The Howling Trilogy

by Gary Brandner

  “Drago.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” she said in exasperation.

  “Amen,” he added piously.

  “I trust, Sheriff, that you won’t mind if I do what I can on my own to locate Dr. Pastory and Malcolm.”

  “Holly, I hope you are not going to get a gun and go rushing off like a crazed vigilante.”

  “I do not believe in guns,” she said.

  “I am relieved to hear that. As long as you stay within the law, I can do nothing to stop you. I have to insist, however, that you will in no way interfere with the actions of legitimate police officers.”

  “That sounds like something you memorized,” she said.

  “It is,” he admitted, “but I mean it.”

  “Good enough, Sheriff. You go your way and I’ll go mine.”

  She turned smartly and marched out of the office, giving him no chance for a reply.

  What reply could he make, anyway? Everything she said was essentially correct. He was the sheriff, and he was doing a lousy job. Moreover, this business had split him and Holly apart just when he was thinking something good might develop there. It was with an honest feeling of loss that Ramsay watched her climb into the little Volkswagen Rabbit with the Greenpeace emblem and drive off, scattering as much gravel as she could manage with the underpowered car.

  * * *

  Holly was so angry when she left Gavin Ramsay that she had to exert a force of will to pull her foot up off the accelerator. She felt like the fabled knight who leaped on his horse and rode madly off in all directions. This was not like her. She was a calm, reasonable woman, always in control of her emotions. What right did that Gavin Ramsay have, anyway, keeping her awake nights thinking about the way they had kissed at her door?

  All right. She would handle it. She got the Rabbit down to an acceptable speed and headed west on Highway 126, which ran along the Santa Clara River. She kept the window on her side rolled down to let the moist morning air flow in and cool her feverish face.

  She drove through Fillmore and on toward Santa Paula, taking deep breaths, feeling the muscles at the back of her neck and along her shoulders gradually relax as she ordered her mind, putting everything into its proper compartment.

  Number One. She was worried about Malcolm. The boy had special qualities that she had only begun to discover. In time she would have found out who he was and what he was and helped him to live with it. That time had been stolen from her.

  It hurt to know that she had been gaining the boy’s trust. It was she he had first spoken to. She for whom he had called when he was hurting. What must he think of his new friend now?

  Number Two. She was mad as hell at Gavin Ramsay. He brushed off her suggestions and her requests like some hysterical woman. Well, maybe that was overstating the case. Nevertheless, he was a whole lot more interested in catching his Werewolf Killer, as the media were now calling it, than he was in locating a missing boy. But wait, she cautioned herself, isn’t Gavin doing his job the very best way he can? Was she being unfair? Maybe so, but what the hell, life was unfair. If he was going to treat her like some addled, helpless female, then to hell with him.

  By the time she pulled into Ventura and parked on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Holiday Inn, she was under control and feeling better. She had a plan.

  The foremost supplier of medical equipment in the area, Landrud & Co., was located in Ventura. If Wayne Pastory had ordered anything medical for this phantom clinic of his, it would have been from Landrud.

  Holly restarted the engine and drove until she found a Texaco station with public telephones. She riffled through the Yellow Pages and located the number for Landrud & Co. She dropped a coin into the slot, punched out the number, and asked the switchboard operator to connect her with the Sales Department.

  “Hello,” she said, making her voice brusque and businesslike when she was put through. “This is Dr. Hollanda Lang of La Reina County Hospital. I wonder if I might see someone there about an order for new laboratory equipment.”

  “Of course, Dr. Lang,” came the answer. “We’ll be glad to talk to you. Would you like to come in this afternoon, or any time tomorrow, at your convenience?”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m rather pressed for time, and if possible I’d like to make it sooner. I’m only about ten minutes away from your building right now.”

  She could almost hear the salesman calculating the probable commission on the other end. “Well, yes, I’m sure that would be possible. I can reschedule one of my own appointments and see you right away.”

