Sacrifice (23 page)

They took a booth along the south wall, and sat at a high table barricaded from its neighbors by a tall dark-wood panel inset with frosted glass.

“This is kind of like what Bennigan’s wants to be,” Joe said, admiring the weathered but elegant wood, bent glowing wall sconces and wide plank floors which looked several years removed from their last coat of urethane.

“What’s Bennigan’s?” Alex asked.

“Never mind. It’s a chain of restaurants that wants to be a real Irish bar. Any invisible people to talk with here? The place looks like it could be haunted.”

Alex nodded. “Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s haunted,” she said. “But yeah, there are some here.”

“See if anyone knows anything? Maybe it’s safer to ask questions here than at the hotel.”

“You mean, like, they won’t attack us and try to pull us into the fifth dimension here?”

“Something like that.”

“Wait ‘til we get dinner,” she said. “I’m starving.”

“I think you’re stalling. First you want a nap, now you want food…”

Alex bristled. “Look. I didn’t ask to get sucked into this little joyride with you. If I don’t want to talk to fuckin’ ghosts, than I’m not going to talk to fuckin’ ghosts, okay?”

Her eyes were wide and her nostrils flaring. Joe held up his palms.

“Whoa, girl,” he said. “I was just kidding. I didn’t ask to be part of this thing any more than you did. But here we are. Don’t turn on me, okay?”

Alex hung her head and stared at the table. “I’m sorry. I just…I’m nervous about all this, okay? I mean…somehow Malachai and all of these others think that I’m supposed to do something about this killer woman. And the Curburide things. And—” she looked up at Joe, and he saw her eyes shimmered with tears—“I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do.”

Joe took her hands across the table and squeezed.

“I know,” he whispered. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, either. But that’s okay. We’ll figure it out.” He squeezed again. “Together, alright?”

Alex nodded.

When the waitress came back to take their order, Joe ordered a bean queso dip for both of them for an appetizer. Then he asked for a burger and a Newcastle.

“I’ll have the same,” Alex nodded, as if she ordered with him all the time.

The waitress had a slight brogue and black hair cut as tight as a pixie.

“You got it,” she said, and slipped back to the bar.

Alex’s eyes lit up and she whispered, “We did it! She didn’t ask me for ID!” Then she frowned a little and said, “What’s a Newcastle?”

Joe laughed. “I guess you’ll be finding out shortly.”

Alex’s eyebrows crossed when she took her first sip of the dark amber ale, but that didn’t stop her from finishing the glass. Or saying “Sure!” when the waitress asked later, “Another round?”

She was giddy as they stepped back out on the street after dinner. The air was alive with guitar solos and the echo of pounding kick drums. “Let’s see a band,” she said.

Joe laughed, but led her to the doorway of the closest bar that had live music. They stepped up to the doorway, but a hefty bald bouncer stopped them.

“No cover,” he said. “But I’ll need to see ID.”

Alex’s face fell.

“I’m old enough to”—she hiccoughed—“drink.”

The bouncer said nothing and Joe pulled her back to the street. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s take a walk.”

They passed a couple more places with prominent door bouncers, and then a tattoo parlor.

“I want a tattoo of a ghost!” Alex proclaimed, peering in at the parlors brightly lit walls, all of them covered by samples of designs, a myriad of garishly colored roses, skeletons, skulls and butterflies. A girl with electric blue hair sat in a chair at the back of the room, while an artist bent over her back, marking out whatever pattern she was about to have etched indelibly in her shoulder.

“Tomorrow, maybe,” Joe grinned and dragged her on.

A few steps farther on and they joined a crowd on the sidewalk to watch a street painter. Kneeling on the asphalt of a small open lot between buildings, the man wore a gas mask to protect him from the cloud of paint that he kept in the air at all times. A boom box vibrated out ambient dance music behind as he grabbed spray paint can after spray paint can, blasting a heavy paper canvas on the street with a mix of yellows, blues, reds and blacks. His hands never slowed; he’d point and shoot with one can, and immediately set it down and grab another, squirting a blast of white or blue across the wet sheet at his knees.

In moments, the mess of color began to take shape, as the man lifted a coffee can lid from where it was protecting a part of the canvas and began to use crumpled newspapers to smudge and shape the paint into a startling array of spiky mountains—an alien landscape that lived in silhouette against a glowing moon.

At the end, he lit the spume of an aerosol can and waved the flames over the finished painting to seal the paint. The crowd clapped, and someone stepped forward instantly, pulling out his wallet to buy the piece as Joe and Alex slipped back to the street.

“Wow,” she enthused. “That was like magic. I wish I had a talent like that. He’s incredible.”

She stumbled against him and Joe put his arm around her and turned the corner back towards the hotel. “You do have a talent like that,” he said, hugging her shoulder tightly. “You can do real magic. Don’t ever forget that.”

“’s not magic,” she argued, eyelids at half-mast. “I just talk to people that…some people can’t see.” She waved a hand in the air. “No big deal.”

“Yes, big deal,” he said steering her across a crosswalk. “You’re going to save the world.”

