was oily and unbrushed and his collar was a faint yellow.
“What’s going on?” Hayes asked. “What’s wrong?”
Garvey sighed again and rubbed his face. Then he stood and took off his coat, moving slowly and unsteadily. He sat back down and stared into the linens on the bed and said, “It’s surfaced.”
“What has?”
“Our killer,” he said. “There’s been two more murders. In a jailhouse this time. Northeastern District Jailhouse.”
“Oh, God,” said Hayes, and lay back.
“Yeah. In Newton.”
It had happened two nights ago, he said. The very night Hayes and Samantha had been attacked outside Skiller’s tenement. He had gotten the call at three in the morning, just as the aching swirls of a hangover were beginning to settle in. He had woken and pulled on whichever clothes he could find, not knowing he’d be wearing them for the next forty hours, and dragged himself down to Newton, where a crowd was already forming.
Charles Denton and Michael Huffy. Two scummy little tennie weasels from deep in Dockland. Both had a long record of breaking and entering and one charge of assault. Put most of an ice pick in a cornerstore shopkeeper who had walked in on them filching cigarettes. Spent a few years in the Hill, got out for good behavior. That night they’d hopped a trolley down to Newton for the high and righteous purpose of throwing rocks and bottles at the cars and passersby, chivalrous gentlemen indeed. Then they were caught, roughed up a little after they stoutly resisted arrest, and tossed in the drunk tank at around midnight.
That was the last anyone ever saw of them. By two-thirty a.m. they were dead and no longer recognizable. Only way to tell it was them was from the front desk log books.
Garvey had walked into the jailhouse to find it was in a shape similar to that of the Bridgedale trolley. Two of the on-duty officers were completely deaf, a third partially. Garvey had followed the trail of destruction back to where the jail cell was blown in. This time a paperweight had been used to hammer off the lock. Inside had been the two winners of the evening, the lucky boys who had gone out looking to hassle some townies and instead had gotten a few worlds of hurt for their troubles.
A tin plate had been the weapon of choice for the occasion. Used the edge like an axe and bent the damn thing like it had been chewed up by a machine. Huffy and Denton didn’t have much in the way of faces afterwards, just the backs and bases of their skulls and a bit of their ears, just a bit. Garvey probably would never forget the moment when he had been slowly walking up the hall to the jail cell, making a note of each of the items found disturbed along the way, and had spotted something twinkling and golden and squatted to look carefully at the object before realizing it was a golden tooth, still stuck in the remains of most of a man’s jaw, a quarter-inch of lip smiling right below its shine.
Garvey had kept hope at first, which was dumb of him. Huffy and Denton both had unsavory records, but nothing in the way of legitimate employment. Just some idiots who had never developed brains past the delinquent days of seventeen or so. But then he had spoken to some known associates of the fellows and learned with a sinking heart that why yes, they had recently found steady work, and where else but at the McNaughton Vulcanization Plant as loaders? And most certainly, they had come into contact with the burgeoning union movement, and had become reformed, passionate men, suddenly reinvigorated and moralized upon realizing the strife of the lower classes.
“No tattoo, though,” said Garvey to Hayes. “So that’s something. Or maybe it’s nothing, at this hour I don’t know shit.”
“So the policemen in the jail didn’t see anything?”
“Same thing as the conductor. They heard a noise, blacked out. Woke up an indeterminate time later to find the place in ruins. Whatever it was, it tore the jailhouse up something fierce.” He sniffed. “There was one more thing, though. There was blood on the outside of the cell door that was broken into.”
“Not Huffy’s or Denton’s?”
“I don’t think so. Wouldn’t make sense, from that angle. I think he or she or whatever the fuck it is hurt themselves. I sent a few uniforms out to hospitals to see if there were any strange injuries. Something on the hand, probably. Nothing, of course. This bastard case won’t go down that easy, it was dumb of me to think it would.”
“How’s the public handling it?”
“Bad. Bad as hell. We’re under fire and no doubt about it. No one’s paying attention to the deafened officers, no one cares if the two bodies once lived a lifetime of sheer fucking stupidity. No, they just see two union men, dead in Newton, slaughtered under police supervision. Jesus Christ, sometimes I wish America would just shit this city into the ocean and be done with it. Harry Mills over at The Freedom is screaming his head off about it.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Yeah. Saying it’s the beginnings of a blood feud, says that every man in a pair of brogans can barely expect to sleep well tonight. Someone found out that the two men were beaten before their incarceration. Well, of course they got beaten, Denton tried to bite off a patrolman’s fingers. They were lucky they weren’t here in the Hammy, with you. Not that they’re lucky now or anything. But that doesn’t matter. People are throwing rocks at officers out there. Shouting at us as we walk by. The Freedom isn’t alone, Benby in The Times is starting to question us, and the goddamn mayor is starting to listen. Or starting to pretend he’s listening, everyone fucking knows he’s funded by, hell, I don’t know, some suit at the Nail. They say McNaughton’s figured out a way to murder people from miles away. Murder whoever they want.” He looked sideways at Hayes. “They say McNaughton has a monster working for it.”
“It’s not a monster,” said Hayes dismissively. “If it is the killer.”
“Then what was it?”
“I don’t know. Something. But not a monster. What did Samantha say?”
“She says pretty much the same thing as you. It was like a person, a person who couldn’t stop moving. It was spotted again, you know. People said they saw a ghost, way out in Lynn. Shuddering under the moonlight and screaming, or something like screaming. From their testimonies that would have only been a few minutes before the murders.”
“That can’t be right,” said Hayes.
“It’s what they said. It crossed the city in a handful of minutes.”
“They’re wrong. It’s bullshit. You’ve chased bullshit witnesses before, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Of course. Things like that aren’t real.”
“You both saw it,” Garvey insisted. “You both heard it and were nearly deafened. It’s the same thing, whatever it is. We’re still tracking down the other thugs that tried to beat your head in but if we find them, which I doubt we will, we’ll probably hear the same thing.”
“Are you seriously considering the scenario of a boogeyman running around murdering unioners?”
“No. No boogeyman. Just something. Someone, maybe. How, I don’t know. What, I don’t know.”
“Oh, please, Garvey. Don’t be stupid.”
Garvey clenched a fist and bit the knuckle. Then he took a breath and said, “Listen, you bastard. Look around you for once. We live in a city powered by thunderstorms along with the usual coal and oil and what have you. The things your company makes here are things the entire world fucking wants. Things that can fly and never have to land. Cranes with arms and legs that can build a whole town in a week. And you. They have you, you crazy bastard. Whatever you are. I’ve lived here all my life and by now I’m willing to believe a lot.”
Hayes shook his head. “That doesn’t matter. It can still be explained. Somehow.”
“Then explain it. Explain to me what’s happening.”
“Someone’s mad. Maybe at the unions, maybe just at these men. I know you love the how and not being able to figure this one out is fucking you up but good, Garv-”
“Of course it is!” cried Garvey. “Eleven people, sorry, thirteen people drop dead within a very small space of time, no sign of resistance, no sign of alarm or of a struggle! How does that happen?”
“I don’t know yet, some sort of bomb or gas!” said Hayes.
“That makes this sound planned, and this wasn’t planned. All the evidence points to anger, to a stupid crime.”
“Not all the evidence, just everything you want to look at.”
Garvey fell silent at that. He sat down and buried his face in his hands and breathed deep.
