“It’s your dime, sweetheart,” I said.
She didn’t say anything. I picked up the Tabasco sauce and shook it over the meat loaf to kill the taste. The Specials sign over the kitchen window doesn’t say what kind of meat is in it, and I’m not brave enough to ask. I’m reasonably sure that whatever it was ran on four legs. Beyond that, I wouldn’t give Vegas odds on it being a cow or a pig.
“You want to sit down?” I asked.
Still nothing, so I turned and saw why. Her face was as pale as milk. She wore too much makeup and clearly didn’t know how to put it on. Little girl–style—too much of everything, none of the subtlety that comes with experience. Glitter tube top and spandex micro mini. Expensive shoes. Clothes couldn’t have been hers. Maybe an older sister, maybe a friend who was more of a party girl. They looked embarrassing on her. Sad. She had one hoop earring in her right ear. The left earlobe was torn. No earring. No other jewelry that I could see. No purse, no phone, no rings. That one earring damn near broke my heart.
“You know how this works?” I asked.
Nothing. Or maybe a little bit of a nod.
“It’s a one-way ticket, so you’d better be sure, kid.”
She lifted her hand to touch her throat. Long, pale throat. Like a ballet dancer. She was a pretty kid, but she would have been beautiful as a woman. Would have been. Her fingers brushed at a dark line that ran from just under her left ear and went all the way around to her right. She tried to say something. Couldn’t. The line opened like a mouth, and it said something obscene. Not in words. What flowed from between the lips of that mouth was wet and in the only bright color she could see.
She wanted to show me. She wanted me to see. She needed me to understand.
I saw. And I understood.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Light flashed through the dark, and Rain saw Betty standing there with a flashlight.
“Okay, folks,” said the waitress, “looks like we’re going to close up shop. Meals are on us ’cause the register’s electric, too.”
Someone gave a nervous laugh. No one else did.
“Hope you brought umbrellas,” continued the waitress.
Rain and her friends got out of the booth and joined the other patrons filing toward the door. Everyone had an umbrella, but the winds outside promised destruction on any such frail devices.
“Guys,” said Rain as they huddled for a moment under the outside awning, rain lashing them hard as blown sand, “let’s meet at my place tomorrow at two, okay?”
She wrapped her arms around the others, pulling them all into a huge, tight, enduring hug. They broke apart slowly, kissing cheeks, squeezing hands. Gay Bob and Yo-Yo hurried off in one direction, and Straight Bob limped to his car. Rain lingered for a moment, watching them go, and then she hunched her shoulders, ducked her head, and ran for home. The downpour beat down with steady brutality.
Above them, the flocks of nightbirds crouched on the wires and rooftops, their ragged wings pummeled by the rain, watching, watching, watching. Then they launched themselves into the storm. A hundred ugly forms that struggled against the winds and followed the four friends.
INTERLUDE SIXTEEN
MONK’S STORY, PART 2
Later, after the dead girl faded away and left me to my coffee and mystery meat, I stared at the floor where she’d stood. There was no mark, no drops of blood. Nothing. Eve came back and gave me my check. I tossed a ten down on a six-dollar tab and shambled out into the night. Behind me, I heard Eve call goodbye.
“Night, Monk.”
I blew her a kiss like I always do. Eve’s a good gal. Minds her own business. Keeps counsel with her own shit. Two kids at home and she works double shifts most nights. One of those quiet heroes who do their best to not let their kids be like them. I liked her.
It was fifteen minutes past being able to go home and get a quiet night’s sleep. The rain had stopped, so I walked for a while, letting the night show me where to go. The girl hadn’t been able to tell me, but that didn’t matter. I’d seen her, smelled the blood. Knew the scent. Walked.
Found myself midway up a back street, halfway between I Don’t Know and Nobody Cares. Only a few cars by the curbs, but they were stripped hulks. Dead as the girl. Most of the houses were boarded up. Most of the boards had been pried loose by junkies or thieves looking to strip out anything they could. Copper pipes, wires, whatever. Couple of the houses had been torn down, but the rubble hadn’t been hauled off.
