Nocturnal

by Scott Sigler

  Why the hell is my partner aiming at ME?

  “Drop it, Bryan! Drop it right fucking now or I will put you down!”

  Bryan’s rage evaporated into the cool night air. There was something in his hands. He looked. He was holding his gun, pressing the barrel against the forehead of a badly wounded sixteen-year-old boy.

  Bryan decocked the Sig Sauer, then slowly slid the weapon into his shoulder holster. The gun’s muzzle left an indented ring on the scorched, blistered forehead. The last of the boy’s energy seemed to fade away like a long, final breath — he closed his eyes.

  He didn’t move.

  Pookie scrambled onto the van’s hood, then up onto the now-crowded roof. The boy’s abdomen no longer pulsed blood.

  Pookie grabbed the boy’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. “Nothing, shit.” He looked up at Bryan. “What the fuck were you doing, man?”

  Bryan didn’t answer.

  Pookie turned back to the boy. Left palm on the back of his right hand, Pookie started chest compressions. Bryan’s gaze drifted toward the buildings on the other side of Geary Street, at heads and bodies silhouetted in lit-up apartment windows. People were watching.

  As Pookie pumped, he again looked at Bryan. “Were you going to kill this kid?”

  Bryan blinked a few times, trying to collect his thoughts, then the impact of Pookie’s words hit home.

  “No,” Bryan said. “He fell, he was on fire … I put out the flames. I didn’t touch him!”

  Pookie’s hands kept pumping. “Didn’t touch him except for putting your fucking gun against his forehead, right? And I saw you. I saw you jump up on this van. Eight feet up and you landed standing? How the hell did you do that?”

  What the fuck was Pookie talking about? Bryan couldn’t do that. No one could.

  The fever swept over him again, hotter than before, as if it was furious at being ignored and wanted payback. The aches pinched his joints, his muscles. His face felt wet and sticky. He touched his fingertips to his forehead — they came back covered in blood.

  Pookie kept pumping, his arms straight, his hands on the boy’s sternum. He stopped to press his fingers against the boy’s neck.

  Bryan waited, hoping Pookie would feel something there, but Pookie’s shaking head told him otherwise.

  “Still no pulse.” Pookie returned to chest compressions.

  The oncoming sirens screamed louder. Couldn’t be long now. Bryan watched Pookie try to save the boy. Maybe this was still the dream. Maybe if Bryan had given first aid right away instead of putting a gun in the boy’s face, the boy would still be alive.

  “Bryan, get off the van,” Pookie said.

  Red and blue lights cut the night as patrol cars turned onto Geary. Bryan looked down at the boy again — horribly burned, young body smashed from a four-story fall. If Bryan hadn’t dreamed about the kid, would this have happened? All that rage, all that hate … how could he feel that for someone he’d never even met?

  “Bryan!”

  Pookie’s yell yanked Bryan back into the moment.

  “Get down,” his partner said. “Let me handle this. You keep your mouth shut, let me do the talking, got it?”

  Bryan nodded. He slid off the van. Next thing he knew, he was sitting with his ass on the concrete sidewalk, his back against the building from which a flaming Jay Parlar had fallen to his death.

  Up on the van roof, Pookie kept pumping away on the boy’s chest. Pulse or no pulse, he would continue to do that until the paramedics arrived.

  Bryan closed his eyes.

  This was what it felt like to go insane.

  Alex Panos Gets Gone

  A half-block east of the ruined van, two teenage boys stood at the corner of Geary and Larkin, their heads peeking around just enough to watch the scene — four police cars, an ambulance and cops all over the place. One of the boys was much bigger than the other. The smaller one wore a black sweatshirt, hood pulled up over his head. His name was Issac Moses.

  The other boy wore a crimson jacket with gold sleeves and a gold BC on the chest. His name was Alex Panos, and he wanted to know just what the hell was going on.

  “Holy shit,” Issac said. “Alex, that cop, I thought he was gonna shoot Jay.”

  Alex nodded. “I recognize those pigs. The one in black is Bryan Clauser. The fat one is Pookie something or other. They were at my house.”

  “At your house? Holy shit, man, holy shit. What are we gonna do?”

