Nevermore (20 page)

Frowning, Dean asked, “Why’re we gonna need her help on Monday?”

“There’s two more sites left to complete Samuels’s sigil, but we don’t know which one of the two it’ll be. Dad’s notes didn’t specify what order the points had to be drawn in. So unless you want me on one and you on the other—”

Dean held up a hand. “Fine, whatever, we’ll get Nevermore

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her to cover one, and then we can ask her about Roxy. Happy?”

Chuckling, Sam said, “Thrilled beyond all possible imagining.”

“Hey, fellas, can I come in yet? Freezin’ m’
ass
off out here!”

Sam turned toward the front door, through which Manfred had yelled. It was much colder tonight than it had been the previous night, and there was no reason to keep Manfred out of his own place. “It’s clear!” Sam yelled.

FOURTEEN

Webster Avenue and East 199th Street
The Bronx, New York

Monday 20 November 2006

Dean hated waiting.

There were a lot of reasons why he had gone to Stanford a little over a year ago to fetch Sam, but at times like this he liked to think the main reason was because Sammy was actually good at the piddly crap.

And the last two days had been chock full of piddly crap, ending now with the pair of them sitting in the Impala on Webster Avenue in the Bronx, waiting for something to happen.

Sunday had been pretty dull. Sam left messages on several people’s voice mails, one of which was Nevermore

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finally returned this morning, saying that the Poe website was paid for by a corporation called Pendulum Pit Incorporated (“Oooh, subtle,” Dean had muttered at the time). It took no time at all for Sam to use his research-fu to find out that Pendulum Pit Inc. was a self-owned corporation owned and operated by one Arthur Mackey.

Unfortunately, he didn’t dig that up until after sundown, and they needed to try to stop their Poe nut—who Dean was still convinced
was
Pym or Mackey or whoever he was—from killing someone else.

Dean and Sam had volunteered to take Webster Avenue and 199th, which was a major thoroughfare containing parking lots, auto parts stores, and mechanics, with three or four floors’ worth of apartments over many of the stores.

McBain took Fordham Road and MLK

Boulevard—which was a huge intersection that had the Church of St. Nicholas of Tolentine and Devoe Park, as well as several more apartment buildings.

Webster was pretty quiet at night, whereas the other location was fairly well traveled. They all agreed that it was better for the two fugitives to take the quieter spot.

The problem was, there were several spots where the next killing could take place, most of which were in apartments. Dean and Sam knew they couldn’t 206 SUPERNATURAL

just wander around looking too much, as this was a predominantly Latin American neighborhood and they stood out.

At least the car wasn’t as big a deal as it might have been. One of the mechanics had a couple of vintage vehicles, and a ’fifty-four Buick was in the parking lot down the street from where Dean had parked. Generally, the Impala was a bit conspicuous, and Sam once made the mistake of bringing up the possibility of abandoning the vehicle for something less distinct, since they were now on the run.

Dean made it clear that Sam was never to even consider the possibility of bringing
that
subject up again. He’d sooner cut off his left nut than give up the Impala.

Their third (and, God willing, fi nal) excursion to the Park in Rear last night hadn’t been much of an improvement. They had pretty much run out of excuses to bring up Roxy, and besides which, they seemed to have gotten as much intel as they were likely to get on that score. Roxy was just one of a long line of girlfriends these guys had bagged and tossed to the curb over the years, and Dean was convinced that half the stories they told about Roxy were actually about some other chick.

To make matters worse, Jennifer wasn’t working Sunday night, and all the other women in the Park in Rear were part of a couple or simply not his type. He’d been hoping that Jennifer would at least Nevermore

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call—he’d given her his cell number before they left Saturday night—but so far, zip.

Dean hadn’t bothered with the “hot” handle on his shower that morning.

Roxy made the same cameo she’d made Saturday night—some cackling, some shaking, rattling, and rolling, and then disappearing. Both Sam and Dean agreed that she probably still hadn’t gotten over the dispersal yet, but that come Friday, she’d probably be back to full-tilt-boogie haunting mode.

Sam had also found some lore about New York City ghosts, most of whom appeared to be famous people: Theodore Roosevelt, an NYPD com-missioner before he was President, haunting the old police headquarters; Mark Twain haunting the place where he used to live at on West Tenth Street; Alexander Hamilton all up and down Jane Street, on the block where he died following his fatal duel with Vice President Aaron Burr; Burr’s own ghost in the Barrow Street restaurant that now stood where a carriage house he’d lived in was; and, of course, John Lennon in the Dakota, the apartment building where he was assassinated.

Sam assumed, and Dean agreed, that a lot of this was New York hype. There wasn’t anything about Riverdale in general or this house in partic u lar, or about women in band T-shirts screaming for people to love them.

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For lack of anything better to do while Sammy was researching, Dean had read up a bit more on Percival Samuels. He had to admit, for a con artist, the sonofabitch was
good
. He put on a great show for his clients—which was good, ’cause they paid through the nose for it. That show didn’t hold up if you paid attention, though. Even Dean knew that Hecate, Osiris, and Morrighan were gods from three different pantheons (Greek, Egyptian, and Celtic), and Loki was from a fourth (Norse) and
wasn’t
the god of love and redemption. But it probably sounded cool to the rubes who didn’t know any better, the same way that the psychics you saw on late night television sounded cool to the folks who missed all the reading tricks and leading questions.

For the nine hundredth time he cast a longing gaze at the radio—he’d found a local classic rock station, and it didn’t even suck that badly—but he knew that blaring music would be a mistake. Headphones wouldn’t improve things, as he needed to be able to hear if something bad happened—like, say, Sam screaming for help, or demon noises, or some other damn thing.

