I looked at Karl. 'You call for backup?' I asked. My voice was a little unsteady.
He shook his head. 'Wasn't time, once I saw what was going down in here.'
'Okay, I'll do it now.'
I took out my radio, got the station, and told them what we were dealing with. The dispatcher promised to send help immediately. 'Be sure to tell 'em to bring an exorcist,' I told her. 'We got something that needs to be sent back to Gehenna.'
As I clicked the radio off, I looked toward the pentagram. The demon was still devouring what was left of the unlucky cultist. Demons are real messy eaters.
Karl saw where I was looking. 'Ate the outfit, too,' he said. 'Must be the extra fiber.'
It wasn't all that funny, and definitely a 10 on the Insensitivity Scale, but I laughed. And laughed. It was all I could do to stop it from turning into tears. Comiclose to being eaten alive can shake you up some.
Even a tough guy like me.
So the crime scene people took our statements, the department exorcist sent the snarling and screeching demon back home, and the poor hooker's body was carted off to the morgue. The cultists were on their way to the county jail. They'd be arraigned in the morning.
Only a few of the robed idiots had actually seen Karl throw one of their buds to the demon. God only knows what kind of story they'd be telling. But if it came down to it, Karl and I would be more credible in front of a jury than a couple of cultists facing murder and summoning charges.
A medic said my ankle was badly bruised, but nothing was broken. He taped it up tight and told me to take ibuprofen for the pain.
As Karl and I headed back to the car, I said, 'That was quick thinking in there, earlier. Pretty good job of power lifting, too. I guess I owe you one.'
There was enough light for me to see his grin. 'Okay, so you're buying breakfast, even though it's my turn.'
'Deal,' I told him. 'But you're driving, since I'm injured, and all.'
As Karl started the car I said, 'You know, those guys in the robes might have been onto something. I sometimes think that Satanism is the perfect religion.'
He looked at me like I'd just grown a second head.
'No, really,' I told him. 'Way I figure it, if you're a Satanist, and you fuck up – well, you go to heaven. Right?'
Karl laughed a lot longer and harder than the feeble joke was worth. Then he turned on the lights and drove us out of there.
The kid was going to work out okay.
• • • •
For Karl and me, the rest of the shift was paperwork: arrest reports, a Supernatural Incident Report, all that stuff. And since Karl had fired his weapon, he had to talk to the Internal Affairs people, who surprised everybody by quickly agreeing that it was a righteous shoot.
We were able to knock off about 6:00, just as the sun was coming up over the city. Karl said, 'See ya,' and headed off to his car, but I stood at the top of the steps for a minute, watching the sunrise. I know that Scranton's not a big deal like New York or San Francisco. But I still like the way the skyline looks at dawn.
It's not a big town. And the way most people figure these things, it's not a great town, either. But it's my town. And protecting it from the forces of darkness is my job.
The shit hit the fan three months later, and none of us even knew it – at first. On the night in question (as we say in court) I came on shift at the usual time. I barely had the chance to sit down at my desk when McGuire was at his office door. 'Markowski, Renfer!' he barked. 'You got one.'
We'd caught a homicide. The stiff, according to McGuire, was in a house on Linden Street. The address was near the campus of the University of Scranton, which I attended for three years before running out of both money and ambition.
'We know anything about the perp?' I asked. 'Vamp, werewolf, or…'
McGuire shook his head. 'Or none of the above. It isn't clear the killer was a supe.'
I let my raised eyebrows ask the next question. McGuire got it immediately.
'It's our case,' he said, 'because although the perp might not have been a supe, the victim was.'
I heard Karl mutter under his breath, 'Well, fuck me to Jesus with a strap-on dildo.'
I couldn't have put it better, myself.
The house on Linden Street was typical for that neighborhood – a mid-size Victorian with a front yard the size of a postage stamp. The uniforms had secured the scene, but forensics hadn't shown up yet. There's a joke around the station house that if forensics ever arrives on time, it's a sign of the Apocalypse.
I think the forensics guys started that one themselves, to stop detectives from bitching.
Inside, I hung back a little and let Karl ask one of the uniformed cops, 'So, what do we got here?' He just loves saying that at crime scenes. What the hell, we were all young once.
One of the uniforms, a stocky guy named Conroy who I knew slightly, led us down a dim hallway toward a room where lights burned brightly. Halfway there, the smell told me this was going to be a bad one.
What crept up my nostrils was a mixture of blood and shit and sweat and fear, and if you don't think fear has an odor, just ask any cop. Overlaying all of that was something a lot like roast pork, which is what burned human flesh smells like.
I don't eat roast pork anymore. I haven't since my second year on the job, when I arrived at a crime scene shortly after a guy had doused his sleeping wife with gasoline and set her ablaze.
From the warning my nose had given me, I wasn't surprised by what was waiting for us in that room, which the owner of the house probably called his study. I saw Karl's face twist when he saw the corpse, but I wasn't worried about him. He'd been a uniform himself for six years before joining the Supe Squad. Like any cop, he'd seen plenty of the ugliness the world has to offer. Although maybe nothing quite so ugly as this.
The vic was a male Caucasian, early fifties. He was tied, with heavy fishing line, to a sturdy-looking wooden chair that probably belonged behind the ornately carved desk over near the window. Shelves on every wall were filled with old-looking books, but the man in the chair wouldn't be consulting them any more. It's pretty hard to read once your eyes have been burned out.
The man was naked, so it wasn't difficult to see everything else that had been done to him – cuts, bruises, and burns covered the body from scalp to shins. I stepped forward for a closer look, making sure to breath through my mouth as I did.
The tissue damage around the burns suggested a very hot flame, the kind you get from a blowtorch. I glanced around the room, but didn't see anything that would produce that kind of heat. Maybe the perp took it with him. On the floor not far from the chair was a wide strip of duct tape, about six inches long, all wrinkled and bloody.
Karl started to say something, stopped, cleared his throat, and tried again. 'How'd you know the guy was a supe?' he asked Conroy. 'He's no vamp, that's for sure, and a were would probably have transformed and got free. That ain't silver holding him to the chair.'
Before Conroy could answer, I said, 'Look here.' Taking a pen from my pocket, I leaned over the vic's left hand. I slipped the pen under his fingers, what was left of them, and gently lifted the hand up. Despite the blood smear, the tattoo of a pentagram was clearly visible on his palm. I'd seen the edge of it from where I was standing.
'Wizard,' Karl said.
'There's something else you guys oughta see,' Conroy said. 'It's in the next room.'
We followed him through a connecting door into what was clearly the wizard's bedroom. The ceiling light was burning, along with a two-bulb floor lamp.
I asked Conroy, 'Were these lights already on?'
'Yeah, that's why I decided to take a look,' he said. 'Everything's exactly the way I found it.' He sounded defensive, and I wondered why.
The four-poster bed was shoved over against a wall, fresh drag marks clearly visible on the polished hardwood. Where the bed had been standing was a hole in the floor, maybe a foot square. The matching pieces of wood used to conceal it had been pried up and tossed aside.
