Werewolf Cop (34 page)

“It's all got very . . . confusing,” she said.

“Things do that sometimes.”

“Bloody hard to know who the good guys are, isn't it?”

“It is,” said Zach. “I'm not even sure that's how it works, exactly. With good guys and bad guys, I mean. It's more like—messed-up guys, some fighting for the good, some for the bad, and the rest just wandering around bumping into the furniture.”

She faced forward, shoulders sagging, head down. “Yes. Something like that.”

Zach was about to speak again—all sorts of mysteries and questions and possibilities were occurring to him. But just then, the phone in his pocket buzzed. He fished it out. It was Goulart calling.

“Hey,” Zach said.

“Connecticut State cops have got a hit on Angela Bose's car,” said Goulart.

His breath caught. He had to work to keep his voice steady.

“I'll pick you up in a couple of minutes,” he said.

28

THE THING IN THE RAIN

M
ysteries, questions, and possibilities.

Zach maneuvered the Crown Vic back across town toward the one-six. The rush hour was over, but traffic never dissipated in Manhattan anymore these days. Every street was as crowded as a sugar-coated anthill, all day long. Zach slapped the Kojak light onto the roof and maneuvered between cabs and delivery trucks, letting off an occasional siren blast when he slipped into the oncoming lane.

And all the while, his mind was preoccupied with mysteries, questions, and possibilities.

What had Abend been after at Margo's place? He must've raced there after leaving Zach in the beach house with his torturers. The gangster whose influence was spreading like black poison through the city's bloodstream was himself at his weakest and most desperate now. Tricked and betrayed by his woman. She on the run and he with only one night left to find that dagger. He must have figured: the wolf follows the baselard, so he would follow the wolf. At that point, like Imogen, he still hadn't realized that Gretchen Dankl was dead, that she had been replaced by another.

He must know now, though. With the monk and Satan gone, and Zach in the news. With Goulart telling him that Zach knew Margo. He would have done what Imogen, in her obsession, had failed to do: put the story together. He would know that the curse had been passed from Dankl to Zach.

What about Goulart, then? Did he know? Did he care? Or was he just taking Abend's money in exchange for inside info on the task force?

And what was he playing at with Imogen? Why was he humoring her, teasing her along? Was he just trying to get into her pants? Was he trying to keep her distracted so she didn't get too close to the truth? Or was he maybe trying to make sure she wouldn't trust
him
—Zach—wouldn't help him get to Abend before the dagger was found and the gangster was once again secure in his power.

Mysteries, questions, and possibilities. Zach could only guess at the answers. Only one thing seemed sure to him: this—this day, this night—was his last chance to get his hands on Abend. If the gangster got to the dagger first, he would disappear again, becoming the unknowable but pervasive influence he had been in Europe.

And right now, Abend was way ahead of him. If Goulart knew that Bose's car had been discovered, then it was pretty certain Abend knew as well. If Abend knew, there was little chance Zach would reach Angela Bose (and the dagger, assuming she had it) before he did.

The moment the Crown Vic slid to the curb in front of the precinct, Goulart—wearing another of his fine gray pinstripes—was out the building's front door and hurrying toward him. He slipped into the passenger seat, smoothing back his hair with a pass of his palm. Zach hit the gas and they headed for the highway, out of the city.

“They have her?” Zach asked. “They find Bose?”

Goulart shook his head. “They were canvassing motels and one of the clerks had checked her in, up by Sharon on the border. By the time the staties got there, she was already gone. They say she can't be far. She only had an hour start. Silver-blue Bentley's gonna be tough to miss, up in farm country.”

Zach cursed. The Bentley would be tough for Abend to miss as well—and whatever leads the police had, Abend would have them too.

Gray-green storm clouds roiled above the slate-drab river as they rolled up the highway. The two detectives traveled in silence, seething silence, the truth hulking between them like a great dumb beast. After that last argument they'd had in the interview room, what secrets were left between them? Not many. The way Zach understood it, Goulart had all but come right out and pleaded with him: Don't tell anyone I've sold my soul to Abend, and I won't tell anyone you killed Margo Heatherton. And that was back then, all the way yesterday, before Abend realized Zach was the wolf, before Goulart could have understood it or believed it, if in fact he knew it or could believe it even now.

