The Origin of Dracula (11 page)

When he finally noticed us, he shook his head, donned an annoyed expression, and mouthed, “We’re closed.”

I waved him over, but he shook his head again and reiterated his mantra: “We’re closed.”

“It’s important,” I said, loudly, so it’d carry through the glass.

He frowned and stood up slowly, as if it took an impossible effort, then made his way around the counter. He took his damn sweet time walking over to the glass doors. So much time that I thought he must have been trained by Andy Callen, the security guard on duty the night of Lucy’s murder. The police report had stated that good ol’ Andy, ensconced behind the marble counter in his own world that night, hadn’t seen or heard a thing.

I leaned close to the doors and didn’t raise my voice this time. “I work at Brown & Butler, but I forgot my pass card,” I said.

“Name?” the guard said, and he moved close enough to the door for me to read his nametag.

Andy Callen
.

I was face to face with the man who could have saved Lucy. The man I’d purposely not confronted. What good would it have done? Detective Wyler had hammered that into me. He’d said over and over again,
It’s not going to change what happened
, and he’d also said,
It’s just going to make you angry
.

He was right. It did make me angry. But I kept my anger in check and forged ahead with the mission at hand.

“Rick Serway,” I said. Rick had been one of Lucy’s colleagues. He’d started at the firm the same month Lucy had, five years ago. He’d been so broken up at her funeral that I hadn’t been sure he’d ever recover. I hoped he had. I hoped he hadn’t ended up like me.

“Rick Serway, huh?” Callen said. “Hang on to your horses.” He moseyed on back to the counter, leaving Lee and me to stare at our reflections in the glass. It took him forever to look through whatever he was scrutinizing behind the counter. It was probably a directory, but now that I knew who he was, I couldn’t help but think it was porn. And that it’d been porn he’d been engrossed in on his cell phone before we’d interrupted his night, and that it’d been porn he’d been watching the night of Lucy’s murder, so absorbed by it that he couldn’t pull himself away to escort Lucy to her car.

Finally, he strolled back to us. “You got ID?”

“I don’t. I left my wallet up there and it’s got my driver’s license
and
pass card in it. It’s got pretty much everything in it—credit cards, you name it. That’s why I had to come back.”

He looked me up and down without bothering to hide his sneer. Then he shook his head again. “Can’t let you in without ID.”

“If I had ID, I wouldn’t be here, because I’d have my wallet. You get that, right?”

Lee flashed a grin, apparently pleased by my aggressiveness. But Callen wasn’t so pleased. His face reddened and his nostrils flared.

“Listen, buddy,” he said. “Without ID, you’re not coming in.” He headed back to the counter.

I pounded on the door.

He whipped around, the fastest he’d moved since we arrived. “Keep your hands off the door!”

“I have to get in there and get my wallet!”

“I just told you: You’re not coming in!” He headed back toward the counter.

I pounded on the door again—and he whipped around again, but he also made the effort to march up to me. “If you don’t get the hell out of here,” he barked, “I’m calling the police.”

“The police? Are you kidding me?
This
is why you call the police?” I was shouting now. “My wife was executed right under your fucking nose and you just sat there on your butt and did nothing! Why the hell didn’t you call the police then? Why the hell didn’t you walk her to her car?
Why the hell didn’t you do a goddamn thing?
”

Callen’s mouth was agape and the color had drained from his face. He was no longer annoyed. He was frightened.

Lee was staring at me, wide-eyed. “Didn’t think you had that in you,” he said.

What I had in me was grief and pent-up anger. And I had spewed it all out at a convenient scapegoat. “Let me into the goddamn building,” I added as a coda.

Callen didn’t react. He stood there like a frightened animal, unsure what to do next.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lee reach into his jacket pocket—he was going for his gun. Did I want to go that far? If not, I had to stop Lee now.

“What’s all the racket about?” The raspy voice came from behind Lee. We turned toward it. The homeless man was ambling toward us, a mobile heap of ragged clothes. As he approached, I heard a repetitive ripping sound that matched his footsteps. It came from one of his filthy high-top sneakers, which was fortified with duct tape. In the wake of every step he took came the crackling of tape peeling off concrete.