  Alex didn’t know. He glanced at his friend’s plain black sweatshirt. Issac thought someone wanted to kill anyone wearing BoyCo colors, so he didn’t wear them. Alex had called Issac a pussy for that, but after seeing what happened to Jay, maybe it was a good idea to lose the Boston College gear after all.

  “Alex, man, I’m scared,” Issac said. “Maybe we should go to the cops.”

  “Dumb shit, those are cops.”

  “Yeah, but you said they were in your house, and they didn’t try anything, right? And that cop in black, he didn’t actually shoot Jay. Besides, both cops were on the ground — they didn’t set Jay on fire and throw him off the fucking roof of his own building, right?”

  Alex looked back down the street. One of the cops that had visited his apartment, the one that dressed all in black, was in the back of the ambulance. A paramedic was working on his face. The other one, the fat chink, he was also around somewhere but Alex didn’t see him.

  Jay was still on the van roof. It didn’t look like he was moving. A second paramedic was up there with him, but he didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry.

  “I think Jay’s dead,” Alex said.

  Issac’s face wrinkled, his blue eyes narrowed and started to tear up. “Dead? Jay? Holy shit, man!”

  “Be quiet,” Alex said. “I gotta think.”

  Issac was right about one thing: the cop hadn’t actually shot Jay. But maybe that was only because Jay was already dying from the fall. If Alex and Issac had been just a couple of minutes earlier, would they be dead as well? What really mattered was that those two cops had come to Jay’s place at three in the morning, and now Jay was dead.

  Issac tugged at Alex’s sleeve.

  “Alex, come on,” Issac said. “Let’s go to the cops. Other cops, I mean. We’re in a lot of fucking trouble.”

  Alex shook his head. “No way. Whatever cop we talk with, those two are going to know, and then they’ll come for us. Cops stick with cops — they don’t give a shit about the law or justice or whatever. We have to find a place to hide for a while. That, and we have to find guns.”

  Alex ducked back behind the building, out of sight of the cops swarming around Geary Street. He started walking north on Larkin, then stopped, reached back, grabbed Issac and dragged him away from the corner.

  Another Day, Another Body

  Pookie went through the motions. Part of his brain paid close attention to details. Another part directed the other cops, sending uniforms where they needed to go to collect information. And yet another part was lost in the bizarreness of his partner, of what this all meant.

  Pookie was overweight, out of shape and slow, but he wasn’t that slow. He’d been maybe two blocks behind Bryan. Pookie had turned the corner just in time to see Jay Parlar’s flaming body sail into the night air. Bryan was down on the sidewalk when the kid’s body smashed into the van. No way Bryan could have thrown the kid off that roof.

  Pookie had closed in, his chest burning, his stomach heaving — he really had to do something about getting back into shape — and then, Bryan’s crazy leap. To leap that high, maybe Bryan had jumped up, then pushed off the side of the van or the van’s door handle, like those parkour guys who could run up the side of a building. Bryan had been far away, it had been dark save for the streetlights, the boy had been on fire … plenty of variables to play tricks with what Pookie had seen.

  Because a man couldn’t jump eight feet straight up.

  Bryan’s feet had cleared the van roof. He had dropped down lightly, one black Nike o
n either side of the facedown, burning kid. Bryan had whipped off his jacket and used it to smother the flames. He’d been helping the boy.

  But when Bryan had rolled the kid over, everything changed. Pookie knew — he knew — that if he hadn’t gotten there when he had, Bryan would have put a bullet through Jay Parlar’s brain.

  The crime-scene investigations team was already finished with their work. According to them, Jay would have died even if he hadn’t been set on fire and tossed off a four-story building. The boy had been stabbed while still up on the roof, severing an artery — he never had a chance.

  When the morgue van took the body away, Pookie had gone up to the roof to see things for himself. There, he’d found symbols written in Jay Parlar’s blood.

  The same symbols they’d found written in Oscar Woody’s blood.

  Back down on the street, Pookie found Bryan sitting in the back of an ambulance, a paramedic examining his head. He looked dazed. No one gave that a second thought, though — the other cops automatically wrote it off as a natural reaction to seeing a burning kid thrown off a building.

