“To what Erik thinks is the patron god of his family.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not.”
“And who exactly is the—and pardon me if I grin while I say this—patron ‘god’ of their family?”
“Well, see, that’s one of the main reasons I came to see you,” said DuSchwezel. “You specifically, I mean. ‘Fenner’ is an Anglicized version of the family name. They’re Scandinavian and their real name is—or at least was—Fenrisúlfr.”
I said nothing. My mouth dried right up.
DuSchwezel nodded. “You know that name, don’t you?”
I nodded. “Fenrisúlfr,” I said hoarsely. “It’s another name for Fenrir.”
“Who is—?” he asked, making sure I knew.
“The wolf god of the Vikings. Fenrir is the father of the wolves Sköll and Hati Hróðvitnisson, is a son of Loki, and is foretold to kill the god Odin during the events of Ragnarök.”
“Yes,” said DuSchwezel. “Erik is trying to invoke a dark god who he believes—really fucking believes—is going to help bring about the end of the world. And, god help me, Mr. Hunter, he sacrificed my little girl to try to make that happen.”
His words seemed to be painted on the air between us in dark red letters. It took me a while to figure out how to reply to something like that.
“Even so,” I said slowly, “why me? If Erik is a psychopath and a serial murderer, and you can’t trust the cops to take him down, what you need is an assassin. I’m not a button man. I don’t do contract hits, and ‘revenge killer’ isn’t on my business card.”
“No,” said DuSchwezel, “but ‘monster’ is.”
-4-
Bang.
There it was.
“No, it’s not,” I said. Which was true in the literal sense. My business card said, INVESTIGATIONS AND PERSONAL PROTECTION. But I could see it in his eyes. He knew.
Maybe he didn’t know what I was, but he knew I wasn’t Joe Normal.
“Who’s told you what?” I asked, keeping my voice casual. “And if you try to play the client confidentiality thing, then I’ll tell you in advance to fuck off and go away.”
He considered that for a moment, then nodded to himself as he decided to play his cards faceup.
“Ivy,” he said.
Ivy. She was one of the few people who knew who and what I was. A year or two back, she tapped me to help out a friend of hers with a problem no one else could tackle. I’ve never been exactly certain how Ivy figured it out, but she asked me for help. A friend’s little son was being attacked in his sleep by something that came out of his closet. Yeah, I know. Monster in the closet is a standard kid thing. Except this time it wasn’t. And it wasn’t a sequel to Monsters, Inc., either. There was something big and bad in the closet, and Ivy asked me to go in there and see what I could do.
It got weird and it got messy.
Bottom line is that there’s nothing left in that closet that’s ever going to hurt anyone again.
So, sure. Monster. Not exactly inaccurate. Not entirely unfair.
Ivy knows that.
“She shouldn’t have told you,” I said.
This time, his eyes didn’t dart away. He gave me a long, hard, sad, broken, desperate look. A father’s look. A look that was filled with all of the grief in the world.
“Ivy thought the world of Olivia,” he said. “She knows that I loved her. Really loved her. Olivia was my little girl.”
Saying that broke him.
And, damn if it didn’t break me, too.
-5-
Which is why I went to see Erik Fenner.
There are some cases where I spend days or even weeks running down clues, doing background checks, tailing suspects, building a case. And then there are some where I go right up to a door and knock. I don’t get many of that second kind. If it was easy, they usually wouldn’t hire guys like me.
Except, in this case, it was easy. Finding Erik, I mean. And there are no other guys like me. Not for something like this. I mean, sure, I’ve got cousins and aunts and all who are like me, but that’s different. None of them live in Philly. Most of my relatives are either in the Cities or in Europe. We benandanti go back a lot of years. I can name every family member going back to early sixteenth-century Friuli, Italy, and my Aunt Violet can name them going back to Etruscan times.
Benandanti.
The “good walkers.”
The hounds of God. Which is a pretentious nickname, but someone else hung it on us.
I wonder if DuSchwezel did his background check. Probably. If you want to stop a psychopath trying to invoke a wolf god, hire a private investigator who has some skin in that game. Not the Norse crap, but you get the picture.
So, yeah. I took the case. Ivy told him the right things about me. He knew I’d take it.
Maybe I did too. That “was” word still burned in my head. The man may have been an asshole, but he had a daughter and he loved her. Maybe he thought he failed her, too. Probably did. Mob lawyer and all. Kid has no one to look up to, so she starts looking down.
And sees a handsome monster looking up at her.
-6-
I drove out to Bucks County, to a sprawling estate near New Hope. DuSchwezel gave me the address and the code for the front gate. I told him I didn’t need the code. Wall was only twelve feet high. I mean, c’mon.
Erik’s father was in South Philly, overseeing one of his dockside concerns. DuSchwezel had made sure that nobody but Erik was home. Well, besides a couple of servants, and three or four bodyguards.
I parked my car under some trees on a side road a quarter mile from the house. Walked the rest of the way as the sun was tumbling over the trees toward tomorrow. I don’t need darkness, and that whole full moon thing is pure bullshit. Moon’s got nothing to do with it. On the other hand, sunlight makes it easy for witnesses, and who needs that bullshit.
