“What?” Randi said.
“Whatever was after me last night. If I hadn’t jumped through that window, it’d be me without a skin this morning, and believe me, I’m cold enough as is.” He looked at the window, at the dumpster, and back at the window. “Fuck,” he said, “we can’t stand here all day. But I’ve got a better idea. Help me roll the dumpster away from the wall a little.”
Randi didn’t understand, but she did as Willie suggested. They left the dumpster in the center of the alley, directly opposite the broken window. Willie nodded and began unbelting the coat she’d lent him. “Turn around,” he told her. “I don’t want you freaking out. I’ve got to get naked and your carnal appetites might get the best of you.”
Randi turned around. The temptation to glance over her shoulder was irresistible. She heard the coat fall to the ground. Then she heard something else … soft padding steps, like a dog. She turned. He’d circled all the way down to the end of the alley. Her ex-husband’s old underwear lay puddled across the cobblestones atop the Burberry coat. Willie came streaking back toward the brewery building speed. He was, Randi noticed, not a very prepossessing wolf. His fur was a dirty gray-brown color, kind of mangy, his rear looked too large and his legs too thin, and there was something ungainly about the way he ran. He put on a final burst of speed, leapt on top of the dumpster, bounded off the metal lid, and flew through the shattered window, breaking more glass as he went. Randi heard a loud thump from inside the bedroom.
She went around to the front. A few moments later, the locks began to unlock, one by one, and Willie opened the heavy steel door. He was wearing his own bathrobe, a red tartan flannel, and his hand was full of keys. “Come on,” he said. “No sign of night visitors. I put on some water for tea.”
“The fucker must have crawled out of the toilet,” Willie said. “I don’t see any other way he could have gotten in.”
Randi stood in front of what remained of his bedroom door. She studied the shattered wood, ran her finger lightly across one long, jagged splinter, then knelt to look at the floor. “Whatever it was, it was strong. Look at these gouges in the wood, look at how sharp and clean they are. You don’t do that with a fist. Claws, maybe. More likely some kind of knife. And take a look at this.” She gestured toward the brass doorknob, which lay on the floor amidst a bunch of kindling.
Willie bent to pick it up.
“Don’t touch,” she said, grabbing his arm. “Just look.”
He got down on one knee. At first he didn’t notice anything. But when he leaned close, he saw how the brass was scored and scraped.
“Something sharp,” Randi said, “and hard.” She stood. “When you first heard the sounds, what direction were they coming from?”
Willie thought for a moment. “It was hard to tell,” he said. “Toward the back, I think.”
Randi walked back. All along the hall, the doors were closed. She studied the banister at the top of the stairs, then moved on, and began opening and closing doors. “Come here,” she said, at the fourth door.
Willie trotted down the hall. Randi had the door ajar. The knob on the hall side was fine; the knob on the inside displayed the same kind of scoring they’d seen on his bedroom door. Willie was aghast. “But this is the men’s room,” he said. “You mean it did come out of the toilet? I’ll never shit again.”
“It came out of this room,” Randi said. “I don’t know about the toilet.” She went in and looked around. There wasn’t much to look at. Two toilet stalls, two urinals, two sinks with a long mirror above them and antique brass soap dispensers beside the water taps, a paper towel dispenser, Willie’s towels and toiletries. No window. Not even a small frosted-glass window. No window at all.
Down the hall the teakettle began to whistle. Randi looked thoughtful as they walked back to the living room.
“Joan Sorenson died behind a locked door, and the killer got to Zoe Anders without waking her sister right across the hall.”
“The fucking thing can come and go as it pleases,” Willie said. The idea gave him the creeps. He glanced around nervously as he got out the teabags, but there was nobody there but him and Randi.
“Except it can’t,” Randi said. “With Sorenson and Anders, there was no damage, no sign of a break-in, nothing but a corpse. But with you, the killer was stopped by something as simple as a locked door.”
“Not stopped,” Willie said, “just slowed down a little.” He repressed a shudder and brought the tea over to his coffee table.
“Did he get the right Anders sister?” she asked.
