Wolf's Bane td-132

by Warren Murphy

  Wolf's Bane

  ( The Destroyer - 132 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  A wild child of the bayous, Leon Grosvenor is a two-legged freak show of shaggy hair and talons with an insatiable hunger for raw flesh. His unique abilities as a bona fide loup-garou have earned him gainful employment as a contract killer for Cajun mafia boss Armand "Big Crawdaddy" Fortier.

  Remo's not buying this werewolf business, but when he gets a glimpse of good ol' Leon§s wet work, well, he's still not a believer, but he is certain that Leon needs to be put out of everybody's misery. And damn soon. The swamps stink, Mardi Gras is giving him a headache and all this talk about silver bullets is getting tedious. But as Leon and his pack circle ever closer to the Destroyer, the question remains: Who is the hunter... and who is dog meat?

  Destroyer 132: Wolf's Bane

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Chapter 1

  What's in a name?

  Shakespeare had posed the question, and now four hundred years later, Samuel Francisco had the answer. If you gotta ask, he told himself, you obviously haven't got a freakin' clue.

  Take his name, for example. "Samuel Francisco" sounded as if his parents couldn't quite decide if he would be a Jewish prophet or a waiter in a Tex-Mex restaurant. He couldn't even trim the "Samuel" back to "Sam," because it came out sounding like a certain northern California city full of fruitcakes. It was perfect, salesmen on the lot going limpwristed when they thought he couldn't see them, mincing little girlie steps as if they were trying out for fairy of the month instead of selling used cars to a bunch of idiots who couldn't tell a differential from a dipstick if their lives depended on it.

  Nope, he caught himself. The proper term was not "used"; it was "previously owned."

  That was another crock of shit, but one that he could understand from years of leeching off the public, one way or another. Dress up a dog turd with a little glitter and some parsley on the side, there would be some damn fool out there who absolutely knew for sure that he had found the bargain of the century.

  The worst thing about Francisco's name, though, was the fact it wasn't even really his. Some pencil pusher back in Washington had picked it for him, maybe snoozing through a slow day, fat and happy with his civil-service paycheck, maybe paging through the telephone directory and playing mix-and-match until something caught his eye. Samuel Francisco had been two years in the federal program when he flipped on the television one night, started channel surfing and wound up in the middle of Alien Nation on TBN. Jimmy Cahn played a cop with an attitude, teamed up with a big-headed freak from Uranus or somewhere. Five minutes into the program, it hit him.

  Sam Francisco didn't get his handle from the California fruitcake capital, after all. Some stupid bastard back in D.C. had been watching television, maybe getting high while he was at it, and decided he should name his next dumb pigeon for a bubbleheaded alien. Someday Francisco hoped that he could meet the genius responsible and break his goddamn funny bone.

  Not that his real name had been so terrific, mind you, but at least it had belonged to him, no crazy strings attached. He had been Aloysius Leroy Cartier for thirty-seven years, the name his sainted mama gave him, and he used to have some trouble over that name, too, before he learned to fight and everybody had begun to call him Bubba. He was getting on just fine, or thought he was, until the day some Feds showed up and hauled his Cajun ass to jail.

  The rest was history. They had an airtight case, and Bubba Cartier was looking at a double deuce, all things considered, if he didn't make a deal. His training from the cradle up was that you should never talk to cops except to pay them off or tell them to go screw themselves, but Bubba had been taught another lesson, too, and that was looking out for number one. He could have gone away behind the federal charges, maybe have some oddball felonies appended by the state so they could ship him to Angola for a while. But his high and mighty bosses had been treating him like shit a month or two before the bust went down, and Bubba didn't feel like doing time to get them off the hook. He started thinking of the shit that happened even in the better jails these days-the race wars, contract killings, AIDS-and he decided, to hell with it.