But today? What secrets were left? Goulart, bitter and cynical in the face of a fatal illness, had gone on a gangster's payroll. And Zach, in the grip of a nightmare he couldn't begin to comprehend, had, one way or another, ripped a woman to shreds. Zach knew what Goulart had done. Goulart knew what Zach had done. Each knew the other knew. They drove in silence, knowing.

It wasn't until the gray towers of Manhattan had dropped away behind them—not until the gray plains of the Bronx had melted into grassland—not until the autumn trees of the downstate counties were crowding the edge of the highway, their last pastel leaves gone dull beneath the louring clouds, their branches quivering in the gusts from the coming storm—not until then that either man spoke a word.

Then Zach said, “Funny, isn't it? You and me.”

And Goulart, looking out the window, drawled sardonically. “Funny, yeah.”

“You New York, me Texas, all that.”

“Yeah.”

“Strange combo.”

“Broadway Joe and Cowboy.”

“It made good copy for the journos.”

“We did good work too,” said Goulart.

They drove in silence again. After a while, the first droplets of rain patted the windshield.

“I gotta bring him down, Martin,” Zach said.

“Hell, I know it.”

“Nothing else makes any sense to me.”

“That's why you're the Cowboy, Cowboy.”

“It ain't right what he does. Buying and selling people. Making their lives go where he wants instead of where they want. Shutting them down when they stand against him. Killing 'em when he can't get his way. It ain't right.”

Goulart gave him a glance of surprise. “But everyone does that. Everyone who can. The rest just haven't had the chance.”

Zach turned his eyes from the road only long enough to return the glance. “Even if we all did it—even if we all thought it was right—it still wouldn't be. I gotta stop him.”

The rain grew steady—not heavy yet, just steady. Zach clicked the wipers on. They set up a rhythmic beat. There was a long, low roll of thunder from off in the northern distance somewhere.

“He'll kill you,” Goulart said. “Just by the way, in case you're interested. You don't know what he is. You haven't got a chance against him. He'll kill you. And for what? He already owns half the force, half the city. All the pols—they were always his at heart, just waiting for him. He's already moving into Boston and Philly. D.C. It's a done deal, brother. There's no point. And even if there was, there wouldn't be. That's the part I've been trying to tell you. That's what I've learned these last couple of weeks. You just die in the end, so what the hell? Go for the gusto, right? Take what you can get and run.”

There was no profit in having this argument again, so Zach didn't answer him. It was, as Imogen had said, very complicated. Bloody hard to know who the good guys were.

After that, they listened to the radio. Overseas, the riots had spread to the north of England, Germany was shut down by strikes and demonstrations, the news out of France was being censored but Jewish refugees were turning up here and there with horror stories. All this the newsmen covered in about ninety seconds, then they were back on the Super Cop in the house of horrors, followed immediately by unconfirmed reports that the Westchester police were searching for an unnamed man who might have been present when heiress Margo Heatherton was killed by a wild animal. . . .

Goulart sent Zach a meaningful glance: how long before those two stories became one story, the Super Cop and the dead heiress? Zach didn't even bother to meaningfully look back at him. There was no profit in having this argument again.

By the time they left the Interstate, the rain was coming down in sheets. Dramatic jagged lances of lightning stabbed the earth and sent static through the radio. The Crown Vic skimmed the New York-Connecticut border on a winding two-lane. The falling leaves swirled and whipped past the windows on the wind. The naked branches of the roadside trees bowed and waved at them, making Zach think back on Gretchen Dankl's witchy fingers. He thought he caught glimpses of her in his peripheral vision, watching him drive past from within the woods. The thunderclaps now were sudden, short and loud.

Goulart's phone rang. He drew it out and listened. “We're ten away,” he said. He killed the connection and said to Zach, “They found the Bentley.”

“But not Bose.”

Goulart didn't answer. He didn't have to. Zach felt as if he were carrying an anvil in his gut.