  “Thank you, I appreciate that. Your name is––?”

  “Schaeffer. Olan Schaeffer. I’ll leave word with the receptionist to expect you.”

  “Very good. I’ll see you in a few minutes, then, Mr. Schaeffer.”

  Holly replaced the receiver and drew a deep breath. She had managed a couple of white lies there without even flinching. And Gavin Ramsay thought she would get in the way of his police work. Hah!

  Damn, why did she keep thinking about the loose-jointed sheriff with those hard blue eyes that could soften like anything? So what if he was one hell of a kisser? Nuts to him.

  Landrud & Co. was in a low, unimaginative cinder-block building with lots of glass around the entrance and some fake-looking greenery in front to soften the antiseptic effect. Holly parked brazenly in a slot marked CUSTOMER and entered the chrome-modern reception area.

  She handed her business card to a lacquered-haired receptionist and said, “I believe Mr. Schaeffer is expecting me.”

  “Oh, yes, Dr. Lang. He asked me to tell him at once when you got here.” The receptionist smiled with several thousand dollars worth of porcelain and touched a button on her telephone panel. Maintaining the smile for Holly, she said into the mouthpiece, “Dr. Lang is here, Mr. Schaeffer.” A moment’s pause. “He’ll be right out, Doctor.”

  Olan Schaeffer was a short, ruddy-faced man with thinning hair and cigar breath, which he disguised inadequately with Tic-Tacs. His suit was a muted sharkskin as befitted the serious nature of the product he sold, but he allowed himself a touch of playfulness in the orange and blue figured tie.

  “Well, Dr. Lang,” he said after seating her in his compact office, “I believe you said you were interested in laboratory equipment. I have our catalog here, and several brochures you might want to glance through.”

  “Actually, that won’t be necessary,” Holly said, wishing she had better prepared her story. “I’d like to talk to you about equipment ordered by a colleague of mine, Dr. Wayne Pastory.”

  Schaeffer’s smile slipped a notch, as though he felt his commission shrinking. “Uh, was that order placed for La Reina County?”

  “No. Dr. Pastory is associated with us, but the equipment I’m interested in was ordered for his own private clinic.”

  “I see,” Schaeffer said, not seeing at all. “May I ask specifically what it is you want to know?”

  “We’ve had excellent reports at La Reina County,” Holly improvised, “about the quality of Dr. Pastory’s equipment. And the price offered by you people, of course.”

  They exchanged little insider smiles.

  “Our board of directors is interested in making a similar purchase for a new wing we have under construction.”

  “Ah, yes, I see. Excellent.” The commission light returned to the salesman’s eyes. “Well, we’ll just punch it up on the old computer here and see what we shall see.”

  He swiveled his chair around and lifted the dustcover from a computer terminal as though unveiling a prized objet d’art. “Everything’s done on the computer nowadays. Sometimes I kind of miss poking through the old filing cabinets, but I guess that’s progress.”

  Holly forced herself to sit quietly and smile while Schaeffer flipped on the terminal and waited for the screen to come to life. She crossed her legs to give the man something to look at other than her smile, which was becoming strained.

  The computer beeped politely and prompted him
in pale green characters to get on with it.

  “Would you spell the doctor’s name for me?” he asked. Holly wrote it out for him on a desk-pad. Stiff-fingered, he punched the proper command keys, then spelled out WAYNE PASTORY, M.D. The computer beeped and buzzed and Holly began rehearsing her exit in case no information came up on Pastory. She needn’t have worried, for after a final buzz and beep the screen was filled with pale green readout that listed dates, medical apparatus, prices, and other coded information.

  “Dr. Pastory has been quite a good customer,” Schaeffer said. “Especially in the last month.

  Ah, yes, that’s what I understand,” Holly said, leaning forward, trying to decipher the computer language on the screen.

