The Changing (The Biergarten Series) (18 page)

Kellogg looked open-mouthed, first at the transparency, then at Ryerson, then back at the transparency. At last he said, "What did you do
that
for?"

Ryerson grinned. "No more Park Werewolf," he said and, at a fast run, exited the plant in search of a phone booth.

~ * ~

Douglas Miller's brain, the brain that used to sort things out quite well for him, where his ABC's were filed away, where he had kept "Miss Fox" his kindergarten teacher separate from "Miss Fox" his mother's friend who had told him, when he was barely into puberty, that he had "bedroom eyes"; the brain that enjoyed high school chemistry and hated high school English, the brain that had tried more than once to hide the truth from him—about his father, who was basically worthless; about his first love, who didn't love him back; about his future, which he had admitted only within the past year probably wouldn't be as grand as he'd hoped; and now about the incredible and vicious entity that dwelt within him—that brain was now a mass of frayed synapses and collapsed cell walls and midbrain, left brain, right brain all trying to keep themselves separate and at the same time to integrate, to come together, to make sense out of the mush that the whole had become.

And there was, for the first time, an exquisite pain attached to that degeneration. A pain unlike any other that Douglas Miller had ever known. A pain that was at once the pain of birth and the pain of death. A pain that wrapped him up and tugged his flesh hard across the bones and tissue, as if trying to free something that dwelt deep within the marrow.

It was a pain that shot out from within each of his cells as they were transformed, stretched, coaxed back from shapes that Mother Nature never intended.

He did scream, but it didn't sound much like a scream. It sounded more like a loud, extended burp that didn't fit at all with the creature it had come out of, the huge, hideous thing that stood crazily triumphant over George Dixon's shattered body.

Then, within moments, the creature that recognized itself as Douglas Miller reappeared, and Douglas Miller whispered to what was left of George Dixon, "See, confession
is
good for the soul, George. It releases it."

He took a long shower in Dixon's cramped bathroom until he at last felt clean again. Then he put on a pair of Dixon's pants and one of Dixon's Eastman Kodak Security shirts, which fit him poorly—too small at the chest (which were so overdeveloped that Miller's second victim had even seen, in his agony, the breasts of a woman there), and too large at the stomach.

And he went to tell Tom McCabe that his two chief suspects in The Park Werewolf murders were dead.

~ * ~

Under "D. Miller" in the Rochester Telephone Directory, Ryerson
Biergarten
found eight listings, including a "D. A. Miller." Under "Douglas Miller" he found six listings, three with middle initials other than "A" and one listed as "Douglas and Mary Ellen Miller," which he dismissed immediately. He called all the others, got no answer from two of the "D. Millers"— the "D. A. Miller" turned out to be a woman—and no answer from "Douglas Miller" on Electric Avenue, a street name that seemed strangely familiar to him. He called the operator, asked how he could find out where Electric Avenue was, and was told to call the Rochester Public Library. He called the library and got a Mrs. Bodega, who told him, "According to my Rochester Street Directory, Electric Avenue runs parallel, sir, with Seneca Parkway on the south and
Landsdowne
Lane on the North. Fairview Heights,
Ellicot
Street, and
Stecko
Avenue run into it from the south, and—" That was all Ryerson needed to hear.

Greta Lynch's apartment was on Fairview Heights.

Tom McCabe didn't trust the smiling, muscle-bound, poorly dressed young man at his door. He wasn't sure why, because the man appeared harmless enough, like an aging Boy Scout who was rapidly getting hooked on religion and had stopped caring what he looked like.

"Yes?" McCabe said, voice warbling because he was still sick to his stomach; within the past hour a genuine hummer of a headache had started as well.

"You don't know me, Mr. McCabe," said the man at the door. "But I know you, and I'd like it very much if we could talk."

McCabe shook his head wearily. "Listen, I'm sick, I don't have time to hear a sales pitch, so if you don't mind—" He began to close the door. The young man's hand shot out and stopped it.

"It's about The Park Werewolf, Mr. McCabe."

McCabe gave the young man's hand a quick, condemning glance. Then he looked him hard in the eye: "I told you, I'm sick, I don't feel like talking."
Another nut case!
"If you have a confession to make, or a finger to point, please do it at the Public Safety Building, Room two twenty-three. That's why it's there." Again he glanced at the young man's arm. "Now take that away or I'll chop it off."

"My name's Miller," the young man said.

"And I'm the Queen of France," McCabe said and pushed hard enough and quickly enough on the door that Miller's arm buckled and the door slammed shut.

~ * ~

It was dusk and the sky was threatening rain when Ryerson found Miller's apartment house on Electric Avenue. It was typical, except for its color, of houses in the area—a late Victorian, three-story, wood-frame house, but this one was painted a bright yellow, and it had just a touch of gingerbread near the roofline.

"Help you there?" called a man in a rocking chair on the house's front porch. Ryerson guessed that the man was in his eighties, at least.

"Yes, my name's
Biergarten
, I'm working with the Rochester Police Department—"

The man cut in, "Never had no trouble with the
po
lice, never want no trouble with the
po
lice."

"No," Ryerson said, climbing the steps, "you don't understand. I'm looking for a man named Miller. He lives here."

The old man, who was now within arm's reach of Ryerson, nodded slowly. "That's right. Douglas. I call him Douglas. He likes to be called Douglas. Says 'Doug' is for a kid and 'Mr. Miller' ain't right— 'specially from someone my age to someone his age—so I call him Douglas. He in trouble?"

"No," Ryerson answered, and regretted telling the man he was with the police. It probably would have been smarter, he thought, to have said he was related to Miller and wanted to surprise him. "I only want to talk to him. I'd like to see his room, if I may." Maybe, just maybe, he thought, the quick, direct, and casual approach might work.

