the primary friction ridges were still in great shape—”

Kurt found it easy to picture her inking up Swaggert’s severed hand. “It
was
Swaggert’s hand, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, and all the partials on the brass, the
speedloader
, and the Smith were Swaggert’s, too. No one else handled any of that stuff before or after he put on the sand gloves.” She pointed placidly to the black-topped counter where she’d set the clipboard. Beside a suds-filled sink lay a plastic bag containing wads of cotton stained with something orange, like
Mercuro
-chrome. She went on to explain. “Neutron-activation analysis on the glove itself found heavy traces of fresh antimony.”

Kurt was puzzled. “Why bother? Isn’t it assumed—”

“We don’t assume anything here,” she almost snapped. “Leave that to the other departments, the three-ring circuses. The first step was to determine that Swaggert had definitely discharged the weapon. This state is famous for police officers shot with their own guns. Shades of Terrence Johnson.”

“But that still doesn’t prove he wasn’t wasted by his own piece.”

“Theoretically, no. But statistically it does, almost without a doubt. Once a cop gets his hands on his weapon, no one ever takes it away. It’s not the cops that are the problem, it’s the holsters. All this quick-draw nonsense, open-tops, friction holsters, thumb-snaps. Dead meat. Cops should have their guns handcuffed to their wrists at the start of every shift. What kind of holster do you use?”

Kurt looked to the floor. “Uh, thumb-snap.”

“Then I guess you also carry around a banner that says TAKE MY GUN AND KILL ME WITH IT,” Jan Beck said, and scowled. “But to get back on track, next I tried to get a type and an Rh from the
bitemark
on
Drucker’s
arm, but the saliva had oxidized by the time I got to it. County ding-dongs don’t know how to preserve evidence. Antigen test was no-go, so was the antihuman serum test. And no chance for a good dental print. It was a lousy bite, not at all pronounced.”