Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3 Page 18

The box was where he'd left it, in the mudroom. He emptied onto the kitchen table. Files and reports. The black notebooks of Ivan Prall's illegible ravings. He had reading of his own to kill.

  LARA opened her eyes. The room was dark, the sofa underneath her unfamiliar. She tried to move but couldn't and she panicked, thinking the paralysis was back. Her hands moved, lifting to her face. It wasn't the paralysis, just a bone deep numbness in every limb. Sitting up was difficult, her legs dead weights clunking to the floor. Her hands frozen clubs. Sensation came back slowly and with it, the sting of pins and needles. There was nothing to do but ride it out.

  She walked stiffly to the light coming from the other room. Her knee smacked into a table and Lara cursed, wondering who rearranged her furniture. Then she remembered where she was.

  The kitchen was too bright. A radio playing somewhere. Gallagher sat with his feet propped on a chair. The table littered with notes and three of Prall's journals. A bottle of Jamesons next to a rock glass. “The dead have risen,” he said without looking up from his reading.

  “Sorry. I passed out.”

  His feet dropped from the chair and he waved at her to sit. “How do you feel?”

  “Weird. Better.” Lara eased stiffly onto the seat. She nodded at the mess. “What are you doing?”

  Gallagher held up the notebook. “Trying to crawl inside this bastard's head. But this...” He tossed it onto the table. “This is all gibberish.”

  “I thought you didn't believe in profiling.” She tried not to wince.

  “I don't believe in werewolves either.”

  It had sounded funny in his head but voicing it out loud, it just came off ridiculous. So he shut up and the radio filled the empty space.

  Lara spoke first, motioning to his glass. “Pass that over.”

  “You can have a glass all your own.”

  “Yours is closer.” She took the glass and tilted it back. Cold water would have been the wiser choice but water doesn't seep into your shoulder muscles like this. “This is good. I don't even like scotch.”

  “That's because it's not scotch, it's Irish whiskey.”

  “There's a difference?”

  “That's blasphemy.”

  She drank again, scaling the weight of the question in her head. She just blurted it out. “Do you think Kovacks was telling the truth?”

  “Kovacks was playing you. It's what pedophiles do.”

  “I think he was telling the truth.”

  Gallagher took back the glass and sloshed more whiskey into it. “I think we both crawled too far into his head.”

  “So you think I'm just crazy.”

  “No. You've been through a violent trauma. Unconscious for three days. I think you're pushing yourself too hard to get back on the horse.”

  “I was awake the whole time.”

  That stopped him mid sip. He lowered the glass.

  “I just couldn't move,” she said. “Not even my eyes.”

  Gallagher set the glass down. Saw the memory of it dredging up in her eyes. The sensation of being dead. Her eye welled up and she wiped it away before it fell.

  “That must have been terrifying,” he said.

  “You have no idea.”

  He took hold of her hand, felt it quaking. His thumb found the contours of her knuckles. “We'll fix this. You and me. Okay?”

  Words. Just words. He held onto her hand, long after politeness required him to let go. The moment moved past awkward and became something else. Her eyes rose to his.

  “John… “

  “I know.”

  He pulled his hand away. She wanted it back. Their eyes bounced off each other's like repelling magnets, the awkwardness rushing back to fill the vacuum.

  “Hey.” A whisper.

  She looked up and he was already leaning in. Already kissing her. Not some big explosion, just soft and tentative. Testing the waters. She kissed him back, her fingertips finding his neck. The water's fine.

  Everything fell away in a sharp tiny moment. Bliss is one word for it. When the body takes over and stifles the brain and all its endless loops of second guesses and missteps.

  A small thud snipped the moment short like scissors. Above their heads, footsteps on the second floor. Amy. The universe won't tolerate being shut out for too long and it rushes back in hard, returning all the petty details, unpaid bills and common bullshit that boil our brains every day. The universe hates bliss, snuffing it out whenever it bubbles up.

  He pulled away and returned his ass to his seat. Amy's footfalls creaked the ceiling over their heads. Both reached for their glass, stalling until one of them had to say something.