"Not unless you got a warrant," the old man said.

And Ryerson began, "I can—"

The old man interrupted, "I'll let you
see
it, sure. But there ain't no way in hell you're gonna search it or
nothin
' unless you got a warrant."

Ryerson smiled companionably. "That's all I want to do, sir. I just want to look. I'm glad you know the law; I wish more people did."

"Country's built on laws," the old man said as he rose slowly from his rocking chair. "Got to have laws if you got people enough to obey 'em and people enough to break 'em. Otherwise you got"—he opened the front door of the house; held it for Ryerson—"you got," he repeated, "ant-
arky
, and when you got ant-
arky
you got yourself some heap of trouble."

"Yes, sir; I agree," Ryerson said and followed the man up to Miller's apartment on the second floor.

~ * ~

McCabe wanted only to sleep, wanted to drift away from the nausea and headache and overall sick-as-a-dog feeling that had come over him today. But sleep was eluding him. He'd begin to drift, feel his eyes closing, the bedroom wafting away, and then--Wham!—he was awake again.

He knew why sleep was eluding him. It was because deep down he thought he was malingering—playing at being sick, even fooling himself, just to get out of the responsibilities of his job.

And there was the young man who'd come to the door fifteen minutes earlier, too. What a spooky son of a bitch he'd been! Even if he knew nothing at all about The Park Werewolf he was just spooky enough, just off-key enough that maybe he—McCabe—should have taken him in hand. Driven him downtown. Had a good long talk with him to find out just exactly what his
real
problem was. Hell, he'd done it before, more than once. The poor slobs usually ended up at the State Hospital on Crittenden Boulevard. But at least they were off the streets.

It was raining on Rochester's West Side, where McCabe lived. In a few minutes the rain would reach Electric Avenue, where Ryerson
Biergarten
was about to enter Douglas Miller's room. But here in McCabe's house, McCabe could hear the rain as a hard, undulating, rushing sound, because a brisk wind came up and died every few seconds. It successfully hid the noises of the thing that had gotten into the house through the cellar-the thing that was just then moving in painful fits and starts toward the stairs that would lead it to the second floor.

McCabe whispered to himself: "Rye thinks I'm an idiot for believing in you guys." He was saying this to the small wrinkled naked men who camped out on his chest when he slept—or tried to—and pulled at his skin. "And maybe I am." He'd asked himself a number of times if he should talk to somebody, somebody other than Rye, about these little men. But hell, they had never hurt him; they'd never even seemed much interested in
him
, in Tom McCabe, as much as they were in pulling at his skin all night (he assumed they did it all night long, because they were there when he drifted off and there, if just briefly, when he awoke). And they'd never gotten in the way of his sleep, except for the first few weeks after they'd made their appearance, a long, long time ago—so long ago, in fact, that he couldn't remember how old he'd been. Ten, maybe. Eleven, tops.

They evaporated. They did that, as if on command, when something startled him or when he got a telephone call in bed. And on the very rare occasions when he had a woman in bed with him, they made no appearance at all, which he appreciated.

He sat bolt upright in the bed. He hadn't
heard
movement elsewhere in the house so much as he'd
felt
it, as if something were being dragged up the stairs. "Who is it?" he called, and reached instinctively for the thirty-eight Smith and Wesson he kept in the nightstand near his bed. There was no reply. He whispered, "Damn it!" and wished the rain would stop so he could hear better. He tossed the blanket off and swung his feet to the floor. He was dressed in pajama bottoms but no top; a shiver went through him because the room had gotten chilly from the cold front that had brought the rain. He moved with much more grace and speed than a man his size, feeling the way he did, would be expected to move, to the bedroom door, stood to the right of it, and listened. Yes, he could hear it now. A slow, methodical dragging sound, as if someone with a bad leg were moving toward the bedroom down the hall.

Junkie
, he thought, though that, he knew, would be a first for this neighborhood. But hell, there was a first time for everything, wasn't there?

~ * ~

"Where's the light switch?" Ryerson
Biergarten
asked, fumbling to the left inside the door to Douglas Miller's apartment. The old man—on the way up the stairs he had introduced himself as Ira Cole, the house's owner—said, from behind Ryerson, "Ain't got no overhead light. You got to use the one on the desk."

The large room was very dark. Ryerson could make out only vague,
amorphic
shapes in it a table, he guessed, a small couch, a chair, and to the left against the west wall, what looked like a desk. He went to it, groped some more; his hand hit a metal lampshade hard; he cursed at the sudden pain in his knuckles.

Ira Cole called, "You think you're gonna be long, mister? Like I said, remember, you can
look
but I can't
letcha
do more than that without a warrant, not without Douglas's permission, you know—"

After what seemed like an eternity, Ryerson found the switch on the desk lamp. He turned it on. Behind him, Ira Cole droned, "Got to respect a person's privacy, you know. Got to give a person the benefit of the doubt—"

"Your phone!" Ryerson snapped.

"My phone?" Ira Cole said, surprised.

"Yes! Where is your phone?!"

"It's ... down ... downstairs," the old man stammered. "It's down in my ... apartment. You
wanta
use it? You can ... you can use it—"

But by then, Ryerson was pushing past him and was heading for the stairs.

~ * ~

McCabe realized that his nausea and headache were going away. He knew why. It was because he had stopped malingering and was doing his job again. He was catching the bad guys. He was laying in wait for the bad guys. He was a being a
cop
, and it felt good. Christ, it had been a long time, a long, long time since he'd felt so good, so
alive
, so
necessary
. . .

There was a phone on the nightstand next to the bed. It rang. McCabe snapped his gaze toward it. For Christ's sake, what a hell of a time for the phone to ring; how the fuck was he going to
hear
anything?!