  “Can you tell me specifically what pieces of equipment you’re interested in? Or I could run a printout of the whole file, if that would help.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure it would, but I want to be certain this is not material the doctor ordered for La Reina. It’s his own clinic that I’m interested in.”

  “Of course. The computer knows all, tells all.” Schaeffer tapped several additional keys. “No, all this was shipped to his clinic up near Bear Paw. Is that the place?”

  Holly almost laughed with relief. “Yes, Bear Paw. A funny name that I can never remember. That’s the place.”

  “Not much of a town, from what I hear,” said the helpful Schaeffer. “Gets a few skiers in the winter is about it. Anyway, they’ve got a post office and your Dr. Pastory’s clinic.”

  Holly stood up. “Thank you so much, Mr. Schaeffer. I can’t tell you how helpful you’ve been.”

  The salesman scrambled to his feet. “But the equipment. Didn’t you want to go over the list?”

  “Why don’t you run off that printout and send it to me in care of La Reina County Hospital? I look forward to doing business with you.”

  Holly made her second hasty exit of the morning, leaving a befuddled Olan Schaeffer wondering whether his commission had just sailed out the door.

  14

  While Holly Lang took hasty leave of the offices of Landrud & Co. in Ventura, Abe Craddock was draining a can of Coors in the old Whitaker place. It was a falling-down cabin set well back in the trees at the south end of Pinyon, and had not been used since old George Whitaker’s Dodge had slipped off a jack while he was under it down at Art Moore’s Exxon station.

  The cabin had been rented from old George Whitaker’s widow by a smart-talking writer fella from Los Angeles who was doing a story for one of the scandal sheets they sold where you paid for your groceries, over at the Safeway. This so-called writer had bailed Abe Craddock out of jail and promised him a cool thousand dollars just for telling him the story of what happened in the woods that day with Curly Vane and the wolf thing. The catch was that Craddock would tell his story to no one else.

  Abe figured he flat had it made. Not only was he living fairly comfortable in the cabin with Betty out of his hair; he was taking this smartass L.A. writer for all the booze he could drink, and figured he could probably up the dollar price on him, too. As for the manslaughter charge against him for blowing up Jones, that was no sweat anymore. With the kid gone and Curly nothing but raw meat, there were no witnesses. It was an accident, pure and simple. Yes, things were surely going old Abe Craddock’s way for a change.

  The L.A. writer, Louis Zeno by name, was hammering away at the old typewriter he’d brought with him like he was trying to set the thing on fire. Abe had never in his life seen a man who could type so fast.

  Zeno ripped out the page he was working on and handed it over to Craddock. “All right, Abe, I want you to take a look at this and see if it sounds all right. Remember, this is supposed to be you telling the story, and I want to be sure the facts are reasonably close to what really happened.”

  Craddock took the page, set aside the Coors can, wiped his mouth, cleared his throat. He began to read in a labored schoolboy manner:

  “When Curly Vane and I entered the dense, dripping forest outside Pinyon on that fateful afternoon, perhaps we should have sensed…”

  Abe stopped reading and looked up, frowning.

  “Something the matter?” Zeno said impatiently.

  “It’s that dripping forest business. The forest don’t drip. Least, I don’t remember no dripping that particular day.”

  “That’s alliteration for effect,” Zeno told him.

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Read the rest.”

  Craddock went through his preliminary mouth-wiping and throat-clearing again and continued:

  “…should have sensed a certain foreboding, an ominous presence lurking unseen in the shadows. But in our innocent good spirits, neither of us could foresee the unspeakable fate that would befall one of us before we would see the sun again…”

  Abe stopped again, shaking his head.

  “What now?” the writer said wearily.

  “Uh, I ain’t sure I get that business about the sun. I mean, it was up there all the time. We weren’t in no cave, you know.”

  “Never mind that,” Zeno told him. “That’s just for atmosphere. All I want you to do is make sure that what I say you say happened is more or less what happened. So if anybody asks you about it after the story comes out you can tell them, sure, that’s the way it was. Okay?”