  “Gee,” she said. “Awkward.”

  “Yup.” His glass went back to the table. “Come on, I'll get you home.”

  “Are you okay to drive?”

  “Hell no. Get your shoes.”

  THE dogs skulked through the trees. Restless, chasing woodmice. Ivan Prall sat cross-legged on the ground, chewing the end of a pencil.

  The notebook was stolen from an unlocked pickup. The paper was lined and the first twenty pages were used to log hours and gas mileage. These were torn out but there was nothing to do about the lined paper. He penciled over it, sketching another drawing. A simple task that calmed him and focused his mind. He had no streetlight nor lantern to work by, here in this rocky clearing in the trees. He needed neither. The phosphorescent hum of a crescent moon and the pinhole of the lodestar were enough for his eyes to see.

  The Siberian trotted up and nosed his ribs. He paid it no attention so the dog circled round and nested at his feet. The pencil worked over the paper, forming the outline of a face. His heartbeat slowed with each pencil stroke and his brain cooled, allowing clarity to his boiling thoughts.

  The scent he'd been hunting so long for had suddenly materialized. Filtered up through the asphalt streets and wafting over the river, its signature tang rising up sharp from the city stink. This was the old wolf, the hated lobo. It had mired its scent in the filth of men to hide from him and suddenly there it was. But it was for nothing. The old lobo had hidden himself inside a prison, sequestered in a fortress of barbed wire and pot-bellied men with guns. The old wolf, the baptizer, had outsmarted him. He had disgraced himself by surrendering to the men but he was safe.

  That was okay, Prall reasoned. He'd learned patience. He could wait.

  His hand moved deftly over the paper, rendering a portrait with strokes true and economic. A woman's face this time. Prall clamped the pencil between his teeth and judged the rendering's merits. The eyes were real enough but the mouth was wrong. The mouth was always elusive. The slant of the corners and the furl of the lips, this was the true measure of a face but the hardest to capture and pin onto the page. The mouth in this rendering was close but not true. Overall, it was a passable rendition of the woman who had gotten in his way twice now. The woman he tore up and let live. That thought sickened him. He had no wish to pass the sin onto another but he had with her. And now she was damned too.

  What was her name?

  Lara.

  27

  GALLAGHER'S TAILLIGHTS FADED to red pinpricks in the raindrops. Lara turned away from the window and kicked her shoes off. He had dropped her at the door like it was the end of some weird date. She kept thinking about the kiss. Where had that come from? She didn't like Gallagher. She even hated him sometimes. Yet he was the one who initiated it, ambushing her like that out of the blue.

  Then again, maybe not. He wouldn't have done that unless there was something there. Had she done it subconsciously, sending signals without even realizing it? Go over the events, crack the details to parse the meaning of it. What if…

  Stop. Her mind was ramping up speed, shifting through a million thoughts at once. A bad habit, overthinking everything until nothing makes sense. It's late. Go to bed.

  She wanted another drink but all she had in the fridge was an open bottle of white that was at least a week old. She popped out the cork from the wine. A
little stale but it would do.

  The kiss kept replaying in her head, despite herself. She turned it over, examined it from all sides like a piece of evidence found at a crime scene. Brilliant. She pushed it away. There were would be no answers, no direction, until the morning when she saw him.

  Pain zapped up her arm. Without even realizing it, she was scratching at the wound through the dressing. The itching was unbearable. Maybe the dressing needed changing. She went into the bathroom, unwinding the gauze.

  It looked worse than before. The strangled flesh was jaundiced and the brittle scab tissue tore away with the gauze. The puncture marks leaked black blood and puss. It smelled awful too. Good God, was it gangrene? Is that possible? The whole hand looked wrong, the wrist bent. The knuckles looked swollen and the fingers twisted as if the bones under the skin had shifted.

  She ran the palsied arm under the cold water, scrubbing it clean. The soap stung the raw flesh but the frigid water numbed the skin a little. She patted it dry with a towel and watched blood well up in the puncture marks. Angry red circles on her arm. And within those circles were tiny strands of hair lifting from the blood, sprouting from the wound itself.

