Wrong Side of Hell (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 1)

by Sonya Bateman

  She took her photos, and I helped her move the body out of the bag and onto the table. I handled the messy end. Once he was up and blocked on the autopsy table, she swapped her camera for scissors and started cutting away the remains of the suit.

  Halfway through one jacket sleeve, she froze and stared at the corpse’s arm. “I’ll be damned,” she said.

  “What?” I came around to her side of the table and looked. The man had a tattoo on his bicep—a dark blue cross with a loop at the top, flared arms, and a tapered point at the bottom that looked like a sword.

  For some reason, the sight of it chilled me.

  Viv pointed with the scissors. “The first victim had that same tattoo on his chest.”

  “Jesus. Two guys with fucked-up cross tattoos,” I said. “I think you’re going to have to drop the wolf theory.”

  She nodded faintly. “Actually, it’s a…messed-up ankh. But yes. Two men with the same tattoo, neither of them easily visible? The targeting is too specific.”

  “Abe’s going to love this. I don’t think he wanted to be right about the serial killer thing,” I said. “Want me to break it to him?

  She looked at me, but before she could say anything, my phone went off. “Hold that thought,” I said, and walked a few steps away. A glance at the screen told me I wasn’t going to be able to help Viv much more tonight. I tapped to answer and said, “You’re killing me, Rufus. What now?”

  “The new kid quit.” Rufus Tamblin, my contact for residential pickups, had a voice like old gas station coffee—thick, burnt, and occasionally nasty. He’d brought me into this job, but he didn’t exactly run a well-organized ship. “Left a body on the stairs. Walk-up building, 1830 Lexington. It’s yours now.”

  “Come on, Rufus. I just—”

  I was talking to dead air. He’d already hung up.

  Holding back a string of colorful words, I shoved the phone in my pocket and turned to Viv. “Gotta run,” I said. “Apparently, there’s a stranded corpse over on Lexington with my name on it.”

  “So I guess you’ll be back?” she said with a smirk.

  “Yeah. Try not to have too much fun without me.”

  “I think I can manage that.”

  We said goodbye and I headed out to the van, thinking about pointed crosses and serial-killing wolves—and the anger I could still feel rolling in waves off the latest victim.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was nearing seven in the morning when I decided I was done for the night and told Rufus I wasn’t taking any more calls. Time to head home.

  Home was a fluid term for me. Depending on how you looked at it, I either lived at the Cosmo Fit gym at Third and Ninety-Eighth, or the SuperPark garage across the street. For fifty bucks a month, I got 24/7 unlimited access to hot showers, bathrooms and lockers, power outlets, massage chairs, and all the exercise I could cram in. Another hundred a month bought me a place to park my van and sleep in the back, where I’d rigged a fold-down mattress and a small rechargeable power station to run a phone, laptop, and a space heater on cold days. I ate at diners and fast-food places. Occasionally I stayed in a cheap motel for a night or two, just to mix things up.

  Truth was, the van was the closest to home I got. I guessed old habits were the hardest to break, even awful ones. But it wasn’t a bad setup. I lived in New York for under four hundred a month, paid cash for just about everything. Used prepaid debit cards when I couldn’t. I figured it was the best way to make sure the Valentines never found me.

  If they did, they’d kill me for defecting. No one left the family business.

  I’d tried to live like a normal person, in a house with a bed and three meals a day. The fosters, Lou and Gina Bosco, had done the best they could with a kid who’d been raised rough on the road, never set foot inside a school, and barely spoke to anyone. They’d helped me get my high school equivalency and put me through two years of community college for emergency medical services. I got certified as a paramedic, and I’d even managed to hold down a job for a while.

  Abe had been the one to save me there, actually. He knew my fosters, kept an eye out for their “kids” while he was on the job, and off. A couple of times he caught me doing things I really shouldn’t have. The usual angsty teen stuff—drinking, fighting, tagging, more drinking. But he never busted me. Eventually his mild disapproval got me to tone down the wild side, and while I went to college, Abe helped me out with coursework when I got stuck. The Boscos were always busy trying to wrangle a fresh batch of foster kids. These days, I only saw them around the holidays.

