Nicholas Pekearo
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE WOLFMAN
Copyright © 2008 by the Estate of Nicholas Pekearo
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pekearo, Nicholas.
The wolfman / Nicholas Pekearo.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-2026-1
ISBN-10: 0-7653-2026-6
1. Werewolves—Fiction. 2. Drifters—Fiction. 3. Serial murderers—
Fiction. 4. Tennessee—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.E357W65 2008
813’.6.—dc22
2008003984
First Edition: May 2008
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
EDITOR’S NOTE
I had the great fortune of meeting Nicholas Pekearo two years before he died, and right off the bat, I knew I liked him. In the span of just a few minutes, we managed to find common ground. We both loved the horror films of the mid to late 1970s and the early 1980s. We both grew up reading comics. Hell, we even liked the same novelists. I was told he was a cop, but when I asked him about it, he sort of chuckled and went on to explain his role as a volunteer police officer with the Auxiliary NYPD. At first I really didn’t get it. I asked him silly, childish questions, like “Do you carry a gun?” and “Have you ever been fired at?” He laughed them off, explaining that as an Auxiliary police officer he did much the same stuff a paid cop would do, that he didn’t carry a gun and wasn’t assigned a bulletproof vest but had saved up for one on his own. It finally sunk in when he admitted that the police volunteer work served as a great inspiration for his writing. More important, he felt that he was doing something right with his service, that it filled some sort of void. He was giving back to the community that nurtured him.
As an editor, I get a lot of folks who ask me if I would look at their work, and it’s hard to say no. But most of the time, they’re just blowing hot air and never hand anything over. So when I asked Nick for a look at some of his writing, I figured the odds of his showing me anything were slim. I was wrong.
He first hit me with a novel he called The Savior (which I found out after his death was his second; his first he called Redbird). It was a first-person serial killer story, and the narrative unfolded through audiotape confessions of the killer’s crimes. It was dark as hell, often funny, and altogether brutal. It was rough, as Nick was still learning how to tell a story in novel form, but the voice was amazing. He had the ability to create these sick and wounded characters but somehow give them souls, ones that you felt might be worth saving, regardless of their crimes.
We met again and I proceeded to break down my reactions to The Savior. He fielded my criticism like a pro and quickly started telling me about the new novel he was working on, which would eventually become The Wolfman. He imagined The Wolfman as the start of a series that would take the main character, Marlowe Higgins, an essentially kindhearted man burdened with the werewolf curse, on the road as he coped with his affliction and tried desperately to find a way to reverse it. And no matter how much he fought it, every full moon he would have to kill. I thought of it as the Incredible Hulk with a raucous metal attitude. Like Bruce Banner, he would travel from town to town, trying to run from himself but constantly finding trouble—sadistic serial killers, neo-Nazi vampires, demented wizards, and insane alchemists. Those were just some of the encounters Nick envisioned for Marlowe. It simply sucks he never got to take Marlowe that far.
On the night of March 14, 2007, Nick was shot and killed while on duty as an Auxiliary officer in the neighborhood he grew up in, New York City’s Greenwich Village. A madman entered a restaurant, armed to the teeth with over ninety rounds of ammunition. He killed the restaurant’s bartender, then took to the streets of Greenwich Village. Nick and his partner, Eugene Marshalik, attempted to stop him after he crossed their path. They pursued the armed killer, though they themselves were unarmed. The killer unloaded. Nick was shot six times: One bullet was stopped by the vest he wore; the others weren’t. Eugene was shot once in the head and died in the street. In a matter of moments, the madman was gunned down and killed by the NYPD. Nick died later that night in the hospital where he was born.
Just four days before he was killed, I had dinner with Nick and he gave me his latest round of revisions on The Wolfman. Apart from our author/editor relationship, Nick and I were becoming great friends. In the months it had taken me to read and respond to his first draft of The Wolfman, Nick had gone ahead and written another novel, The Invisible Boy, about a tortured teenager who shoots up his high school, which he had handed me in January. That’s how prolific he was. He never stopped writing. That was his dream. His mother told me that when he was a child and was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, among “a pizza pie man” and “a stunt man,” “writer” always found its way onto the list. As an adult, he set his sights there and never looked back.
It goes without saying that Nick was a hero that night on the streets of New York. But his heroism, for me, goes beyond that sacrifice. Every time we met, he reminded me of why I got involved in book publishing: to tell great stories and meet great people. Nick was well on his way to a terrific career as a writer, and the best was yet to come. It is with great pride that I present to you Nicholas Pekearo’s The Wolfman. You did it, Nick. Here it is…. Rock on.
PROLOGUE
Let me paint a picture for you: The full moon was bulbous and yellow like the blind and rotted eye of a witch that peered down from the murky sky with bad intentions, and a million little stars shone down on the sleepy Southern town of Evelyn. The breeze was gentle and cool, carrying on it the scent of flowers and wet earth from the recent rain spell. The only thing missing was the children singing hymns, and I’m sure it would have been enough to make someone happy to be alive.