  After he agreed to testify, shit started happening like it was preordained or something, maybe laid out in those horoscopes from TV Guide his wife was always reading to him at the breakfast table, like he gave a damn. Bubba was short on faith in higher powers, even after being raised a Catholic-sort of-in the bayou country of Louisiana, but he figured maybe Uncle Sam could take care of his own. He should have known better.

  The marshals on the federal witness program had their rules to follow, little bureaucratic games to play. Bubba understood that kind of shit, but still it pissed him off when perfect strangers started playing with his life. The name, for instance. Some geek's little joke at Bubba Cartier's expense. And then there was the job they got him, covering a used-car dealership. He knew damn well that somebody had checked his file and seen the time he did for running chop shops, thinking, Hey! This asshole likes to work with cars, let's fix him up. Like that, the little things that wound up being Sam Francisco's life.

  He didn't even want to think about the home away from home they had selected for him, all the way to hell and gone in Michigan. He could imagine Means or Sheppard, one of those guys, staring at a big wall-mounted map of the United States and wondering where they could send him so the bloodhounds wouldn't track him down. That ruled out Dixie and the border states, for starters. He could almost hear them talking: "Here we got ourselves a Southern boy, we better stick his ass up north somewhere. Nobody gonna look for him in Michigan, you think?" So be it.

  Even so, he could have been worse off. They could have sent him to Seattle, where it rained nine months a year, or up to Maine, where inbred fishermen ran lobster traps and answered ay-uh every time you asked them something. When Bubba thought about it that way, he believed that things were not the very worst that they could have been. But Cadillac was bad enough.

  They had to name it for a car, of course, it being Michigan. Not that he particularly gave a damn. The main thing was that he was living farther north than certain parts of Canada, where it started snowing in November, sometimes in October, and you froze your ass off through the end of March, more likely into April. Living in the bayou country all those years had thinned his blood, and it got damn cold up there, almost two hundred miles above Chicago. There were days the town closed up because the snow plows couldn't run, much less school buses, garbage trucks and squad cars.

  There were also days when Bubba wished that he had gone ahead and done his time.

  Too late to think about it now, and yet he couldn't help it. He was well and truly stuck, dependent on the marshals in the Witsec program-short for Witness Security-who had made his life over from scratch. No matter how he really felt, he couldn't piss them off too much, because he knew one thing as sure as hell.

  The bloodhounds never really lost your scent. And if they found him, after all this time...

  Rita was always bitching at him, over one thing or another. She was paranoid about the coloreds, and while Bubba couldn't fault her logic, he was all the time reminding her that colored money spent the same as any other kind, and they were big on buying cars. She blamed him for the fact that she could never see her friends again-small loss, as far as Bubba was concerned-and for the drop in income they had suffered when he left the outfit, started working eight to six and paying taxes. Rita blamed him when the kids got into trouble at their school. And sometimes, when the PMS kicked in, she even blamed him for the weather.

  And so what if she was right. They wouldn't be in Cadillac if he had been a little sm
arter, quicker on the uptake, watching for the Feds. Once he was busted, Bubba could have kept his mouth shut, let the jail doors slam behind him, trusting that the outfit would have taken care of Rita and the kids. The truth was, though, that he had been shit scared of doing twenty years, had half convinced himself he couldn't do it, and they psyched him out. The deal was done, he had delivered on his end, and Sam Francisco of the Cadillac Franciscos was the end result.

  But Christ, he couldn't get a decent plate of jambalaya anywhere within a hundred miles. He was reduced to eating store-bought gumbo out of cans. Some days-most days, in fact, he wished that he had cut a bargain with the Feds to let him disappear alone, leave Rita and the rug rats out of it. His new life would have been a whole lot easier if Bubba weren't saddled with that baggage from the past. He could have saved a fortune, too, on aspirin for the headaches Rita gave him with her nagging, day and night.

  What had attracted him to Rita in the first place? Thinking back, he knew it was her body, back when she was dancing at the Velvet Club, outside Metairie. Looking at her now, three kids and all those bonbons down the road, no one would guess that she had once been an A-1 looker.

