Supernatural 10 - Rite of Passage (21 page)

“And the preschool’s number?”

“After hours,” Sam said. “I tried on my cell while you had Bobby on the line. No answer.”

“So you asked blog girl for the phone numbers?”

“First I congratulated her on scooping the newscasters, asked how she knew about First Step. Then I asked for the number.”

The laptop pinged. Sam smiled. “She wants to know why I want to know.”

Sam typed a message.

“And?”

“I told her I had the same idea: supernatural origin.”

“Spilling family secrets now?”

“I’m getting an anti-establishment vibe from her,” Sam explained. “If she sees me as a kindred spirit, maybe she opens up.”

“Dude,
you’re
giving off a sexual predator vibe.”

Focused on the information, Sam ignored the jibe. “Her ‘sources’ gave her the names of eight of the kids,” Sam said. “All go to First Step. And there it is—the cell number of the owner and manager, Lethia Williams.”

“See what you can get out of her,” Dean said. “I’ll keep trying Bobby.”

While Dean dialed Bobby’s phone again and again with no success, he heard Sam talking to the preschool owner, giving her the insurance adjuster spiel. Moments later, Sam switched into sympathetic listener mode. Dean imagined the woman must have tremendous guilt issues if her business was the source of the staph outbreak.

In frustration, Dean slammed his phone down on the table.

“… anything unusual in the last couple days?” Sam was saying. “Anything that felt odd?”

A pause.

“Really. A tall man with a cane and a bowler hat. A ball … ?”

Good job, Sam,
Dean thought.
If bowler man caused one dangerous outbreak, it’s a good bet he caused the other.

And Bobby was in pursuit.

Think, Dean!

The static had begun when the call came in over McClary’s radio. McClary activated his siren and the cell phone reception unceremoniously went to hell. Surely the siren wasn’t the cause … but maybe bowler guy could interfere with communications. If he could disable dozens of airbags, maybe he could create cell phone interference.
Dean considered it half a miracle they worked under normal circumstances.

He slapped a palm on the table top. “Police scanner!”

Sam held up his hand. “Thank you, Ms. Williams. I appreciate your assistance.”

Dean hurried down the basement stairs.

Eighteen

After leaving the hospital, Sergeant McClary and Bobby were heading to the police building, where Bobby had left his Chevelle. During the drive, Bobby decided to call Dean to tell him the MRSA outbreak had originated at the First Step Forward Preschool and that the deadly influenza strain may have started in a local bar.

“I thought you were here alone, Agent Willis,” McClary said, an edge of suspicion creeping into his voice. Either suspicion or fear of an impending jurisdictional pissing contest.

“Couple of specialists in town I’ve worked with before,” Bobby said casually before the call connected. “Studied the M.O. of the burglary ring.”

Dean’s phone rang with a garbled tone.

The poor cell phone connection prevented Bobby from
giving Dean all the information he had. By the time he had managed to tell Dean about the preschool, a request for backup had come over the police radio. A patrol officer had spotted the plumber’s van and was in pursuit of the suspected kidnapper. As they were passing through the commercial district, McClary was closest to the scene, on a perpendicular course.

Bobby’s connection dropped completely a few moments after McClary turned on his siren and lightbar.

Bobby double-checked his seatbelt. McClary noticed the motion. “Don’t count on your airbag,” Bobby reminded him.

“Right,” McClary said, nodding. “EMP jammer.”

“Or whatever the hell it is.”

McClary spoke on his radio to ask the patrol officer, Tom Gravino, if he had a visual. Gravino confirmed and gave his location: traveling south on Queen’s Boulevard.

“I’m on West Ellis Pike,” McClary said. “I’ll cut him off.”

McClary tapped his brake and swerved around cars in the last two intersections before Queen’s Boulevard. The cruiser roared onto the boulevard, making a wide right turn, and moments later Bobby spotted the speeding white plumber’s van. Several blocks behind, another police cruiser raced in pursuit, Gravino’s Crown Vic.

