Werewolf Cop (16 page)

“Did you collect leaves when you were in school, Daddy?”

Zach caught the questioning tone just in time, and went back through his mind until he could remember what the boy had asked him. “I did,” he said. “I remember doing just that thing. We glued them in a big book with colored pages.”

“That's what I'm going to do,” said Tom. “Mommy, can we get colored pages so I can glue the leaves too?”

And while she answered him, Zach returned compulsively to his memories like an addict to his drug. He remembered the roaches on Grimhouse's body fleeing as backup arrived, clattering away into the broken wall as the door burst open and the uniforms charged in. The roaches were gone from the hallway too; that whole sea of them had receded, and there was no sign of them anywhere. No trace that they had ever been there except for the bites on his calf and ankle, the only bites that had really broken through the skin. He had gotten one of the EMS guys to disinfect them for him.

What the hell did that?

Some sort of gigantic cockroach or something.

These buildings, man. The stuff that comes out of them. I swear, there's things been growing in the walls here since dinosaurs walked the earth.

Maybe so. But that didn't explain the way they'd attacked him, the way they'd poured out of their secret places, scrambling toward him, scrambling in his direction only, while Abend walked calmly away. It was as if the bugs were acting in service to the gangster's will, as if they were instruments of his malice. Zach knew that could not have been true, and so he felt it must not have been true, that he must have imagined it. And yet, though he kept going over and over it in his mind, he couldn't bring his memories into line with the requirements of reality. He told himself it might have had something to do with his fever, might have been an aftereffect of that wave of fever that had hit him on the bridge. But he wasn't convinced. He had seen what he'd seen—it was no illusion. And if the bugs had been real—if the malice of their attack had been real—what else was real that couldn't be, what else was real that he had chalked up to the fever? What about that impossible executioner standing on the bridge? What about that meeting with Gretchen Dankl in the clearing in the woods? He had let that memory slip away as dreams slip away, but if the attack of the roaches in the hall was real. . . . What the hell? What the hell was going on?

When he put his boy to bed, Zach lay down beside him. He read him
The Cat in the Hat
while Tom snuggled up on his chest. Even when the book was done, Zach continued to lie there with his arm around his son. He knew the boy was breathing him in, whether the boy himself knew it or not. Zach's own father had died when he was only eight. A Green Beret missing behind enemy lines in Afghanistan—Zach could never learn much more. He still remembered the smell of the man when he would tuck him in at night. You got to get the smell of your father in you when you're little, he thought, lying there until the boy was snoring softly. It's what makes your spine grow strong.

He found his wife, as usual after the children's bedtime, washing the dishes at the kitchen sink. He came up behind her and put his arms around her and held her close.

“Oh my,” she said, leaning back against him.

“Oh my,” Zach breathed into her ear.

She turned around in the circle of his embrace. She reached up to touch his cheek with her wet fingers. “I heard on the radio they found a body that might be connected to the Paz murders. They're saying it's some kind of gang war or something. Were you part of that?”

“I found the body.”

She studied his face, concerned. She was already worried about him, back at work so soon after his fever.

“I thought you seemed kind of far away tonight,” she said. “Well, you sit down now and tell me all about it.”

It was the last thing he wanted to do. He didn't even want to
think
about it anymore, though he knew he couldn't stop—and he definitely didn't want to talk about it. It was too much effort, and there was too much he would have to leave out. The roaches—he couldn't tell Grace about that, could he? She'd think he was hallucinating. She'd insist on his going back to the doctors. And he wasn't going to end their evening with a description of Grimhouse either, the body hanging from that beam with the creatures crawling on him.

But this was their arrangement—that he would tell her about his job—so he sat at the kitchen counter with a bottle of beer and said what he could. He told her about the thugs blasting away at him with their cannon-like Dezzies and about his confrontation with Abend.

“He was right there in front of me,” Zach said. “That close, but . . .” he added, vaguely, “I was pinned down and couldn't go after him.”

As quickly as he could, he got to the part about his confrontation with Goulart in the aftermath. That was good gossip—a woman would like that, he figured. It would distract her from the inexplicable strangeness he'd carefully omitted from the rest of his story.

“Broadway was sorely P.O.'d I hadn't brought him with me. I can't rightly blame him. He was sticking his finger in my chest. Whisper-yelling, you know, so the NYPD detectives wouldn't hear us going at it. ‘Why didn't you call me? What did you think you were doing coming out here alone?' I told him I thought it was a bum lead and I didn't want to waste his time. Pretty lame excuse. I never even called him.”

“Well, it's just not right of Rebecca to put you in that position,” Grace said. “You can't work with a partner you don't trust.”

“I know it.”

“She's just trying to enlist you against him, because she hasn't got the courage to stand up to him on her own and she knows everyone respects you. That's weak leadership.” She plunked a glass in the dishwasher with an extra fillip of indignation. “If those gangsters had blown your head off, it would have been partly her fault for making you feel like you had to go there with no backup 'cause you couldn't trust Martin.”

“No, it was my fault. It was a dumb play.”

“Well, now that she
has
put you in that position, you're gonna have to decide one way or the other. Either y'all can trust him or not, either he's your partner or not. You can't go on like this, baby, you'll get yourself killed. Stupid woman!” she finished, meaning Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell.

Zach tilted the beer bottle to his lips and let a taste of the foam touch his tongue, but really he was watching her over the top of the brown glass. It suddenly occurred to him that she was upset about the gunfire, about the thugs blasting at him. Well, of course she was! It went to show how little insight he had into her inner life, that even an idiotically obvious thought like that struck him with the force of revelation. Sure, he knew a cop's wife worries all the time and has to be strong and so on—he knew it theoretically. But most of the time he didn't see it realistically. He didn't think about it from her side, didn't think about the effort involved, or the actual anxiety she must feel. Grace was always so cheerful and gentle and good-tempered that it didn't often occur to him that she might have to struggle to be that way, to fight down her worry and her flashes of temper. He imagined her praying over it. He assumed she did, but now for a moment he actually imagined her on her knees ardently begging God to give her the strength and patience she needed to do her job as his wife. It occurred to him that if she did pray like that, she never told him about it. She never even mentioned it.