She put a hand to her mouth. “Not before I get some sleep.”

“Next time you decide to kick me in the ribs, take your fuckin’ boots off.” Ariana held a hand to her side as she slowly rolled off the bed.

Jeremy stood in the bathroom doorway, looking sheepish with a towel around his waist. “Well, keep your claws to yourself then. Is it any better?”

“Gets worse every day. I don’t know how we did that shit on Monday. I couldn’t fuck now if my life depended on it.”

“Didn’t stop you from enjoying my tongue last night.” He shrugged. “You were still in shock the day after. But all those endorphins wore off yesterday.” He leaned back out of sight, and then returned with a pill bottle in his hand. He tossed it on the bed. “Take another. We hit the road and you can crash for a couple hours.”

Ariana palmed the bottle and nodded. “I want to be awake when we get there.”

“I’ll wake you. But first we need to find some breakfast. And coffee.”

Ariana yawned, and then slipped past Jeremy into the bathroom. She snaked an arm around him to take a nipple between her fingers. And twisted.

“Hey!”

She giggled evilly. With a swipe, she ripped the towel from his waist and pushed him, naked, into the room.

“Bring me back a hash brown?” she asked sweetly. She twirled the towel into a knot, and then flung it at him, whipstyle. The crack of its end against his bare ass echoed through the room.

“You bitch!” he yelled, but jumped out of range.

“Orange juice, too,” she sang, and closed the door.

He managed to find a Burger King and some hash browns, and Ariana walked straight from the shower to the greasy bag, water still dripping down her plastic-smooth back. He watched her pop about five orange-brown nuggets into her mouth before asking, “Hungry?”

She eased herself onto the bed and spread her still-glistening legs for him to admire, all the while still chewing greasy fried bits of potatoes. “Behave, and you can have dessert before we hit the road.”

He’d had his dessert, and been eaten too, and now they were on the expressway again, headed east and into the glare of the sun.

Now Ariana was stretched out with the seat tilted back, black shades hiding her eyes. The reflection of cottony clouds moved across the mirror of their lenses, and Jeremy kept sneaking peeks at her, still not sated. The woman was phenomenal. A taut, curved bundle of dangerous, electric sex. Even now, bruised and in pain, she looked hot. She’d worn a pair of black stretch pants for the car ride that showed the swell of her ass when she moved, and a plain white T-shirt that didn’t bother to hide the shape of her nipples through its pores. Not surprising, since she hadn’t bothered to pull on a bra when they’d packed up and left. “Pulling this over my head hurts enough,” she’d said.

“So what happens when we find this backwater town?” Jeremy finally asked. It was pathetic, but he realized he was just looking for something to say so that he could hear her voice again.

“We find a place to crash, and hopefully an Internet café. Or maybe the hotel will have a connection. I need to e-mail a friend there and let him know we’ve arrived. He’ll set up the meeting with our sacrifice.”

“So you’ve got a whole network now, huh?”

She laughed, and then grimaced, holding her side. “Oh yeah. You, me and the twerpy Internet nerd…we’re a regular Interpol.”

“When we kill this guy, that will be it?” Jeremy asked. “The spirits will be able to come through and help you then?”

“When we kill
her,
” Ariana corrected. “This one’s a girl. So I may really need your help this time.”

“I don’t hurt girls,” Jeremy mumbled.

“Fuck that.” She groaned as she rolled towards the window. “You got plenty of hurt in you. I just need you to help me get close to her, gain her trust. One quick flick of my claws and she won’t be fighting for long.”

“Gonna wear your catsuit again?”

“I don’t think I could if I wanted to. But no. This one’s
au natural,
for all of us. We need to bathe in her life, to call forth death.”

“You’re a poet and I didn’t know it.”

“Shut up and drive, lapdog.”

“Your pussy is my whip.”

She snorted.

Captain David Carroll stepped through the line of squads and walked towards the lawn. The red and blue lights flickered eerily across the dirty white siding of the otherwise nondescript split-level house. Two paramedics were feeding the back of an ambulance with a body bag.

Dave had known before he reached the house that this scene was locked up. But he’d felt the need to come anyway. It had happened in his jurisdiction, damn it, and he wasn’t going to sit it out. Nevertheless, he knew his presence here was perfunctory. Frank Alton, the man who’d introduced him to his wife, as well as his best poker buddy, stepped out of the front door, and took off his cap to scratch a balding head.

“Looking grim?”

Frank’s face lit up at Dave’s voice, but then instantly fell. “It’s a damned abattoir in there, Captain.”

Dave knew it had to be badder than bad if Frank was calling him captain. The man was rattled. Heavily.

“Two bodies?”

Frank nodded. “But it looked like five. She painted the walls with them.”

“You really think it’s the Slasher?”

“It’s brutal in there, man. All the organs were pulled out. Took them a couple hours to connect all the pieces to the bodies.”

“But the others were all in hotels. And all men.”