  “Yeah, okay. I get it.” Craddock sucked noisily at the empty beer can. “Reading this stuff is mighty thirsty work, and damn if I don’t think this is the last of the Coors.”

  “Jesus, Abe, it isn’t even noon yet, and you’ve put away a whole six-pack and part of another.”

  “Hell, that’s nothin’. You should of seen me and Curly when we really got down to some serious drinking. Hell, we wouldn’t leave no bottle untapped in three counties.”

  “I’ll bet,” Zeno said unhappily.

  “An’ you did say you’d provide the drinking stuff as long as I gave my story to you and nobody else. Ain’t that right?”

  “That’s right, Abe,” Zeno said. “Let’s just finish this part where you walk into the woods and first see the Wolfman.”

  Craddock coughed loudly. “Damn, Lou, I just don’t think I can rightly concentrate anymore without something to cool down my throat.”

  “All right,” the writer snapped. “I’ll go get some more beer. Do you think a twelve-pack will hold you till lunchtime?”

  “Might be,” Craddock said. “If you get the sixteen ounce cans; it’ll go farther.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sixteen-ounce.” Louis Zeno lowered the cover onto his precious portable Royal and stood up.

  Someday, some blessed day, Louis Zeno would finish the book that was finally going to make him some real money and free him forever from writing trash for the supermarket tabloids and dealing with scum like this foul-smelling Abe Craddock. He had the outline tucked away in his apartment in West Hollywood. All he needed was a free month or so to get it down on paper and off to a publisher.

  In the meantime, he would just have to keep turning out stories about mothers who stuffed their babies into microwave ovens and country girls fucked by green men from outer space and assholes like Abe Craddock and his imaginary werewolf. He could look forward to one small victory when Craddock tried to collect the imaginary thousand dollars Zeno had promised him. The writer crossed the cabin’s single room to where his jacket hung from a bent nail.

  “You might pick up some Fritos while you’re at the store,” Craddock suggested. “One of the big bags.”

  “Big bag. Sure.”

  “When you get back I’ll tell you the part where I took on that wolf thing with my bare hands after I seen what he done to Curly. I mean, I was holdin’ my own, too, maybe gettin’ the best of things. If only I hadn’t of caught my boot there in them bushes and tripped myself up it might of been a whole ’nother story.”

  “Yeah, Abe, swell, but let’s just stick to the story we’ve got. I’ll ask the questions and you tell me what happened in your own halting words. I’m t
he professional. I know how to put these things together.”

  “I guess that’s right,” Abe said slyly, “but without me you wouldn’t have nothing to put together. Ain’t that so?”

  Fuck you, you stinking ignorant redneck bastard! is what Louis Zeno thought. What he said was, “Yeah, that’s so, Abe. Without you I’d be standing in the unemployment line.”

  “Well, don’t you worry, Lou buddy, you and me are going to make us a whole shitpot full of money with this before we’re through.”

  Zeno shrugged into his jacket and headed for the door.

  Neither man looked toward the dusty windowpane at the side of the cabin. If they had, they might have seen the eyes that watched them. Eyes that gradually changed color until they seemed to glow an unearthly green.

  * * *

  Derak watched the man from the city leave the cabin and stalk down the trail to the clearing where he had parked the little orange car. The engine fired and the city man drove off. Derak looked back through the window at the gross, murdering hunter. The smoldering hatred inside him kindled to a flame. Derak moved a short distance away from the cabin and carefully removed his clothes so they would not be shredded as the transformation began.

  * * *

  Abe Craddock thumbed a wad of Copenhagen into his cheek and sucked out the good tobacco flavor. He should have told the writer fella to pick up a couple of tins of that, too. The dumb prick would bring anything Abe wanted as long as he got what he called an exclusive on Abe’s battle with the werewolf. In Abe’s mind the whole thing by now had actually taken place as he told the story and retold it. He came out looking a little more heroic every time.