Willie stood there stupidly for a moment holding the kettle poised over the cups. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve got identical twins sharing the same house. Let’s presume it’s a house the killer’s never visited before. Somehow he gains entry, and he chains, murders, and flays only one of them, without even waking the other.” Randi smiled up at him sweetly. “You can’t tell them apart by sight, he probably didn’t know which room was which, so the question is, did he get the werewolf?”
It was nice to know that she wasn’t infallible. “Yes,” he said, “and no. They were twins, Randi. Both lycanthropes.” She looked honestly surprised. “How did you know?” he asked her.
“Oh, the chains,” she said negligently. Her mind was far away, gnawing at the puzzle. “Silver chains. She was burned wherever they’d touched her flesh. And Joan Sorenson was a werewolf too, of course. She was crippled, yes … but only as a human, not after her transformation. That’s why her legs were chained, to hold her if she changed.” She looked at Willie with a baffled expression on her face. “It doesn’t make sense, to kill one and leave the other untouched. Are you sure that Amy Anders is a werewolf too?”
“A lycanthrope,” he said. “Yes. Definitely. They were even harder to tell apart as wolves. At least when they were human they dressed differently. Amy likes white lace, frills, that kind of stuff, and Zoe was into leather.” There was a cut-glass ashtray in the center of the coffee table filled with Willie’s private party mix: aspirin, Allerest, and Tums. He took a handful of pills and swallowed them.
“Look, before we go on with this, I want one card on the table,” Randi said.
For once he was ahead of her. “If I knew who killed your father, I’d tell you, but I don’t, I was in the service, overseas. I vaguely remember something in the Courier, but to tell the truth I’d forgotten all about it until you threw it at me last night. What can I tell you?” He shrugged.
“Don’t bullshit me, Willie. My father was killed by a werewolf. You’re a werewolf. You must know something.”
“Hey, try substituting Jew or diabetic or bald man for werewolf in that statement, and see how much sense it makes. I’m not saying you’re wrong about your father because you’re not; it fits, it all fits, everything from the condition of the body to the empty gun, but even if you buy that much, then you got to ask which werewolf.”
“How many of you are there?” Randi asked incredulously.
“Damned if I know,” Willie said. “What do you think, we get together for a lodge meeting every time the moon is full? The purebloods, hell, not many, the pack’s been getting pretty thin these last few generations. But there’s lots of mongrels like me, half-breeds, quarter-breeds, what have you, the old families had their share of bastards. Some can work the change, some can’t. I’ve heard of a few who change one day and never do manage to change back. And that’s just from the old bloodlines, never mind the ones like Joanie.”
“You mean Joanie was different?”
Willie gave her a reluctant nod. “You’ve seen the movies. You get bitten by a werewolf, you turn into a werewolf; that is, assuming there’s enough of you left to turn into anything except a cadaver.” She nodded, and he went on. “Well, that part’s true, or partly true, it doesn’t happen as often as it once did. Guy gets bit nowadays, he runs to a doctor, gets the wound cleaned and treated with antiseptic, gets his rabies shots and his tetanus shots and his pen
icillin and fuck-all knows what else, and he’s fine. The wonders of modern medicine.”
Willie hesitated briefly, looking in her eyes, those lovely eyes, wondering if she’d understand, and finally he plunged ahead. “Joanie was such a good kid, it broke my heart to see her in that chair. One night she told me that the hardest thing of all was realizing that she’d never know what it felt like to make love. She’d been a virgin when they hit that truck. We’d had a few drinks, she was crying, and … well, I couldn’t take it. I told her what I was and what I could do for her, she didn’t believe a word of it, so I had to show her. I bit her leg, she couldn’t feel a damned thing down there anyway, I bit her and I held the bite for a long time, worried it around good. Afterwards I nursed her myself. No doctors, no antiseptic, no rabies vaccine. We’re talking major-league infection here, there was a day or two when her fever was running so high I thought maybe I’d killed her; her leg had turned nearly black, you could see the stuff going up her veins. I got to admit it was pretty gross, I’m in no hurry to try it again, but it worked. The fever broke and Joanie changed.”