  Pookie scratched the stubble on his cheek as he stared at his partner. He’d tried hard to rationalize all of this crap, tried to come up with a normal explanation, but it was time to accept what he’d witnessed with his own eyes.

  The dreams were for real.

  It was no trick, no gimmick. Was Bryan psychic? Pookie wasn’t ready to believe that just yet, but after tonight he couldn’t rule it out. He’d been in Bryan’s apartment when Bryan dreamed about Jay Parlar. No evildoer had slipped in and whispered in Bryan’s ear. There were no microphones in the wall, no electrodes in the pillow. Bryan had dreamed a kid was in danger. Then, he’d shot out of the apartment, tried to save that kid just as any cop would do. An abnormal method of discovery, but a normal reaction.

  As fucked up as it was, Pookie felt infinitely better. Bryan had not killed Jay Parlar — if he hadn’t killed Jay, then he probably hadn’t killed Oscar Woody. Probably. Bryan had no alibi for Oscar. He could have killed Oscar and someone else could have killed Jay.

  Which would mean, what? That Bryan had accomplices? That maybe he was working with other killers? Even if that was true, why would he murder those kids? Pookie spent at least fifty hours a week with Bryan. Before last night, Bryan clearly hadn’t know a thing about Oscar Woody or Jay Parlar or BoyCo. There was no motive.

  Fuck. None of this made any sense.

  Patrol officers were already in buildings on both sides of the street, knocking on apartment doors, looking for witnesses. Pookie didn’t have any hope of finding someone who had been up at three A.M. and had seen the deal go down.

  There were no witnesses.

  Wait … that wasn’t right — there was one person who had seen Jay Parlar up on that roof.

  Bryan had. In his dreams.

  Pookie walked to the ambulance. The paramedic was just finishing up, wiping down the cut on Bryan’s forehead. Bryan’s black clothes helped hide the fact that he’d bled like a stuck pig, even left a trail of droplets all the way from his apartment to here.

  Pookie leaned in and looked at the sutured wound. “Hey, is that just three stitches?”

  The paramedic nodded. “Yeah. Not too bad.”

  “Three stitches for all that blood? Bryan, what are you, a hemophiliac?”

  Bryan shrugged.

  “I asked him the same thing,” the paramedic said. “Seemed like a lot of blood, but it appears to be clotting normally. No problems. Maybe it was from his sprinting here, I’m not sure. Scalp wounds always bleed like hell, though. He’s fine.”

  “Thanks,” Pookie said. “Can you give us a minute?”

  The paramedic nodded and walked off.

  Pookie sat next to his partner in the back of the ambulance.

  “Bri-Bri, you good?”

  Bryan shook his head. “Far from it. Panos and Moses are next if they’re not dead already. You put out a call to have them picked up?”

  Pookie nodded. “Ball-Puller Boyd already tried the Panos place, but Alex wasn’t home. Susie doesn’t know where he is.”

  “Shocker,” Bryan said.

  “I know, right? A patrol car is at Issac Moses’s place, but he’s also nowhere to be seen. I called a BOLO for both of them.”

  Bryan nodded and seemed to relax. The call to Be On the Look-Out went out not only department-wide, but across the Bay Area. Someone would find those kids and bring them in.

  Pookie took in a slow breath. He had to ask the hard question. Asking it somehow made all of this real, and he wished to God it wasn’t real, but he couldn’t beat around the bush any longer.

  “Okay, Bryan, spill it — tell me what you saw.”

  Bryan pointed out the ambulance’s open back doors toward the ruined white van. “I turned the corner, started running down Geary, and—”

  “No, not that what you saw. In the dream. Tell me what you saw in the dream.”

  Bryan looked down — not at Pookie, not at the floor, just down. When he spoke, it was in little more than a whisper. “I saw Parlar. He was walking. It was like I was looking down from above. Like I was tracking him … stalking him.”

  “From above,” Pookie said. “Maybe, four stories above?”

  Bryan looked at Pookie, then up to the apartment building’s roof. He nodded, understanding. “Yeah. Maybe four stories above. Only, it wasn’t me that saw him. It was and it wasn’t. I was on the roof, with this … other guy.”

  “What did the other guy look like?”

  Bryan paused. “I don’t remember.”