What the hell had that little girl been doing on a street like this?
I had a pocket flashlight on my key chain and used it to help me find the spot. It was there. A dark smudge on the sidewalk. Even from ten feet away I knew it was what I was looking for. There were footprints all over the place, pressed into the dirt, overlapping. Car tire tracks, too. The rain had wiped most of it away, smeared a lot of the rest, but it was there to be read. If I looked hard enough, I’d probably find the flapping ends of yellow crime scene tape, ’cause they never clean that stuff up. Not completely, and not in a neighborhood like this. Whole fucking area’s an active crime scene.
Doesn’t matter. That’s me bitching. I knelt by the smudge. That was what mattered. It was dried. Red turns to brown as the cells thicken and die. Smell goes away, too. At first, it’s the stink of freshly sheared copper, then it’s sweet, then it’s gone. Mostly gone. I can always find a trace. A whiff. And it was hers. Same scent. If I were a poet like Eliot, maybe I’d call it the perfume of innocence. Something corny like that. I’m not, so I don’t. It’s just blood. Even the rain couldn’t wash it away. I squatted there for a few minutes, listening to water drip from the old buildings. Letting the smells sink in deep enough so I could pin them to the walls of my head.
Back in the day, before I went off to play soldier, before I ditched that shit and went bumming along the pilgrim road trying to rewire my brain, smells never used to mean much. That changed. First time I didn’t die when an IED blew my friends to rags, I began to pay attention. Death smells different than life. Pain has its own smell.
So does murder. I stopped being able to not pay attention, if you can dig that. I lost the knack for turning away and not seeing.
There was a monk in Nepal who told me I had a gift. A crazy lady down in a shack near a fish camp in bayou country told me I had a curse. They were talking about the same thing. They’re both right, I suppose. A priest in a shitty church in Nicaragua told me I had a calling. I told him that maybe it was more like a mission. He thought about it and told me I was probably right. We were drinking in the chapel. That’s all that was left of the church. They don’t call them Hellfire missiles for nothing.
This girl had come to me. Couldn’t say what she wanted because of what they’d done to her. Didn’t matter. She said enough.
I dug my kit out of my jacket pocket, unzipped it. Uncapped a little glass vial, took the cork off the scalpel, and spent two minutes scraping as much of the blood as I could get into the vial. Then I removed the bottle of holy water, filled the dropper, and added seven drops. Always seven, no more, no less. That’s the way it works, and I don’t need to fuck with it. Then I put everything away, zipped up the case, and stood. My knees creaked. I’m looking at forty close enough to read the fine print. My knees are older than that.
Spent another twenty minutes poking around, but I knew I wasn’t going to find anything the cops hadn’t. They’re pretty good. Lots of experience with crime scenes around here. They even catch the bad guys sometimes. Not this time, though, or the girl wouldn’t have come to me.
The vial was the only thing that didn’t go back into the case. That was in my pants pocket. It weighed nothing, but it was fifty fucking pounds heavy. It made me drag my feet all the way to the tattoo parlor.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
The streets were pitch black, and Rain had to slow down to keep from running into parked cars and walls. Puddles soaked her shoes, splashed dirty water halfway up her body. It was so cold. A deep, penetratin
g cold that made her bones hurt. She staggered on sore ankles, trying to be careful when care was impossible. A few cars hissed by, their lights blinding her. The darkness was filling with sirens, and someone was screaming far away.
Then lights behind her threw her own shadow into her path, transforming her silhouette into a capering goblin shape. She half turned and saw a car coming toward her. Driving very slowly. The rain was so heavy and the headlights so bright that she could not tell a single thing about the car except that it was big.
Was it him?
He’s coming to get you, taunted her parasite.
“No,” she murmured and quickened her pace.