“You weren’t just friends,” Randi said with certainty. “You were lovers.”
“Yeah,” he said. “As wolves. I guess I look sexier in fur. I couldn’t even begin to keep up with her, though. Joanie was a pretty active wolf. We’re talking almost every night here.”
“As a human, she was still crippled,” Randi said.
Willie nodded, held up his hand. “See.” The burns were still there, and a blood blister had formed on his index finger. “Once or twice the change has saved my life, when my asthma got so bad I thought I was going to suffocate. That kind of thing doesn’t cross over, but it’s sure as hell waiting for you when you cross back. Sometimes you even get nasty surprises. Catch a bullet as a wolf and it’s nothing, a sting and a slap, heals up right away, but you can pay for it when you change into human form, especially if you change too soon and the damn thing gets infected. And silver will burn the shit out of you no matter what form you’re in. LBJ was my favorite president, just loved them cupro-nickel-sandwich quarters.”
Randi stood up. “This is all a little overwhelming. Do you like being a werewolf?”
“A lycanthrope.” Willie shrugged. “I don’t know, do you like being a woman? It’s what I am.”
Randi crossed the room and stared out his window at the river. “I’m very confused,” she said. “I look at you and you’re my friend Willie. I’ve known you for years. Only you’re a werewolf too. I’ve been telling myself that werewolves don’t exist since I was twelve, and now I find out the city is full of them. Only someone or something is killing them, flaying them. Should I care? Why should I care?” She ran a hand through her tangled hair. “We both know that Roy Helander didn’t kill those kids. My father knew it too. He kept pressing, and one night he was lured to the stockyards and some kind of animal tore out his throat. Every time I think of that I think maybe I ought to find this werewolf-killer and sign up to help him. Then I look at you again.” She turned and looked at him. “And damn it, you’re still my friend.”
She looked as though she was going to cry. Willie had never seen her cry and he didn’t want to. He hated it when they cried. “Remember when I first offered you a job, and you wouldn’t take it, because you thought all collection agents were pricks?”
She nodded.
“Lycanthropes are skinchangers. We turn into wolves. Yeah, we’re carnivores, you got it, you don’t meet many vegetarians in the pack, but there’s meat and there’s meat. You won’t find nearly as many rats around here as you will in other cities this size. What I’m saying is the skin may change, but what you do is still up to the person inside. So stop thinking about werewolves and werewolf-killers and start thinking about murderers, ’cause that’s what we’re talking about.”
Randi crossed the room and sat back down. “I hate to admit it, but you’re making sense.”
“I’m good in bed too,” Willie said with a grin. The ghost of a smile crossed her face.
“Fuck you.”
“Exactly my suggestion. What kind of underwear are you wearing?”
“Never mind my underwear,” she said. “Do you have any ideas about these murderers? Past or present?”
Sometimes Randi had a one-track mind, Willie thought; unfortunately, it never seemed to be the track that led under the sheets. “Jonathan told me about an old legend,” he said.
“Jonathan?” she said.
“Jonathan Harmon, yeah, that one, old blood and iron, the Courier, Blackstone, the pack, the founding family, all of it.”
“Wait a minute. He’s a were—a lycanthrope?”
Willie nodded. “Yeah, leader of the pack, he—”
Randi leapt ahead of him. “And it’s hereditary?”
He saw where she was going. “Yes, but—”
“Steven Harmon is mentally disturbed,” Randi interrupted. “His family keeps it out of the papers, but they can’t stop the whispering. Violent episodes, strange doctors coming and going at Blackstone, shock treatments. He’s some kind of pain freak, isn’t he?”
Willie sighed. “Yeah. Ever see his hands? The palms and fingers are covered with silver burns. Once I saw him close his hand around a silver cartwheel and hold it there until smoke started to come out between his fingers. It burned a big round hole right in the center of his palm.” He shuddered. “Yeah, Steven’s a freak all right, and he’s strong enough to rip your arm out of your socket and beat you to death with it, but he didn’t kill your father, he couldn’t have.”
