Wolf's Bane td-132

by Warren Murphy

  "You grew up here?" Remo asked their reluctant navigator in the front passenger seat.

  "Louisiana born and bred, that's right," the Cajun said.

  "You like it?"

  Cuvier considered that one for a moment, frowning as if Remo's question puzzled him, presenting issues he had never taken time to ponder.

  "Like it?" Shoulders thick with muscle lifted in a shrug. "Is where I'm from. Like it or don't like it, what difference? Tell you one thing true-I like it more than Omaha."

  He stretched the last word out as if its syllables were unfamiliar to him, something from a foreign language-which, Remo decided, was a fair enough description in the circumstances.

  "You may not be safe here," Remo told him, "even if we find the man who's tracking you."

  "I told you three, four times already, ain't no man," said Cuvier. "Armand done hire himself a loup-garou. You find him, he find you, don't matter which. That's all the trouble you going to need."

  "Tell me something," Remo said. "In all the time you worked with Fortier, did he have lots of werewolves on the payroll?"

  "Go on with jokin'," said the Cajun. "That's all right. You meet old loup-garou, then you'll be laughing out the wrong side of your face."

  "I wasn't joking."

  Cuvier gave him a quick sideways glance and they rode in silence for a few more minutes, Remo concentrating on the road, Chiun pretending to be asleep in back, before the Cajun spoke again.

  "There's not just one old loup-garou around here, if you wanna know. Not many, but a few. A few is all it'll take. Pass on the secret and the power."

  "But you never met one?"

  "Not me, no," said Cuvier. "My grandpa seen them, back a time, before I was born. See one, it last you for a lifetime, if you live that long."

  "I'm only interested in recent werewolves. You don't know this werewolf," Remo pressed him. "Where he lives or what his name is, anything to help us track him down."

  "Done told you not to worry about that thing. He'll find us when he feel like it, I guarantee. He find us, and that's all she wrote."

  Remo veered to a different tack. "What would you pay your average wolf man for a job like this?"

  "A contract? All depend on what he ask for, what he needs. I reckon some take money, just like common folks. You can't be sure, though. Loup-garou might ask you something else."

  "Such as?"

  "No tellin'. He be lookin' for someone to carry on the line, might ask you for a soul."

  "How's that?"

  "Your firstborn baby girl, for example. Raise them up a litter that way, keep the pick and lose the rest."

  Remo was trying to get real-world answers, and this guy was hanging out in the twilight zone. "The white man in his arrogance assumes that he knows everything," Chiun said from the back seat. "He visits distant lands, interrogates the people who have lived there for a thousand generations, then dismisses half of what they say as fantasy, the rest as lies."

  "Is there a point?"

  A bony index finger, moving with the speed of thought, tapped Remo sharply on the head. "Your point is sadly obvious," the Master of Sinanju said. "Do not take wisdom for granted. A man with wisdom accepts that there are things he does not know. Koreans understand this basic truth. Even Chinese and Japanese can grasp it, with some effort. White men, on the other hand, display their ignorance by claiming knowledge of all things."

  "Okay, I get your drift," said Remo, switching to Korean for privacy. "But I wasn't raised on spooks and demons. We know what this werewolf is and what it's not. This wolf man is brought to you by Judith White, not Hammer Horror."

  "I assume nothing. Perhaps this creature is not what we think it is, but what the Cajun criminal thinks it is."

  "Huh? You trying to tell me that you believe in werewolves? The supernatural kind? Silver bullets and all that?"

  Chiun answered with a haughty silence.

  Remo sighed. "Okay, Little Father, look-this has the signature of Judith White's little projects. Judith White ran away just a few months ago. Seems to me Judith White's the most likely culprit."

  "Perhaps," Chiun replied without conviction. Cuvier was looking concerned at the unintelligible conversation going on around him. Remo didn't want him freaking out on them. Not while he was still good bait. He switched back to English. "So," he said, glancing over at the Cajun, "how does someone go about becoming loup-garou?"

