The Mall of Cthulhu (3 page)

His brain shut down. What was happening was clearly impossible, which meant that he was actually in bed having a nightmare, and if he could only scream loud enough, maybe he'd wake himself up. He kept screaming. He stood up and looked around. He had a second to register the fact that there were two corpses at the corner table, and that the new artful splatter pattern, red against the orangey-yellow walls, was probably their brains. Something dripped off the wall and landed with a wet splat. Ted continued to scream. A man in a suit lay in front of the counter, half of his face hanging off of his skull, and intestines drooping out of his abdomen. There was blood everywhere.

All of this took maybe a second. Ted's brain started to kick into gear again, and he was annoyed by the sound of screaming, unaware that it was coming from him. He turned and saw another guy in a suit, Mr. Half-soy, Half-caf, standing in front of him with a gun.

"Where is it? Where the fuck is it, slacker boy? Do you want to die fast or slow?"

Now, this was actually a question Ted had given a fair amount of thought over the last ten years. Not simply the speed at which he wished to die, but whether he wanted to live at all, whether there was any point to his being alive. His grandmother had always told him that God has a purpose for every life, and he figured that his purpose was to dispatch a colony of vampires from a major research university, that God had wanted him to remove that evil from the earth He'd created, and the fact that he was still alive was pretty much of an oversight on the part of the Almighty. And it was a shame that his purpose hadn't been to be the patriarch of an enormous happy family, but most people don't get what they want.

So now a man with dark hair and a gray suit that was covered in blood was pointing a weapon at him and asking him how he wanted to die. If he'd wanted to, Ted might have been able to have a quite lengthy conversation about this issue, but something in him, the part of him that had killed multiple times in one evening ten years ago, woke up for the first time in ten years and asserted that it would rather not die at all.

Without thinking, Ted grabbed a pitcher of milk that still had steam coming from it off the cappuccino machine and tossed it in Half-caf's direction while diving under the counter. The gunshot and the scream happened almost simultaneously, and Ted was showered with broken glass and crumbs of muffins and brownies as the baked-goods counter exploded over his head.

Half-caf was still screaming, and Ted said, "I've killed a lot worse than you. I killed a fucking colony of vampires—
vampires
, man, not some pussy with a gun,
vampires!
With a fucking axe! So
Don't!"
As he said this, Ted saw himself grabbing the gigantic stainless-steel urn of Decaf Sumatra off the warmer and tossing the steaming contents over the counter onto Half-caf's prone form,
"Fuck!"
And now it was the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe,
"With!"
And good old Colombian to finish,
"Me!"

Half-caf was still screaming and would hopefully be covered in third-degree burns. Ted turned to run away, then stopped. He grabbed a cloth and wiped the foam off the wand. He hadn't liked Michelle, but her insistence that the milk always be steamed fresh had probably just saved his life, and he wasn't going to pay her back by letting her be found with a dirty wand. He ran through the back room and out the back door, and, with no plan in mind, he ran for the harbor. He reached the fountain at Post Office Square—jets of water hitting columns of slate. A few early lunchers were already gathering on the benches that ringed the fountain, and they gaped as he ran through it, watching the blood diluting and running off him, staining little streams of water pink until they swirled down the drain. He ran again, past men and women in suits and the odd family of tourists. Finally he could see the Boston Harbor between the buildings ahead of him. He came to Long Wharf and ran past the tourists signing up for whale watches, the school kids filing into the glass-and-steel aquarium, past more tourists strolling obliviously out of the lobby of the hotel on his left, all the way to the end of the pier, where he stood, looking out at the boats going back and forth across Boston Harbor and the planes coming in low to the airport across the water. He vomited until there was nothing else left in his stomach, and then he just heaved over and over again, while strings of bilious mucous dripped down from his mouth and made iridescent streaks on the surface of the water.

