Return of the Wolf Man (29 page)

“He’d have hypnotized an entire boatload of sailors?”

“Dracula has bewitched entire towns in his long and terrible career,” Talbot said. “During the war his castle was protected by an army of the damned. Trooper Willis, you
must
believe me. And you must let me go.”

“I can’t.”

“But you
must!”
Talbot tugged hard on the strap. “Don’t you see? Caroline’s in terrible danger and I’m the only one who can help!”

“Mr. Talbot,” Willis said, “I’m going to have Dr. Werdegast come and see you as soon as possible, but that’s all I intend to do right now. You can tell her all about the vampires and man-wolves and living corpses. The undead and the army of the damned. If she thinks there’s any danger she’ll let me know.”

“There
is
danger!” Talbot cried. He tugged harder at the strap. “You’ve seen the deaths, the condition of the police station. How can you be so
blind?”

Talbot’s shouts had brought two big, white-suited attendants to the door. They unlocked it and entered.

“Trooper Willis, is there a problem?”

Willis looked back at Talbot. “Check the straps. I think Mr. Talbot means to leave us if he can manage that.”

“Dracula means to spread his evil throughout the world!” Talbot shouted as the men approached. He continued to pull on the strap while with his free hand he tore the bandage from his throat.
“She
did this to me! His bride, the one you think was eighty years old! She looked like a young woman when I fought her. And soon Caroline will be like her—a slave of the Lord of Vampires. You
must
let me go! Please!”

The attendants went to the left side of the bed and forced Talbot’s other hand into the strap hanging there. Once that was secure they went to the foot of the bed and tied down his feet. Talbot struggled the entire time.

“These won’t hold me!” he screamed at them. “Tonight I’ll tear through them like they were flesh!”

Trooper Willis watched while Lawrence Talbot flopped on the squeaking bed like a landed marlin. “Oh no you won’t, Mr. Talbot.”

“I will!
Please!
You’ve got to let me go so I can save Caroline!
Why won’t you listen to me?”

“Because everything you’ve said is completely impossible,” Willis replied angrily as he stood. “There has to be an explanation other than monsters—the supernatural. When you’re ready to give them to me or to Dr. Werdegast, we’ll listen.”

Talbot fell still and laughed bitterly. “If only I
could
give you another explanation. But if the world were only what we see, then there would be no God either. Do you believe in God, Trooper Willis?”

“I do, sir.”

“Then ask for His help. For when the sun goes down, Caroline will need it.”

Shutting his eyes, Talbot tried once again to understand the sinister and bloody things he’d seen the night before.

Why him? What had he done in his life to deserve this endless torture? Yet worse than his own suffering was the pain of the image he couldn’t see. That of Caroline transfixed and alone somewhere as she awaited the vile commands of Dracula. Curling his hands into fists, Talbot pretended that his fingers were knit together. And for the first time since Bela the Gypsy attacked him, Talbot prayed. Not for himself, not for one who was already unforgivably damned, but for one who might still be saved . . .

TWENTY-ONE

T
om Stevenson woke late in the morning after a dreamless night. As soon as he felt the pain in his body and in his mind, he wished he were back asleep. He moaned and a nurse summoned Dr. Aubert.

After being given an efficient but thorough examination, Stevenson lay on the hard bed in his private room, gazing at the white ceiling. He had no choice. Because of the tight support collar the attorney was wearing, he couldn’t move in either direction. And Aubert didn’t want to sedate him unless the pain made it necessary. The doctor told Stevenson that Willis might want questions answered for the investigation and didn’t want his only witness unconscious.

Stevenson said he understood. Then he asked about Lawrence Talbot and Caroline Cooke.

“Talbot is under observation here and I haven’t seen Dr. Cooke this morning,” Aubert answered truthfully as he left the room.

“Could you be a little more specific?” Stevenson called after him.

But the doctor was already out the door.

Stevenson looked up.
So much for bedside manner,
he thought.

