Revenant (12 page)

“Chief McMahon, hello! Finally decided to get out of that little apartment you’re renting downtown and enjoy the advantages of home ownership?”

Mike laughed. “No ma’am, I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of responsibility just yet. Actually, I’m calling on police business. We are investigating the disappearance of a Paskagankee resident, Earl Manning, and believe a newly arrived couple in town may have information which could be helpful in the search. The problem is we don’t have a last name for either the man or the woman. We only know that they are likely renting a home on the outskirts of town. We believe their first names are Max and Raven. I don’t suppose you’ve rented any homes within, say, the last three months to a couple with these names? The man is considerably older than the woman.”

“No, Chief, but the rental market has been very slow recently. Between the slow economy, which will continue to struggle in a remote area such as this even after the rest of the country has gotten back on track, and that horrible business with Chief Court killing all those people last fall, residential home sales and rentals have virtually dried up. I’m certain I would remember if I had served a couple such as the one you mentioned. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”

“No problem. Thank you anyway, Barb.”

“Good luck with your search, Chief, and give some thought to what I said about buying a house. There are tax advantages, not to mention the pride of ownership.”

“I’ll think it over, Barb, and when I’m ready to buy, you’ll be hearing from me. Thanks again.”

Mike hung up and glanced out through the open blinds into the bullpen to see the front legs of Sharon’s chair slam down on the worn tile floor as she stood, writing furiously in her notebook. She looked up and caught Mike’s eye, gesturing with her head for him to come out of his office. He could see, even from twenty feet away and through a window, that she was onto something. Her eyes shone and her body crackled with an electric energy that made Mike’s heart ache.

He left his office in time to hear the end of Sharon’s telephone conversation with the realtor. “Are you kidding me?” she said into the mouthpiece. “That place was run-down ten years ago. I’m surprised it’s even inhabitable. Thank you so much for your information; you might just have helped locate a missing person.”

She hung up the phone and turned to Mike. “Bingo. Max Acton is the guy’s name, and he’s renting the old Higginson house out on Depot Road, way out in the woods. The place was empty and falling apart when I was in high school—“

“—Way back then?” Mike interrupted, and Sharon smacked him on the arm.

“The point is,” she continued, “the place was a piece of crap a decade ago and it has undergone virtually no maintenance or restoration since. No legitimate couple would ever rent that place unless they were trying to keep as low a profile as they possibly could.”

Mike smiled and fist-bumped his officer. “Looks like we’re in business. Let’s go”

16

Josh Parmalee listened for the creaking sound a second time, his mouth hanging half-open, Dorito crumbs littering his jeans and his Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. He was careful to dress professionally when in public on the job with Parker—the Great Man would expect nothing less—but out in the woods in the middle of nowhere a suit seemed a little bit like overkill.

He was certain he had heard a noise, furtive and hushed, like someone (something) sneaking across the newly constructed wraparound porch Parker was so proud of. The hairs on the back of Josh’s neck stood on end and he felt a worm of fear wriggle its way through his intestines.

He shook his head and grunted. He was being ridiculous, a freaking little pansy. Next thing you knew he would scream and piss his pants. He was just unused to being way out here in the forest, that was all. He was a city guy, had been born and raised in Seattle and spent his entire life there. All of this vast emptiness, with its three hundred year old towering pines and its millions of frigging mosquitoes and its mooses or meeses or whatever the hell they were called, it was all a little unnerving. That was all.

Besides, he had now been listening closely for at least a minute and had yet to hear a repeat of the sound which had caused this massive overreaction. He was glad his old compatriots on the Seattle PD couldn’t see him now, cowering inside his rich boss’s house, all because of a little
noise.

He grunted again and stuffed another Dorito into his mouth and that was when the front door slammed open with a
Crash!
banging into the freshly painted living room wall with enough force to gouge out a chunk of drywall. A puff of delicate white dust floated into the air like a miniature explosion and Josh’s eyes widened in shock.

