by Scott Sigler
Hadn’t yelled, and certainly had never put his hands on his father in anger. This intensity, these highs and lows — all of it was new. He’d had emotions before, of course he had, but nothing this pure, this overwhelming.
What was happening to him?
“Just finish your story, old man.”
Mike stopped rubbing his throat. He sat down heavily, opened another bottle and took a long drink. “We didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I mean, what could we do? Eric brought the baby to us. He said he had to give the baby to us because he knew we’d make good parents. We watched out for Eric, but he was crazy and homeless. A baby in his hands? That was dangerous. So we took you from him, just to make sure Eric didn’t do something bad.”
“And you didn’t call the cops? You had an infant, probably kidnapped, and you didn’t try to find the parents?”
Mike sniffed, slid a hand across his nose. He sniffed again. “We thought we’d try and figure out where you came from, talk to Eric and get some information before we had to call the cops. For God’s sake, Bryan, Eric went crazy killing for our country, watching his buddies die all around him. We had to at least try and help him out of a jam.”
Bryan breathed slowly. He fought to control the heartbreak and rage swirling inside. This was the man he’d looked up to his entire life? A man who would take another’s child?
“I belonged to someone else,” Bryan said. “Are you actually going to look me in the eye and say you did it to save some insane homeless guy from a well-deserved felony rap? What, were you hoping he’d bring another so you’d have a matched set?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Mike said quickly. “Eric was terrified, Bryan. I’ve never seen anyone that scared. He said he had to find the baby a safe, loving home, or he’d get into a lot of trouble. He knew your mother couldn’t have kids, so he brought you to us.”
This just kept getting better. “Eric the Homeless Guy knew you guys couldn’t have children?”
“Everyone in the neighborhood knew. That’s what God had chosen for us. We didn’t broadcast it, but when people asked if we were going to have kids, we told them we couldn’t. We’d thought of adopting, sure, but hadn’t really focused on it. When Eric brought you to us, we couldn’t help but think that maybe … maybe it was a miracle.”
Bryan’s throat pinched. Sadness roared up to swirl side-by-side with the anger. How could they have done this to him?
“A miracle? Are you shitting me?”
Mike tilted his head a little, an expression that said come on, think about it and you’ll see. “Two people are totally in love but can’t have kids, then a baby shows up on their doorstep? What more proof of a miracle do you need?”
Bryan’s words came out as a cracked yell. “How about making Mom able to have kids in the first place? Isn’t that a more logical miracle than sending a homeless man with a kidnapped baby?”
“I don’t question the Lord’s ways.”
“That doesn’t make you pious, that makes you stupid. What happened then? You just walked out and told everyone you’d suddenly had an immaculate conception and delivery?”
Mike again looked to the ground. “We kept it very quiet. The night Eric dropped you off, I tried to talk to him but he just kept babbling about what they would do to him if he failed.”
“And who were they?”
“He wouldn’t say. The next night, I tracked him down.” Mike paused. He took a sip of his beer. “Eric was dead, Bryan. I think he ODed on something. We didn’t know what to do about you. Your mother and I read the papers, watched the news, waited for any story about a kidnapped baby. There was nothing.”
This was the man who raised him: a liar, a coward who only thought of himself.
“And still you didn’t go to the cops. The kidnapper was dead, someone had lost their goddamn child, and you didn’t do anything?”
Mike looked away. “After the second day, your mother and I were already so in love with you we would have risked everything to keep you. If we’d known who the parents were, that would have been different, but there was no news at all. We told everyone we knew that your mother was already four months’ pregnant. I sent her away to a cabin in Yosemite — we told everyone she was staying at your grandmother’s until the baby came.”
Bryan wanted to remind Mike that the women he was talking about were neither his mother nor his grandmother, but he kept quiet.
Mike drained the beer in one long pull, then set it down with a glass-on-brick clink. “You mother came home with a baby. Simple as that. The neighbors bought it hook, line and sinker. Everyone commented on how big you were for a newborn. We just laughed and said you were going to play for the ’Niners someday and make us rich.”