Unfortunately, the bright ceiling was a perfect screen on which to replay the horrors Stevenson had endured the night before. Talbot’s metamorphosis. The cold, brutal murder of Willis. His own helplessness when the stranger turned on him. Stevenson was frustrated at how useless he’d been, though he took some comfort from the fact that a lack of preparedness was to blame, not a lack of courage.

When he’d worked as an attorney and activist for the nonviolent environmentalists at Greenpeace, Tom Stevenson used to get bashed around quite a bit. He was pummeled insensate by angry lumberjacks who didn’t give a hoot about spotted owls. He was clubbed by frenzied hunters who became enraged when they couldn’t club harp seals. He was bludgeoned by Japanese tuna fishermen who didn’t care whether or not they caught dolphins in their nets. Those beatings were the main reason he’d left Greenpeace to find his own peace here in sleepy LaMirada. To regroup and remind himself that not all humans were monsters.

Yet those attacks paled beside what he had suffered at the station house. The killer was fast and incredibly strong. He could still feel the man’s powerful hand around his throat; it came close to lifting his head right off his neck. The only preparation that might have helped any of them was to be somewhere else.

Stevenson wondered if this could have been one of the “monsters” Caroline had told him about. He’d always had an open mind about the supernatural. He had to; he’d seen some pretty strange phenomena during his life. While piloting the plane during one of his team’s excursions to the Arctic, he spotted what he could have sworn was a giant praying mantis frozen in ice. The insect was perfectly preserved and even from two thousand feet up it looked almost alive. Unfortunately, the icy tomb was covered by a storm and the specimen was lost. A month later, on an environmental field trip to California, he’d come upon a meteorite that actually grew when exposed to water. But until last night he’d never seen a man turn into an animal. Stevenson hadn’t told Trooper Willis about the transformation because he didn’t want to be moved from here to the psychiatric ward alongside Talbot. He’d only told Willis that he thought he saw the cloaked killer fighting a bear—which was strange enough. What he
had
seen was Talbot transform into some kind of monster in the jail cell. And it happened the moment the moonlight appeared over the window—exactly what Caroline Cooke had tried to warn him might happen. Stevenson and Dr. Cooke and Deputy Clyde all saw it before the killer arrived.

Deputy Clyde—

Before yesterday, Stevenson had also never seen a man killed. Of the three ghastly milestones he’d experienced last night, that was the worst. Stevenson remembered being dropped on his head when the killer went to the cell to fight that bear or ape or oversized dog or whatever it was Talbot had become. He remembered lying there and watching blood run in thin sheets from the cleaved flesh beneath David Clyde’s chin. He remembered the surprised, helpless expression on Deputy Clyde’s face as he tried in vain to hold the flaps of the wound shut, as he tried to breathe. He remembered trying to get to Clyde and passing out.

Stevenson had had enough with being conscious. They could wake him up if Willis needed him. He was about to use the call button to summon the nurse when Trooper Willis walked in.

“The doctor said you were awake,” Willis said. “I was just in talking to Talbot and thought I’d stop by. How are you?”

“I’m not too bad, all things considered,” Stevenson informed him. “How is Mr. Talbot? And Dr. Cooke? I assume that since Aubert hasn’t seen her she’s okay.”

“Don’t you worry about the two of them,” Willis said. “You just worry about getting better.”

“Matt,” Stevenson told him, “I am going to worry about those two. They’re my clients.”

“Not anymore, Tom,” Willis said.

“Excuse me?”

“Tom, you almost had your head torn off. You need to take a long rest—”

“My head’s going to be fine and Mr. Talbot and Dr. Cooke
are
still my clients,” Stevenson replied.

His throat was raw and his voice raspy from the abrasions he’d suffered during the attack. He reached for the water glass on the nightstand. Willis stepped over and handed it to him, helped him drink.

“Thanks,” Stevenson said.

Willis pointed to a bottle on the nightstand. “You want some of the painkillers?”

“Not right now,” he said. “It’s not my neck that’s bothering me as much as this damn collar.”

“Wait until the painkillers wear off,” Willis said. “It’ll be your neck.”

