I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2)

by Tony Monchinski

  “I see the way you’re looking at me, Mark.” Tad’s attitude was wrong. He sounded unconcerned, arrogant even. “Just remember who won, Mark.”

  Mark forced himself to stay seated: who won?

  “David and Goliath, Mark. David and Goliath.” Tad spoke and Mark felt his blood pressure rising. “See, I know people, Mark.” Tad got up, crossing to the refrigerator and the small magnetic mirror there. “People. If you don’t want to be reassigned to some backwater parish,” Tad inspected his teeth in the mirror, “mind your own business. You hear something that bothers you? Don’t listen. You see something that concerns you—look the other way.” Tad wasn’t even trying to deny anything. “I mean, well, think how hard it’ll be hard to finish your degree in Peoria, no?”

  Tad turned his head from the fridge to look over his shoulder at Mark, smiled at him.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go coach.” CYO basketball. More kids. “That is, if you don’t object. The boys are waiting.”

  The way he said it like that, flaunting it. Coach youth basketball my ass. Mark glared at the man.

  “Oh, if you wouldn’t mind,” Tad added before he left the kitchen, “could you put my dishes in the sink? JoAnn will be around to do them in the morning and, gosh, I’m in such a rush.”

  Mark balled his fist on the table and squeezed, exhaling, his arm and fist shaking.

  The phone on the wall rang and he couldn’t answer it. It rang again and then again and he had to answer it. If he didn’t it would disturb the monsignor and Mark didn’t want for that to happen.

  “St. Ann’s.” He fought to control the anger he felt, to keep it from his voice. “Hello.”

  “Peace be with you.” Mark recognized the voice immediately, felt funny saying it back to the caller but he did: “Peace be with you.”

  “Mark, can you talk?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Mark, I am going to ask you a question. But before I ask it, know this: your answer stands to change the course of your life.”

  Yeah, great. Mark waited.

  “Can I ask you a question, Mark?”

  “Go ahead.”

  51.

  8:50 P.M.

  There’d been some talk about locking the convicts down in their cells while the arson was dealt with, but for some reason it wasn’t done. And so it was that when the prison authorities carted the charred body out they carted in out in front of everyone, the cons sitting around in their small groups. Dickie, Bianchi with his bandaged elbow, Nicky and Jimmy Scal, trying to play cards. The Scal in his shades and a robe, looking bruised but rested.

  “Hey, boss.” Nicky lifted his chin.

  A group of prison guards in riot gear, bearing a stretcher, entered the rec area. Whatever was on the stretcher was covered by a sheet. As they passed through, everyone got a whiff. The stretcher bearers were passing Dickie and his crew when their litter jostled and a blackened arm flopped out from under the sheet to hang limply over the side.

  “Would you look at that,” the Scal remarked of the limb. But it was what was melted onto the hand that drew Dickie’s eye. A Styrofoam cup, what was left of it cohering to the charred fingers and palm. Like the one Renfeld had carried around.

  Looking around the room, Dickie didn’t see the nut job.

  Shortly after the turtles left with their body, the convicts were given a talking to. The Warden himself stopped by and stood there, trying to look and sound tough in front of hundreds of tough men, telling them whoever was responsible for this was going to pay big-time, that if anyone had any information they’d better pipe up because if they didn’t they’d be charged as accessories to the murder. He said this to a bunch of men, many of them already there for one or more murders.

  Afterwards, their day continued as it normally would. That night, they were fed and sent to their cells.

  “We got anybody we got to worry about?” Dickie asked Bianchi, the two of them walking down their tier.

  “No.”

  Cupping his elbow, Bianchi turned into his cell, Dickie continuing down to his own, passing a few cons who looked away. They were afraid of him and his guys, word already spreading throughout the prison.

  Werner waited outside his cell.

  “How you doin’?” A big shit-eatin grin on the screw’s face. Dickie thinking he’d like to wipe it off for the guy, thought maybe one day he’d get the chance.