Looming in the doorway, swaying side to side as if drunk or high, stood a haggard-looking skeleton of a man, hair unkempt, dirty clothes hanging off his rail-thin body, his face somehow . . .
off
. . . as if the features couldn’t quite coordinate with each other. His eyes seemed off-kilter, glazed and unfocused and looking in two different directions, and one side of his mouth curled up as if attempting to smile or perhaps sneer, while the other side bent down in studious concentration.

The man shook his head side to side slowly and his eyes came together, focusing on Josh, who was so surprised he hadn’t moved, hadn’t even put down his bag of chips. The intruder shambled forward a couple of feet and stopped. “Brett Parker?” he asked, the voice issuing from deep inside his chest, low and rumbling, and that was what snapped Josh out of his shocked inaction.

Josh leapt to his feet, orange-yellow crumbs scattering all over the freshly varnished hardwood floor, and he had the absurd thought that he had better get the mess cleaned up before Parker saw it or his boss would flip out. He reached for his weapon, a Sig Sauer P229 shoved into the waistband of his pants at the small of his back. He yanked it out, holding it—for the moment—with both hands at his side, barrel pointed toward the now-messy floor. Josh had instinctively checked the intruder’s hands the moment he crashed through the door and they were empty, and he knew he could bring his weapon to bear, if it came to that, before the man could get within arm’s length of him.

Josh had had plenty of experience dealing with drugged-up losers back in Seattle, usually young men, assholes hopped up on meth or angel dust or any of the other crazy shit these idiots were stupid enough to put into their bodies, and that’s what it appeared this dirtbag had done.

Sort of.

Something
was off about the guy, that much was plain as day.

“Why don’t you just stop right there,” Josh said calmly, his insides churning with the adrenaline rush he used to experience almost daily but had nearly forgotten about since hiring on with Parker. He raised the Sig to punctuate his point and almost lowered it to the floor again, but thought better of it and held it eye-level, barrel now pointed at the intruder’s chest.

To his surprise, the man
did
stop. In Josh’s police experience, losers as far gone as this guy appeared to be didn’t normally pay the slightest attention to a weapon, whether pointed at them or not. But this guy looked quizzically at Josh and repeated his question. “Are you Brett Parker?” The voice really was spooky as hell.

“Who wants to know?” Josh countered, and the man standing three feet inside the damaged doorway, swaying on his feet like a stoned teenager at a heavy-metal show, shook his head. “You ain’t Parker. Where’s Brett Parker?”

And that was when everything went to shit. Because at that moment Brett Parker, the
real
Brett Parker, the man this loony-tune was searching for, came wandering into the room from the hallway, forehead wrinkled, demanding to know just what in the holy hell was going on here. And the hallway was behind the intruder, meaning the crazy bastard stood between Josh and Parker. Meaning the intruder was closer to Parker than Josh was, meaning also that if Parker came any closer to the man standing in front of the door, there would be no way he could get a shot off without risking hitting his boss.

It was decision time. Josh had to make a split-second determination whether to fire his weapon or not. The answer was simple. This crazy-looking motherfucker had burst into a private residence uninvited and unannounced, lunacy written all over his features, ranting and raving about Brett Parker, a man worth billions and who had dozens—if not hundreds—of enemies throughout the business world.

It was a no-brainer. Sure, the intruder was unarmed, but Josh could take care of that minor detail later; maybe put a steak knife in his dead hand or something.

He fired. Flame belched from the barrel of the Sig and the weapon blasted, the noise loud and shocking inside the enclosed room, and a sharp, tangy smell filled the air, and the crazed-looking, drugged-up stranger took a direct hit in his chest. The impact blasted him backward and he smashed into the partially open door, falling against the wall he had damaged with his violent entrance.

Parker instinctively dove to the floor and Josh had to give him credit, he never screamed. Josh figured a prepped-up Ivy League pussy like Brett Parker would crap his pants with the discharge of a weapon, but he did nothing of the sort. He hit the deck and rolled into the hallway and instantly rose a notch in Josh Parmalee’s eyes.

Josh lowered his weapon and looked down the hallway. His hands were shaking and he was breathing heavily and he could feel the adrenaline pumping through his system. It felt good. “Are you all right, boss?”

