“Fine, but I got friends on the force,” I said. “No, you don’t,” he said.
He was right. “Damn, Abe, you didn’t have to say it like that.”
He came down the stairs and slapped me on the arm. “Marley, I feel for you, man, but you gotta pull your shit together. You can’t go on and let yourself fall apart because of these external factors, man, you know what I’m saying? I know you’re hurting, but you’ve got to be a big man here.”
“I know. I just can’t help it.”
I felt like crying right there. I couldn’t believe I’d been fired. “I lost my fucking job, man….”
“You need someone to talk to, you know I’m here for you,” he said.
“I know, bro. You never liked Ozzy, but you’re an okay guy.”
“Yeah, and you never liked Al Green.”
“I don’t even know who the fuck Al Green is,” I said. “If you did, we wouldn’t be here right now. Now, get outta here. And, Marley?”
“Yeah?”
“Be good. There’s a lot of people in this town who remember how you used to be, and they don’t fuckin’ like you. Don’t justify that shit with some stupid-ass behavior like the shit you just pulled in here, okay?”
“Arright.”
“What would do you good is a little bit of church.”
I was driving on Old Sherman Road, my mind spinning in a hundred different directions. If my radio had worked, I would have been informed that there were still no developments with the Rose Killer case, and there was no comment from the police. Luckily, my radio was on the fritz. I didn’t have to hear it.
I hit a pothole, and my head hit the roof of the cab. It hurt, and I squeezed my eyes shut for just a second. When I opened them again, I saw there was a man in the road just ahead of me. I hit the brakes hard, and the truck skidded to a stop just feet in front of the man.
He was old, and wearing a tattered suit and a baseball cap. Over one shoulder he had a plastic bag full of cans he’d picked up from the gutters. In his hand was a long stick with a nail driven through the end. It was the fucking Indian.
His eyes glimmered with wisdom and dirty secrets, like they were laughing at me for not knowing what he knew. I should’ve hit him.
“Do you want to die, old man? Are cans that important that you’ll stand in the middle of the fucking road?”
He looked at me like I owed him an apology.
“What the fuck are you lookin’ at, you old bastard?” I shouted out the open window. He said nothing. I knew he wouldn’t. “What are you doing?”
He came over to the truck, to the side, to my window. He was holding that stick up like a weapon.
“Waiting for you,” he said in a low, cracked voice.
“The fuck does that mean?” I sneered.
“You drive these roads … like a mad wolf, white man. I know which way you come. Your darkie friend gave you some excellent wisdom, and … you’d be wise to follow it.”
“Yeah? What would that be?”
“External factors have destroyed the balance.”
“Fuck did you just say?”
“Outside forces are at work, Higgins. Be aware …”
“How the fuck do you know my name?” He smiled, ignored the question. “How do you know about me?”
The toothy smile on his face turned into a perfect moonlike crescent.
“You sinister little bastard,” I said, opening the car door, my fist clenched at my side.
Just then, I heard a noise like the wail of a clarinet, and caught a movement in the corner of my eye. On the other side of Old Sherman, right where the woods meet the road, was a wolf, watching me. It was gray, with blue eyes so piercing my heart skipped a beat. It looked at me, yawned, then padded into the maze of trees, out of sight. When I turned back to the old man, he was gone.
What did that damn Indian mean about external factors? Wasn’t it a strange coincidence that Abraham had just said the same thing earlier that morning? Abe also said I should go to church. At that point, a lightbulb went off in my head, and church didn’t sound like a bad idea at all.
The church I went to wasn’t just any old church, but the one that had been broken into the night that Josie Jones disappeared.
I knew which one it was because I had read the article several times.
It was all the way on the west side of town on a very quiet block. Just a few homes here and there, and the church took up one whole corner. Off to the side was a playground. Past that was a church-type school, where the kids wore uniforms. The street was empty, and I couldn’t imagine it being any different in the dead of night. The cross on top looked nice and even, and all the stained-glass windows were clean. No one had seen or heard a thing when the place got busted into, but I needed to satisfy a curiosity. Maybe something had gone down they didn’t mention in the papers. If there was semen all over, or a swastika or some such thing, I can’t imagine the churchgoers being anxious to know about it. But I had to know. It couldn’t just be a coincidence that a church break-in occurred on the same nights as the disappearances. I could have been grasping at straws, but something told me I wasn’t. After all, there was a mighty strange incident that had happened years before I moved to Evelyn, and it involved a church.
It was 1988. The bodies of three children had been found in a drainage ditch just a few miles outside of Chicago. Two of them had been there for several weeks. The third was fresh. The papers said there were no signs of sexual misconduct, but that didn’t mean anything to me. When the full moon came around, the wolf knew what to do.
It visited the dumping ground, picked up a scent, and tracked it on the wind to a fellow named Jack Kaplan, who at that moment was joyriding on a Japanese motorcycle. He was a high school dropout with an arrest record loaded with drug charges and a couple of indecent exposures. Nothing serious, but that’s just because he’d never been caught. Just like me.
The wolf stalked him till he turned off an exit and wound up in the suburbs, far away from prying eyes. On a quiet street, it sprang from the bushes, causing the man to fall from the bike. He took off his helmet, saw what was coming at him, and took off like a bat out of hell.
Directly across the street was a church. He charged it, as if he would be granted asylum there. He kicked the door in and shut it behind him. The wolf entered the church just seconds later, but was unable to locate the man, who was just several feet away, hiding under one of the pews. This had never happened before. It was as if the wolf’s powers had been nullified once it set foot on holy ground. Anywhere else in the world, it would have been able to find the man with its eyes closed, just on scent alone, but in that church, the creature was rendered almost human.
The wolf looked left and right, and roared in confusion. The hellish sound of the beast scared the man out of his hiding place, and he ran. The wolf followed.
To make a long story short, the wolf eventually chased the man onto the roof, where he jumped and died. This incident is unique and noteworthy for two reasons. One, something to do with the church legitimately fucked up the wolf’s senses. Two, something to do with the church had prevented the wolf from ripping the man to shreds. Instead, it led him to his own doom. It was as if the wolf had obeyed some unwritten rule I knew nothing about, or if not, it seemed that Jesus put the kibosh on the beast’s dastardly ways while it was on His turf. Maybe Jesus came down and said, “Hey, man, don’t make a mess in here.” I didn’t know what to make of it at the time.
On another occasion many years earlier, I had taken shelter in a church on the night of the full moon. As night came down, the priest was alerted of my presence because I was screaming. I was changing, but it was happening more slowly than it would have in any other place. It hurt twice as much. I couldn’t move. The priest helped me outside to wait for an ambulance. The changing process then sped up, and that’s when I killed him.
I climbed the stone steps to the church and opened the heavy wooden door. The church
