Known Devil

by Matthew Hughes

  The sudden whoop of an ambulance siren sent a fresh jolt of pain through my head. When it had receded a little, I said, “Look, I dragged myself out of my bed of pain because it seems like the gang war’s escalating. I want to know what the fuck happened here and why.”

  “Short version,” Scanlon said. “The answer to your first question is ‘car bomb’, and I’m guessing the answer to the second one is ‘to kill a bunch of folks’.”

  “Well, duh,” Karl said, which earned him another look from Scanlon.

  “How many dead?” I asked him.

  “They’re still bringing bodies out,” he said. “Nine that we know about, so far.”

  “They’re all human, aren’t they?” Karl said.

  “How the hell do I know?” Scanlon said. “That’s for the Medical Examiner’s people to figure out.”

  A third-story parapet that had run across the front of an apartment building directly across from Ricardo’s suddenly came loose and fell to the sidewalk with a crash. I was glad nobody had been standing underneath it. There’d been enough dying on this street tonight already.

  “My point is,” Karl said, “that I’m pretty sure none of them were vampires.”

  “Yeah?” Scanlon said. “And you reached this conclusion how, exactly?”

  “Because you can’t kill vampires with a bomb.”

  Scanlon and I both stared at him, then we looked at each other. “He’s got a point”, I said.

  “Does he?” Scanlon frowned. “Look, I freely admit this isn’t my area – I mostly deal with humans who kill other humans.” He looked at Karl again. “You’re telling me you can sit a vampire on top of a ton of TNT, set it off, and the vampire just gets up and walks away once the smoke clears?”

  “Yeah, pretty much,” Karl said.

  “But the vampire’d be blown into a million pieces,” Scanlon said. “Do they all get –”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” I said. “A human would be in a million pieces. The vampire wouldn’t discorporate like that. He’d probably be blown a fair distance by the blast, and he wouldn’t feel so great for a while – but, yeah. He’d get up and walk away.”

  Scanlon shook his head slowly. “How the fuck is that possible?”

  “Who the hell knows?” I said. “How are vampires possible? How is magic possible – and lycanthropy, and all the rest of it? It just is.”

  “Wait a second,” Scanlon said. “What about that case down in Louisiana a few years back? Some religious nut turned himself into a suicide bomber directed against vampires. He made up an explosive vest, then hung a bunch of silver jewelry all over it. Showed up at a party some vamps were having, and boom. That killed a few, as I recall.”

  “Yeah,” Karl said, “but that was the silver shrapnel that did it, not the explosion itself.”

  “Maybe that’s what happened here,” Scanlon said.

  “No way,” Karl said. “If there was that much silver around here, I’d be able to feel it – and I’m not getting anything at all like that.”

  I tried to make myself think, despite the insistent pounding in my head. “This is fucked up,” I said.

  “What was that word your partner used a minute ago?” Scanlon said. “Duh?”

  “No, what I mean is, if you’re waging war against a gang of vampires, why would you use a weapon that’s not gonna kill any vampires?”

  Karl looked at what had once been the front of Ricardo’s Ristorante. “I think you’re right, Stan,” he said. “What’s the point?”

  “The point?” Scanlon made an impatient gesture that took in the whole street. “Maybe the fucking point is to make sure that nobody ever comes near this joint again, even if they do get it rebuilt someday. That bomb might not’ve hurt Calabrese’s body, but it sure as shit put a big, fat hole in the middle of his wallet.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

  “What the fuck’s that mean? Scanlon said.

  “Think about it, Scanlon,” I said. “The restaurant wasn’t a money-maker for Calabrese – my guess is, he barely broke even on the place. And since this was his headquarters, he wouldn’t have had any of his illegal operations going on in there, so blowing the joint up probably wouldn’t even affect his main income stream.”

  “And if Calabrese hasn’t got a ton of insurance on this place,” Karl said, “then the bastard isn’t half as smart as I think he is.”