“Jeez, I thought Aubert’s bedside manner was lousy.”

“Yeah, well, it’s been a shitty night,” Willis said. “Listen, I’ll come back later. We can talk then—”

“We’ll talk now,” Stevenson said.

“Tom, you’ve got to rest.”

“How can I, when you’re threatening to turn my clients over to that fee chaser D’Arcy Corrigan?”

“I’m not ‘threatening,’ Tom. And D’Arcy’s a good attorney—”

“For contesting wills and suing for whiplash and filing nuisance suits for big settlements and padding his hours,” Stevenson said. “There’s no way in hell I’m going to put Dr. Cooke and Talbot in his hands for what could be murder and abetting. Now talk to me. Tell me how
my
clients are.”

Willis frowned. He took the glass from Stevenson, filled it from a pitcher on the nightstand, and then set it down again. “Tom, I’m afraid your clients are not doing very well.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Dr. Cooke is missing,” Willis said.

Stevenson was actually relieved to hear that. When Aubert hadn’t answered him, he’d begun to wonder if she might have been killed in the attack.

“Did she go with anyone?” Stevenson asked.

“We don’t know,” Willis replied. “She disappeared about eight o’clock last night, right after the attack at the station house. I’ve got a team of troopers from Naples looking for her. So far, nothing. Not even a legitimate clue.”

“Legitimate?”

“Something other than what Talbot has to say,” Willis said. “As far as I’m concerned, that man is delusional and dangerous.”

“Matt, in both law and psychiatry delusions are beliefs a patient holds strongly in the face of invalidating evidence. But in them, there’s often a kernel of truth. What did Talbot have to say about last night?”

“Not one thing that makes any sense,” Willis said. “The man is nuts, plain and simple. Even Dr. Benson thinks so.”

“That’s not good enough and you know it.”

“No?” said Willis. He flipped open his notebook. “Fine. Let’s run some of these statements up the sanity flagpole.” The trooper looked down at his notes. “Talbot says that what you saw in the station house last night was a wolf and that the wolf was him. He says that David Clyde’s killer is a vampire named Dracula and that this Dracula took Caroline away on a boat. Talbot further insists that Dracula had as his companions an eighty-year-old vampire mistress who’s been dead for fifty of those years, and a hundred-odd-year-old monster made up of parts from dead bodies and powered by electricity.” He flipped the notebook shut. “If he’s not crazy, Tom, then I am. But what really pinches is that the law says I’ve got to look into his claims because he was a witness, crazy or not. So I’m off to do that now. I’m going to check with the Coast Guard and I’ll see what the coroner found out about our old dead ladyfriend.”

“What about the patient who was onboard the LifeSaver?” Stevenson asked. “The one from the Tombs.”

“We’re still poking through the wreckage but that fire was pretty hot. There isn’t much left in the way of flesh and bone, especially in the back near the fuel tanks, where he was. The patient was probably burned to death.”

“Just to keep the legal issues nice and neat, I assume you’re going to have Dr. Werdegast see Talbot?”

“I’m on my way to call her,” Willis said. “Now how about you taking it easy, Tom. At least for the rest of the morning. Nap. Watch some game shows. Listen to some of that New Age music crap you like.”

“Sure,” Stevenson said. “That’ll definitely take my mind off what happened last night.”

“Tom,” said Willis, “nothing will ever make you forget what you saw. Thirty-odd years ago I saw my best friend step on a land mine in Vietnam. I still see it when I look into my cup of coffee every morning. Pictures like that don’t go away.” He patted Stevenson on the arm. “I’ll be back in a couple hours. You want the bed raised or anything before I go?”

“No thanks,” Stevenson said. “I’m fine. And I’ll be finer if you promise you won’t call D’Arcy Corrigan in on this?”

Willis hesitated then nodded reluctantly.

The attorney smiled as the state trooper left. As soon as the door was shut, he put his hands behind his neck. Slowly and painfully Stevenson lifted his head from the pillow. He sat up.