“We need your help, Neff.” Wilson sat hunched in his chair, his eyes glistening like dots beneath the heavy folds of his brows. “I helped you.”
“Oh, Christ.” He smiled, turned his head away. “Oh, Christ, the favor. The great big favor. Let me tell you, Wilson, I don’t give a rat’s ass about your big favor. That’s not a factor.”
“That camera could solve this case for us, honey, get the damn thing out of our hair. We only need it for a night or so.”
“You need more than the camera, you need me to work the damn thing. It’s balky as hell, you gotta know how to use it.”
“You can teach us.”
He shook his head. “Took me weeks to learn. You don’t get it just right you don’t get any picture.”
She stared at him. “Dick, please. Just one night is all we ask.”
He frowned at her, as if asking “Is this for real?” She nodded gravely. “A night, then,” he said, “maybe it’ll be a few laughs.”
So he agreed, just like that. She wished she felt more than grateful, but she didn’t. His anger and tiredness made her wish to hell that she would not have to spend the rest of this night with him.
She showed Wilson to the door. “See you at headquarters,” she said as he pulled on his coat. “Eight o’clock?”
“Eight’s fine.”
“Where are you going now, George?”
“Not home. You’re crazy to stay here, as a matter of fact.”
“I don’t know where else I’d go.”
“That’s your business.” He stepped out into the hallway and was gone. She started to wonder if she would ever see him alive again, then stopped herself. Not allowed. She turned, took a deep breath, and prepared to face the rest of the night with her husband.
Chapter 6
« ^ »
They were hungry, they wanted food. Normally they preferred the darker, desolate sections of the city, but their need to follow their enemies had brought them into its very eye. Here the smell of man lay over everything like a dense fog, and there was not much cover.
But even the brightest places have shadows. They moved in single file behind the wall that separates Central Park from the street. They did not need to look over the wall to know that few of the benches that lined the other side were occupied—they could smell that fact perfectly well. But they also smelled something else, the rich scent of a human being perhaps a quarter of a mile farther on. On one of the benches a man was sleeping, a man whose pores were exuding the smell of alcohol. To them the reek meant food, easily gotten.
As they moved closer they could hear his breathing. It was long and troubled, full of age. They stopped behind him. There was no need to discuss what they would do; each one knew his role.
Three jumped up on the wall, standing there perfectly still, balanced on the sharply angled stone. He was on the bench below them. The one nearest the victim’s head inclined her ears back. She would get the throat. The other two would move in only if there was a struggle.
She held her breath a moment to clear her head. Then she examined her victim with her eyes. The flesh was not visible—it was under thick folds of cloth. She would have to jump, plunge her muzzle into the cloth and rip out the throat all at once. If there were more than a few convulsions on the part of the food she would disappoint the pack. She opened her nose, letting the rich smells of the world back in. She listened up and down the street. Only automobile traffic, nobody on foot for at least fifty yards. She cocked her ears toward a man leaning in a chair inside the brightly lit foyer of a building across the street. He was listening to a radio. She watched his head turn. He was glancing into the lobby.
Now. She was down, she was pushing her nose past cloth, slick hot flesh, feeling the vibration of sub-vocal response in the man, feeling his muscles stiffening as his body reacted to her standing on it, then opening her mouth against the flesh, feeling her teeth scrape back and down, pressing her tongue against the deliciously salty skin and
And the man in the doorway returned his glance to the street. Nothing had moved, as far as he was concerned. Ever watchful, she scented him and listened to him. His breathing was steady, his smell bland. Good, he had noticed nothing.
Now her job was over, she dropped back behind the wall and ate her trophy. It was rich and sweet with blood. Around her the pack was very happy as it worked. Three of them lifted the body over the wall and let it drop with a thud. The two others, skilled in just this art, stripped the clothing away. They would carry the material to the other side of the park, shred it and hide it in shrubs before they returned to their meal.
As soon as the corpse was stripped it was pulled open. The organs were sniffed carefully. One lung, the stomach, the colon were put aside because of rot.
Then the pack ate in rank order.
The mother took the brain. The father took a thigh and buttock. The first-mated pair ate the clean organs. When they returned from their duty the second-mated pair took the rest. And then they pulled apart the remains and took them piece by piece and dropped them in the nearby lake. The bones would sink and would not be found at least until spring, if then. The clothing they had shredded and scattered half a mile away. And now they kicked as much new snow as they could over the blood of their feast. When this was done they went to a place they had seen earlier, a great meadow full of the beautiful new snow that had been falling.
They ran and danced in the snow, feeling the pleasure of their bodies, the joy of racing headlong across the wide expanse, and because they knew that no human was in earshot they had a joyous howl full of the pulsing rhythm they liked best after a hunt. The sound rose through the park, echoing off the buildings that surrounded it. Inside those buildings a few wakeful people stirred, made restive by the cold and ancient terror that the sound communicated to man.