  Scanlon spent a few seconds with his eyes closed, rubbing the bridge of his nose with two fingers. Behind him, the work of cleaning up the devastation continued.

  EMTs brought out the dead and injured as soon as the Fire Department could locate them. Cops were trying to secure the crime scene so that evidence could be systematically gathered from it later. Men and women in yellow hardhats from PG&E went around deactivating the live electrical wires before somebody stepped on one and got fried. And clergy from several faiths were ministering to those among the injured who the EMTs didn’t think were going to make it as far as the hospital.

  “Let me see if I understand this,” Scanlon said at last. “Whoever set the bomb off wasn’t trying to kill vampires with it, cause you can’t kill vamps with a bomb.”

  “That’s right,” Karl said.

  “And they didn’t do it to destroy the business,” Scanlon went on, “since Calabrese doesn’t use the place to make money.”

  “Seems that way,” I said.

  Scanlon looked at me, then at Karl, then back at me again. “Then why the fuck did the Delatassos do it?”

  “That’s a hell of a good question,” I said. “But I’ve got one that might be even better.”

  “Which is…?”

  “What if the Delatassos didn’t do it?”

  As Scanlon walked away, I noticed Dennehy from the State Police bomb squad standing a couple of hundred feet away, giving orders to some of his people.

  “Come on,” I said to Karl, and we made our slow, careful way over to where Dennehy was standing. I stumbled once and Karl tried to take my arm, but once I’d glared at him, he let go again. We came up on Dennehy just as he was finished deploying his troops – four guys and a woman, all dressed in identical blue jackets that read “State Police BDU” on the back.

  “Don’t forget to check for fragments buried in the sides of buildings.” He practically had to yell to be heard over the noise from all the other people and vehicles in the area. “You see anything unusual, dig it out and bag it. We’ll figure out if it’s relevant later. OK, get to work.”

  As the four bomb techs trotted away, Dennehy turned toward Karl and me. “I wish I could say it was good to see you fellas again, but under the circumstances…”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said.

  Dennehy looked at me for a few moments, his head tilted a little to one side. “Christ, what happened to you, Stan?.”

  “It looks worse than it is,” I said. “I just got jumped by some guys early this morning. One of them whacked my head with something hard, probably a gun barrel. But I’ve got that thick Polack skull. I’m OK. But we came over to ask you about this bomb.”

  “What d’you want to know about it?”

  “Anything you can tell us,” I said. “I realize you haven’t had much time to investigate yet.”

  Dennehy sneezed a couple of times, then blew his nose on a big bandana handkerchief. “It’s the dust,” he said. “Always irritates my sinuses at these scenes. I tried wearing a respirator once, but the other guys kept asking me if I was still beating up on Batman, so I gave it up.”

  “The bomb, Chris,” I said. “What about the bomb?”

  “OK, well, for starters – it had a lot more juice than the one that did in what’s-his-name…”

  “Castle,” Karl said. “Victor Castle.”

  “Yeah, him. You can see by the amount of damage that it was a much more powerful explosion this time – not the kind of charge you could fit in a trash can, that’s for damn sure.”

  “What was it in, then?” I aske
d him. “Any ideas?”

  “Car bomb, most likely.” Dennehy pointed up the street in the direction of what had once been Ricardo’s Ristorante. “That car there, specifically.”

  A couple of hundred feet from the restaurant’s entrance was something that might once have been an automobile. It was lying on its roof – at least, I think it was. Looking at that twisted, burned pile of metal, it was hard to say for sure.

  “You figure plastic explosive, like the last time?” I asked.

  “Most likely,” he said. “Big difference between this bomb and the last one, though – I mean, apart from the amount of explosive used.”

  “How do you mean?” I said.

  “That other one – very precise. You can’t use words like ‘surgical’ when talking about bombs, but the one outside the rug store had a very specific objective – to take out that one man. The other damage was incidental. But this….” Dennehy waved his arm in a gesture that took in the whole scene. “This is more like the kind of stuff you see in the Middle East. The fuckers who set it off don’t really have a specific target in mind. They just want to cause as much damage – to people and structures both – as they can.”