“Can you help me out with a little change?” he said, bringing with him an odor so rancid I had to step back. “It’s been two days since I got some food.”

“Go back where you came from,” Lee said.

“I’m from here.” The man was staring at me instead of Lee, as if I’d been the one who’d told him to take off. His skin was weather-beaten and coarse. His beard was a mixture of matted clumps and wiry projections.

I had to turn away from him, as Nate would have done, and now I was facing Callen again. He no longer appeared frightened. His arms were folded in satisfaction as if he was glad to be off the hook.

Lee took a menacing step toward the homeless man. “Get the hell out of here.”

The man didn’t budge. “Can you help me out?” he said behind me.

“No,” Lee said.

“Come on. A man’s gotta eat.”

Callen started to walk away, but not before I saw the sneer return to his face. He was getting the last laugh, leaving us to deal with what was probably one of his own recurring problems: a pain-in-the-ass homeless man who accosted the tenants of the building, begging for handouts.

“Hey! We’re not done here!” I shouted, and pounded on the door.

“You touch that door again, and the cops will be all over your ass,” Callen said. So he had a short memory. He’d already forgotten my tirade.

“Open this goddamn door or I break it down!” I said, reminding him that I had every reason to do something violent and stupid—that I held him partially responsible for Lucy’s death.

“Don’t cause trouble here,” the homeless man said. “They don’t need no more trouble.”

I glanced at him.

“Just give me a little change,” he said and moved toward me, accompanied by the sound of duct tape peeling off the pavement. S
krrritt, skrrritt, skrrritt
.

I pulled out my wallet, grabbed a couple of dollar bills, and thrust them at him, hoping to send him on his way. As he took the money, I realized my incredibly stupid blunder.

I looked back into the lobby. Callen was staring at my wallet—the one I’d supposedly left upstairs. Then his eyes met mine for a beat. His smugness was blatant. He walked back toward the counter.

“Thank you, mister,” the homeless man said, and began his retreat. “God bless you. This ain’t no place for trouble. Somethin’ wicked this way comes.”

What the hell?
The homeless guy was throwing off Ray Bradbury titles? Was this novel therapy or just a coincidence? For the second time in less than a few minutes, I didn’t react the way I normally would have. First I had stepped out of character and unleashed my anger at Callen, and now I was going to hold a conversation with a homeless man.

“What you do mean, ‘something wicked this way comes’?” I said.

The homeless man stopped his retreat, turned back, blinked two or three times, slowly, as if he was rebooting himself, then stuffed the money into his soiled and ripped navy pea coat.

“I told them already,” he said. “Yep, they know.” He shivered, then started to amble away, accompanied by the duct tape symphony.
Skrrritt, skrrritt, skrrritt
.

I went after him. “You told who
what
?”

“Let him go,” Lee said. “He’s off his rocker.”

Lee might have been right, but I was conjuring up a scenario where Lee was wrong. Perhaps when Otranto had said face your fear, she meant
this
fear. The fear of descending into despair, which the homeless man represented for me. Did she want me to talk to this man?

And then came the answer to that question: I glanced back once more toward Callen, and in the glass door, I saw my reflection and Lee’s reflection—and
no
reflection for the homeless man.

Sure, it was possible that he was standing in a dead spot, or at the wrong angle, but I knew that wasn’t so. My pulse raced and the night rushed in on me. I looked back at the man, then again at the glass. There was no doubt: he wasn’t casting a reflection. My chest tightened as I realized that the netherworld of Cold Falls was exerting itself right here, right now.

“Tell me what you mean by ‘something wicked this way comes,’” I said, “and I’ll give you more money.”

The duct tape symphony stopped, and the homeless man turned back to me. I pulled out my wallet and fished out a couple more dollars.

He stared at the cash, then looked at me and blinked that slow measured blink again. A second later, he plucked the money from my hand and stuffed it into his pea coat.

“I mean that lady who was killed in the parking lot,” he said.

I swallowed. “… You saw it?”

He nodded. “Yep.”

I was flabbergasted. My anger rushed back, but this time my fury felt like molten steel burning in my gut. It was so painful that it hindered my breathing. There had been no witnesses to Lucy’s murder.

I forced myself to breathe. “Why didn’t you tell the police?”

“I told ’em.”