“Says you,” she said.
“He didn’t kill Joanie or Zoe either. They weren’t just murdered, Randi. They were skinned. That’s where the legend comes in. The word is skinchangers, remember? What if the power was in the skin? So you catch a werewolf, flay it, slip into the bloody skin … and change.”
Randi was staring at him with a sick look on her face. “Does it really work that way?”
“Someone thinks so.”
“Who?”
“Someone who’s been thinking about werewolves for a long time. Someone who’s gone way past obsession into full-fledged psychopathy. Someone who thinks he saw a werewolf once, who thinks werewolves done him wrong, who hates them, wants to hurt them, wants revenge … but maybe also, down deep, someone who wants to know what’s it like.”
“Roy Helander,” she said.
“Maybe if we could find this damned secret hideout in the woods, we’d know for sure.”
Randi stood up. “I wracked my brains for hours. We could poke around a few of the city parks some, but I’m not sanguine on our prospects. No. I want to know more about these legends, and I want to look at Steven with my own eyes. Get your car, Willie. We’re going to pay a visit to Blackstone.”
He’d been afraid she was going to say something like that. He reached out and grabbed another handful of his party mix. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, crunching down on a mouthful of pills. “This isn’t The Addams Family, you know. Jonathan is for real.”
“So am I,” said Randi, and Willie knew the cause was lost.
It was raining again by the time they reached Courier Square. Willie waited in the car while Randi went inside the gunsmith’s. Twenty minutes later, when she came back out, she found him snoring behind the wheel. At least he’d had the sense to lock the doors of his mammoth old Cadillac. She tapped on the glass, and he sat right up and stared at her for a moment without recognition. Then he woke up, leaned over, and unlocked the door on the passenger side. Randi slid beside him.
“How’d it go?”
“They don’t get much call for silver bullets, but they know someone upstate who does custom work for collectors,” Randi said in a disgusted tone of voice.
“You don’t sound too happy about it.”
“I’m not. You wouldn’t believe what they’re going to charge me for a box of silver bullets, never mind that it’s going to take two weeks. It was going to take a month, but I raised the a
nte.” She looked glumly out the rain-streaked window. A torrent of gray water rushed down the gutter, carrying its flotilla of cigarette butts and scraps of yesterday’s newspaper.
“Two weeks?” Willie turned the ignition and put the barge in gear. “Hell, we’ll both probably be dead in two weeks. Just as well, the whole idea of silver bullets makes me nervous.”
They crossed the Square, past the Castle marquee and the Courier Building, and headed up Central, the windshield wipers clicking back and forth rhythmically. Willie hung a left on 13th and headed toward the bluff while Randi took out her father’s revolver, opened the cylinder, and checked to see that it was fully loaded. Willie watched her out of the corner of his eye as he drove. “Waste of time,” he said. “Guns don’t kill werewolves, werewolves kill werewolves.”
“Lycanthropes,” Randi reminded him.
He grinned and for a moment looked almost like the man she’d shared an office with, a long time ago.
Both of them grew visibly more intense as they drove down 13th, the Caddy’s big wheels splashing through the puddles. They were still a block away when she saw the little car crawling down the bluff, white against the dark stone. A moment later, she saw the lights, flashing red-and-blue.
Willie saw them too. He slammed on the brakes, lost traction, and had to steer wildly to avoid slamming into a parked car as he fishtailed. His forehead was beading with sweat when he finally brought the car to a stop, and Randi didn’t think it was from the near collision. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, “oh, Jesus, not Harmon too, I don’t believe it.” He began to wheeze, and fumbled in his pocket for an inhaler.
“Wait here, I’ll check it out,” Randi told him. She got out, turned up the collar of her coat, and walked the rest of the way, to where 13th dead-ended flush against the bluff. The coroner’s wagon was parked amidst three police cruisers. Randi arrived at the same time as the cable car. Rogoff was the first one out. Behind him she saw Cooney, the police photographer, and two uniforms carrying a body bag. It must have gotten pretty crowded on the way down.
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