Bill Parker was driving down Old Sherman Road, a four-lane blacktop that went right around the edge of the whole town in a near-perfect circle. Driving in the dead of night was one of his many compulsive habits, but this one was rather bad. He did it often, about four nights a week, and I say it was a bad habit for a very specific reason.
Unfortunately, I won’t tell you what that reason is just yet.
Everyone in town knew he drove when he couldn’t sleep. His neighbors on Bunker Street knew it because his beat-up Oldsmobile starting up in the middle of the night would, with the exception of the crickets, be the only noise on the block.
The cops knew his routine too. They’d pulled him over for speeding at two, three in the morning more times than they could count, which may or may not have meant anything, considering the kind of town it was, but still. The number was considerable. They let him get away with it after a while too. They knew he’d never stop, but aside from that, Bill Parker wasn’t the kind of guy that most cops wanted to ticket. He was, after all, an important member of the community, being the coach of the baseball team over at Bailey High and all. I think a lot of the cops felt that if they gave him a ticket it would jinx the team. They lost just about as often as there was a virgin birth.
Hell, even I knew about
Bill Parker and his odd driving habit. I only knew him as an infrequent customer at my restaurant, but gossip travels through the air in small towns like the smell of burning leaves.
Bill Parker always had a lot on his mind. He was the kind of guy that seemed to relish his worries, and if he ever found that he only had two or three things in his life to worry about, that would worry him too. He’d go so far as to turn little things into life-or-death situations.
Let me relate to you my one dealing with him, and you’ll see what I mean. Bear in mind this was about a year before he died. One time he came into the restaurant and ordered a sandwich. Roast beef, perhaps, though I never really cared to remember what it was exactly. Details were never my strong point, me being a broad strokes kind of guy myself. Anyway, he ordered this sandwich and I figured, well, this here’s a man that deserves a damn good sandwich, seeing as how the team he coached had just scored yet another victory, so me being the kindly sonofabitch that I am, what did I do? I put the fancy mustard on the sandwich for him—the kind with all the little seeds and herbs and so on in there.
Bill Parker went and flipped his lid when he took a bite of that sandwich, like the balance of the universe had been shocked into an irreparable state. Like the Earth itself had been thrown off its axis and was now on an inevitable crash course with the sun.
“Jesus Christ,” he shrieked. “What are you trying to do to me?”
He acted like I’d put battery acid in the fucking thing.
I apologized, of course, and went on and made the man another sandwich. This time I used the regular mustard, the kind that looks like yellow paint but can sometimes smell like someone had pissed in their pants.
I thought nothing of this incident—it was like watching a woman fuss over a broken nail in a room full of amputees—because the fact of the matter is, if anyone on this stinking planet has anything to worry about, it’s me.
Fuck it, the point of it all is that Bill Parker was the kind of man that couldn’t sleep at night, and in some crazy way, driving a few times around Old Sherman Road like it was a goddamn racetrack when everyone else was sleeping made him feel like everything was going to be okay. That’s why he was driving that night.
He was not yet forty, but Father Time had not been kind to his face or his features. He’d lost most of his hair when he was still young enough to look like he couldn’t buy alcohol, but the missing hair from his head slowly resurfaced on different parts of his body, like his chest and back. Behind that hairy back he was called “the Pad” by a lot of the kids at the school. “The Pad” was short for “the Brillo Pad.”
When Parker would make one of his young charges run a few extra laps for some form of tardiness or other, the student would later remark to a friend of his, “The fucking Pad had another wild hair growing somewhere today.”
Bill Parker didn’t know the students had come up with a name for him until he heard his colleagues refer to him as “the Pad” in the teachers’ lounge one day. He pretended he didn’t hear them because that’s the kind of guy he was.
All that body hair must have kept him pretty warm, because he was always sweating at least a little. It was by the grace of God alone that a girl named Mary Beth had thought enough of the man to marry him and go through the pain and the grief of having his children.
His wife proved through the years that she had the strength and determination to keep the house up and running and the kids well-dressed and fed, but Bill Parker let it all go, and focused on his work at the school. Whereas Mary Beth fought hard to get her librarian’s figure back after giving birth to two chunky boys, Bill Parker put weight on and never lost it. In fact, it was as if the extra weight he’d put on was lonely, so he added to it now and then so it could have some company. At first he claimed the weight was from what he liked to call “sympathy pains,” but that stopped working as an excuse when Mary Beth got back into her old jeans, and the boys were old enough to carry on a meaningful conversation with the minister from the Lutheran church that Mary Beth always tried to drag her husband to. The fact was that Bill had gotten complacent in his marriage.
I digress, back to the picture: Bill Parker checked the time on his cheap watch. It was getting on to two o’clock in the morning. That made it Tuesday, exactly fourteen weeks since he came home from work one evening to find that his lovely wife had taken their two boys and moved to her parents’ house over in Edenburgh.