Mike opened another beer. He tossed the cap away.
Because of this man, Bryan would probably never know who his real parents were. For the first time in his life, Bryan felt tears welling up in his eyes. He blinked rapidly, tried to hold them back.
“What about my birth certificate?”
“Flash enough money around Chinatown, you’ll find a doctor who’ll play ball. Your birth certificate just says you were born in this house, not a hospital.”
“You kept a kidnapped infant and you bribed a doctor. What upstanding citizens. What happened next?”
Mike shrugged again. “That’s it. We loved you. You were the center of our lives. God delivered you to us and we spent every day trying to show God that we were worthy.”
Bryan couldn’t stop the tears anymore. “Thou shalt not lie. You ever hear of that one?”
The pain returned to Mike’s eyes. His body sagged. He had never looked so old.
“We knew it was wrong,” he said. “After a little while, we were able to just block it out. We didn’t think about it. You were our son.”
Mike Clauser had been a rock: unflappable, reliable, always looking for the positive in all things. Now, he seemed defeated — deflated, perhaps, as if someone had stabbed him in the back and let his soul drain away.
Bryan felt torn in two directions; part of him hated this man with every fiber of his being, while the other half saw Mike’s pain, remembered all the love given during a wonderful childhood. He wanted to hit him. He also wanted to hug him — but he would never do that, never again.
“You’re not my father,” Bryan said. “You never were. Don’t visit. Don’t call. You’re dead to me.”
Mike’s head dropped. His big body shook a little bit as he started to cry.
Bryan wiped his own tears as he turned away. The Buick smelled like beer. He got in and drove away. Fuck Mike Clauser. The man could burn in hell for all Bryan cared. Mike didn’t have the answers Bryan needed.
There was one place left that Bryan might be able to get those answers. But not right now. Not today. He’d had enough … he’d just had enough.
A Hospital Visit
Chief Amy Zou stared down at Jebediah Erickson. He looked so much older than the last time she’d seen him. Of course, that had been twenty-six years ago, when he’d left the asylum.
The asylum that she’d sent him to.
Amy had once been a snot-nosed rookie who knew better than the older cops. She and Rich had put the pieces together, connecting the symbols to the silver arrowheads, tracking down Alder Jessup, quietly building a case against Jebediah Erickson even as her superiors tried to shut her up, tried to get her to back off. They’d even promoted her to inspector as a form of hush money. She’d taken the promotion, but hadn’t stopped — at the time, she thought it poetic justice that she used her new power to further her efforts. She’d found the right judge to hear her case. She’d lined up the right person in the DA’s office.
Back then, Erickson hadn’t been some old man in a hospital bed, bandaged, loaded with tubes leading into his nose, his arm. Back then he’d been death personified. Just looking into those remorseless eyes had made her cross herself.
Now, he just seemed old. Scars covered his arms, his neck, hi
s chest. Nasty scars, too — long, curving things that must have required hundreds of stitches. This man was a warrior. The scars told the story of his battles.
“Goddamit, Bryan,” she said. “You don’t know what you’ve done.”
She should have fired Bryan and Pookie sooner. Pookie couldn’t let something like this go. The Blake Johansson situation had proved that — if Pookie smelled crooked cops, he went after them. Maybe she should have switched him to Internal Affairs years ago.
If she had told Pookie and Bryan the truth about Erickson, about the monsters, would those guys have pursued the case anyway? Based on their track records, she’d assumed they would have done exactly that. And how could she hold it against them? They had done exactly the same thing she had done.
When her efforts put Erickson in the loony bin, how many people had died from her stubbornness?
More important, how many people would die now, because of Bryan’s?
This wasn’t the first time Erickson had been out of commission. He’d been injured twice before that she knew of, but both times he’d left the hospital the very next day. This time, however, he didn’t look like he was going anywhere. Was he just old, or was there something else?
Hopefully he would recover soon … before Marie’s Children realized that they could once again kill at will.