  "Some born that way, what I been told," said Cuvier. "Them others go on out lookin' for it. Wanna grab the power for themselves."

  "Is there some kind of formula?"

  "Ain't made no study on it," said the Cajun. "Heard some stories, long time back. One say you gotta have a wolf skin, other say you don't. One talks about some kind of ointment made of herbs. Another one tells how you gotta say the right words at a certain time of night."

  "That's helpful," Remo muttered.

  "Ain't no help to get," the Cajun said. "Go on up against old loup-garou, best say you prayers before you start."

  "I'll make a note."

  "One thing I'm happy 'bout," Cuvier said. "Oh, yeah? What's that?"

  "Time we be gettin' into New Orleans," said the Cajun, "we'll be right in time for Mardi Gras. We have a little party before the end."

  HUMILIATION and frustration kept Leon from sleeping on the long drive home. The leader of the pack didn't need the others grumbling at him, but they did it anyway-except the bitch, who simply glared at him from time to time, then slowly turned away without a sound, a gesture of supreme contempt.

  The pack was pissed because Leon had made a kill without them, and there was no time to share. The cop had stumbled into it as he was leaving, more than likely summoned by a neighbor who had wakened to the noise of Leon freaking out and tearing up the absent target's house. It had been close, that one. Not from the aspect of a risk, since he didn't think an ordinary bullet would have fazed him, but because there could have been another cop, one who escaped if he was lucky, sounding the alarm.

  Leon's chief weapon, other than the pack, his teeth and talons, was the fact that 99.9 percent of all Americans would swear upon a stack of Bibles that there were no loups-garous. That kind of ignorance protected him and made him stronger than he was already. Granted, one scared cop wouldn't be able to convince the world at large-hell, they would more than likely slap him in a straitjacket-but if enough people reported a phenomenon, somebody from the government was bound to check it out eventually, and that spelled no end of trouble for a werewolf on the prowl.

  So all of them were angry for different reasons as he drove around the clock to get back home. His brothers and the silent bitch had their noses out of joint because they hadn't had a chance to chow down on the cop-as if he had-and they were making due with cold ground beef from several all-night markets strung along the highway.

  Leon, for his part, was mad and worried all at once, because it was the first time he had blown a paying job, and he had no idea what his next move should be.

  The shopping was a problem, same with gassing up the van, but he had worked it out with help from the old man who raised him long ago. He had to hide his face and hands when he was out in public, meaning off the bayou, anywhere on the road. You couldn't travel far in the United States, even by night, and remain invisible. Even if he could satisfy the pack with roadkill, there would still be stops for fuel, other essential shopping expeditions, maybe even rare occasions when he had to ask directions from the locals.

  The old man's solution was to purchase a hat and raincoat from the Goodwill people, with a pair of roomy leather gloves, and big rolls of gauze. Dressed up, with gauze wrapped all around his head beneath the snap-brim hat, sunglasses on, the leader of the pack resembled someone who had suffered facial burns, or maybe was recovering from some kind of extensive plastic surgery. The old man took one look at him back then and beamed. "Just like Claude Raines," he said.

  Whoever that was.

  Leon didn't care for movies-had no television at
his present den, in fact-because they always ended wrong. He had to have seen two dozen movies about loups-garous when he was growing up, and every stinking one of them had all the facts backward. They inevitably showed the loup-garou as a half-pathetic human-always agonizing over how he had been "cursed"-and half-demented monster who was forced to change against his will and run amok, so crazy-stupid that he would attack his mama if she didn't wear a sandwich sign.

  Bullshit.