Frank shrugged. “Slightly different, yeah. But it’s all a razor job. And who would know to cut off their genitalia and feed it to them? Who would know to put the liver at eleven o’clock around the head, and the heart at one? It can’t be a copycat, unless the killer has been following the Slasher around.”

“Sounds tight. Number five, huh? And still no idea who the hell she is.”

“No idea who
she
is,” Frank agreed. “But she may have a new traveling companion.”

“Meaning?”

“The man we took out of that bedroom was not her husband. 99 percent sure on that, based on photos and the wallet. And the vehicle in the driveway that’s not registered to Jeremy or Sheila Bruford. If the rituals weren’t so methodically exact, I’d say this was a crime of passion. Sheila was flogging someone else’s pony.”

“And Jeremy?”

“Gave the grandmother a call this morning and asked her to hang onto the kids for the night; he and his wife were supposedly busy. He’s in on this one, Dave. And while we may not know who she is…”

Dave grinned. “That’s the break they’ve been looking for in San Fran, Phoenix, Austin, New Orleans…we’ll take it.”

“APB on Jeremy went out a few minutes ago.”

“Good. Anything left inside to see?”

Frank laughed. “Lots of stains. They’ve marked and photographed the site, so don’t worry about it. Take a look. I just hope you haven’t eaten lately. You’ll forgive me if I don’t give you the guided tour.”

Dave slapped him on the shoulder. “Get out of here. I’m just gonna take a peek to say I was here and then I’m heading home myself.”

The house was creepy.

Dave stepped inside, and instantly the noise of chatter and squawking radios dropped off, and the oscillating lights of the emergency vehicles faded to some long colored shadows on the far wall of the living room. He stepped through the darkened foyer and into a hallway which he guessed led to the back bedroom where the murders had happened. A call had come through before he’d come on duty about the discovery; an old woman, the mother of one of the deceased, had come by to pick up some clothes for the grandchild who was staying with her. She let herself in with her own key, and according to the call log, practically had a stroke before she managed to call 911 to report the grisly murders.

But that was hours ago now. Tuesday night was coming on with a long shadow, and the house was still after the crime units had made their critical passes. The pictures taken, the hairs collected, the body parts removed. A forensics tech bustled past him and slammed the front door, and Dave knew he was alone in the house.

The slaughterhouse.

He could smell the blood. It wasn’t like some scenes, where the bodies had fruited and rotted for days until the stench was rich with the perfume of maggots and sewer. No. This was fresh. He could still taste the faint scent of iron in the air.

There was no question about what room it had all happened in. At the end of the hallway, in the fading light he could see the dull glow of light blue walls. And the blotches of bloody spurts and handprints marring the robin’s egg purity of the walls.

He stepped into the room and saw what Frank had referred to. On the wall above the queen-size bed, someone had written in smeared, drippy blood. They’d written the same thing that had appeared in the carefully guarded reports he’d pulled from out-of-state precincts on all the other scenes of the Sunday Slasher. Who for some reason, in Tallahassee, had decided to kill on the day after the Lord’s day. Maybe she got her calendar mixed up, he thought.

Come Curburide

Set Us Free.

Dave shook his head at the scrawl. What the fuck was a Curburide? And free from what? Then he looked at the rest of the room and his stomach turned.

The carpet he stood on was saturated in the blood of the victims. His feet stuck to the fibers when he lifted them. The bodies were gone now, but it was clear where they’d lain. Deep red stains circled those areas, though the room had been stripped of virtually everything else. Evidence.

He pivoted and studied the room, looking for more writing or blood spray. But the other walls were clean. Except…

He noticed a crack in the wall the bed butted, a crack that ran floor to ceiling near the corner of the room, where the back wall joined the wall of the window. Guy wasn’t much of a fixit man, Dave mused.

He stepped closer, and then closer. It was a crack all right, but not really a normal one. It seemed to be…bleeding black. Not just a simple fissure in the paint and drywall, but a seepage of something from behind the wall.

“What the fuck is that shit?” he whispered, and stepped around the bed and nightstand to peer closer at the flaw.

The squad lights set up a kaleidoscope behind him that he tried to ignore as Dave leaned closer to the crack in the wall. He felt a chill in his neck, and turned around to see if someone was at the door.

The doorway was empty. But when he looked back at the wall, someone was looking back at him.

Someone with an eyeball missing, and a jowl-hung face that looked a thousand years old. Someone who grinned with blackened teeth and whispered, “We’ve been waiting for a little peace and quiet.”

“Huh?” was all Dave could say before two bony hands reached out from the seeping black crack and grabbed him by the wrists.

“We’re not coming,” the gnarled ghostly face hissed, locking the police captain’s hands in a vice grip both icy and unbendable. “We’re here.”

With that, David Carroll’s salt-and-pepper hair suddenly smacked hard against the wall. But the room wasn’t filled with the snap of cracking vertebrae, or the thud of a skull cracking. Rather than breaking or thumping, Dave’s forehead—and then his head and neck—passed
through
the wall, and two more ghostly arms reached out to grab the captain by his belt loops.

In a moment, without a single cry, the bedroom was empty once again.