Murder Was the Case
Sleeping until noon had a way of making anything more palatable. So Bryan Clauser was a fleshy-headed mutant. So what? He was still Pookie’s best friend. He had saved Pookie’s life. Getting all worked up about this wasn’t going to fix anything. Pookie would find a way to get his boy through this. Hell, it wasn’t like Bryan was a Yankees fan or anything really unforgivable.
Emma danced around his feet. Pookie was supposed to just give one treat at a time, but he grabed a big handful and dropped them on the kitchen floor. Life is short; treats are good.
He poured a cup of coffee from Robin’s coffeemaker. Nice machine. Everything the girl had was nice. Medical examiners, it seemed, earned a bit more income than homicide inspectors.
He heard footsteps behind him, then a woman’s voice. “Did you make coffee?”
He turned with mug in hand. A sleepy-faced, yawning Robin shuffled into the dining room. She wore only a black T-shirt that was too big for her — one of Bryan’s, most likely. She sat at the table. Pookie poured a mug for her, then sat as well.
She took a sip. “I made a bunch of calls after you turned in, then I ran out of steam. My friend Dana just called from the hospital, woke me up. Erickson is stabilized.”
“He’s better?”
“Not even close,” she said. “He’s still in intensive care. He hasn’t woken up yet.”
A knife in the belly was worse than a bullet in the shoulder, but Bryan’s wound had healed up within hours. “Erickson has the Zed. Why hasn’t he healed?”
“Beats me,” Robin said. “All I have is a hypothesis. I don’t know anything about these people. You heard from Bryan?”
Pookie hadn’t. But he had received a voice mail from Bryan’s dad. Poor Mike was a mess. Maybe that was the price you paid for lying to your child your whole life, but Pookie wasn’t about to judge.
“No word from Bri-Bri yet,” Pookie said. “I think he’s okay, so don’t worry.”
She crossed her arms and slowly rubbed her own shoulders. “He’s not okay. Pookie, please, just tell me what’s really going on.”
She was hurting bad for Bryan. She wanted to share Bryan’s pain, help him through anything, but it wasn’t Pookie’s place to tell her the truth. If Bryan didn’t want her to know, that was his choice and Pookie had to back up.
“Bo-Bobbin, you know what? As you’ve pointed out repeatedly, you’re not his girlfriend anymore. It’s not your business.”
She laughed at him. “Right. Now you’re going to pretend he doesn’t belong with me? You’ve spent six months trying to get us back together.”
She leaned forward and put her hand on his wrist. “Pookie, I made a mistake pushing Bryan away. I love him. I also know him. Maybe not as well as you do, but I know him, and I think he’s real close to doing something bad. If you don’t let me help and something happens to him, you won’t be able to live with yourself.”
He didn’t have a one-liner this time. She was right, but that didn’t change anything — telling Robin, or anyone else, was Bryan’s decision alone.
“I can’t,” Pookie said.
Her eyes narrowed. He had a sudden feeling that she was looking right into his brain with that magic chick-power that women have. She turned and looked at the RapScan machine sitting on the table. Her eyes widened. She covered her mouth. “Oh my God. That second sample, it was from Bryan.”
What had he said? Was it that obvious, or had he done something to tip her off? He had to cover, and cover fast. “Uh … come on now, why would you say that?”
She turned angry eyes on him. “That’s why he went to see Mike. The second sample was X-Y-Zed, so Mike can’t be his real father.”
“Robin, the second sample wasn’t Bryan’s, it was—”
She slapped the table. “Stop it! We both know I’m right, so stop insulting my intelligence.” She pointed her finger in his face. “Don’t you lie to me one more minute, you understand me?”
Pookie leaned back. He nodded. “Okay. You’re right.”
Her anger broke. Tears welled up in her eyes.
Oh Jesus, now he had to deal with a crying woman? “Take it easy. We’ll figure something out. Bryan is my boy — that’s not going to change.”
“This isn’t about being boys,” she said. “I can’t imagine what he’s going through. Oh my God … he went to confront Mike and you let him go by himself?”