  “I’m good.” Dickie stepped past the screw and into his cell, the cell strangely dark, the light out. “Hey what’s with the lights?”

  “We’ll call Con Edison in the morning.” Werner stood there grinning at him as the bars slid shut, locking Dickie in. “You have yourself a good night.” The screw laughed a little laugh, walking away, his steps echoing down the block.

  Dickie sat on the edge of his mattress and took off his slippers. He was thinking Werner’s being here tonight was the screw’s way of letting Dickie know he suspected something. Question was, what would Werner want to keep his mouth shut?

  He lay back on his mattress and stretched out his legs. He was thinking about Maryann and their kids, mulling over the fact that he was never going to see them outside this place, thinking how the only way he’d get to touch his wife, hold her, love her, was if they let her visit him and spend the night out in one of the trailers.

  Dickie thinking no, not his Maryann, that was beneath her, beneath his image of her.

  No way he’d subject the mother of his children to that.

  It was hard not to get bitter about the fact that a fuck-wad like Werner got to go home every night to whoever that asshole had at home. And Dickie was here.

  He adjusted his crucifix and crossed his arms behind his head, on top of his thin pillow. Dickie had been in enough tight spots in his life to know he couldn’t give in to despair, couldn’t show it. Appearances were everything, especially here in prison, in front of his men, in front of the other men, in front of fucks like Werner. Couldn’t let them see how he felt inside. Had to ignore that shit, soldier through it. This cold, on the other hand, was another matter.

  It was cold in Dickie’s cell, cold and very dark.

  The thing under his bunk reached up and wrapped its arms around him, a slimy hand clasped over his mouth, pulling his head down into the cot, trapping his arms under his head. Its other arm crossed his torso, one unnaturally long clawed finger drawing across his chest.

  Dickie kicked his legs and tried to free his arms but he couldn’t. The stench of the thing overpowered his senses. It didn’t smell burnt. It stunk like the grave.

  The elongated fingers wrapped around the crucifix Dickie wore, wrenching it from his neck. He heard his chain jingle somewhere on the cell floor. Even as he lost control of his bladder, Dickie vowed to himself that he would not scream.

  The thing spoke to him, its voice reedy and high.

  “Hello, Godfather.”

  Saturday

  24 October 1998

  52.

  12:34 A.M.

  It never ceased to amaze Barry, how quiet the projects could get at night. He sat with his back to tower number four, looking out onto a quad lost in darkness. He changed position under his blanket, drawing his legs in closer.

  Nights were getting cold now.

  Time was the Ripple would help him chase away the chill, but Barry knew from firsthand experience enough drinking could leave a cat shivering and cold, worse off than when he’d begun. The only vice he allowed himself these days was tobacco. He’d smoked earlier, cleaning out his pipe and storing it away among his things.

  Barry took great pride in his pipe, his most valued possession. There was a story behind how it’d come into his possession, a story he liked to tell if to a willing listener. Not too many of those out here no more. Most people these days ignored him, acting like he wasn’t even there. Like he was a non-person, just because he was homeless.

  The whole time he’d been settled here tonight, he’d seen no one. Enough streetlamps were bu
rnt out or broken that most of the quad was lost to him, and he from it. A solitary strip of concrete coursed under a lone streetlamp in the near distance. Barry could see the path and anyone on it, but he was sure no one could see him in his position. Once or twice he’d heard some movement out there, teens up in the middle of the night, maybe up to no good, maybe just being teenagers.

  Whatever they were up to, they hadn’t come into view.

  Life on the streets could be hard, real hard, especially with the colder weather coming in. Barry shrugged his blanket further up onto his shoulders, his shopping cart parked against the building next to him. The shelter system, man, the shelter system was no picnic. More dangerous in there than out here it was. Out here, the main things you had to worry about were the young kids came by, thinking it was fun to mess with a bum.

  Or maybe Conyers’ men when the ugly got up in them.