  The movies had it all wrong, which was no surprise to Leon. They were advertised as "science fiction," after all. He knew nothing about the science part, but there was plenty of fiction in the werewolf movies he had seen. The moon, for one thing, how it was supposed to make a loup-garou transform against his will. That was a load of crap. The moon was nice for hunting when you needed light, but it couldn't compel the change. Leon had heard that some loups-garous transformed by will, regardless of the season or the hour. Others, like himself, had grown so comfortable with their primal state that they had basically forgotten how to slide back into human shape-come to think of it, had he ever known how?

  Leon was different, and he was better than all the other loups-garous. The woman had seen to that. She had taken what was nothing but your average bayou werewolf and made him into something spectacular.

  When he was growing up, when the old man was teaching him how special he was, he'd been full of pride. But then she came. She remade him into the baddest loup-garou that ever was. And all it took was a glass of water to do it.

  He was ecstatic with the new him, and his appreciation for the strange woman-what was her name?-was boundless. She was his savior. She was his angel. He had fallen in love with her.

  Then she betrayed him.

  LEON HAD NO USE for motels and less for restaurants; all risk aside, they were a waste of money spent on luxuries he didn't crave and meat that was spoiled by fire. Whatever groceries and other things he couldn't pick up in the swamp, he had delivered by a black youth who was smart enough to do his job and ask no questions. When he needed new clothes, every second year or so, he put on his disguise and made a quick run into St. Charles after dark, to the Goodwill store, to pick up blue jeans, overalls and denim shirts.

  Around St. Charles, they figured Leon had some kind of skin disease, most likely leprosy, that made him hide his face and hands that way, go shopping only once or twice a year, and always on the razor's edge of closing time. He didn't know it, but the gray-haired folks who ran the Goodwill store kept kitchen tongs behind the counter, underneath the register, against those days when Leon paid a call. They never touched his money with their hands while it was lying on the counter, but waited until he was gone before they grabbed the tongs.

  It would have made him laugh to see the "normals" going through their paces, acting like the power of a loup-garou was something you could catch like mumps or measles, rubbing shoulders in a crowd. Hell, if it worked that way, Leon wouldn't have been the only loup-garou he knew, and he would have more friends to talk to than the members of his pack.

  You didn't catch it like a disease. You were born with it, and then, if you were lucky, you drank the strange woman's special water to make you complete.

  Not that he knew of others like himself. He was alone, except for the pack, and they weren't really like him. His brothers and the bitch weren't exactly acting very friendly at the moment. It would take some time, he knew from past experience, for them to lay the grudge aside and stop their sulking. Being home again, with the entire pack, the whole family, would make things feel right.

  But the pack had learned to covet human flesh and blood; it was a delicacy they enjoyed far more than the venison, raccoon or rabbit he collected on his night runs over Highway 90. None of them were capable of checking out what the old man had called the long view, sometimes the big picture, which meant looking down the road to what might happen days or even weeks ahead.

  Leon himself had trouble with the long view, but at least he understood the process, realized that simply living in and for the moment, like a full-fledged wolf, could lead you into mortal danger.

  Not that laying plans was any guarantee of long life and success, by any means. He had sat down and planned his latest road trip, even buying road maps from the retard who worked graveyard at the Texaco in Luling, but it all came down to shit if one of his intended meals skipped out ahead of time. The Cajun who was paying him had given Leon names, addresses, everything he needed to complete the job, but he had seemingly ignored the possibility that one or more of Leon's targets might evacuate before the loup-garou arrived, and he couldn't wait around to see if number four was coming back.

  Not after he had trashed the house and killed that cop in the backyard.

  The Cajun would be furious; that was a given. Leon thought about that for a moment, and decided it was logical for him to worry. Not because he feared the man, per se, but rather for the knowledge his employers had. Someone behind the Cajun knew enough to seek a loup-garou, which meant he not only believed, but he had also done his homework and would have a few tricks up his sleeve.

  Like silver, for example.

  Leon felt his hackles rising as he thought about it, and the bitch picked up on something, possibly a subtle variation in his body odor, peering at him curiously from the shotgun seat. She knew the fear smell of a human, but it had no place among the members of the pack. She studied Leon as he drove a good five miles, and finally decided not to push it.

