you?”
“Yeah, actually it does,” he replied without missing a beat, his voice even and tone matter-of-fact. “Our Jane Doe had a tattoo of one. Why?”
“There’s more to it than that,” I replied. “It has some kind of significance. I just don’t know what.”
“Well, maybe I do. We found some shit on the computer about ‘em. Some crap about a swan society or somethin’ like that. Apparently they’re a group of wingnuts who let the other wingnuts drink their blood. Pretty fucked up, huh? Anyhow, we’re already chasin’ down some leads in the local freak community. No offense, Row, but you’re a little late to the party on this one.”
I let out a heavy groan.
“You okay, white man?” my friend asked, concern edging his voice. “You don’t sound so good.”
“Tell me about it,” I sighed. “Listen, Ben, I may be late, but this party is just getting started.”
“Whaddaya…” he began, then his voice lowered to a mumble. “Jeezus, Row… Twilight Zone?”
“Yeah.”
After a pause he asked, “So are you sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’?”
“Yeah, Ben,” I replied. “There’s another victim. The body just hasn’t been found yet.”
“Fuck me… Okay, so since you’re callin’ and tellin’ me this, should I assume you’ve officially fallen off the hocus-pocus wagon?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid so,” I told him. “And right now it seems there’s no point in even trying to get back on.”
“So, what now?”
“I don’t know. I guess you wait for someone to report a body. I’m going to hope this aspirin kicks in soon, so I can try to get home before this headache gets any worse, if that’s even possible.”
“Home? Where the hell are ya’ right now?”
“Not far away. I had a meeting. I’ll be fine.”
“Ya’ sure? You need me to come and pick you up?”
“Really, Ben, I just need a few minutes and I’ll be fine. But, I do have a bad feeling I’m going to need a bigger bottle of aspirin before this is all over.”
CHAPTER 10:
The dogs were yipping as the garbled notes of the front doorbell echoed through the house in a rapid staccato. I tried not to think about it, but the racket definitely had a different idea in mind. A vague memory flitted through my brain, and I remembered hearing a very similar combination of raucous noises a bit earlier. At least I think it was earlier. I couldn’t be sure about the actual passage of time, not that it really mattered much.
At any rate, I was fairly certain the original clamor was only a dream, so I had ignored it. Just like I had ignored the telephone-both my cell and the landline-when they intruded on my slumber as well. Eventually, the earlier cacophony had faded into nothingness and simply went away, which seemed to prove out my theory that it was all in my head.
Or so I thought.
Now, the ignoring didn’t seem to work as well. Instead of a few evenly spaced tones and a handful of random barks, the obnoxious chime was assaulting me as a neverending non-rhythm of dings, dongs, and pings-not necessarily in any recognizable order. And based on the yelping, the dogs weren’t exactly pleased by this development at all.
I dragged the pillow up and clamped it over my head with one arm. My new theory was that if I couldn’t hear it then it wasn’t real.
“Go…the fuck…away,” I groaned out of frustration.
The insane din finally stopped and I let out a sigh. However, before I even finished expelling the air from my lungs, I heard the phone in my office begin to ring. The muffled bell pealed four or five times before eventually falling silent. A moment later the William Tell Overture began to warble through the bedroom. I tossed the pillow to the side and opened one eye. My cell phone was dancing in a vibrating semicircle atop the nightstand as the tune spewing from it rose through the scale, starting at mildly audible and arriving somewhere near flat out blaring.
With a heavy grunt I gave in and rolled myself up into a sitting position and reached for the device. Before I could wrap my hand around it, however, it stopped jittering and fell silent. I allowed my chin to fall against my chest then reached up and rubbed my face. Twisting around, I squinted at the digital clock and saw that it was pushing 4:30 in the afternoon.
Rocking forward, I stood up, then stumbled around the bedroom. As I found my bearings in the semi- darkness, I began moving on some sort of automatic pilot. Somewhere along the line I must have snatched up a shirt, though I didn’t remember doing so. All I knew was that I noticed it in my hand sometime after my haze-filled brain figured out how to open the door. Lumbering forward on pure instinct, I decided maybe I should put it on and managed to slide one arm into the wrong sleeve after three tries.
My head still felt like it was going to explode. I didn’t think it was any worse than it had been earlier, but it definitely wasn’t any better. Of course, I hadn’t really noticed the pain until a few moments ago when the person at the door found it necessary to roust me from the relative comfort of sleep. For that very reason, I was already displeased.
By the time I staggered up the hall and through the living room to the front door, the insane rattle of the bell had been replaced by the sound of someone pounding on the wooden barrier. I started to yell but quickly decided against it because I had a sneaking suspicion doing so would only add to my agony.
Out of reflex I squinted and put my eye up to the peephole as the door vibrated under the hammering fist. I wasn’t surprised to find Ben on the other side. After all, my cell had been chirping the ring tone I had assigned to his numbers, and it was pretty unmistakable. The phantom memories I had been trying to pass off to my subconscious as mere dreams were now solidifying somewhere in the back of my head, so even in my foggy state I was able to make the obvious connections between the back-to-back calls coupled with the frantic knocking.
I took a couple of steps away from the door and shot a quick glance at the pendulum clock hanging in our dining room, just to double check myself. It read closer to quarter past four, which meant I’d forgotten to account for the intentional fifteen-minute time warp on Felicity’s alarm clock. In any case, if my addition was correct, only a little more than four hours had gone by since I had last talked to my friend. Of course, it had been my experience that a lot could happen in four hours, most of it not necessarily good.
I sighed heavily, slipped my arm out of the now upside down shirt, then managed to twist it around and drag it partially back on before unlocking the door and swinging it open.
“Dammit, Ben, just stop, will you?” I said as I squinted at him. “Even the dead can’t sleep.”
The look on his face might have been amusing under different circumstances, but right now I didn’t care.
“Jeezus fuck, Row,” he exclaimed. “I’ve been out here for fifteen minutes. You okay?”
“Do I look okay?” I grunted, a highly detectable bristle in my voice.
“Not really.”
“Well then I guess that’s your answer.”
I finished wrestling my way into the shirt and began fumbling with the buttons as I stepped aside to allow him entry. A moment later I looked up to see that he was still standing in the doorway. Near as I could tell, he hadn’t budged.
“Well, are you coming in or what?” I asked.
My friend looked me over with a half-curious, half-embarrassed expression and said, “Ya’know, you’re actin’ pretty pissy. I didn’t interrupt you and Firehair or somethin’ did I?”
“Hell no, she’s not even here right now,” I replied. “Besides, if you had, she would probably be the one you’d have to worry about, not me.”
“Okay, so then you’re half undressed and actin’ like an asshole why?”
“I was in bed trying to sleep off this damned headache,” I told him. “By the way, I’m half dressed, not undressed.”
He shrugged. “Half full, half empty. Same friggin’ difference in my book…”