“Got him,” McClary said, flashing a satisfied grin.

The van swerved right, jumping a curb on the west side of the highway and barreled across a vacant parking lot. Then the driver made a sharp right and headed back north up the alley behind the shopping center.

“Gravino, take the north entrance,” McClary barked into
his microphone. “I’ll block the south. Over.”

McClary floored the accelerator, cutting across three lanes of traffic before hitting an entrance ramp into the parking lot. With his left hand braced on the dashboard and his right gripping the upper window frame, Bobby held on throughout the bumpy ride, trying not to think of everything that could go wrong in a high-speed pursuit when the odds were stacked in favor of the other guy.

“There’s no outlet from that alley until the other side of the shopping center,” McClary said. “He’s trapped between us.”

One side of the alley was lined with the backs of strip mall stores, one abutting the next at varying heights. The other side consisted of a long eight-foot high retaining wall topped by a ten-foot chain-link fence.

Calls from other units crackled over the radio. They were seconds away. Bobby had a bad feeling his fate would be decided before they arrived.

They saw the rear of the van as the driver raced north on a slight incline, toward Gravino’s cruiser. The alley was wide enough for a semi to back into the loading docks behind a few of the larger stores in the strip mall; enough space for two cars to pass side by side. But Gravino wouldn’t allow that to happen. For the next few moments, Gravino and the driver in the van were engaged in a game of chicken—a game that was fair only if both drivers had to worry about the outcome of a collision.

At the last moment, Gravino slammed on his brakes and spun his wheel hard to the left to present the broadside of
his cruiser to the front of the van.

The van never slowed, never veered.

The collision sounded like an explosion. The van crushed the passenger side of the cop car and pushed the cruiser twenty feet backward. The back wheels of the van rose two feet off the ground, before slamming down.

A split-second after the initial impact, a woman’s body came flying out through the van’s windshield, slamming into the lightbar on the hood of the cruiser and partially dislodging it, before rolling limply down the rear window.

The rear doors of the van swung open and Bobby saw a blur of movement inside, somebody bending over, lifting something.

“Look out!”

A man’s body sailed through the air toward McClary’s approaching cruiser.

“What the hell!?” McClary exclaimed.

He slammed on his brakes and tried to veer to the right.

The large corpse—Bobby realized it must be the plumber’s body, with a ring of dried blood around his chest—crashed into the windshield. The safety glass crumpled with a thousand fractures and the lifeless body pressed down on the dashboard.

McClary’s evasive action steered the car down a loading bay ramp where it slammed into the concrete wall. As Bobby suspected, no airbags deployed as he was flung against the seatbelt’s shoulder strap. Only after he fell back against the seat did he release the breath he had been holding. His hands trembled as he unbuckled the seat belt. In the instant before
the impact, he had convinced himself the seatbelt would fail as well.

With the cruiser’s front end crumpled, Bobby’s door screeched as he forced it open. McClary’s door seemed jammed as well, but his side window had shattered, so bracing himself against the window frame, he hoisted himself through. Bobby squeezed through the tight space he had made and circled around to the back of the cruiser.

They had lost less than thirty seconds, but they were too late to save Gravino.

At the top of the ramp, with McClary a step behind him, Bobby saw the tall figure in the bowler hat walking toward the smashed police cruiser, an iron-tipped cane clutched in his right hand. There was no mistaking who he was, even if Bobby hadn’t figured out exactly
what
he was.

Gravino was out of the ruined police car, his gun in a two-handed grip pointed at the imposing figure, who strode forward as if unconcerned. “Stop! Or I’ll shoot!”

Quick as a striking cobra, the cane batted aside the gun. To Gravino’s credit, he held onto his handgun, but before he could bring it to bear again, the tall man thrust the cane forward, like a fencer lunging with the tip of an epee.