“What the hell is going on here?” Parker demanded, rolling onto his hands and knees and looking up at Josh, waiting for an answer. His sandy blond hair hung in his eyes and he looked more angry than afraid.

And before he had a chance to explain, before he could tell Parker about the door slamming open and the crazy fuck bursting in, swaying on his feet and jibbering about looking for Brett Parker in his drugged-up, spooky voice, before he could say any of that, the intruder, the guy crumpled in the corner who by all rights should be dead, the guy who had taken a 9mm hollow point right in his drugged-up chest and been blasted five feet backward, that guy, began to rise.

 The stranger pushed himself up on his hands and knees slowly, until he was in virtually the same position as Parker. Then he lurched to his feet, his hands exploring the hole that had appeared in his chest when the slug punched through his body, a look of annoyance mixing with wonder on his face.

Josh stared, mouth agape, too stunned to move. This guy could not possibly stand after being shot in the chest—Josh would bet a week’s paycheck he had hit the man right in the heart—at practically point-blank range. It was inconceivable. The druggie’s shirt, already dirty and threadbare, was now shredded and torn where the bullet pierced it on its way into the man’s body.

Josh could see a ragged hole in the man’s chest around the fluttering remnants of that shirt. The hole seemed much larger than it should have been, even considering the damage his round could do. But the most unbelievable part, the part that had Josh staring in wonder when he should have been preparing to defend himself and his employer, was the utter lack of blood.

The man’s chest should have been gushing; blood should have been pumping out of him with the force of a small fire hose, spurting out with every beat of his heart, leaking and flowing and soaking his shirt as the life ebbed out of him. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t gushing or pumping or flowing or doing anything else; it simply wasn’t there.
There was no blood.

The crazy-ass stranger who was hopped up on drugs and didn’t seem to know how to bleed began shuffling forward across the floor, moving toward Josh, shambling like some kind of fucking zombie out of a two a.m. horror movie on cable. Except it wasn’t two a.m. and this wasn’t some stupid zombie horror movie. Incredibly, the guy still hadn’t taken note of Brett Parker, but Josh wasn’t thinking much about Parker or anything else at the moment. All he could think was
this is not freaking possible.

The stranger spoke again as he shambled toward Josh, demanding for the third time, “Where is Brett Parker?” His voice now sounded ten times worse even than before. Because now Josh could now hear his words coming out of the hole in his chest as well as out of his mouth.

This is not freaking possible.

Finally Josh thought to raise his gun and train it on this weird intruder who didn’t seem to be able to die or even to bleed. He brought it to chest level and fired just as the guy clamped one impossibly strong hand around his neck and tossed him effortlessly across the room. Josh heard the sound of the gun discharging and felt it buck like something alive in his hand. He caught the flash of fire as it flew from the barrel, saw it in his peripheral vision as he felt himself flying through the air, not with the greatest of ease or even any small amount of grace.

Josh slammed into the granite fireplace and the last two things he thought before his world went black were, 1) He must have blasted that motherfucker to hell this time, and, 2) Parker was going to be really pissed when he had to clean all of Josh’s blood off his brand new chimney.

He wavered for a moment, lost somewhere in that fuzzy grey expanse between alert and unconscious, thinking of nothing besides what a relief it would be when his body finally shut down. Somewhere outside of himself he heard a long moment of complete silence. Then the screaming started.

Parker hadn’t screamed before, but now he did, he made up for his lack of expression earlier by shouting out a symphony of terror, screaming until he went hoarse, screaming for mercy and for his mother and for nothing in particular besides a sane moment in a suddenly insane world.

And then Josh Parmalee’s world disappeared, going up in a puff of smoke as his brain shut itself down.

17

Earl grabbed the guy who had shot him and tossed him effortlessly across the room as the man fired his gun again. This time the bullet missed Earl and the shooter’s body smashed into the fireplace with a thud and crumpled onto the polished granite hearth. His strength surprised him. He wasn’t especially tall and had always been scrawny and that was even truer now that he was dead, but he lifted the much heavier gunman with no trouble at all and threw him like a pitcher firing strike one across home plate.