Huh — when she said it like that, it did sound kind of stupid.
She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I have to find him. He’s all alone.”
“If he’s alone, it’s because that’s what he wants.”
She stood. “This isn’t about what he wants, it’s about what he needs. You should have known that.”
As soon as she said it, he knew she was right. That Detroit-sized nuke had dropped in Bryan’s life, and Pookie had thought the man could handle it solo.
“He’s still the Bryan we know,” Pookie said. “He won’t do anything stupid.”
She wiped her eyes again as she let out another derisive laugh. “You mean he won’t do anything stupid like go into the house of a killer without a warrant or backup?”
Pookie’s eyebrows rose. Touché, Bo-Bobbin, touché.
His cell chimed the theme from The Simpsons.
Robin walked to her bedroom. Emma padded along behind her. Pookie knew she was going to get dressed, then try to find Bryan. There was no point trying to stop her.
So instead, Pookie answered his phone.
“Black Mister Burns. My day is already about as tasty as a St. Bernard turd rolled in rancid salmon poon. Whatever you have to tell me now is going to make my emotional boo-boos all better, right?”
“Only if you like your salmon-poon turd served with a side of tainted clams,” John said. “I finished that murder-rate analysis.”
Pookie sighed. “Screw it. Go ahead.”
“First some perspective. San Francisco’s population peaked in the 1950s at 775,000. Right now it’s about 767,000. Not much variation in the past fifty years, so the population is a constant against which we can evaluate murders on a basic one-to-one, year-to-year basis.”
“Do you always talk like a band nerd that played the French horn?”
“What?”
“For example, when you fuck, do you say shit like I’m going to insert my penis now, then move it back and forth in a rapid motion until one or both of us achieve an orgasm.”
“Yes, but only when I’m banging your mom.”
For the second time that afternoon, Pookie’s eyebrows rose in respect. “Point taken, Mister Burns. Continue.”
“The hig
hest murder rate in recent memory was 1993, with 133 murders. Things have been down lately. We haven’t had over 100 since 1995. Twenty-seven years ago, however, there were 241 murders. That’s the highest the city has ever officially recorded. What that doesn’t take into account is the fact that in that same year, from January to June, there were 187 murders for an average of 31 a month. In July, it dropped to nineteen. After that, the murders dropped off to 7 a month, which is about the normal murder rate. Now, guess when Jebediah Erickson was released from detention in the California Medical Facility?”
The coffee felt funny in Pookie’s stomach. He felt like he was going to throw up. “I don’t want to guess.”
“I’ll tell you anyway. He got out that same July. Erickson gets locked in the loony bin, and a few months later the murder rate skyrockets. He gets out, things almost immediately come back down to normal.”
Yes, he was definitely going to puke. Vigilantism was one thing, but to have that kind of impact on a murder rate?
“There’s more,” John said. “The crime spike wasn’t just for homicides. Missing persons cases tripled in the same time frame. And serial killings were up 500 percent. Records indicate the Bay Area may have had seven serial killers in action at the same time. That shit never got released to the press, because Mayor Moscone sat on it like an ugly fat girl riding a willing drunk.”
“See, when you talk like that, it makes all this death and despair so much more fun.”
“I’m doing my best to make it more palatable.”
The jokes were automatic for Pookie, but he felt none of the humor. “You said the murder rate didn’t spike when Erickson first went in?”
“It didn’t. Things were normal for several months, then slowly ramped up to the levels I told you about.”
Pookie thought of a stuffed little girl holding a fork and a knife. Erickson probably hadn’t killed her on a whim. Would people like that girl run wild if Erickson was out? More important, were there more creatures out there like the four-eyed bear-thing?
Chief Zou’s words rang through his head. She’d asked for his trust. She’d told him there was more going on than he could know. If only she’d just come out and explain this. But even then, would Pookie have gone along with it? Zou had known he and Bryan might push too far, possibly get Erickson committed again, leave the city open to mass murder. But they hadn’t put him away — instead, they’d put him in the ICU.