  “Bri-Bri, you lie about as well as I do when I tell a woman I’ll call her in the morning. Start talking.”

  Bryan reached up, his fingertips lightly touching the three tiny black stitches. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “Dude, I’m already positive you’re crazy. So tell me what the guy looked like.”

  Bryan looked down again. “He had a blanket over his shoulders, his head. From what I could make out, he … he looked like a snake.”

  “What, you mean shifty? Like those fucking Italians?”

  He shook his head. “No, I mean like a snake. Green skin and a pointy nose.”

  Pookie stared at Bryan. Bryan continued to stare at the ground.

  “Green skin,” Pookie said. “Pointy nose.”

  Bryan nodded.

  Pookie didn’t want to laugh, but he couldn’t stop a small one from slipping out. “Man, I’d love to see the lineup if we catch this guy. Will number three step forward? No, not the werewolf, the snake-man.”

  “It was just a dream, okay? It’s not like I saw a snake-man in real life.”

  “Okay, okay,” Pookie said. Bryan was taking this hard. Who wouldn’t? But Pookie still had to treat him like any other witness — walk him through the situation, rephrase questions and ask again, and so on. “So what do you think is going on, Terminator? Did you know these boys?”

  “No.”

  “Before we found Oscar Woody, had you ever heard of the Boys Company?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did you know someone was trying to kill Jay Parlar?”

  Bryan sighed. He probably wanted to believe all of this even less than Pookie did. “I already told you, Pooks. In my dream I was stalking him. I wanted to kill him, just like I wanted to kill Oscar in that first dream, although I didn’t know who Oscar Woody was at the time.”

  Pookie closed his eyes and rubbed his face. He had to start making the smart decisions. Bryan hadn’t killed Jay Parlar, fine, but there was no longer any question that — somehow — he was involved in these murders. Partner or no partner, he belonged in interrogation, getting grilled like any other suspect in a murder case. But Pookie just couldn’t do that to his friend. There had to be another angle here.

  “Bri-Bri, you said there were others with you in the Jay Parlar dream. You said the same thing about the Oscar Woody dream, right?”

  Bryan nodded.

 
“So do you think you could describe them to a sketch artist?”

  Bryan thought for a second, then shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I can’t really visualize them, you know? It was just a hodgepodge of messed-up features.”

  A young uniformed officer approached. Pookie slid out of the ambulance to meet him. “Officer Stuart Hood, good to see you. Your mom win that cook-off last month?”

  “Took second,” Hood said. “I’ll tell her you asked.”

  “Aw, she got robbed. You tell Rebecca she should have won the blue ribbon. And tell her to make me some more of those hazelnut cookies you brought in. Like little slices of heaven, those things.”

  Hood smiled. “I’ll tell her. Turns out we have a woman who saw something suspicious, Inspector. Tiffany Hine, sixty-seven years old.”

  “A witness at three A.M. in this part of town? Nice work, Officer Hood. I’m surprised you didn’t find a ring-tailed lemur first.”

  Hood smiled, laughed a little. “I wouldn’t get too excited, Inspector.”

  “Oh, you think this is a funny situation?” Pookie said. “This is high comedy to you?”

  “If I’m sad and melancholy, is he going to suddenly spring back to life?”

  “Melancholy? That’s a big word for you, isn’t it? Just tell me what Hine said.”

  Hood bit his lip, trying to hide a smile. “She said she saw a werewolf take the boy.”

  The last thing Pookie needed right now was a standup comic moonlighting as a cop. “Officer Hood, I’m really not in the mood for jokes, you get me?”

  Hood shrugged. “I’m not joking. That’s what she said.”

  “She said, a werewolf?”

  “Well, she said the guy had a dog-face, anyway. That sounds like a werewolf to me. But Wolfie wasn’t alone, he had … a partner.” Hood’s chest jiggled from a suppressed laugh. “She said … she said it was a guy with … with … a snake-face.”

  Pookie looked at Bryan, then back to Hood. “A snake-face? You’re sure?”

  Hood nodded. He coughed, still trying to cover up his laughter. “Uh, Inspector Verde is en route. He said the case is his because of the symbols on the roof. He’s coming to take over the scene. Should I give him this crazy … excuse me, I mean this valuable witness?”