  Abe cried at my graduation. I never told him I’d seen it—didn’t want to hurt his manly pride.

  But even after all that, it turned out I just wasn’t wired for domestic living. The rules and the walls got to me, and I took the first chance I could find to escape. Which happened to be Rufus.

  His typical hiring process consisted of grabbing a paramedic leaving after their shift and offering them a hundred bucks to bring a body to a funeral home—more than the usual per-corpse payout. He made sure the first gig was easy. Most of the old man’s recruits chose to moonlight as body movers, since the pay wasn’t great, and they were more or less used to working with the dead and almost-dead. I’d embraced the opportunity to leave supervisors, procedures and paychecks behind, and worked on expanding my contacts to include medical facilities, funeral homes, and of course, the NYPD.

  Now, here I was. A full-fledged freelance corpse transporter with all the clients I could handle.

  I hit the gym showers first to get the stink of the night off me. My normal routine was to work out for an hour or two, shower again, and then grab some sleep—but I figured lugging nine bodies around last night constituted a workout. After the shower, I headed straight back for the van.

  I’d just folded the bed down and was ready to climb in when my phone buzzed.

  “Don’t answer it,” I muttered aloud, even as I pulled it out to look. It was probably Rufus. He didn’t always pay attention when I told him I was done. That or he just didn’t care.

  But the screen said it was Abe’s cell phone.

  I picked up. “Don’t you ever sleep?” I said by way of a greeting.

  “Gideon.” His voice sounded strange, almost angry. And he kept the volume low, as if someone might be trying to listen. “Thought you might like to know that we’re definitely looking for a wolf, or possibly a large dog.”

  “Wait a minute.” I sat on the edge of the bed. He must’ve gotten at least a preliminary report from Viv by now. “Didn’t you hear about the tattoos? Both victims—”

  “Were attacked by animals. The chief’s sending SWAT and a team from animal control into the park tonight to catch it. And I’m off the case.”

  This was not right. I hesitated, trying to choose my next words carefully. “Did you happen to share my theory with the chief?”

  “I’m also taking a few days off due to work-related stress.”

  So that was a yes. Damn it. This wasn’t the first time my ideas had managed to get Abe in trouble with Chief Foley. So far he’d been vindicated when he proved my suggestions, but every time it happened, the chief seemed to trust him a little less. He’d never been taken off a case before now, though.

  Abe was one of the good guys. I knew he just wanted to find the perp—the real one, not whatever the department felt like pinning it on so they could take it off the board. And after what Viv found, this was definitely a slapdash case-closed deal. “I’ll find you something, Abe,” I said. “Promise. Don’t get too comfortable with that time off, okay?”

  “Yeah. Just stay out of Central Park tonight, got it? Let them do their jobs.”

  “I will,” I told him.

  As if we both didn’t know that was exactly where I’d be going.

  CHAPTER 4

  I’d always felt more at home under the moon than anywhere else.

  Central Park at night wasn’t much like the landscape of my youth. It was brighter, for one. Clean a
nd tame. Worlds away from the wild mountains, forests and swamps I’d been dragged through ever since I could remember in search of the next big kill.

  But the moon was constant. The same moon that shone on miles of wilderness—where night after night I’d huddled in a ratty sleeping bag as far from the Valentine clan as I could get, hoping no one would decide to use me for target practice that night—now muted New York’s great green refuge to soft blues and shadows.

  I’d managed to get a few hours’ sleep and some food in me. At some point, Abe had texted me a message that was just the number nine. I assumed that was the time the raid would start. Viv hadn’t come in yet when I stopped by Screw U, so I’d headed to the park early and started searching the Ramble for signs of wolf, or any large animal. Not that I expected to find any. I just figured I’d be thorough.

  So far I’d found a couple of squirrels’ nests, some deer tracks, and a bat who was running late for the twilight insect call. And in the non-wildlife category, almost two bucks in change.

