The Wolfman

were fired? Was it a suicide-by-shotgun? Was he involved in any illegal activities that the department is aware of? Was this a crime of revenge? Is there any connection to the Rose Killer?”

The captain responded to the questions with yes or no answers, and finally got fed up enough that he walked off the stage. The sounds of the camera flashes were almost as loud as the shouts.

Someone else stepped up to the mike, a sergeant, I think, and warned the public to be aware of any dogs roaming around that weren’t tagged at all. This set off another maelstrom of questions from the press, but the sergeant promptly exited stage left.

I went into the bathroom and threw up.

They said it was a tragedy. A hundred times I heard them use that word. It was a tragedy.

In the kitchen I untwisted the twisty-tie that held shut the big black Hefty bag the bloody tarp was in. I opened the bag, and right there, resting atop the thing like a candle on a birthday cake, was the piece of the jawbone I had presumed belonged to the Rose Killer. It was about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and was crowned with two sterling, white teeth. Danny’s clean teeth.

Dear God, I thought. I wanted to reach down and touch it, to express how sorry I was, but that fragment wasn’t Pearce anymore. It was an item that proved to me what a curse I was to the world. It was evidence, and it had to be destroyed. I was sorry to have to think about it. I closed the bag.

I went into the bedroom and closed the door behind me. Up on the wall were all the articles about the Rose Killer and his victims. The Rose Killer was supposed to be dead, not the man who had believed in me, had trusted me, and had been my friend. Something had gone horribly wrong.

I briefly came upon the thought that if the wolf had known what it was doing, that if it had gone out with a mission last night and had killed Pearce, then he must have been guilty of something, if not the Rose killings, then maybe he … I don’t know. Left his seed on the bodies of those dead girls, perhaps. But I knew this was impossible. Pearce couldn’t have been involved in the murders or anything as filthy as I was thinking. First off, he was a normal guy. He had a wife and a baby on the way, and further, those murders went back for years and had occurred all over the country. There was no way that Pearce, while being a family man and a cop, would have the time to travel all over the United States to carve up a couple of dozen women.

But no one knew who the Rose Killer was. So maybe Pearce was a copycat killer.

Maybe he freaked out. Maybe he couldn’t find a cigarette, and he snapped. Maybe he snapped, and to cover up his ghastly crime, he made it look like all those murders out West?

No fucking way, I thought. But why was he dead when he wasn’t the one I’d sent the wolf after?

Could he have left his seed on one, or both, of those girls? Could he have been a deviated pervert like that? He was awfully dirty when he came over to my place that evening not so long

Ago….

No fucking way, I thought. There was only one logical explanation for the tragedy that had occurred. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.

I went over to my lumpy bed, which was still in the corner because I had forgotten to move it back that morning, and got on my knees to reach under it. I slid out my Remington. It was always oiled and loaded, ready to go.

I sat on the bed and leaned forward. The butt rested against the floor, and the long barrel came up to me like the stem of a flower. I put the business end in my mouth and hooked my thumb around the trigger.

The bottom line was that after so long, so very long, the beast had gone mad. In killing Pearce, it went against my orders and did the one thing it was never supposed to do, and that was to kill an innocent person.

The beast had gone rabid. The beast had fucked our little arrangement right in its pearly little ass. It could not be trusted anymore with the responsibilities I’d bestowed upon it, and because it couldn’t be trusted, I couldn’t be trusted.

There was no way in hell I was going to let myself go on anymore after that. I wasn’t about to go back to living the kind of life I lived before I learned how to control the fucking thing, when every single day was an exercise in torment and every moon was a study in damnation. There was no way I could live with myself, not after having it so good for so many years. I wasn’t going to go backward. I couldn’t be responsible for the death of another child, I just couldn’t, and the knowledge of having killed Pearce burned an acid hole in my stomach.

I glimpsed one of his memories again behind my eyes.

He proposed to her in an Italian restaurant, all cheesy-like, by putting the ring in a glass of champagne. She cried, and it bowled her over. Everyone in the place clapped.

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” he told her.

“Get out of my head!” I screamed to no one in particular.

Knowing that this kind of tragedy (there’s that magic word again) could happen again to some other poor soul so easily made me absolutely sick, hence the gun to my head.

No more blood. No more tears. No more running. Sick of running. I would never again look in a mirror to see my face with that blank, shell-shocked look plastered onto it like a death mask. No more face, I thought. No more killing. No more head. It’s over now.

“You motherfucker,” I gurgled. “We had a deal.”

I could feel the snot and the tears and the spit running out of me, spilling down the barrel of the rifle. I didn’t want to die. I truly didn’t. Jesus, I didn’t have much. I had a truck, an ashtray, a recliner. Doris’s night-light. An old leather jacket with half its flairs missing and a twenty-year-old Led Zeppelin patch on the back. A stinky old eagle feather my mother gave me years ago, which, apparently, was my legacy.

That gun.

My thumb tightened. The trigger went back a hair’s width at a time. I clenched my eyes, wondering if I’d hear the bang.

That fucking beast. How could it betray me?

When all the madness started, the beast would go after anybody—women, children, old folks, you name it. The thing had none of what a common thug would call “decency.” Once I tightened the leash on it, though, it only went after bad guys—people I singled out for it to hunt, even if I didn’t know who they were. I’d give it enough hints to do its job, and it never failed. You’d think that after so many years of routine, the thing would be reliable. I had more than enough information on this Rose Killer to give the beast a good lead, not only from the papers but from a goddamn detective too. And it took my friend down. No one in the world would ever be safe again. The beast was loose. I had to stop it the only way possible.

I would be leaving behind a ratty house with half of its contents hidden, like I was a paranoid old man. No one would ever know who I was, what I was, but because of the articles on the wall, people would be talking about me for years.

In the silence of my bedroom I heard the spring in the gun coil. It was the sound of death made real, and would have been the last thing I ever heard in this world, if not for the roar that erupted in my brain.

I opened my eyes, and I was in the woods.

No I wasn’t. I was in a graveyard. The graveyard in Edenburgh.

The wolf was giving me one of its memories—a brief clip from its night on the town. A single piece of the puzzle.

The wolf was down in Judith Myers’s grave, a great big wall of dirt piled up on one side of the desecrated hole. The full moon rained down silver light.

With one of its giant hands, the wolf angrily swept the dirt from the lid of her coffin, and then broke the locks on it as if they were made of plastic instead of steel. The stench of death wafted up into the monster’s face, forcing a long bellow to echo out from between its frothy lips. The stench of chemicals was thick, of formaldehyde, and alcohol, of makeup for the little girl’s corpse.

It reached behind her neck and lifted her head up. Her lips were red, her dress was a light violet, a draped and high-necked thing of silk. It covered the stitches in her chest. Her eyelids were sealed shut with glue. Behind