That couldn’t be right
. Detective Wyler had told me there had been no witnesses. I pulled out my cell phone, ready to call him right then, my rage dictating my actions, but then I glanced at the glass door and saw the man’s lack of a reflection again and realized that this wasn’t under Detective Wyler’s jurisdiction—it was under
my
jurisdiction. I tried to push my rage away.

“Please tell me what you saw,” I said.

He blinked a few times. “He was back there, in the bushes. Right outside my place.”

“Your place?”

“I got a good setup back there. A nice tent. He was looking to steal it.”

“Who’s he?”

“I’m telling you that. I looked out of my tent and saw him. He was crouched down, or kneeling down or something. It was hard to tell. And I couldn’t really see his face neither—like it was covered or something. But it wasn’t. ’Cause I saw his eyes. They were black, with some gold in ’em, too.”

That hit a nerve, and I glanced over at Lee to see how he was reacting to this man’s tale. He was already riveted by it.

“Then he goes over to the opening in the hedges and crawls through. That was
my
door.
I
made it. They closed it now. They put new bushes there. I see him go out into the parking lot—but he doesn’t walk normal. Like he don’t wanna stand up or something. Maybe he was staying low so no one would see him. I don’t know. But when he gets near the building, he stands up. He’s tall. Real tall. Then he kinda disappears in the shadows or something.”

The vagrant stopped talking and stared at me. He wasn’t blinking slowly anymore. He wasn’t blinking at all. It looked like he was studying me, gauging my reaction to his story, as if he was expecting me to cut him off. I wasn’t going to, though—not yet, anyway. His story tracked, but just barely.

“Then I see him again. Close to the building. But he wasn’t moving, and I got to thinking it wasn’t him. It was just a shadow. A dark one. So after I stare it awhile, and it don’t move—at all—I go back into my tent and fall asleep. Not sure for how long. But I wake up and hear a click, click, click. Someone’s walking across the lot. Click, click, click, you know, like ladies’ shoes.”

Lucy’s shoes
.

“So I get out of the tent and look through the bushes. There’s a lady walking across the lot. And then I see him again. It had to be him, but he looked different.”

“How?”

“This time I see his face. It’s kinda white, but not white like paint—white like maybe he’s sick. Like maybe he got a disease. But she didn’t see him. Or I’m guessing she didn’t see him. Or she woulda run. She’s just walking to her car. Click, click, click. The only car in the lot. He’s moving toward her, fast. Only he isn’t running, he’s kinda gliding. I crawl through the bushes—I’m gonna warn her. When I get out, I see him wrap around the lady, kinda like a blanket. Except this blanket is as black as the night. Like she’d walked out of the light. Or he blocked the light or something. She screams, and then he comes at me. But he’s hunched down again—like an animal coming at me and—”

“The lady—what happened to her?”

“She was on the ground—not moving—didn’t know if she was—”

“He didn’t shoot her?” Though his story was far-fetched, almost hallucinatory, I’d been following along, sucked into it, until this detail.

“He came after me and I ran. I had to run—”

“Did he shoot her?”

“I headed for Ma—”

“Did he shoot her or not?”

“No—I told them no—”

“Told who?”

“The cops.”

“You told them no shots?”

“I didn’t hear nothing. No gun.”

Maybe this guy was off his rocker after all. And that was why Detective Wyler hadn’t told me about this supposed eyewitness account. Or there was another possibility—

“So the lady you saw that night
wasn’t
the lady who was shot?”

“I’m telling you about something wicked this way comes. That’s what you wanted me to—”

“This happened back there. In the parking lot. In the middle of the night.” He must’ve been talking about Lucy, even if this detail wasn’t right.

“Yeah.”

“Okay… What happened after he came after you?” Maybe he’d give me something to verify that he was talking about Lucy. Or that he wasn’t.

“I run outta here, down Maple Avenue. I get to Jefferson. It’s all lit up there. So I finally look back. He’s gone. All I see is some dog, one of those big ones. You know, kinda wild, but smart-looking. That dog mighta scared this guy away.”

“Then what?”

“I stay there in the lights. Near the Best Buy sign. Don’t know for how long. Then I hear sirens and see cop cars coming. So I go back and tell ’em what I saw.”