  Karl and I glanced at each other. “That’s very interesting,” I said.

  “The first time, it was a hit, pure and simple,” Dennehy said. “But what we had here tonight was fucking terrorism.”

  “You think so?” I just wanted something to say while I tried to get my mind around what I’d heard.

  “Goddamn right it was,” Dennehy said. “And you know what Lenin wrote about terrorism?”

  “The Russian revolution guy?” Karl asked him.

  “That’s the one. Lenin said, ‘The purpose of terrorism is to terrify.’”

  “Sounds about right, but a little obvious,” I said. “What’s your point?”

  “My point,” Dennehy said, “is this: just who were these fuckers trying to scare?”

  An hour or so later, we were back at the car. The trip to the crime scene hadn’t given me a lot of useful information, but it sure had been a rich source of questions.

  “Where to?” Karl asked. “Back to Mercy?”

  “No, fuck that. If I was gonna drop dead from that whack on my head, I’d have done it by now. Take me home, will you?”

  “Home it is, then,” he said, and started the engine.

  “Wait,” I said. “Where’s my car, anyway?”

  “Should be in your driveway. One of the guys from the squad drove it over to your place from Jerry’s earlier today.”

  The route Karl followed to my place took us past Saint Peter’s Cathedral. Karl averted his eyes from the large crosses on the front door, but did it without a lot of drama. I didn’t say anything – I’ve seen him do that a hundred times since he joined the ranks of the undead.

  We’d gone a block past the cathedral when Karl said, “Remember what Victor Castle told us a while back – that he thought a vampire’s aversion to religious symbols was just psychological? We believe we’re supposed to be scared of crosses, and so we are.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Think it’s true? Or is it because we really are spawn of the devil?”

  I shifted in my seat, which didn’t help my head any. The issue Karl had raised was one I tried not to think about too much.

  There was a time when I was wary of vampires, because the popular culture said they were monsters – a view that the Vampire Anti-Defamation League has been fighting for decades. Then a vampire killed my wife, and I came to hate the creatures. That was why I’d requested a transfer to the Occult Crimes Unit – I figured it would give me the chance to kill a few vampires in the line of duty and thus get away with it.

  But now my partner and best friend, as well as my daughter Christine, were vampires. More than that – each of them was undead because I had made it happen. It was either that or stand by helplessly and watch them die.

  Karl and Christine weren’t evil – I was convinced of that. But I also knew that if you waved a cross – or a Star of David, or some other religious symbol – in the direction of a vampire, he’d run from it. Or she would. And if religious symbols represent God, vampires being afraid of them meant… what?

  The academic types have a name for my current attitude towards vampires: cognitive dissonance. That’s a fancy way of saying that somebody holds conflicting attitudes toward something – or somebody.

  “I don’t know if Castle was right or not,” I said to Karl. “But that spawn of the devil stuff is bullshit.”

  Another couple of blocks went by before Karl said, “I’ve been spending some time with Doc Watson, talking about all that shit.”

  I didn’t know what to say about that, so I settled for “Uh-huh.”

  Terence Watson, MD, is a local psychiatrist who’s been a lot of help to the Scranton PD over the years. I’d last run into him about a month ago, in the frozen foods section of Wegmans. Doc and I had chatted briefly, but he didn’t say anything about having Karl as a patient. Of course, he wouldn’t. Doc Watson’s very big on preserving confidentiality – maybe that’s why so many people trust him.

  “Doc seems inclined toward Victor’s Castle’s opinion on the cross issue,” Karl said.

  “Seems?”

  “You know how it is – or maybe you don’t. He doesn’t tell me much. Just asks questions and lets me come up with my own answers.”

  “So you’re working toward the point where you can look at a crucifix without wanting to run like hell?” I said.

  “Something like that.”

  “How’s that working out?”