He wiped his mouth on his damp, cold apron and decided he could not continue to wear it. He reached back to untie it so he could throw it in the trash, and as he took it off, he felt the CD in the pocket. He grabbed the CD and stuffed it into the right butt pocket of his pants, then stuffed the apron into a garbage can overflowing with Dunkin' Donuts cups, and dialed Laura's number.

"What's up, Ted?" she answered, and Ted suddenly found himself unable to speak. He knew that the minute he opened his mouth, he'd start to cry. He tried whispering.

"Laur," he said. "I'm in trouble."

Laura sat on her couch and watched the news on the flat screen TV hanging on the wall. Channel eight just couldn't get enough of the blood-spattered walls of Queequeg's, while channel twelve favored the police composite sketch of Ted which had been made from the recollections of customers. Fortunately Ted had largely let his wand do the talking in his time at Queequeg's, and so most of the customers couldn't really summon up anything too specific. They had gotten the pale skin, the goatee and the long, dirty-blond hair, but there were probably ten thousand guys in Boston who fit that description, and those identifying features could be easily disposed of. Of course, the police probably already had all his personal information off the hard drive in the computer in the Queequeg's back room, which meant that they'd probably already searched Ted's apartment, and they'd be pulling the logs of his cell phone (which, GPS chip and all, now resided at the bottom of Boston Harbor as Laura had instructed), and pretty soon her phone would ring, and at that point she'd have to either summon up her prodigious lying skills or else just give him up and be shed of him forever. (The forever that would be an eternity of blood-soaked nights if not for Ted, she reminded herself.)

But if they had the hard drive, why were they holding back Ted's name? And all the accounts listed four people dead of gunshots and said nothing about a horribly burned man with gunpowder all over his hands. Either they were holding this back (though Laura couldn't imagine any reason why they would do this, since the burn victim was the shooter, and they'd want to reassure the public that this case was closed) or somebody had come for him, probably only seconds after Ted left. And probably taken the hard drive from the computer, which meant somebody knew who Ted was, but it wasn't law enforcement. In which case perhaps he wasn't so stupid to run and call her instead of staying put and calling 911. In which case she might owe him an apology.

Then again, she was putting her law-enforcement career in jeopardy just having him in her apartment, even though he was only officially a "person of interest" rather than a suspect. And if the whole thing had happened the way Ted described it, surely the ballistics, the bloody footprints, all the physical evidence would show that the shooter was in front of the counter, and that Ted had been behind the counter the whole time. Right?

Well, a small, nasty voice from a dark corner of her mind said, That's if it happened as Ted described it, and he hadn't just snapped. For ten years he'd had nightmares, for ten years he'd been a wreck—was it possible that he'd just had a psychotic break and reenacted his killing spree of ten years ago?

No, that was ridiculous. Ted didn't have a gun. And people didn't just go on killing sprees and not remember it, except in cheesy movies when they were possessed by demons or something. Which Ted was not. Right? Well, who knew. It always seemed unlikely to Laura that everybody involved in the Omega house colony was gone. Somebody must have started that particular chapter of the Vampire Sorority, and she didn't think it was Bitsy. Was someone involved in the dark arts getting revenge on Ted? Wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if they'd used him as a puppet to kill innocent people, after he'd killed so many, uh, things that were neither innocent nor people?

Laura chided herself, tried to bring herself back into the world she'd felt so sure of at work this morning, the world of cubicles and fluorescent lights. The dark arts probably weren't real. After all, just because vampires were real, it didn't necessarily follow that werewolves and demons and the boogeyman and the tooth fairy and Santa Claus were all real. Since joining the Bureau, she'd done a lot of unauthorized poking around in files and had never found anything anywhere that even suggested the existence of anything but incredibly depraved but otherwise normal humans.

She flipped through the cable news stations, which had picked up the Queequeg's massacre story and were now going into talking-head mode. She stopped as one red-faced guy was yelling, "Queequeg's is the embodiment of godless secular liberalism! It's not surprising at all that this hippie-era, Manson Family White Album degeneracy comes home to roost at the very place that foments it!"