  ONTO Lovejoy, joining the traffic headed for the bridge. The column of vehicles backed up so Gallagher veered off, deciding to just drive for a spell. Clear his head. Try and sort out what had just happened.

  It was stupid, he knew that. Disastrous too. Sure, Mendes was attractive. More than attractive, if he was honest with himself but he could deal with that. He had dealt with it, hadn't he? He never wanted a partner in the first place but then everything went screwy with the body on the riverbank. Mendes was a pickle and a stickler for procedure but they'd worked it out, got past that. Maybe—

  No. This was a time-bomb waiting to blow up in their faces. He knew that from experience. There was Cheryl, of course. They were both young and convinced they had to stick it out for Amy's sake, blindly hoping things would just somehow get better on their own. It didn't. The divorce and the untangling of one life from the other while raising a daughter had been hellish. He was never going through that again.

  Yet, dumb ass that he was, he got involved with another woman from work two years later. Pam was too young and he was too angry from the divorce. It was a mess from day one, both with wildly different expectations. Yet, small graces, it had ended cleanly. No lingering details, no fuss.

  There were other women after that but none of them from work. No officers nor admin staff, not even a meter maid. He also swore off doctors, nurses and paramedics just to be sure. That cut about ninety percent of the women he met in a day from the potential dating pool. Normal women, the everyday population like the other parents at his kid's school, they just didn't appear in his world. Or he didn't appear in theirs. So his dating history was sparse and unremarkable. So why this thing with Mendes? Of all people, Mendes?

  His eyes dipped to the speedometer. He'd been driving for twenty minutes without once paying attention to the road, lost in his own head. Where the hell was he? Cruising northwest up Front, following the river. The water on his right and the railyards to his left. No other cars on the road. He pulled to the shoulder and wheeled round onto the southbound lane. Something flashed in the headlights—

  Gallagher braked, dipping the Cherokee's nose. A dog stood in the middle of the empty road, its eyes flashing in the halogens. It didn't bolt or even flinch at the oncoming grill, like the road belonged to it and he a trespasser on its pissing grounds. It was the Canario, that evil-looking hound with its cropped ears and muscular chest. He had looked it up after the earlier encounters, flipping through pictures of breeds till he found it. The dog eyed the truck, mouth open and then turned and trotted out of the beams.

  One of Prall's dogs. Had to be. What are the chances? Gallagher wheeled onto the grade and killed the engine. Not much to see, the streetlights only threw so far into the empty expanse of railway tracks. His hand went to his belt but the gun wasn't there. It was in the cupboard, along with his badge. He had his cell. He could call it in, get a radio car out here to help look. For what, one dog?

  Gallagher checked the road ahead and the road behind. No cars but on the far side of the road was an old sign listing in the weeds. Harvey's Garage. Why was that sign ringing a bell?

  The body on the riverbank. This wasn't far from where Elizabeth Riley had been found.

  The dome light came on when he opened the back. Gallagher took up the Maglite and found a field hockey stick under the stack of reusable grocery bags. He had told Amy a hundred times to move her gear out of his trunk but now he was glad she'd forgotten. He gripped it tight, testing its balance. The thing was deadly. He never understood field hockey. Why in the world would you arm twenty hormonal teenage girls with a bludgeon and send them onto a field to murder one another?

  The dome light snuffed out and the Maglite went on. The beam didn't throw very far in the vast dark of the rail yard. His boots crunched the stone between the rail ties. Freight cars rusted on the lines, mammoth and silent in the darkness. He cast his eyes down the tracks, where they wound south into the core of the city. Was this how Prall was moving, running his dogs along the tracks? The tracks and the riverbanks.

  The grinding stones were loud under his boots so he stopped on a creosote tie and listened. He could hear it, the dog, padding through the gravel somewhere between the cars. And then he heard the others skulking through the freights. He threw the light over the cars and caught their eyes in the beam. Up ahead and behind, to the right and to the left. Smart bastards, surrounding him in the dark like this and him standing there with a schoolgirl's stick in his hand. Maybe they could play fetch? He tallied the dogs up, spotting the Siberian, two pits, the Canario and the Malamute. Where was the Rottie? And that big mastiff?

