Diabolical (19 page)

When he reached the car, he saw he'd been right. A flashlight was on the ground, bulb burning bright, pointed at the rear passenger tire. A knife handle protruded from the sidewall.

The flashlight came in handy as he changed the tire. More than a half hour had passed by the time he got to the convenience store. He pulled along the side of the building, drove by where Edgar had parked the Harley. The headlights illuminated a white rectangle on the ground.

Hatcher got out of the car and picked it up.

The note inside read,
Maybe next time.

 

 

THE INSIDE OF THE CHURCH WAS QUIET ENOUGH THAT EACH footstep seemed a cavernous, amplified clomp, jarring enough to make Morris wonder how resounding a scream might be in such a place, feeding his imagination with fantasies of terrified shrieks bouncing off all the hard wood and marble. It was such a solitary place, dark and still. He paid special attention to whether he could hear any other footfalls, ones more subtle than his own, uncertain if his guardian demon, as Deborah had called it, was able to enter such a place.

But, why wouldn't it be? The place was nothing but a building. Just because demons may actually exist, it didn't mean there had to be a God.

He walked the aisle, scanned the rows of pews. He stopped a few feet from the altar, stared up at the stained glass beyond it, the colors softly glowing with moonlight. Twenty-four women, and not once over the years did he ever think of killing any of them in a church. That was something he was going to have to add to the list. Maybe even before he was done with this venture.

Treated like a god,
she'd said.
That hand is godlike, and so shall be the bearer of it.

It was his destiny, according to Deborah.

She had promised him it wouldn't be much longer. He looked down at the bulge in his jacket, thinking,
it had better not be
. It had been a couple of months, and now he was long overdue. Three months, that was the max it could wait. He pulled his Hand from his jacket pocket and scratched the back of it. The skin covering it was tough and smooth, never quite dry, but often peeling. And when he went a while without indulging it, it started to itch. Like it was now.

Oh, but how just plain fucking
beautiful
it was. Holding it up to silhouette it against the stained glass, he flexed and scissored the twin appendages that were his fingers, a pair of enormous, curving digits that extended outward in a crustacean motion. The fused bones of those digits made the skeletal structure incredibly dense, and the confused biology had resulted in abnormal growth. The length from the bend of his wrist to the outermost tip at the longest point was a hair over fifteen inches. No thumb, no fingerprints, just two massive, prehensile phalanges connected to a padded section of bone that was harder than rock. Long, and strong.

He'd lived with it all his life, but he still couldn't get over how much he loved it. It never let him down.

And there was nothing like the sensation of running it down a woman's body.
Nothing
. It was as if the senses of touch and smell and taste combined to form some inexplicable sensitivity, one that filled him with awareness and feeling and excitement, every moment of contact mainlining a powerful drug directly to his brain. The silky warmth of their flesh, the salt of their sweat, even their fragrant aromas were more than just felt, they were absorbed by each and every touch, flooding his consciousness until his mind was awash in them, with that added bonus of pure delight sizzling through his nerve endings, the experience that made it all so irresistible—the tactile taste of fear.

How indescribably delicious it was, how literally mouth-watering. His marvelous extremity—an extremity in every sense of the word—sliding over their beautiful bodies, the sight and feel of it creating waves of terror that his own, special flesh could actually ingest, a taste it chemically identified like a tongue slathering over something oh-so-sweet, oh-so-sour, a tanginess that reached up and tingled through his taste buds even as it bathed some magical part of his brain. It was the very best part of him, and always had been. By the time he was four, maybe even younger, it was something he knew made him unique, something he couldn't imagine being without.

But he also knew that while his limb was a many-splendored thing, it was thrust upon him against his will, and he was not surrounded by those who appreciated such exceptionalism. By kindergarten, it was obvious he was never going to be accepted as normal, and yet his mother kept talking about surgery? To remove the only thing he cared about? What should have been a gift was treated like a curse. His mother had made him this way, and he was still a boy of fifteen or so when he decided she would have to pay. His Hand was a thing of wonder, but everything bad he suffered, the taunting, the names, the constant stares, the looks of such utter disgust from girls, those were all her fault. She had not equipped him for childhood, had set him up to be tormented. The Hand made him special, but she had made him different. Yes, she would have to pay.

And pay she did.

Morris was thinking about that, remembering the rush of touching her with It, the sexual thrill that coursed through him as he held the knife to her throat, the surprise of finding It running over her breasts, almost with a mind of Its own, the dizzying cocktail of sensations, culminating in the satisfying crunch as he tightened those tentacle-like digits around her throat, recalling all the vivid snapshots of memory, reliving each moment, especially that one—that special, all-important one—when he realized he could use the hand on other women, women like those he had spent all those hours sitting and watching at the mall, dreaming of those legs, of It running up the silky interior of their thighs, burrowing into that special opening . . . no, not just women, mothers . . .
that
was the epiphany. Young mothers, young mothers with young children, children who would grow up suffering, damaged, always and forever tortured inside. Always different. It all became clear to him, not so much knowledge but understanding, not so much a thought but a feeling, an orgasmic convergence, where he saw the color of ecstasy, saw it, felt it, comprehended it. It was the red of his mother's blood, and the yellow of a school bus filled with children, children staring hopelessly, robbed of their childhoods like he had been, a color emerging from this epiphany, swirling inside him, painting itself over his brain as It indulged in a feast of sensations from his mother's body, his mind drowning in it, it and all it stood for, that brilliant, rapturous shade of orange . . .

He stiffened. Someone was there, next to him. The presence abruptly registered, jolting him out of his reverie.

“How long have you been here?” the man asked.