Laura clicked off the TV in disgust. With the TV off, she could hear Ted dry-heaving in the bathroom. The sound made her slightly nauseous, as did the thought of cleaning his puke splatters off the pristine white tile in her bathroom. He had been kind of okay for a few hours, had then vomited, had then eaten an entire large pizza from Fred Ciampa's Same Old Place, and now appeared to have finished vomiting that up. Laura knew it made her a bad person, but she was just tired of holding up his head and wiping his chin. She figured that Ted, especially with all the alcohol and drugs he'd done in the last ten years, could probably vomit on his own with the best of them.

What was she going to do? They had to go to the police. Didn't they? If the police knew about Ted, it would certainly be better to go to them before they came knocking on her door. But it had been ten hours. Laura would not be surprised if she were the only number Ted ever called from his phone, so surely the police would have called her by now if they had Ted's name. So she had to assume that the police did not have the shooter, that someone else had come for the shooter and had taken all the information that would lead the authorities to Ted. If people willing to wade into a crime scene across from a courthouse and remove a screaming burn victim and a computer in the moments before the police arrived were looking for Ted, Laura wasn't sure any place was going to be safe enough.

So maybe they should go to the police. Maybe that was the best way to keep Ted safe. Except that Ted's story fundamentally didn't make any sense. One deranged customer (or employee, Laura tried to stop herself from thinking) shooting up a Queequeg's was a believable atrocity, but the idea that there was some kind of swift-moving conspiracy behind this—well, it just didn't make any sense. Why would an organized group of whackos target Queequeg's without issuing a statement explaining themselves? And why would they strike the customers rather than the establishment? Terrorists? But a suicide bomb is a much more reliable way to take out a café full of people. No, something was wrong with Ted's story, and that meant they couldn't go to the police.

Ted emerged from the bathroom, face and hair freshly wetted down. A plush purple towel that matched the bath mat and hand towels in the bathroom was around Ted's neck, and Laura winced thinking about Ted wiping his puke with it. Well, she could always buy more towels.

"Hey—what's the word from the local news? What did the hottie on channel 29 say about me?"

"Which one?"

"Bridget Tran y Garcia, of course!"

"She really doesn't look Irish. You think she just decided to add Bridget when she got hired in Boston?"

"Who cares? She looks really hot! What did she say?"

"She said your police composite sketch made you appear devilishly handsome, and that she was aching for your touch despite, or possibly because of, the heinous act you'd just committed."

"Cool."

"Yeah, that's about as good as it's going to get, I'm afraid. So far you're just a "person of interest," but I'm sure the
Boston Mail
will have you upgraded to suspect by five a.m."

"Nothing about Half-caf?"

"No. Which means the police probably don't have or know about him. Which means he probably wasn't acting alone, which means—ugh, I hate to say this—fleeing in terror down to the harbor was probably the right thing to do."

"Man, I wish I could tape record that. Could I just write 'Ted was right' on your calendar?"

"No."

"So nobody thinks I might have been the guy who got away and was now hiding in terror?"

"Well, that's not as good a story as you flipping out because Michelle docked you for a seventeen-minute break or something. In that scenario, there's only one bad guy, and that's just much simpler and easier for everybody to get their heads around than some kind of conspiracy. Which seems weird, because these psychos almost always work alone. I can't understand why there would be any kind of organization behind this, Ted, I really can't. It doesn't look like terrorists, and it doesn't look like some fair-trade blow against Queequeg's corporate hegemony."

"Is that how you say that word?"

"What?"

"Hege . . . that one. I've only ever seen it written."

"I don't know, Ted, that's the way I say it, okay?"

"Okay,"

"But do you get what I'm saying? I mean, I'm mostly an ATM snoop, but I am a law-enforcement professional, and your story and the data just don't fit."

Ted looked angry. "So you think I did it?"

Maybe. Probably not. "Of course not. I'm just saying that your story rests on a conspiracy that makes no sense."

Ted's face went from angry to embarrassed, and he was now shifting from foot to foot and looking kind of guilty. "I think I might have a clue about the conspiracy."