Was I here to do a contract killing?
Not really. I gave DuSchwezel his check back.
This was for a teenage girl who didn’t know better than to walk into one of the outer rings of hell. DuSchwezel couldn’t actually tell me what happened to her. I doubt any father could force those words into his mouth. Instead, he handed me a copy of the autopsy report.
That she had been raped was horrible enough. It wasn’t the worst thing that had been done to her. We don’t need to go into all the details. Even I get nauseous sometimes. Her body was found in a wrecked car, but the extent of her wounds wasn’t consistent with the amount of damage to the vehicle. The car had rolled and burned, but that didn’t account for the dismemberment. It didn’t account for her eyes and heart being missing. And the pathologist determined that the victim was not alive when the car caught fire. However, on reflection, the pathologist recanted and decided that all of the injuries had, in fact, been sustained in that crash.
Five weeks after the autopsy report, the pathologist put a down payment on a mini-mansion in Newtown. You can connect the dots however you like.
I found a nice little blind spot where the Fenner security cameras couldn’t see through some thick rhododendron. I stripped out of the sweats I’d worn and went over the wall in a way that left claw marks on the brick.
On the other side, I dropped down and ran on all fours. I usually stay on two feet except when I need to move fast. My senses are better then, too. DuSchwezel had given me a scarf that used to belong to Erik. Olivia had kept it as a token of her love.
Still had his scent on it. Useful. Before I went over the wall, I took a big enough sniff that I could have found him halfway across the state.
In the end, it wasn’t even all that hard.
He was sitting by the pool, wearing a pair of skintight Speedos, Wayfarer sunglasses over his eyes, a beer resting on his belly. He did not have three bodyguards with him. There were six of them. Or maybe three worked for his dad and the other three were part of Erik’s mini-cult. They all had wolf tattoos on the sides of their necks.
Very stylized—Fenrir with his jaws wide to swallow Odin on the day the world ends.
Even the guards had that.
They all looked blown out. Couldn’t tell right off if they were hammered, high, stuffed from a big meal, or just a bunch of lazy fucks who were dead tired this early. Or some combination of all of that.
There was an iPad plugged into a Bose speaker dock and Kanye was yelling some bullshit that I didn’t want to hear. They had it on too goddamn loud, too. The asshole club was sprawled all around the pool. No women around, which is odd. Usually, these clowns have all kinds of arm candy, and often it’s paid for in one way or another. Cash, drugs, access to power, whatever. But not now.
Good. That simplified things.
I circled the pool area, following the blood scent to its source. It was the pool house. It had been converted into something else. Not sure if the word “church” would apply. Temple, maybe. Shrine. Something like that. The windows were all blacked out, and inside, someone had gone completely ass-fuck nuts. The walls were painted with magical symbols from at least a dozen religions and twice as many phony cults. Inverted pentagrams, representations of goat-headed Baphomet, symbols of evil. Such bullshit. Some of this crap I knew for sure was from old monster movies that had no actual connection to real beliefs.
The blood was real, though.
There was a lot of it. Old and new. Many sources. Not just Olivia—and I could smell her scent here, too. There were others. As I stood in the doorway, I took in at least fourteen separate female scents. Two of them were prepubescent. These fuckers had killed little girls, too. That’s worse. I’m not sure how exactly, but it is.
Fourteen dead girls and women.
There was an altar and Erik had laid them upon it and he and his wolf pack had done terrible things. I didn’t need to see pictures to know what had happened there. My senses fed the information to my mind. When I was a cop and we learned about forensics, there was a saying that every contact leaves a trace. Now imagine what traces were left for senses like mine to find.
I could smell the pain, the horror, the death. I could almost hear the echo of voices screaming for mercy that was not theirs to have, just as I could hear the laughter of those sons of bitches out by the pool.
Were they true believers? Or was this part of some kind of shared madness inspired and perpetuated by Erik Fenner?
I don’t know and I didn’t much care.
As I stepped into that room, my focus was drawn to the altar. To the smell of blood that washed down from it.
So potent.
So fresh.
“What the fuck is that?” I breathed, and my words came out twisted because my throat was not a human one.
The answer to my question was there to be read, and my senses never lie.
That’s when I knew I was too late. That’s when I realized why those pricks out at the pool looked so logy and sated.
I’d waited until sunset to come here. My caution made me too late to save somebody else’s little girl. Or sister. Or wife. Or whatever. There was blood on the air and smeared on the altar. Female, young. Dead.
And, if my senses were reading it right, not just dead.
No.
Fuck me. There are certain smells flesh makes when it interacts with saliva and digestive juices. I smelled the stink of a feast only recently finished. It was the smell a pack of wolves made when they were gathered around a deer they’d just torn down.
I turned and prowled to the doorway to the pool area and looked at the seven of them.
And I knew.
They had crossed way over the line from making human sacrifices to a wolf god to trying to be wolves. Or become wolves.
The wolf in me wanted to attack. Right then. To kill them all as they slept. The wolf was vicious but he was not cruel.
That’s why I changed back to me.
You see, I can be cruel.