Morris whipped his Hand down and back into his jacket, blading his body to block the view as best he could until It was concealed. This had to be the guy, the one he was supposed to meet. He didn't have a description, didn't even know his name. But who else could it be? Before he could say anything, the man started to walk away.

“Follow me,” the man said, tossing his arm ahead of him, gesturing forward.

Yes, Morris thought, had to be the guy. He looked like some businessman, all gussied up in a suit and tie, black trench coat hanging open. Not what he expected, but what, exactly, did he expect? Horns and a goatee?

“Where are we going?” Morris said.

The man stopped at a large wooden door, opened it with a tug and a long pull.

“Downstairs.”

As soon as the man finished saying the word he was through the door, descending into a dark stairwell toward a faint spill of light. Morris watched him, watched the top of his head bob downward, swallowed by the shadows in long, slow gulps. Then he followed.

Seconds later, Morris stepped into an impressive basement, spacious and finished with an institutional look: functional floor tiling, a corporate shade of eggshell wall paint, fluorescent lighting. A hallway stretched back beneath the church. He could make out a doorway to what looked like a classroom.

A few steps ahead of him, his guide headed to another door in the opposite direction, this one leading to an unfinished storage area, rough concrete flooring cluttered over with many years' cumulation of junk. A yellow bulb cast an uneven light from the ceiling, leaving most of the perimeter in a dusky mélange of indistinct shapes. The man picked up a flashlight from the top of a nearby box, Morris realizing a beat later he must have left it there himself to retrieve. He flashed it toward the far wall. The beam shone down a narrow space that cut between crates and boxes and stacks of chairs that had been pushed aside. The makeshift path led to another door, an old, imposing piece of antiquity, solid planks of arched wood that looked like railroad ties, secured to each other with wrought-iron bands bolted through. The man headed straight for it, then gave it a solid tug. It swung slowly.

The air was thick as they descended, like the darkness had substance to it. The faint light cast down from the open door pulled away, growing smaller with each downward step. The man pointed the flashlight ahead into the pool of inky blackness, illuminating their path. Morris noticed a few empty metal torch mounts tracking the stairs along the right side, but there was little else to see.

The beam glanced across walls of stone to each side that curved in front of them, but those soon gave way to rough swaths of vertical earth. The air grew more damp and cooled steadily as they progressed.

“Where are you taking me?”

“By the time I explained it, we'd be there.”

They continued down the stairs for another minute or so, until the last step deposited them onto a rocky landing, a chamber carved out of the substrate.

The man crossed the area to a door that was a bit smaller than but just as imposing as the last one. It was coated with dirt, its features obscured except where some recent hands had been at work. He strained it open, leaning back with his body to keep it moving. The hinges groaned as it drew, an almost nautical sound, deep and scraping. The void behind it came into view like a puddle of crude, thick and opaquely black.

“What's down there?” Morris asked.

“The future,” the man said. “To end all futures.”

HATCHER HEADED BACK TOWARD L.A., UNCERTAIN WHETHER to go to Vivian or just head back to his place. He still needed to think, but he wasn't sure all the thinking in the world would do him any good without some answers. What he'd learned tonight only raised more questions.

Given his lack of understanding, he'd considered driving back and crashing the general's party, just to force the issue. But that was a nonstarter. He was unarmed, one man, against a squad. That kind of math never resulted in anything good. Besides, his only advantage now was that he knew something the general didn't know he knew.

But what exactly it was he knew, he couldn't say.

None of it made any sense. What did Bartlett want from him? To find out about this Hell Gate from the Carnates? And then what? Pass the intel along? Act on it and stop whatever it was from happening?

And what was the deal with Edgar? The guy struck Hatcher as a sublimated psychopath, and Hatcher was inclined to think he was more the latter than the former. He'd seen his share of them in combat, guys who enjoyed it, who lived for the kill, jumped at any excuse. Doing the right thing was not high on their agenda. So why was he helping him? And was “helping” even the right word? There had to be a hidden motive of some sort. Maybe some vendetta against Bartlett. Maybe something impossible to even guess.

A bunch of men moving things from trucks to a cave in the hills of nowheresville. Bartlett supervising them. General Bartlett, maybe not retired. The more he chewed on it, the more he could feel another headache circling his brain, looking for a place to burrow in.

He decided to let Vivian sleep and go straight to his place. He was a few minutes away when he checked his cell phone. Amy had called. Shit.

It was unforgivably late, or unforgivably early, depending how you looked at it. He thumbed the button to dial her anyway. She answered on the fourth ring.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“Yes.”

“Why doesn't that surprise me?”

“I figured you wouldn't have called unless you had something.”

“What I have is a big fat nothing. But I thought that was unusual enough to be something.”

“Nothing?”

“As far as I can tell, your Nora Henruss doesn't exist. No social, no driver's license. Nothing.”

“That's strange.”

“Yes. Needless to say, I couldn't find any connection to Susan Warren.”

“What about the baby?”

“Checked that, too. Found the birth information. Isaac Garrett Rohner, born January twelfth.”

“Rohner?”

“Her maiden name. She changed it to Jordan when she moved to New York, then took the name of Warren when she married. It was on the birth certificate, née Rohner.”

Hatcher thought about that, wondered if he'd heard that name before. Decided he hadn't.

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“Thanks for doing this, Amy.”

“You're welcome.” She paused. “Hatcher . . .”

He waited for her to finish.

“You should have told me.”

This was the subject he was dreading. Playing dumb wasn't even an option. He kept his mouth shut and said nothing.

Amy said, “You should have trusted me.”

“I did trust you, Amy. I still do.”

“I know why you did it. Or at least I think I do. But you didn't have to. If you would have told me, we could have figured something out.”