  Never let them fool you, Leon thought. The bitch was smart.

  He had to be smart, too. He had to think carefully about his employer, the big man behind the Cajun who gave orders and expected prompt results. The name of the employer was Fortier, and everyone knew Fortier was a man to reckon with. He could be generous or vengeful, depending on the circumstances and his mood. These days, since he was locked up in a cage for violating human laws, his mood was seldom jovial. It would be less so when he heard that target number four had slipped through Leon's paws.

  The leader of the pack knew he had to come up with a plan quickly if he intended to retain his lucrative employment. And yet, no matter how he tried to concentrate, no plan announced itself. His mind was filled with jumbled images of blood and violence, but nothing that would qualify as strategy.

  It'll be better once we're home, he told himself, and hoped that it was true.

  Chapter 7

  Remo took one look at the New Orleans streets, decked out for Mardi Gras, and recognized a good news-bad news situation off the top. The Crescent City was in jubilant chaos, swinging with the massive party residents and tourists spent a whole year looking forward to, and no district of New Orleans was more rowdy than the teeming French Quarter. Remo watched the costumes and figures lurching past him, everything from painted dwarves to looming giants, all apparently intoxicated and intent on staying that way for the next several days.

  A vacationing trio of sophomore coeds from Northern Illinois University ran up under Remo's balcony and yanked their shirts up to their chins. Remo found himself admiring their bare breasts, each pair more pleasing than the next.

  "Sorry, girls," he said. "No beads."

  "You don't need beads, shweetie!" one of them slurred. "We'll show you whatever you want! For free! How 'bout we come on up?"

  "Cops!" Remo called. "Here they come!"

  The coeds couldn't focus well enough to see that it was a lie and jogged off into the seething crowds. Smith and the insidious tentacles of CURE had reached out from Folcroft Sanitarium and somehow managed to get hotel reservations on Tchoupitoulas Street. Such rooms were normally sold out a year in advance of Mardi Gras, many of them to a clientele that showed up every year like clockwork. Remo and Chiun had one large room with a bed and a sleeper sofa, together with a tiny balcony that overlooked the crowded street and faced a rank of quaint saloons across the way.

  The crush of inebriated flesh would complicate the task of finding Cuvier's old cohorts from the Cajun mob and squeezing them for leads o
n the elusive hit man. Staring at the freak show on parade below, Remo decided that a real-life werewolf would have no difficulty strolling down the boulevard and plucking victims from the crowd. No look was too grotesque for Mardi Gras, no behavior too bizarre. There would be witnesses, of course, but most of them would laugh it off, assuming that the act was some kind of burlesque, a Grand Guignol performance staged for their amusement.

  Chiun had the television on. His ages-old infatuation with American soap operas, which had dimmed when they became too heavy on the gratuitous sex and violence, had recently reemerged with a twist. These days the old Korean was drawn to Spanish serials.

  It got worse. Remo had recently begun to suspect that the ancient Korean was leaving the Spanish-language stations on a bit too long after the soap operas ended. Remo was wondering if maybe Chiun had become interested in...

  No. Couldn't be. It was too horrible to contemplate.

  But the guy on the screen right now was bad enough, and he spoke English, more or less. It was some kind of infomercial with a white-haired Southern statesman-type gesticulating for the camera, grinning like a used-car salesman. Was he selling fried chicken? No, Remo realized, it was politics.

  "Now, my esteemed opponent likes to quote the Good Book in his speeches, tellin' you all the Lord Himself would vote Republican if He was registered in the great State of Louisiana. My dear old mama always taught me it was rude to argue with another man's religion, and I ain't about to go against her teaching now. But I will take a moment to remind you all of what the Book of Proverbs tells us, chapter twenty-six, verse five. It says, 'Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.' By which I mean to tell you all-"