“What do
you
think?” he asked her, letting his bottle hand sink down to the counter.

She was using the faucet hose to wash scraps down into the garbage disposal. She was watching the swirl of the water fiercely, intensely—probably focusing on that so he wouldn't see how upset she was about the gunplay.

“What do you mean?” she asked him. “What do I think about Martin? I think Rebecca ought to get herself some proof before she goes on ahead and opens her big mouth.”

Zach nodded slowly. “But do
you
think he could've gone bad?”

She watched her own hand—fiercely, intensely—as she waggled the hose back into its hole. When she was done, she plucked her hair from her mouth with her fingers and blew it from her eyes, giving her something else to do besides meet his gaze.

“Well, baby, I don't want to make things any worse for you,” she said.

“But you think he might've, then.”

“Well . . . I think he
might've
,” she said. And when he flinched, she said, “Oh, baby, I know how much you like Martin. . . .”

“Well, he's saved my life more than once, Grace.”

“And God bless him for that, for sure. For sure. And I know how you like how he says all those rude things other people won't say. . . .”

“Well, it brings out the ugly truth sometimes, that's all.”

“I know it does. I know. And a man doesn't like to be told what he can and can't talk about, like he's in church all the time. It goes against his natural grain. But . . .” She searched for the words. “. . . I mean, anyone can say a true thing by being mean on people. Can't they? We're all sinners, after all.”

“We are. That's for certain. Still. . . .”

“I know,” she said. “I know. And I don't mean to talk Martin down. It's just. . . .”

“What, then?”

“Well, baby, you got a goodness in you he doesn't have. No, it's true, anyone can see it,” she said, in answer to the look on his face—because he was grimacing at the memory of that night he'd betrayed her with Margo, he was thinking he had no goodness in him at all. “You got a—integrity in you he doesn't. Probably 'cause your mama put The Word in you.”

“Oh, there's plenty of fine folks without religion, Gracie, you know that.”

“I know,” she said, though she didn't sound convinced.

“You've always been judgmental on Broadway 'cause of his women and the divorce, and all that.”

“It's not that. . . .”

“That's just his way, that's all. He's suffered for it, Lord knows.”

“It's not that,” she insisted. “It's just. . . . Well, there comes a time in a person's life when doing wrong just makes perfect sense to him. And if he hasn't got . . . well,
something
in him—” He knew she was going to say
The Word
but had amended it to suit his more broad-minded view. “If he hasn't got
something
in him that makes him say ‘Well, I don't care what sense it makes, I'm not doing wrong anyhow,' then that's when the Enemy can make his move on him.”

“And you're saying that's happened to Broadway—”

“No. I'm just saying it could've. It might've. It wouldn't . . . you know, shock me if it had.”

Zach had an awful nightmare that night. He couldn't remember it later, not all of it, but it had something to do with one of those war documentaries he liked to watch on television sometimes—only, in the dream, he was inside the documentary, walking through its black-and-white scenes. He was in one of the Nazi death camps—he remembered that. There was a bulldozer pushing through a pile of corpses—so many corpses—hundreds and hundreds of marble-gray bodies. They were drained of all color and spirit, but their eyes were still open, their stares lifeless yet somehow accusatory. It was as if they were watching him as he watched them being collected by the 'dozer in ghastly piles of murdered flesh. The stench of offal and rot was overwhelming.

Dominic Abend was not in the scene himself, but Zach sensed him there—sensed in that horrible nightmare way that if he turned around, the killer would be standing right behind him, wearing his Nazi uniform and grinning in amusement as he'd grinned in the hallway just that afternoon. Zach was afraid of that grin—that's what the dream was about, he realized later. He was so afraid of the mind behind that grin, and the black world inside that mind, that the fear threatened to unman him. He had sensed that black world for a moment in the hallway. He had felt the jolt of its utter emptiness just before Abend had stepped into view. It was a world, it was a mind, in which conscience was the discarded custom of lesser men, in which cutting a child's throat and nursing a baby were of equal value, depending on what you felt like or who got the benefit. It was terrifying to him.

In the dream, Zach struggled against the compulsion to turn and face the gangster—and so he went on watching the hundreds of bodies being bulldozed—and that's how he came to focus on one pair of eyes among all those staring corpse-witnesses—a young woman's eyes—staring directly back at him—until she blinked!

Sweet Jesus, she's still alive!

Whereupon he woke, with a little gasp, his heart hammering.

He lay on his back, taking steady breaths to calm himself—and, as he did, a tendril of that death-camp stench wafted into his nostrils.

He sat up hard, searching the darkness, the thudding flutter of his pulse loud in his ears. But he was in his bedroom, just in his bedroom, and the smell was dissipating with the dream. Relieved, he was about to lie back down.

Then he saw something—someone—in the shadows.

A figure was sitting in the armchair in the far corner by the dark window, a frail, childlike figure, slumped in a posture of defeat. Zach glanced over at Grace, to make sure she was still in bed with him and, yes, there she was, curled on her side right by him, turned away, breathing lightly.

And the figure was still there in the chair. A woman, he saw now as his eyes adjusted to the dark. The death smell coming off her was faint but unmistakable. She lifted her hand. She lit a match, making Zach recoil from the glare. She held the flame to the cigarette bobbing between her lips. Her face in the orange match-light was more horrible than anything Zach had ever seen, because she was so obviously dead and yet alive.