The car fell behind for a few minutes and then it, too, accelerated. Not fast enough to catch up, but enough to keep pace twenty yards behind her. Rain heard a strange noise above—like flapping cloth—but when she tried to look up, the wind attacked her umbrella, snapping the thin metal struts and ripping the silk cloth. Disgusted, Rain flung the dead umbrella away, and it landed in the middle of the street, clearly illuminated by the oncoming headlights.
“Shit.”
She started running again, and her block was up ahead, the line of tall, tired brownstones looking more welcome than they had ever been. The headlights painted her shadow on the wall of the apartment building on the corner, and she watched that ungainly figure diminish in size as she raced across the street. Joplin’s building was sixth on the row, hers was eighth. The car was coming faster now. She heard its engine growling.
“Please, please, please,” she panted as she sprinted toward her steps. She grabbed the rail and dragged herself up. Then she was through the door, turning to slam it shut, leaning on it, but also leaning close so she could see the car.
The car passed and Rain saw what it was.
A huge, black Cadillac cabriolet.
She whimpered and dropped to her knees, still pressing her hands against the door to hold it shut as if the very presence of it was a physical invasion of her haven.
The car vanished into the storm.
A second set of headlights swept the street ahead of another big black car. Rain stared at it wide-eyed. It was a battered old Jeep Wrangler.
“Monk?” she whispered.
The two cars were swallowed by the storm, and the darkness outside became absolute except for occasional flashes of lightning.
Rain got up, wiped water from her face and eyes, and then ran up to her flat, locked herself in, and shoved a chair under the door handle. Bug nearly turned herself inside out barking and jumping. The power was still out, so Rain used her phone to find a flashlight, candles, and matches. With the flashlight in one hand and her knife in the other, she checked the bathroom, the closets, under the bed. Nothing.
Doctor Nine was not there because the monster was out in the storm.
And Monk was following him. Why would he? How could he even know?
Or was the strange detective with the monster?
INTERLUDE SEVENTEEN
MONK’S STORY, PART 3
“Hey, Monk,” said Patty Cakes when she heard the little bell over the door.
“Hey,” I said and dragged a stool over, and sat down. Patty and me go way back. She’s one of my people, the little circle of folks I actually trust. We met the year I came back from Southeast Asia, and she spotted something in me from the jump. Bought me my first meal at the Delta.
I set the vial on her workstation. She looked at it for a moment, then got up, flipped the door sign to Closed and turned out the front lights. I stripped off my coat and shirt, caught sight of myself in the mirror. An unenamored lady once told me I look like a shaved ape. Fair enough. I’m bigger in the shoulders than most people, deeper in the chest, bigger in the arms. A lot of me is covered in ink. None of it’s really pretty. It’s all faces. Dozens and dozens of them. Small, about the size of a half dollar. Very detailed. Men and women. Kids. All ages and races. Faces.
She picked up the vial, held it up to the light, sighed, nodded. “Gimme a sec. Have a beer.”
I found two bottles of Fat Pauly’s, a craft lager from Iligan City in the Philippines, cracked them open, set one down on her worktable, lowered myself into her chair, and sipped the other. Good beer. Ice cold. I watched her as she removed the rubber stopper from the vial, used a sterile syringe to suck up every last drop, then she injected the mixture into a jar of ink. It didn’t matter that the ink was black. All my tats are monotone. White skin, black ink. Any color that shows up is from scars that still had some pink in them, but that would fade away after a while.
I drank my beer as Patty worked. Her eyes were open, but I knew that she wasn’t seeing anything in that room. Her pupils were pinpoints and there was sweat running down her cheeks. She began chanting something in Tagalog that I couldn’t follow. Not one of my languages. When she was done mixing, she stopped chanting and cut me a look.
“You want the strap?”
“No,” I said.
She held out a thick piece of leather. “Take the strap.”
“No.”
“Why do we go through this every time?”
“I don’t need it,” I told her.
“I do. Goddamn it, Monk, I can’t work with you screaming in my ear. Take the fucking strap.”
I sighed. “Okay. Give me the fucking strap.”