  “I’m not there yet,” Karl said. “Maybe I will be, someday.”

  “Here’s hoping,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  Karl had been right about my car. When we got to my house, his headlights showed the Toyota Lycan, sitting in the driveway. As we came to a stop, I checked my watch: 3.18.

  “You going back to work from here?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, might as well see if McGuire’s got anything for me to do as a solo, or maybe I can go out with one of the other teams. If not, there’s always paperwork to catch up on.”

  Karl put the car in park and looked at me. “You gonna take tomorrow night off?”

  “Fuck, no – I’ll be in for my shift. You can tell McGuire as much, too.”

  “I dunno, Stan. I mean, no offense, but you’re not movin’ around too good right now. Maybe some rest is just what you need.”

  “I’m gonna get some rest. I plan to keep vampire hours today – sleep from sunrise to sundown, and I may even get to bed earlier than that, after I talk to Christine.”

  “OK, good, but I still think–”

  “Karl, listen. The fucking city is coming apart at the seams, right? We got bombs going off, supes doing crimes to get high, fangsters shooting it out in the streets, and God knows what all. And by the way, I know what you’re thinking.”

  He gave me a flash of fangs in a quick grin. “Is that right?”

  “Yeah – you’re thinking that I’ve got some kind of Matt Dillon complex–”

  “Who?”

  “Gunsmoke. Before your time. Anyway, you think I’ve got some kind of hero thing going on, where I figure that only I can stop all the bad shit that’s been goin’ on. Right?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite that way – but that’s because I never heard of Gunsmoke.”

  “I should’ve used a James Bond example – but, anyway, you’re wrong. I don’t figure I’m going to stop it alone. Shit, maybe it can’t be stopped by anybody. But all I know is, I’ve got to try.”

  Karl made an “I give up” gesture and said, “Alright, OK. Fine.”

  “Scranton’s my town, Karl. I’ve never lived anyplace else. And I’m not gonna spend tomorrow night at home watching Zombie Survivor on TV while the whole place goes to hell in a handbasket. I can’t.”

  “I said OK, didn’t I? I believe you, Stan – don’t g
et aggravated.”

  “Yeah, I guess that could be pretty bad for a guy in my condition, huh?”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Karl said. “Goddamn fuckin’ A right.”

  “OK, I’ll see you at nine tonight. Thanks for the lift.”

  As I reached for the door handle, he said, “I’ll wait until you’re inside before I take off.”

  I turned back and looked at him. “I’m all grown up and everything, Karl. Besides, I’ve got my Beretta.”

  “You had it with you this morning behind Jerry’s Diner, didn’t you?” He gave an embarrassed shrug. “I’m just sayin’.”

  I like Karl pretty well most of the time, but there are moments when I hate him – especially when he’s right. Like now.

  I drew in breath to say something sarcastic, but what came out was, “OK, Karl – and thanks.”

  I closed the kitchen door behind me and made sure it was locked. Christ, Karl had got me paranoid now – although I’d always thought that the philosopher Allan Konigsberg had a good point when he said “Being paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not really out to get you.”

  I could hear the TV playing in the living room – I’d already known that Christine was home, since her car was in the garage. I was about to call out “It’s me!” when the TV shut off. She’d heard me come in, as any vampire would have. A moment later, Christine appeared in the doorway between the living room and kitchen.

  She looked at me for a second before saying, “Hi.”

  I think she’d been about to say something involving the phrase “death warmed over” but changed her mind. Good for her.

  “Hi, yourself.” I pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and sat down, although “collapsed into it” is closer to the truth.

  Christine went to the freezer and removed what looked like a gallon-size freezer bag filled with ice cubes. I was pretty sure it hadn’t been in there yesterday. She wrapped the bag in a clean dishtowel and handed it to me. “Here,” she said. “Try this on your head.”

  “Thanks, honey.” I took the ice pack and pressed it gingerly against my lump. She’d been right – after a little while, the pain started to ebb a bit.