Kitty's Greatest Hits

Cormac listened, almost amused. Gus must have snapped. The guy was half Brewster’s size, but he could have managed it.

“No, that’s the thing, Gus’s pissing his pants. They don’t think he did it.”

That piqued Cormac’s attention.

“They were locked in together, what else could have happened?” Frank said.

“All I know is he got cut up, but they didn’t find a knife, and Gus is pissing himself. Says he didn’t even see what happened.”

Frank chuckled. “Yeah, that’s a good story. That’ll get him off the hook for sure.”

“It’s just like what happened with that serial killer, the one from the thirties, remember?”

“I thought that happened in the sixties,” Frank said.

“Maybe it was a vampire,” Cormac said. “Turned to mist, come in through the bars.”

Frank stared at him. He was young but worn down, a stout white guy with a dozen tattoos scattered piecemeal across his back and arms. He’d spent more of his adult life in prison than out of it.

From the other cell Moe said, “What’d he say?”

“You’re not serious,” Frank said. “Can they do that?”

One thing was for sure, the world had gotten a whole lot more interesting over the last year, since the NIH went public with data proving that vampires and lycanthropes were real. Cormac loved throwing out bombshells like that. He loved that people acknowledged the existence of monsters without knowing anything about them. It made terrifying them so easy.

“But it probably wasn’t that,” Cormac said. “Vampire wouldn’t have left all that blood lying around.”

“Jesus Christ,” Frank muttered. “Now how am I supposed to sleep?”

Cormac knew that vampires didn’t turn into mist. They moved quickly, with faster-than-the-eye reflexes, and that was probably how the mist stories started. They couldn’t break into a locked cell. But if Gus had nothing to do with the murder, then something had gotten in and killed Brewster.

It was just the rumor mill. He’d wait for more reliable information before drawing conclusions.

* * *

That night, Cormac woke up sweating, batting at a humming in his ear. The place had bugs. Rolling to his side, he settled his arm over his head, and tried to imagine he was outdoors, camping at the edge of his meadow, his father sleeping a few feet away, his rifle beside him. Any sign of trouble, Dad would take care of it.

Cormac hadn’t thought much of his father in years, until he ended up here. Here, he thought about everything. What would his father think of him now? Would he be surprised his kid ended up in prison?

The breathing and snores of the dozens of other men on the block echoed and kept Cormac rooted to this place. Best not to let his mind wander too much. Had to stay here. Pay attention. He shouldn’t have thought of his father.

A voice plucked deep in his mind, a buried place carefully covered over, where not even his dreaming self went. That place had lain quiet as a matter of survival.

What are you?

A shadow stirred, rustling, looking for the light. Cormac shut the door on it.

Olson would see him next week and ask, Anything troubling you? Anything you want to talk about? That shadow would start to rattle around the inside of his mind, but Cormac would just shake his head no. Nothing to talk about. Except that the inside of his skull itched. Again Olson would ask, What’s on your mind? And Cormac would say, Let me tell you about my father, who died when I was sixteen. Let me tell you how, and what I did to the monster that killed him.

The buzzing wasn’t a fly; the legs crawled on the interior surface of his skull. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to take the top of his head off and scratch.

It was just this place getting to him. Well, couldn’t let that happen. Had to hold on, stay sane. He had too many reasons to stay sane and get out of here in one piece. He never thought he’d say that. Never thought he’d have anything to live for except the next job, the next hunt.

He drifted off and again woke up sweating. This time it was light out, sun coming in through distant skylights. Cormac still felt like the bugs had gotten to him.

* * *

He thought of all the things that could slice up a man in a locked cell. A guy could do himself in like that if he put his mind to it, and it wasn’t too hard to think of how captivity could drive a man—the right kind of man—to it. That was the simplest explanation and the one the warden would probably settle on. Let the psychologists hash it out.

While Cormac had been joking about vampires turning to mist and coming in through the bars, other things could appear from nowhere, things that didn’t have physical bodies, demons with knifelike claws that fed on blood, curses laid from afar. Ghosts that tickled the inside of your mind. If he’d been in charge of an investigation and the physical evidence couldn’t explain it, that would be the first trail Cormac followed: Did Brewster know anyone who could work that kind of magic, who also had it in for him? Without seeing the body for himself, Cormac didn’t have much to go on. They’d probably find some reasonable, nonsupernatural explanation.

Two guards didn’t come to work the next day.

Yard time was cut short. Half the block didn’t get time at all, which set up an afternoon of trouble. Guys yelled from their cells, hassling guards during counts, which happened half a dozen times a day. The warden even added a count, which started up a rumor that somebody was missing and probably cut up the same as Brewster.

That couldn’t have been the case, because when a count turned up short the whole facility went into lockdown, and that hadn’t happened since the body was found. Lockdown then had only lasted a day, but that made two days now that the routine had been trashed. Without routine, inmates floundered.

At dinner, Cormac took his tray to his usual corner in the dining hall. A couple of tables over, his neighbor, Moe, was tugging on another guy’s arm. Big guy, bald, tattooed arms, glaring across the room with murder in his eyes. Cormac followed the gaze to a group of black men who seemed to be minding their own business. Moe was trying to get the guy to sit back down.

Cormac took his tray and moved another table down, farther away from them, and put his back to the wall. Sure enough, the shouting started, the big guy broke away from Moe’s grasp and lunged toward one of the black guys, who lunged right back at him. The fight turned into a full-blown melee in seconds, two gangs pounding into each other, surrounded by a ring of more men screaming them on.

This was what passed for entertainment around here.

Cormac kept quiet and wolfed down as much of his dinner as he could, because sure enough, guards swarmed into the place, clubs drawn to beat the crowd into submission and drag the worst offenders to the hole. They cleared the whole room. When a guard approached Cormac, he raised his hands, lowered his gaze, and went back to his cell without argument. The prison went into lockdown yet again, which mean a lot more staring at ceilings and grumbling.

“He said it was voodoo,” Moe said right after lights out, in a hissing voice that managed to carry down the row. The guy had somehow managed to extricate himself from the worst of the mess and got out of any kind of punishment. “Hal said that Carmell knew voodoo and made a voodoo doll of Brewster and ripped it to pieces. That’s what got Brewster.”

Somebody muttered at him to shut up.

“Voodoo doesn’t work like that,” Cormac said. He shouldn’t be encouraging the guy.

“It don’t work at all,” Frank said.

“You know so much about it, how does it work?” Moe said.

Cormac sighed. Maybe a scary enough story would shut him up—or make it worse. “That voodoo doll thing is Hollywood. Saturday morning cartoons. Real voodoo, you want something done you have to make a sacrifice. Usually a blood sacrifice for something big. You’d slaughter somebody in order to do the curse, not as the curse itself.”

Now there was a thought that halfway made sense. It wasn’t a murder, but a blood sacrifice. That still didn’t explain who or why.

The others shut up for at least half a minute.