nothing fell. And, dammit, I’d had quite enough. I pulled the flashlight out of the pocket of my overcoat and clicked it on.
And then instantly wished I hadn’t.
I was in another cellar room, but not the one I’d landed in earlier. No, this one had tables arranged in rows from end to end with little walkways in-between. They were like mortician’s slabs, each draped in a white sheet. And there was no doubt what was under those sheets: I could see the forms easily enough. Now and again, a hand had slipped from beneath its covering, dead fingers dangling in midair. I could see the toes of some of the taller ones. Quickly, I went from slab to slab, looking down on those ruined faces. I recognized quite a few.
It was about that time, my skin all clammy and my fingers stiff as pencils from the cold, that I first sensed it. I don’t know how to adequately describe it. It was like the air around me had changed, was charged with something. I could feel the hairs along the back of my neck stand up. Gooseflesh spread down my spine like ripples in a pond. The air was suddenly full of static electricity, thrumming with it, some noxious stored potential was beginning to vent itself. I caught a sharp aroma of ozone like lightening was about to strike.
And then it did.
My head reeling with that savage smell, that dark and rising sweetness, the bodies on the slabs all began to sit up. I saw sheets shudder and slide from sunless, graveyard faces. A lot of them were little more than skulls knitted with tight dry flesh like tanned leather.
I didn’t wait to see what came next.
There was a window on the other side and I went for it, smashing through it with my flashlight and diving into the cool grass. And then I was running and stumbling and sliding down the hill on my ass. I could see my heap waiting for me and then I saw the two heavies next to it.
Unarmed, smelling like a litter pile in a death camp, they came at me. My. 45 slid out from the speed rig and I started drilling those bastards, knowing that you can’t kill something already dead, but sometimes you can sure give ‘em a bad day.
I emptied the clip and drove them back and then I was in the heap. I had barely started rolling when she was hit hard. I thought a truck had rammed into us. I was practically knocked against the passenger side door. Another thud and that old Chrysler went up in the air a few feet, balancing on two tires and then hammering back down, the shocks squeaking like honeymooner’s bedsprings.
Then I saw.
It was no truck that hit me. It was worse.
Out of my window I saw him standing there, his huge and moonish face grinning like a skull in the desert: Tony “The Iceman” Buscotti. Remember him? He was the human ogre and former syndicate hitman that was supposed to be feeding the worms out at Harvest Hill in that grave big enough to drop a Steinway into. Yes, sir, old “Frankenstein” himself. Big Tony could have given Karloff the cold sweats.
His hand smashed through my window and I covered my face against the implosion of glass shards. His hand-big enough to palm a football-came snaking in, fingers clawing for purchase. And those fingers…I could see the bones popping through the knuckles, the skin hanging in ropy loops. I slammed down on the accelerator and almost went right into a tree. I threw her in reverse and mowed down the other two goons that I’d given the gift of my bullets to. I rolled right over one of them. Then Big Tony was there again, the yellow of his skull showing through the holes in his face which looked like a wormy shroud hanging from a clothesline. Those gargantuan hands took hold of the door and at the exact second I gave the old heap the gas, there was a sudden lurching and screeching metallic groan as Big Tony ripped the door clean off the driver’s side.
Then I was peeling away in a spray of dirt and that big, dead hulk was standing there with the door in his paws like a cue card. I don’t remember very much of my escape. Only that I sideswiped tombstones and bushes as I thundered down that winding maze of dirt road. Drenched with fear-sweat, I exited those black gates like a train rocketing from a midnight tunnel. Then the road. The highway. The city lights.
And me, shivering like a sick kitty in a high wind.
9
Ninety minutes later, after half a pint of rye, I was back out there.
This time Tommy Albert was with me. Him and about twenty cops, local johns-sheriff’s deputies-and assorted whitecoats from the coroner’s office. The place was wriggling with badges. You know what we found? Squat. Yes, that’s right. The bodies were gone. As were Marianne and the ghoul glee club. But they hadn’t completely sanitized the place. There just wasn’t time.
Downstairs we found the slabs. We also found the room where they did their thing with the stiffs. All the equipment was pretty much in place. We found blood everywhere. Sticky fluids. Scraps of raw animal meat. A linen bag of human bones so fresh they still had red-brown stains on them. But that was pretty much it.
“ It happened,” I was telling Tommy. “Don’t look at me like some kind of freak. I saw it.”
He stopped looking at me. “I believe you. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do.”
I dragged off my cigarette. “These guys never will.”
“ They don’t have to, Vince. What we got out here is more than enough justification for me to call in all these boys.” He stuffed a cigar in his mouth. “I gotta pick up that Portis broad. You know that. She’s behind all this and only she can fill in all the holes.”
Holes? Sure, we could’ve dropped most of the Midwest through the holes there were in this one. Graverobbing. Cannibalism. Murder. Walking dead hoods. Any minute now, I expected Chaney and Lugosi to be brought in for routine questioning. That’s how bad this mess was. It stunk worse than a trucker’s underwear.
A uniform came running in from the outside. “Inspector, we gotta a dead cop,” he said to Tommy. “In the city.”
Then we were back in Tommy’s Ford sedan screaming towards the concrete jungle, lights blaring and siren shrilling. There was no more to do out at the mausoleum. Those already there could handle it. Once we had the streets beneath us and the concrete and brick wrapping us up like mama’s arms, I started to feel better. On the West Side, down near the docks, was where the cop was. He was sprawled in a pool of his own blood.
There was a sheet over his body, reporters barely held at bay by a defensive perimeter of uniforms. Another detective-a thin, asthmatic guy named Skipp-was breathing through a handkerchief. You could smell the wharfs, the docks. That stagnant fishy smell of the bay blowing in with fingers of mist.
Skipp pulled the sheet back. “This your boy?” he said.
Tommy nodded. “That’s Mikey Ryan. He worked vice.”
I knew Ryan. We’d gone to the academy together. We’d pounded a beat together, drank out of the same bottle, raised hell. I was at his wedding. Now he was dead. Another good cop gone in a city that can’t afford to lose too many.
He hadn’t been mutilated. He’d been stabbed, though. Skipp said he’d been stuck at least fifteen or twenty times. “Took the last jab right in the pump,” he told us. “Then as an afterthought, his killer did this.”
Ryan’s neck had been snapped. The side of his throat bulging with a shank of protruding bone. “Wasn’t an easy way to go,” Skipp said and resumed breathing through his hanky. It sounded like there was a whistle lodged in his throat every time he sucked in a breath. “Goddamn night air…it’s not good for me.”
“ It’s even worse for him,” I said.
“ He didn’t die right away, though,” Skipp said.
He held up Ryan’s hand, it was wet with blood. That didn’t mean a lot until you saw what was scratched in blood a few inches away: LUN
“He lived long enough to leave us a message.”
Tommy just kept staring at it, shaking his head. “L-U-N…what in Christ you suppose that means? Could be a plate number…could be just about any goddamn thing.”
But I knew. There was no doubt in my mind. “He was telling us who did this to him,” I pointed out. “LUNA. As in Johnny Luna.”
Tommy looked at me. “He’s in the morgue.”
But I just stared at him, boring holes in his face.