  As for the brats...

  Too late, he told himself. You're in it now, and no mistake. A man does what he has to do.

  Yeah, right.

  On Friday night, not knowing it would be his last, Bubba Francisco parked his trash cans at the curb, for pickup in the morning, and sat up to watch the best of Letterman. That wasn't much, in his opinion, but the fella with the big chin didn't do much for him, either, and the flick on HBO was some damn thing with Whoopi Goldberg.

  Wonders never ceased.

  Before he turned in for the night, he poured himself another double shot of Beam and went around to check the house, each door and window in its turn. He was supposed to be secure, up there in Cadillac, but you could never really tell.

  The bloodhounds could be anywhere.

  OUTSIDE, THE LEADER of the pack sat waiting for the windows to go dark. That done, he waited half an hour more, in case the man was pleasuring his woman, then he tacked on fifteen minutes more for them to doze. No time was ever truly wasted if you used it properly, in this case sniffing out the night breeze, studying the deeper shadows with his yellow eyes and looking for a trap. If there were hunters here, he had to give them credit for the way they had concealed themselves. He had to give them special credit for the control they exercised. His own craving was so strong it was almost too much to stand.

  When he was sure as sure could be that he wasn't about to walk into an ambush, he went back to fetch the others. They were waiting for him in the van, unsettled by the city sounds and smells perhaps, but calm enough that he wasn't required to warn them about making noise. Six pairs of eyes intently focused on him as he opened up the sliding door. "Come brothers, sister."

  They piled out and formed a ring around him, claws tap-tapping on the asphalt. When he started walking, after he had locked the van, two of them automatically took point, the others hanging back. The sleek bitch held her place beside him, on his left. They watched for traffic, crossing streets, and kept to shadows where they could. The residential neighborhood had streetlights at the intersections, but the houses in between were dark and still.

  Surrounded as he was by things of man, the leader of the pack could smell the woods nearby. The neighborhood was no more than a half mile from Lake Cadillac and William Mitchell State Park, with Lake Mitchell and the Manistee National Forest a mile farther east. He wished they had the time to do some hunting for the hell of it, but business took priority. Within an hour, tops, they would be homeward bound. By this time Sunday, he could turn the pack out on familiar ground. They could rejoin the rest of the pack and run amok if they were so inclined.

  But first they had a job to do.

  He didn't know the target's name and didn't care. The men who hired him had supplied a photograph, which he had briefly studied, then devoured. It was his theory that ingesting snapshots of his prey gave him an edge. Before the men he hunted ever met him in the flesh, he had consumed a portion of their souls and thereby weakened them in preparation for the kill.

  Or maybe he was full of shit.

  Some thought so, back at home, though none of them would say it to his face. Even the ones who knew him best might doubt he had the "power," but they never crossed him. Never more than once, that is. The leader of the pack possessed a fearsome reputation, which was well deserved. Even the bad boys knew it wasn't smart to piss him off.

  The target had a five-foot wooden fence around his backyard, as if it would keep anybody out. The leader of the pack went over in a flash, the others following and forming up beside him in the darkness, waiting while he watched and smelled the house.

  There would be no alarm, because the target thought that he was safe. You change a name, mock up some history. Time flies. What else was there to do? He was supposed to have protectors running interference for him in the big, bad world, but they were not in evidence this night. Except for bitch and whelps, the bastard would be on his own.

  The leader of the pack advanced until he stood before the back door of the house. He crouched and sniffed around the doorknob, smelling whoever had touched it last. A tasty child-smell, meat so tender it would slip right off the bone, no problem. He could almost taste it now.

  He straightened, threw back his shaggy head and called upon the power. It responded instantly, fire racing through his veins. He clenched his fists and felt his muscles swelling, straining at the denim fabric of his shirt. Long nails like talons bit into his palms. One of his brothers snarled, but he was used to that. They meant no harm.