  The fiends knew Barry, they knew he didn’t have any money or nothing they could trade for their drugs. So they left him alone, and he was glad. Talking to some of them cats was too much like looking into a mirror at his old self. Barry felt better off each night taking his chances out on the streets, right here in the Quad. And if he kept close enough to the Moses, no police were going to bother him either.

  The last few nights had been festive enough, non-stop partying when that singer came through. Even the Conyers’ boys had been on their best behavior. They’d been real busy the last couple days around tower three. Barry figured something was afoot, maybe another one of their big drug shipments. He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. Drugs were part of the tragedy that had been Barry’s life. He’d been a bus driver for the city until they caught him drinking one too many times while on the job, and then he had no job. The union couldn’t do anything for him. And Barry knew it wasn’t nobody’s fault but his own.

  He’d kicked his habits—drinking was just one of them—going on three years, didn’t even want to see the stuff no more. Whatever the Conyers boys might or might not be bringing through Moses in the next day or so, none of it concerned Barry. Anyhow, curiosity could get a cat killed with these kinds of people, so Barry minded his own business.

  Halloween was just around the corner. That would have meant something to Barry when he was younger. Now it was pretty much just another day. Kids used to trick-or-treat around here way back, when the towers first went up. These days, you didn’t see kids in costumes around the Moses. Some years, one of the local organizations ran a party for children in one of the rec centers, but that had seemed to largely fall off with the arrival of the Conyers boys.

  It was sad, Barry thought, sad for the kids, but sad for him too, because the sight of the little costumed cowboys and princesses never failed to bring a smile to Barry’s wrinkled face.

  He was smiling to himself about that, picturing the children in their costumes, when a figure limped into view on the path, and spying such Barry had to wonder if Halloween itself had indeed arrived early. The stranger paused under the streetlamp in plain view. The cat’s dress was outlandish: what looked like a men’s full length fur coat over a dark suit with wide lapels; some kind of spats over dress shoes that shined in the lamplight; the man’s head a mass of wet-looking jheri-curls. He wore them little pince-nez glasses with purple lenses. One hand was resting on the decorative wolf’s head handle of a walking cane.

  The man paused under the streetlamp, not in the least concerned should anyone see him. Cat dressed like that, Barry considered, gonna get took for what he had. Where’d this guy think he was? And where the hell he from? 1970?

  The man raised his head and sniffed at the air.

  Thing was…despite his appearance, the guy looked like…looked like someone you wouldn’t want to mess with. And the other thing, this cat was somehow both familiar and unknown to Barry, kind of like he knew him from around somewhere, but maybe didn’t actually know him personal-like.

  Turning his head, the man’s nostrils flared and relaxed, his nose working, searching something out. Like he could smell it. Sniffing the air, Barry himself couldn’t detect anything. He snuffled, clearing his nostrils, but still not a thing, though now the man under the light was peering out into the darkness around tower four, right towards where Barry sat.

  Barry clenched his eyes shut, like he did when he was a kid. Like he did when he was a kid in his room and he thought there was a monster in the closet, like he did when he thought if he couldn’t see the monster it couldn’t see him. He waited and listened, shivering under his blanket, but not from the chill.

  When Barry opened his eyes, the man was limping away, supporting himself on his cane. And that’s when Barry recognized him—

  But no, there was no way.

  He knew what the cat looked like from the television at the food pantry, from the posters on display in all the music stores and bus shelters. He knew what the man would sound like if he had talked to him, knew that from the radio. Thing was, this guy was supposed to be laid up in the hospital. Cat had just gotten shot up in an elevator last week, almost killed. What was he doing down in the Moses?

  Barry watched him go.

  Watched Gangster Khan limp off into the gloom, the tip of his cane tapping against the concrete path, the rapper inhaling deeply and turning his head around to the side where Barry could see his mouth. Growling, lips pulling back over fangs and long, pointed eyeteeth. Looked more like a dog’s mouth than a man’s to Barry from his vantage point.

  The rapper faded into the night and was gone.

  Barry exhaled.