So he sat in silence, and waited.

Dean really hated waiting.

Finally, Sam came out of one of the apartment buildings, looked around to see if anybody was Nevermore

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on the street, saw two people walking north on Webster, and then wandered slowly toward them, head down.

The two people were talking to each other, and each had one ear bud from the same iPod in their ears. They didn’t even notice Sam, but he still waited until they turned up Bedford Park Boulevard before stopping, turning, and jogging across the street to the Impala.

“Nothin’,” he said as he slumped into the passenger seat, slamming the large door shut. “I’ve checked both apartment buildings. There’s that one other place over the auto parts store.”

“What about the store?” Dean asked.

“Which one?”

Dean shrugged. “Any of ’em.”

“I don’t see it. Cars didn’t exist in Poe’s time. If it’s gonna be something that has an emotional connection to Poe’s life and work, it’d have to be in one of the apartments.”

“A sidewalk near a college campus isn’t in any of Poe’s stories either, is it?”

Sam frowned.

Dean shifted in his seat so he was facing his brother. “The thing with the orangutan happened on a street—it was in an apartment in the book, though, right?”

“Yeah.”

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“So obviously our nut job is willing to fudge it to get the location right. Hell, for all we know, that garage over there has a big-ass pendulum in it.” Sam rubbed his chin the way he did sometimes when he wanted to make Dean believe that he was thinking. Dean never bought that, because he knew Sam was thinking all the time. No, this was Sam stalling.

“All right, then—why don’t you check out the garages, and I’ll take the last apartment building?” Dean just blinked and stared for a second.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I’m just shocked that you came up with a plan that doesn’t suck.”

“Hardy har har.”

Grinning, Dean climbed out of the car, as did Sam.

After making sure all the doors were locked, Dean jogged over to the garage with the big yellow sign saying manny’s car repair on the corner of 199th, even as Sam went around the corner—the entrance to the apartments over Manny’s was on the numbered street, perpendicular to Webster. Dean assumed that Sam would wait for someone to walk out and make like he was a resident coming in at the same time—or just ring a doorbell and do the “I’m your neighbor, I forgot my keys” routine. The speakers on these buildings were so crappy that Sam could probably pull it off without too much trouble. Be-Nevermore

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sides, he had that whole earnest thing going for him.

People trusted Sam, which was another reason he liked having him along for hunts.

During the day, Manny’s probably had the door wide open so cars could pull in. Now, though, the big metal garage

door—which was about three

car lengths wide—was shut, with a chain securing a thick metal bolt on either side of the door. Looking up, Dean saw that the door raised and fell automatically, which meant that he would need a remote to open it, even if he could pick the lock securing the chain to the dead bolts. Squinting in the dim light provided by the streetlight several feet away—there was a closer one, but it wasn’t working—Dean saw that the chains were secured with one of the new special locks that were supposed to be harder to break. In the real world, that meant that with good light it would take him fifteen minutes to pick them instead of the usual two. He probably could pull it off, but he’d already had the cops called on him once, and this garage door was considerably more exposed than the side door to that house had been, and he’d have to pick
two
locks, which would take forever.

Not worth the risk.

Then he noticed the small door inset into the garage door, which only had a regular key lock for a standard dead bolt. He knew he could open that in half a second.

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As always, Dean marveled at how stupid people could be sometimes. They’d spend thousands of dollars on an alarm system, but then never change the code from the default provided by the company—or worse, would change the code to something obvious like their birthday or the house’s address or something. Or they’d have four locks on the door, but leave the front window wide open because it was too hot. People were better at the illusion of security than they were at actually being secure.

And the own ers of this garage were just as bad.

Peering through the very small, very fi lthy windows of the garage door, Dean could just make out several cars, and the big locks that kept them safe from being stolen. But by leaving a door like this with just a crap lock on it, an enterprising thief could easily break in and make off with the smaller pieces of equipment or car parts that were there for the asking.

Reaching into his jeans pocket, he took out his lock pick and within seconds had the small door open.

At which point a loud beeping noise started, loud enough to make Dean’s eardrums vibrate.

Looking around quickly, he located the alarm code pad, ran to it, saw which model it was and knew that it only required a three-digit code, and entered the garage’s cross street: 199.

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The beeping stopped as soon as he hit the enter button.
Let’s hear it for stupid people!

With the alarm silenced, he jogged back to the door and shut it.
No sense in advertising that
there’s a break-in.
The only cop he wanted to encounter this trip was McBain.

Dean considered leaving some kind of memento of his presence, just as an object lesson to Manny and his employees that their security sucked. Back when he was a kid, about eleven years old, he used to go looking for cars that had “No Radio in Car” signs on them. He’d take a removable radio, of a type that was very popu lar at the time, and throw it as hard as he could at the car window with a note wrapped around it that read, now you have one.

Really, did anyone think that sign would actually
stop
people from breaking into their cars?

“Ow, fiddlesticks!” someone screamed from the back room, just as something metal crashed to the fl oor.

Dean’s eyes went wide.
Fiddlesticks?

Slowly, removing the pistol tucked into the back of his jeans, he moved toward the back room, past two Geo Metros and a Prius. For a brief instant he gazed longingly at the Prius—not so much for its elegance, as it was a truly butt-ugly vehicle, but for the hybrid car’s gas mileage. The Impala had many virtues, but it also guzzled gas like a sonofabitch, and at anywhere from two to three bucks a 214 SUPERNATURAL