  The dogs sniffed the ground, trotting sideways like shy ponies. None barked or growled. No need to intimidate the man. An easy kill.

  Gallagher clocked the Cherokee and gauged the distance. Too far to outrun the dogs, not over these tracks. He stepped back slowly, hoping to ease the distance some. If they charged, he could brain one or maybe two of them with the stick. If he was lucky, the others would balk and he could make a run for it. But these dogs had killed before. They hunted as a pack and killed like one. The cell was still in his pocket but it may as well have been a brick for all the good it was now. And where the hell was Prall?

  Show yourself, you creepy sonovabitch.

  He sidled back towards the truck. The dogs matched his pace, neither closing in nor losing ground. His foot caught a rail and he stumbled, almost fell. The dogs jolted. The Siberian flashed its teeth, black lips stretching up the tartar-spackled fangs. The Canario broke ranks and rushed him. Gallagher dropped the flashlight, swung hard with both hands and clubbed the dog's skull. It yelped, rolled with the blow and ran off. The others stopped, watching the action. No other dog charged.

  Gallagher kept moving, his heartbeat thrumming in his ears. The dogs watched but didn't pursue, tongues hanging from their chops. What the hell are they doing? Who cares. Keep moving. Don't fall.

  Something big skulked into his periphery and lumbered in his direction. He knew what it was before seeing it. He knew then that all the rationalizations he'd constructed was all bullshit. The thing moving at him was bullshit too. It didn't exist but here it came just the same.

  The lobo lumbered heavy over the rails. Snout to the ground, tracking him with yellow eyes. Hackles up, the fur like blades ridging the backbone. Christ almighty. How had Lara survived an attack from that?

  The wolf charged in for the kill. If he ran, he was dead. He charged at it instead. Screaming out some banshee-kamikaze war cry as he rushed it. It worked, the lobo reared back and he cracked the club across its skull with everything he had. It snapped, teeth popping at him. He swung and bludgeoned it again. It reared and shook its head violently at the pain.

  He ran. Gallagher ran like he hadn't run since he was kid, full tilt and blind. His feet s
omehow slamming between the rails, the truck getting closer. The thing was already on his heels, popping its jaws. He sailed over the last rusty spar and spun in midair, hurling the stick at it. The ditch was muddy as he crashed and rolled and kept running. No time to even glance back to see if he clobbered it, he just ran.

  Fingers tearing open the door latch. He jumped under the wheel and almost snapped the key firing the ignition. The Cherokee roared and he slammed the shift into gear, kicked down the pedal. The truck lurched forward. The passenger window exploded. The truck sunk portside and lifted on its starboard side. The snout jammed through the window and snapped, slicing its flesh on the shattered safety glass. The truck lurched up and threatened to tip over onto Gallagher's elbow. He punched at it, kicked the accelerator. All four wheels hit the ground and the truck lurched forward and Gallagher didn't let up. Dragging the monster until its head slipped the window and it was gone. In the rearview, the lobo shook it off and chased after him. Gallagher punished the old V8, putting distance between him and it.

  No.

  He jammed the brakes and cranked the wheel, spinning the truck around. The lobo flashed in the headlights.. The truck shot forward and he aimed the grill right at the damn thing. The monster lunged leeways but he caught a piece of it, nailing the hind end. Like a brick wall, the truck buckled and spun. Gallagher bounced hard and fought to keep it on the road. The truck balanced out. His chin ached from slamming into the wheel. He spun the truck back around but the headlights threw down on an empty road. He saw the dogs loping away through the freight cars, darting past the Maglite he had dropped out there. Of the wolf, there was no sign.

  The Cherokee started to clink and sputter. Gallagher couldn't catch his breath, couldn't think straight with the adrenaline still pumping his heart. Rain spackled the windshield. It pattered in through the shattered starboard window. He watched the seat darken with the raindrops, not knowing what to do next. Call the cops? Check the damage to the grill? Call the insurance company or just get it fixed himself?