  He knew what he’d just seen, but he didn’t understand a bit of it.

  53.

  4:37 P.M. (CEST)

  Even though it was going to mean he’d be a few minutes late, Jay stopped at the Bloemenmarkt and perused the tulips. Tisiphone loved her her flowers. The variety at the flower market this late in the fall wasn’t what it would be in the spring, but there was still a decent selection. In the winter they sold wooden tulips here.

  That winter would be here soon enough, and Jay thought maybe after it’d broken him and Tisiphy could head down south to Zuid-Holland, maybe find a bed and breakfast in Lisse, spend a night or two there, visit the Keukenhof Gardens. She’d like that.

  Jay made small talk with the vendor as his tulips were wrapped, then continued along his way, pausing to let a trolley pass on Muntplein, lighting a Moore, crossing the under the Muntorren.

  Tisiphone was waiting for him at their favorite café a few blocks over, seated outside across from a man, the man’s back to Jay as he approached. Large through the shoulders, the guy’s t-shirt hung over his traps and deltoids. Looked like…couldn’t be. Jay smiled at his love as he sat down beside her, “Hello, baby,” his suspicions confirmed as he turned from his love to face the man, his smile gone.

  “Mierda…”

  “Hi, Jay.” A greeting bereft of any warmth, Boone barely glancing at Jay, his eyes on Tisiphone the whole time. “Can’t you at least smoke a man’s cigarette?” Boone still didn’t smile. “I already met your friend,” He winked at Tisiphone. “No need to introduce us.”

  Jay didn’t know what to say, so he asked, “How you been Boone?”

  “Oh, you know me, Jay.” Both of Boone’s hands were under the table, out of sight. Tisiphy’s manicured hands rested on the table top. “I’ve got a way of landing on my feet.”

  The waiter came over with Jay’s coffee.

  “I heard about what happened,” Jay mentioned, thanking the waiter and exhaling, reaching over to take Tisiphy’s hand, squeezing it. He looked over at her, gazing at his woman, struck as if for the first time by her beauty. “And I’m sorry. I really am.”

  The waiter had gone back inside the café.

  Tisiphy’s eyes were red-rimmed and Jay knew where this was headed. He let her hand go and sat back in his chair.

  Boone spoke to the woman. “Lot of people back in New York interested in you.”

  “That what you here about Boone?”

/>   “Yeah,” Boone kept his eyes on the Fury, running his tongue across his lower gum, spitting out of the side of his mouth. “Something like that.”

  A single drop of blood welled up from Tisiphy’s eye, coursing down her cheek.

  “That’s one of the problems with Boone, baby,” Jay sipped his coffee, the drink strong, bitter, like Espresso back in the States, “always been one of the problems with Boone. He don’t respect the game.”

  She turned faster than Jay had ever seen it happen before, her form rising and transforming. One moment she’d been an exquisite human female, seated there with eyes tearing blood. Now her chair toppled to the sidewalk and she stood, changed for the world to see: A canine body with the wings of a bird; hissing serpents undulating in her hair; her eyes bleeding, red streaking freely down her face. In one clawed hand she wielded a whip of scorpions, the arthropods pinching their claws.

  Passersby screamed, scattering in all directions. Jay stared transfixed, his breath caught in his throat: his woman magnificent, beautiful beyond words, his woman ethereal—

  Boom!

  Boone with the Anaconda from under the table, firing from the waist—

  Boom! Boom!

  —Boone rising from his seat, gripping his gunhand with his free hand, steadying his arm, firing—

  Boom! Boom!

  —Tisiphone rocking with each round, gouts of herself tearing free with each impact, dying on her feet. Jay went down on the ground beside her, his hands around hers, her red eyes blank. Tables and chairs were upturned, the tulips scattered.

  Jay sobbed, his body shaking.

  Boone came around the table, standing over them both. “So let me ask you, Jay.” The .44 at his side, one round remaining in the chamber. “I’m gonna have to worry about you now?”