She slapped it into my palm, and I put it between my teeth. She got out a clean needle and set the bottle of ink close at hand. She didn’t ask me what I wanted her to draw. She knew.
I didn’t start screaming right away. Not until she began putting the features on the little girl’s face. We were both glad I had the fucking strap.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Midnight came and went, and the storm pounded the whole region. The lights sputtered on piecemeal and, as the last of the darkness was chased back, the storm, too, abated, leaving Brooklyn battered and gasping.
Monk spent an hour driving around and finally found himself back on the same block as the Diner. It was still closed, so he parked outside and lit another cigarette. He debated whether to make the call or not and decided what the hell. He punched the number and waited until she answered.
“Hello?” The young woman sounded drowsy, as if she’d just woken up. Monk glanced at his watch and winced at the time.
“Rain? This is Monk Addison,” he said. “Sorry to call so late.”
“No, it’s fine,” she said thickly.
There was a bedsheet rustle, and Rain coughed to clear her throat. He heard a whimper, too. A dog. Small and scared.
“You okay?” he asked.
Rain snorted. “Oh, sure, life’s a Disney movie.”
“Sorry.”
“I saw your car tonight,” she said. “Outside my place.”
“Yeah, I was driving around, running down some things.”
“Were you following another car?”
“What other car?”
There was a beat. Rain said, “Never mind. What’s up, Monk? Why are you calling?”
“You asked me to see if I could find out about the shower curtain.”
“Yes,” she barked, and all drowsiness was instantly gone from her voice. “Did you find out?”
“Yeah.”
“God, what was on it?”
“Before I answer that,” said Monk, “I have two things to say. Some information and a question. You steady enough to deal?”
“I guess so,” she said with no trace of confidence in her tone.
“First, there was another suicide,” he said. “Same place and same method the kid used. Not a shower curtain, but the same pipes.”
“Oh, my God! Who was it?”
“Remember the old Japanese guy? Him.” Monk described the scene and what was written on the walls and tattooed on the man’s body. “Your boyfriend, Joplin, found him and called the cops. No, wait, don’t yell. Joplin’s fine. He’s probably wrung out from answering a lot of questions he didn’t have answers for. He’ll probably tell you about it in th
e morning. And if you’re thinking about going over there right now, don’t. Detective Martini has the case. Might be best to avoid her.”
“Okay,” said Rain. “That’s awful, though. That poor man.”
“Yeah. Whatever’s going on over there is now a pattern, and cops really hate patterns. I do, too. I mean, sure, it helps frame a case and gives them more to go on than a single incident, but at the same time, it proves the case is bigger and stranger. Maybe this is a murder suicide with the Japanese guy as the perp who did the kid and killed himself in remorse. That would fit the evidence, but I don’t think that’s what it’s going to be. Don’t ask me why I think that. Call it gut.”
“That’s so terrible.”
“Yeah, and it’s sad. And it pisses me off.”
“Me, too,” agreed Rain, and it sounded as if she meant it. “You said there was something else. A question?”
“It’s about the shower curtain. Why do you want to know about the pattern? I need you to be straight with me, because right now, you’ve got a foot over the line into the suspect category. Martini will think that, and if you’re clean, then you need to be totally straight with me. You know something about the boy we saw at the morgue. That’s not a question, so don’t give me any more bullshit stories about blogs or concerned citizen or any of that. You know something, and if you want my help, then you need to trust me.”
“I never said I wanted your help.”
“No? Cool. Then I guess I’m wasting my time with this call just like I wasted my time finding out about that shower curtain.”
While he waited through a heavy silence, he lit a cigarette and blew smoke out into the wet wind blowing past his car.
“Okay,” she said. “Remember I said that you wouldn’t believe me?”
“Sure,” said Monk. “Remember how I answered?”
“Yes,” said Rain. “People say that, but they usually have limits on what they’re willing to believe. No, it’s more than that … people have limits on what they’re even willing to listen to.”
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