  A little before nine, I spotted something embedded in the meat of a thick old maple tree, forming a dimpled, sap-stained hole. Something that glinted in the moonlight. I moved toward it, pulling the smaller of the two knives I carried. That was when I realized the stains weren’t sap. It was blood.

  And I remembered that victim number two had died with a gun in his hand.

  Working quickly, I pried the object free. I wasn’t surprised to find it was a flattened bullet. What surprised me was the size of the thing—it had to be a .45 caliber, at least. Whoever had been hit with it should’ve died right there, or damned close to it.

  But there hadn’t been any gunshot victims found out here recently.

  Frowning, I looked around the immediate area. The blood spatter reached a good four feet, with traces still remaining on broken branches, young leaves, and patches of moss. But there was no trail leaving the scene. No sign of anything wounded, human or animal, heading away from an attacker.

  As I pocketed the bullet to bring to Abe, something else caught my attention. A small, unnatural feather of white half-buried in loose dirt at the base of the tree. I knelt and brushed it clear, until I uncovered a fringed white leather pouch strung on a rawhide cord. The cord had snapped, and blood stained the lower right corner of the pouch.

  I turned it over carefully, feeling small, loose things like stones or buckshot shifting inside. There were symbols scrawled on the other side, like nothing I’d ever seen before—but looking at them made my throat clench and my head ache.

  Shivering slightly, I scooped the pouch from the ground and tucked it into my inside jacket pocket. It must be evidence of something. But I still had no idea what.

  By then it was about time for the party to start, so I headed for the main park where SWAT and animal control would be gathering. There were quite a few vans at the site where the NYPD usually congregated for anything in this part of the park, and a lot of people milling around wearing full protective gear, their weapons plainly visible.

  Okay. That was unusual.

  I hung back, hidden in brush and silently watching as a man who was apparently coordinating the team gave instructions I couldn’t quite hear from my position. When they scattered, I followed a loose group of three for a few minutes, but soon they’d broken up too.

  They wouldn’t find anything. I decided to head for Abe’s place, and maybe we could figure out what was really going on.

  My status as a contractor for the NYPD afforded me certain perks. So even though I wasn’t on official business, I’d parked my van in a clearing just off one of the main park walking paths. I figured it had a better chance of not being stolen that way.

  Until I reached the clearing and found a slim, hooded figure dressed in black, trying to jimmy the door open.

  “Hey!” I shouted.

  The figure froze, just for an instant—then bolted into the trees without a look back.

  I thought about giving chase, but it wasn’t worth the effort. If the car thief really wanted to steal a van, there were plenty more of them not far from here. All of them police property. More power to the guy if he could pull that one off.

  Just as I reached the van to see if the would-be thief had done any damage, three loud shots rang out in rapid succession. The sound came from the direction the hooded figure had vanished—and the shooter was close. Maybe the thief was armed.

  But if he’d had a gun and was willing to use it, why hadn’t he pulled it on me?

  I circled around to the front of the van. An instant later, the hooded thief burst from the tree line, breathing hard, one gloved hand pressed to his side. There was enough light to see the dark, wet stain spreading beneath the hand, and another patch of wetness on a thigh. He glanced over a shoulder, and then looked straight at me.

  She. She looked straight at me. It was a young woman about my age, with a few loose auburn curls springing from the edges of the hood and bright fury burning behind hazel eyes. The unlikely thief took a few more stumbling steps and fell to her knees.

  Behind her, the trees rustled and underbrush crackled beneath running feet.

  The shooter was coming.

  I stopped thinking and sprinted toward her. She was trying to open the zipper on a small canvas pouch attached to her belt, using the hand that wasn’t presumably holding her guts in. “Don’t move,” I called as I ran. “I’ll get you to a hospital.” As long as whoever shot her doesn’t take me out too, I thought with a crazed kind of desperation. What the hell did I think I was doing, anyway?

  She glared at me. “Don’t help me.”