The cane pierced Gravino’s throat with so much force that it shattered his spine, the iron tip bursting through the nape of his neck. Then, as if sensing Bobby and McClary behind him, the tall man grabbed Gravino’s belt with his left hand and effortlessly hurled him bodily over his head toward them.

As soon as the cane tip pulled free of Gravino’s throat,
blood spurted and gurgled from the opening. For a few moments, Gravino’s heart kept beating as his body tumbled through the air. McClary broke to the left, while Bobby ducked to the right. Both men had their guns drawn, but their target loped away from them.

Several police cruisers arrived as reinforcements, three at the north end of the alley and two more from the south. Without warning, McClary fired several rounds at the retreating figure. None seemed to connect. Bobby tracked the man, arms extended, his gun in a double-handed grip, waiting for the right moment and wishing he had a rifle instead.

The tall man veered to the right and leapt onto the closed lid of a dark Dumpster. As he turned toward a utility pole braced against the back wall of a store, Bobby fired three quick shots. At the second shot, the tall man jerked and Bobby believed he had found his mark. The bowler hat, already askew, tumbled off the man’s head.

“D’you see that?” McClary asked, stunned, as they ran to close the distance to their target.

“Yup.”

“How is that possible?”

“Bad genes,” Bobby said, and instantly regretted it.

The tall man scooped up his bowler from the Dumpster lid and jammed it on his head again, slipped his cane through his belt, and leapt toward the utility pole. With inhuman strength and speed, he climbed the pole, hand over hand, and reached the roof even as McClary and Bobby emptied their magazines at the ascending target.

McClary spoke into the microphone clipped to his epaulet. “Officer down! Perp’s on the roof! Armed and extremely dangerous! Move units to the front of the shopping plaza. Now! Go! Go!”

The last police car at each end of the alley reversed course to circle around to the front. Bobby looked back at McClary’s cruiser, Gravino’s, and the van. All vehicles disabled. If they’d had an opportunity to stop him, they had missed it. The odds were in his favor, always in his favor. And Bobby now seriously doubted conventional ammo would slow him down, let alone put him down.

Nevertheless, Bobby broke into a sprint, or what passed for a sprint at his age, to the alley’s north entrance. All three police cruisers had backed out now. McClary ran beside him, his breathing not nearly as labored as Bobby’s. Reports on McClary’s radio came back negative, one after another. Nobody had spotted the fugitive.

“I hit him at least twice,” McClary said. “You?”

“Four, easy,” Bobby said, matter-of-fact. “Three in a row while he climbed that pole like a damned monkey.”

“What the hell is he?”

“Don’t know,” Bobby said honestly as they reached the entrance and turned toward the front of the plaza.

“But that—what I saw—on his head,” McClary said. “It was, right?”

Bobby nodded. “Horns.”

“Jesus!”

They stopped in front of the first store. Police cruisers roamed the vast empty parking lot like sharks hoping for
chum. One patrol officer trained his car’s spotlight toward the store windows as he drove slowly past each business.

Too much glare,
Bobby thought.
Never see a damn thing in there.

McClary stared at Bobby. “You’re not nearly as freaked out as I am.”

“No,” Bobby admitted. He peered into the night, hoping to catch some movement. Streetlights provided enough illumination to prevent the tall man from hiding anywhere outside the plaza. Maybe he had doubled back, once they abandoned the alley. The way he climbed the utility pole, he’d have no problem scaling the chain-link fence above the retaining wall.

Bobby shook his head. “We lost him.”

“Not yet,” McClary said. Squeezing the radio microphone again, he deployed the cruisers in a widening grid. Two stayed at the shopping plaza—if the search failed, he and Bobby would need a ride back to the police station.

McClary turned to Bobby, hands on his belt. “So what was that? Genetic mutation? Some kind of circus freak?”

“If I knew, I’d tell you,” Bobby said, and almost believed he would. “Whatever it is, it ain’t normal.”