Bill sighed.
It didn’t feel like it had been that long, but enough had happened since then that he knew his calculations were correct, like his realization that he didn’t know how to operate the washing machine in his basement. Now that he was all alone, his wardrobe took on the appearance of ill-handled rags, or a collection of aging bathroom mats at a free clinic. The undershirt he was wearing was clean enough, but the daylight-blue pajama bottoms he had on reeked of meals he couldn’t remember eating.
He decided that he’d make one more loop around Evelyn on Old Sherman Road, and when he got home, he’d try to pick up all the beer cans that littered his two-story home like mouse droppings.
He’d at least try.
Bill Parker frowned, thinking about what he’d done, probably, and continued driving east. He’d just passed Larchmont Street. On his left were the blocks of little one-story homes, all wood and dust and ancient glass. On his right were the woods—deep and dense and always stirring. The woods pulsated and moved like the ocean at night. You couldn’t see it, but you could feel it, like something bad was about to happen.
On this night, the woods were blacker than the sky. As Bill Parker drove along, he looked up at the moon and smiled. Something about it made him feel at peace, I suppose. At that point he reached down with his right hand and turned on the radio. It was already set to KBTO—Evelyn’s classics station—and once he raised the volume, he knew he was listening to Johnny Cash’s “Daddy Sang Bass.”
That was fine with Bill.
Up ahead, something moved. Bill Parker put his eyes back on the road, and that’s when he saw it.
It sprang from the black woods like a mountain bird, as if that dark wall of leaves, branches, and limbs had rejected this thing and violently spat it out on the pavement. Bill Parker caught sight of it in the bright glare of his headlights and hit the brakes hard.
At first he thought it was a deer, but the creature didn’t look like any deer one would be familiar with. In the back of his mind, he wondered what the hell it was he was looking at, but there was no time to think of such things.
Bill made a noise like a woman as the car skidded along on melting rubber tires, and just when he thought he was going to make violent contact with this thing on the road, it leapt up and came down on the hood of his car. The sound of it was as if someone had dropped a piano. Bill Parker saw that this animal had two feet, not the four that he was expecting, even hoping for. Bill’s mouth fell open, not making a sound this time.
It was a look the beast had seen a thousand times. In another day and age it may have relished the fear it provoked, but now it was all business. The beast gave Bill Parker a look like he was a nail that needed hammering.
What Bill Parker saw wasn’t a man by any stretch of the word, but that’s all he could think of. The beast on the hood of his car was crouched down and leering in at him through the dirty windshield with bloodred eyes. Judging from the size of it, Bill figured it had to be about seven feet tall. It was backlit by the moon, so he couldn’t make out any fine details, but he could see that it was covered in hair, almost like it was an honest-to-God, look-it-up-in-the-dictionary kind of animal. He also saw that the beast had nails at the ends of its fingers that were so goddamn big they could cut through a tree.
Over the hum of the motor, Parker could hear the monster breathing. Deep, seething breaths. Like he owed the thing money.
The beast growled, raised one of its fur-lined arms, and punched a hole through the middle of the windshield. The tiny shards of broken glass pelted Bill Parker lik
e raindrops. He let out a guttural cry. Before he could do anything one might call “useful,” the beast had dug its nails into the meat of Bill’s left shoulder and was making progress on separating the arm from the rest of the body. Bill screamed again. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but it soon dawned on him that his life was dangerously close to being a thing of the past. Thus, as he told his team, it was time to get busy.
He slid down in his seat and ducked to his right, trying to break the beast’s grip, but he couldn’t. Blood came out of him in spurts along the dash. Red waves caught the moonlight. Bill Parker could feel the heat of the blood as it rolled across his chest and neck in waves. All the while he screamed, and, little by little, the beast inched its head through the space where the windshield used to be. The smell of sweat and wet animal hair filled the interior of the car. As Bill Parker breathed in shallow gasps, the stench of it almost made him sick.
He struggled a few more inches and opened up the glove box. Behind the cube-shaped box of tissues, the rubber gloves, the baby oil, and the car manual was a small, black handgun. It was a peashooter by my standards. I was in the army and I used to pick my teeth after meals with bigger guns than that. In fact, I think most ladies in bad areas would have been embarrassed to carry around such a thing. Our friend Bill apparently didn’t have such prejudices.
He raised the gun and aimed it at the shape above him. Hefired once and saw a brilliant crimson mist saturate the air. The beast howled and drew back. Its grip on Bill’s shoulder loosened considerably. Bill fired three more times in rapid succession, and a spray of blood rained down upon him. The beast fell back, rolled across the hood, and in the night, Bill heard the thing hit the road in front of the car.
If not for Johnny Cash, it would have been perfectly quiet. Bill Parker was breathing heavily, but it took a minute for him to notice it. After that, he heard the crickets in the night, the hum of the motor, the wind playing with the leaves, the sounds of the night birds as they hooted and swooped past trees and snatched away their furry little snacks.
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