  “Um. But you’re—”

  “Stay back!” She managed to pull something out of the pouch. It looked like a mini-snow globe, but with nothing inside the glass. Not even snow. As she turned it over, it fell from her fingers into the grass and rolled a foot or so away. She let out a nasty curse and tried to reach for it.

  I decided to help her whether she wanted it or not. She was obviously in shock, since apparently she planned to take on an armed gunman with a crystal ball.

  Just as I reached her and prepared to carry her away if I had to, another figure emerged from the trees, gun at the ready.

  Christ, the armed gunman was an officer from the search team.

  Why the hell would the cops try to take down a car thief with a SWAT team? Unless she was the perp. Damn. I’d told Abe the killer might be a woman…but this little slip of a thing? Whoever or whatever slaughtered those men had incredible strength, and was physically massive. It couldn’t have been this girl.

  The officer strode toward us, lifting his weapon.

  It was aimed at me.

  “What the—” I managed to blurt, staring at his outstretched arm. On his wrist was a distinctive, fucked-up cross tattoo I’d seen once before…and Viv had seen twice.

  “Sorry,” the officer said. “No witnesses.”

  I weighed my options and decided I was going to be shot. But that didn’t mean it had to be fatal. I’d happily take on a charge of assaulting an officer, since the officer in question was clearly batshit crazy.

  As I tensed to lunge, brilliant white light flashed at the corner of my eye, on the side where the thief knelt. The officer faltered and stopped ten steps away. His horrified expression was fixed in the direction of the thief.

  Something growled.

  Everything in me ran cold. I really didn’t want to look, but my head turned slowly toward the sound anyway. My rational mind still expected to see a young woman in black. Possibly holding a snow globe.

  Instead, there was a goddamn wolf as big as a horse.

  Maybe she was the perp, after all.

  CHAPTER 5

  Okay, so it wasn’t literally horse-sized. But the beast was a lot bigger than any wolf had a right to be. And it wasn’t exactly wolf-shaped, and it had far more teeth than it should. It was five and a half feet of wrongness, all wrapped up in lethal fury.

  The officer managed to fire a single shot
before the wolf sprang at him.

  My brain kept right on thinking wolf. Stridently insisting it, in fact. I was not going to attach a were to that word. Yeah, maybe the thing walked on two legs. Maybe it had arms and hands instead of paws, and no tail. Maybe its fur was the exact same auburn shade as the girl’s hair had been.

  But damn it, that was a wolf. I refused to believe anything else.

  It behaved like a wolf—a real one, not the way people thought of them from movies. It attacked without sound. The lunge took the officer down, and the wolf went straight for his throat.

  Panic must’ve given the cop some extra strength, because he threw the beast off and managed to get up. One foot came down hard on the snow globe thing as he staggered back, crunching it to pieces, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was taking aim.

  The officer fired and hit the wolf high in the shoulder. Its torso twisted briefly and it let out an awful, pained snarl, but didn’t even pause in its charge. This time, the wicked teeth found their mark.

  The struggle lasted all of twenty seconds, but it felt a lot longer to me. Mostly because I couldn’t move my feet fast enough in the opposite direction.

  I backed slowly toward the van. The wolf-thing rose and looked at me while the officer died at its feet. It snorted, shook its head and whined once. Then its eyes rolled back and it collapsed to the ground.

  In the near distance, I heard shouts and breaking branches. More of the SWAT team, finally responding to the gunfire.

  I wanted nothing more than to climb in my van and drive away as fast as I damned well could. I couldn’t un-see what just happened right in front of me, but my mind still refused to accept that was a wolf that started with w-e-r-e. Which was seriously impacting my sanity level.

  But the wolf—who was actually a girl, even though I absolutely wasn’t going to believe that—had probably saved my life. She’d attacked a man who’d been ready to kill me, and she’d been shot three or four times, at least. I couldn’t just leave her there for the rest of the cops to finish off. Even if she was the killer. Because right now, those murders were starting to look like self-defense.