Sometimes, I want to be.
Sometimes, I need to look into the eyes of certain people because I want to see understanding. Maybe I hope for a flicker of regret or remorse. Not that a moment of repentance has saved anyone who I’ve gone after. Fuck it, I’m not a saint. I’m not even a very good private investigator.
I’m a hell of a hunter, though. And, yeah, sure, make a joke about the name. It was picked as a joke by one of my ancestors, so the joke’s on you.
When I take on a client—or in the case of DuSchwezel, a proxy client, because I was here for Olivia, not for her dickhead lawyer father—then that person becomes part of my pack. Wolves protect their packs.
Oh, yeah. We do.
So, it was in my own shape that I walked out of the pool house, strolled over to Erik Fenner’s chaise lounge, raised my leg, and heel-kicked him in the Speedo.
Real fucking hard.
He screamed and grabbed his balls and fell out of the chair.
The screams woke everyone else up. The three bodyguards came out of their chairs like they had springs up their asses, and suddenly, there were guns in their hands. The other three sprang up too. One of them had a gun; another produced a knife from god knows where. The third one grabbed a beer bottle and smashed the fat end off it.
Six of them in a ring around me, with Erik screaming on the ground while his face turned an amusing shade of puce.
And me standing there. Short, skinny, twenty years older than any of them. Naked as an egg with my dick hanging out.
“Who the fuck are you?” screamed one of the guards.
This was the kind of moment when you really want to put a button on it by saying something really cool. Witty. Like the one-liners those action heroes always use.
But goddamn it if I couldn’t really come up with anything snarky.
What I said was more expository than colorful.
I said, “Fenrisúlfr isn’t real, assholes. Fake god from a dead religion. Not even sure the Vikings believed in him.”
They stared at me. Part surprise that I was even dropping the name Fenrisúlfr, and partly wondering who the hell this naked crazy guy was. Even Erik paused in his shrieking to stare at me.
He said, “W-what—”
“You fucktards think you’re becoming wolves?” I asked. “Is that it? I mean, is that what this shit is all about? Some kind of superstitious ritual bullshit?”
Erik managed to get to his knees. His face was dark with pain and he still cupped his mashed balls, but there was fury in his eyes.
And . . . something else.
Maybe it was the darkening sky or maybe it wasn’t, but I saw his pale Scandinavian eyes change from an icy blue to a red that was brighter and bloodier than his face.
All around me, I saw the eyes of the others begin to change, too.
“Well, fuck me,” I said.
The shape of Erik’s mouth began to change. He suddenly had way too many teeth and his lips almost couldn’t form the name of his god. “Fenrisúlfr.”
I don’t know how they managed it, but holy shit. They were actually turning into wolves. All seven of them. A wolf pack transformed somehow by blood sacrifices and the savage slaughter of the innocents, all in the name of a god whose mythical status I was very quickly having to reevaluate.
I said, “Oh . . . shit.”
They laughed, but the laughter sounded like snarls.
Like growls.
So, I figured . . . what the fuck.
They were wolves. Okay, I have to accept that. Werewolves, I suppose. Of a kind.
But they were new at this game. I’ve been playing it a long, long time.
They say age and treachery will overcome youth and skill. Take that to the bank. And another aphorism. Experience is the best teacher.
These pricks have only ever sunk their teeth into innocent flesh.
Fighting another werewolf is different.
Fighting a benandanti werewolf is even harder. It’s a death wish. Ask anyone I’ve ever gone up against.
Oh, yeah, wait: You can’t.
These young
monsters changed.
I changed faster.
-7-
While they still could, they screamed for mercy.
Didn’t help.
They screamed for their god.
He didn’t show.
They screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
I was okay with that.
-8-
I let a couple of weeks go by and then met with DuSchwezel in a booth at Heaven Street Diner. Couple of the regulars were there, but nobody disturbed us. It’s that kind of place.
We worked through a cup of coffee each and he pushed his apple pie around with a fork before we got to it.
“Terrible what happened,” he said. “The fire. Those poor boys.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Makes you think.”
He nodded. Lifted some apple glop, looked at it, set it down.
“I went to Olivia’s grave the other day.”
I said nothing.
“There were flowers on it. Not expensive but lovely.”
I sipped my coffee.
“Any idea who put them there?”
The clock on the wall ticked through half a minute. DuSchwezel nodded.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For what?” I said. “I never did anything for you. We have no understanding other than the fact that I paid you a hundred bucks to answer some legal questions. You cash that check, by the way?”
“Of course. It’s a matter of record now.”
We sipped our coffee.
“Hunter,” he said, “can I be frank with you?”
“Funny question for a lawyer to ask, but sure.”
He almost smiled. “I went to law school to be the kind of lawyer I became. Seriously. I never had aspirations of being Atticus Finch. I never wanted to do anything but make money pretty much the way I do.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Go ahead and sneer, but I’m trying to say something here.”
“Be my guest.”
“In my line of work, I only meet bad people. Fathers and sons, like the Fenners. Hangers-on. Gangs in expensive suits. You understand what I’m saying?”
What the #@&% Is That? Page 23