The Bentley was in a ditch on a forest road, one tire flat, its fender mashed against a tree. The passenger window was shattered. There was glass all over the seat. There were three patrol cars pulled to the shoulder, one in front of the Bentley, two in back. Lots of staties in gray cowboy hats and fluorescent green raincoats milled on the pavement. Sizzling red flares warned traffic off the road, but there was no traffic.

“Looks like she blew a tire and lost control,” said a Captain Mansfield. The rain ran down his green sleeves. It darkened his hat. He was a solid block of a guy, athletic, plodding—not stupid, but talking nonsense all the same.

Goulart—his sleek suit now hidden under his official Extraordinary Crimes rain jacket, his slick hair under a task force baseball hat—was nodding at the guy as if he weren't spouting total crap. Zach, in an identical jacket with the plastic hood pulled up, was bending down to look through the Bentley's passenger window. The rain drummed on the back of his head, making it hard to hear the surrounding conversations.

“Then where is she?” he said now, straightening up, looking back at the captain. “If she blew a tire and ran into a tree. Where'd she go?”

The captain shrugged his big shoulders. “Car was here a while before we found it. She could have run for it or flagged someone down. We're checking doctors and hospitals. She's a fugitive, after all, right? She could be anywhere.”

Zach pointed to a scratch in the Bentley's silver-blue paint, a dent and a gash back near the right rear tire.

“Looks to me like someone ran her off,” he said. “Ran her off the road, broke through the window and took her.”

Zach thought Captain Mansfield gave Goulart some sort of look then, but he didn't know how to interpret it. Could've meant:
Your partner here is a pain in the ass.
Or it could've meant something more like:
As fellow servants of the powers of darkness, we must conspire to confuse and destroy this infidel.
At this point, no suspicion was too crazy or too paranoid.

Zach moved away from the Bentley, moved toward the center of the road where the red flares were burning. He looked off into the distance in one direction, then into the distance in the other. Nothing much either way. Forest. Road. Lightning flickered in the green sky. Thunder rolled.

“Don't suppose there are any traffic cams near here,” Zach called to the captain through the drumming rain.

The captain shook his head. “Nothing at all between the highway and Main Street over by the bank in town.”

Zach moved back to the shoulder of the road, to the rear of the Bentley, to the edge of the woods. Beyond the pavement, the ground rose, a smooth incline into the forest. He looked up the hill into the trees, his senses alert. The rain fell hard and loud on the forest floor. It rattled in the skeletal branches. The branches swayed and creaked in the wind. Their tangled lacework grew denser and denser the farther back they went, darker and darker the closer they came to the sky. Zach sniffed the air, but the downpour had washed away every living scent.

They were gone. Bose. Abend. The dagger. Gone. The rain pattered hard on Zach's plastic hood as he realized the full extent of the catastrophe. Abend had what he wanted. He would now go back into hiding to complete his criminal work unseen. Which left Zach to do . . . what then, exactly? To live on in a monthly cycle of murderous brutality? Live with more and more blood on his hands as the useless chase continued? Pass the curse on when his own crimes became too many and too horrible to bear? He couldn't live like that—couldn't live as all the wolves before him had lived. Maybe it was weakness on his part, but he couldn't. He wouldn't.

He peered up into the woods, deeper and deeper into the interweaving patterns of vines and branches, deeper into the shadows of forest obscurity and the fog of the sheeting rain.

Suddenly, there was a sizzling snap of forked lightning on the shrouded hilltop. At the same instant, Zach gasped as he was hit by a wave of inner darkness, that nasty shock he had experienced twice before. It was such a strange, bleak, internal—such an
emotional
experience that he hadn't thought of it as being real until now. Now, since Imogen had mentioned it to him, he understood that it always accompanied the presence of Dominic Abend, as if Abend's presence contained a greater presence than himself.

The darkness—and the sense of hopelessness and terror that came with it—struck him and washed over him and was gone and then the thunder rolled. But in its wake, Zach lost all thought of everything and everyone around him. The police—Goulart—the wrecked Bentley—they all fell into the background of his consciousness. Dwindling figures, diminishing voices, gone. He was alone in his own mind.