  He felt the power throbbing in him as he reached out for the doorknob, took it in his hand and twisted it with all his might. The lock resisted for a moment, then gave out a sharp metallic snap. The door swung open and he stepped inside.

  He hesitated for a moment, just across the threshold, listening and sniffing at the house, to learn if any of its occupants had heard the noise. When no alarm was sounded, he stepped forward and the others joined him in the kitchen, heavy with the smell of good meat spoiled by fire. He understood that men preferred to char the sweet flesh they consumed, but he was still revolted by the practice.

  He would take the real thing, raw and bloody, every time.

  He led the pack beyond the kitchen, to a darkened hallway, picking up the odor of tobacco smoke and something else-perfume, cologne, some kind of makeup?-that would lead him to the target's bitch. He paused outside the room where two boys slumbered, opening the door without a sound and nodding to the darkness, smiling as a couple of his brothers broke formation, peeling off to do their work. The next room was a girl's. Another silent signal, and a supple shadow left the pack to go in search of something edible.

  That left two brothers and the bitch to follow as the leader of the pack proceeded to a final doorway, also closed. He went down on all fours to sniff the carpet, baring yellow fangs. The sound that rumbled from his throat was out of place in human company.

  He reached up for the doorknob, hesitating, head cocked so that one ear almost touched the door. Was that a voice he heard inside? The leader of the pack stood and squared his massive shoulders, grinning fiercely as he turned the knob and stepped into the master bedroom. Taloned fingers found the light switch, flicked it and a ceiling fixture blazed on, noonday bright.

  In bed, the target and a woman with a double chin were sputtering toward consciousness. They saw the leader of the pack through bleary eyes, but it was still enough to startle them and make the woman scream.

  "Surprise," he told them as he started toward the bed. "We just dropped in to have a bite."

  ED BEASLEY HADN'T HEARD such screaming since ...well, come to think of it, he'd never heard such screaming in his life. Oh, maybe on the late show, when they had a horror movie on, but he was more inclined to watch the Playboy channel. The noise was coming from next door.

  He glanced in th
e direction of the bedside clock and saw that it was nearly 1:30 a.m. Too late for parties in the neighborhood, and he had never known his neighbors, the Franciscos, as the entertaining kind. Kept mostly to themselves, they did, and there were no kids old enough to raise this kind of hell, unless...

  He fought a brief and indecisive struggle with his sheet and blanket, dragging them behind him as he tumbled out of bed and made a beeline for the window. Pulling back the drapes, he peered across a redwood fence at the Francisco house. No lights were in evidence, and he waited for the screams to be repeated.

  Nothing.

  Beasley hesitated for another moment, wondering if he had been dreaming. Then he heard a crashing sound, as if some heavy piece of furniture had been upended, maybe hurled across a room and slammed into the nearest wall. He took a quick step backward from the window, trembling in his flannel PJs as he wondered what in hell he ought to do.

  Call 911!

  Beasley found the bedside lamp and switched it on reluctantly, half fearing someone in the outer darkness would discover him and burst in through the glass. He tapped out 911 and killed the lamp again, already feeling safer in the darkness. Three rings in his ear before another tape came on.

  "You've reached the Cadillac Police Department emergency response line. All our operators are engaged at the moment. If your call is an emergency, please hold the line. If not-"

  Goddamn it!

  Beasley dropped the telephone, stood and lurched back to the window. Only deathly silence came from the house next door, so that he wondered if he had imagined the commotion to begin with.

  Crash! Another heavy piece toppled somewhere in the darkened house.

  He rushed back to the telephone and scooped it up. "You've reached the Cadillac Police Department's-"

  Shit!

  He slammed down the receiver, bolting for the bedroom door. He stepped on his cat and nearly lost it as the chunky tom spun out from under him, claws raking at one ankle.