'Thanks.' He turned to the man. 'Sorry, I'll have to get back to you.' He was moving. 'Some sort of an emergency thing, I apologize'—in motion and out the door even as he spoke, the words thrown like a handful of coins crashing out into the room behind him as he sprinted out of there, saying 'sorry' and hearing the one they called Captain Sewer mumbling something to him but he was already gone and down on the pavement and running to the car.
Waiting now, as a patch-plugged call on the switchboard landline was laboriously (in seconds) rerouted through his tactical command radio and knowing then it was bad when he said 'hello' hearing Edie breathe his name into the other end of a line somewhere.
'Jack . . .' A word that she sobbed, cried out, crying literally, crying as if in pain and he knew it was bad and he was afraid then. Afraid of what the next words would be and he could feel his inner demons gloating as they grabbed his guts and squeezed them and twisted.
He felt time compress in that awful way time sometimes can. Felt one second become an hour in an hour that would last an eternity, felt time wrap itself into a fetal ball and freeze in that position. Felt it crawl to a standstill as he heard her sob his name. Heard the demons roaring in stop-time.
Do you believe in black magic? Had she called him up from the dark place—conjured him, it almost seemed —made this happen by seeing the grainy photo of his ugliness for the first time. Forced Jack to show it to her, the thing that had taken Ed and turned his life source into a bloody mess of gristle and torn meat. And when she had seen the picture, it was almost as if she'd made it happen. Because within hours he had Lee and he had her. He had them both to
She had been so easy. She had seen one of her familiar shadows at the window and knew exactly who it was out there, lurking in the darkness of the shaded yard as the kids trudged home from school—it was Weirdo—her old friend back to pay her a social call. And she had felt no fear, only anger and a bit of remorse but then more anger as she stomped out of the back door and around the house to confront the old pervert and he had taken her in midthought, catching her in the air as she was moving, that is, with a huge paw over her mouth, her body suddenly propelled backward through the air as if by dark magic.
He was pulling her back inside as easily as if he had been carrying a fifty-pound feed sack, effortlessly, and she felt like her neck was going to snap as he carried her right back in, back toward the center of the house and then holding her, with her hands tearing at him, whispering awful things to her, telling her how it would be, telling Edie the terrible things about her daughter, the evil that would befall them if Mommy didn't come with him quietly, a big smile for the neighbors to see.
The horror that she'd summoned up with no more than a stare into an old and grainy photo, the horror had come to take her away. And it had her lovely little child as well, and then it showed her something that was so ugly she couldn't believe the sordid, ugly, nastiness of an ordinary object. He fished a little torn scrap of cloth out of his pocket and held it under her nose and she saw immediately that it was part of Lee Anne's ink skirt that she'd had on at school today and she new that the horror had the child and she nodded a grim compliance.
And instantly she was moving and a smile forced itself across her face as he whispered S M I L E roughly to her through fierce, gritted teeth, guiding her by the arms with just the proprietary helpfulness you'd expect of a friend, nothing to arouse suspicions from a casual onlooker, and suddenly she was in with Lee and being forced down to the floor and feeling a rope biting into her flesh, and a filthy gag going into her mouth and hearing the engine come to life beside her and feeling them pull away from the safety of her world.
'Jack,' she cried, and sobbed out a sentence to him and he couldn't make out a single word of it. 'Jack, Jack . . .' She was crying and for a few seconds he let her cry, the thing that was holding her beside a phone somewhere and then he did something to her to make her scream out in pain and he heard her fighting to regain control of herself and she sobbed out 'I—oh, I, uh, Jack . . . Oh God . . . Ah—ahhhhhhh—he haaaaaa—he has
'You there?'
'Yes,' he replied to the surprisingly deep voice. 'I can hear you,' he added inanely, his mind freezing from the shock of the moment.
'Listen. Don't bring more police. You come alone or they die, and I let your whore suck me while I eat the rat's heart.' That's what Jack thought he'd said for a second then realized he had called Lee Anne a brat. He would eat the brat's heart. Is that what he said? Why would he want to do that? He was fighting to get his brain working. He felt paralyzed. Drunk. He felt as if he was absolutely paralyzed with booze. He couldn't think, move. He strained against the phone, crushing the receiver to his ear before he realized he was holding a two-way radio mike in his hand as the call sizzled on the speaker of the police radio.
'What?'
'You heard me. Don't bother tracing this. And don't be stupid. If I see others, these bitches die bad.' The horror gave a location and Jack laid the mike on the seat and started the car, grinding into the ignition having forgotten it was already running, slamming the gear shift down as he screeched out into the traffic, telling himself to breathe deeply and take in some oxygen and get that brain going. Brain dead. That was the only phrase that occurred to him. The patient is brain dead.
The genius cop, Jack Eichord, the crime crusher of all time. Bulldog fucking Drummond and nothing was working up there. Total zero. A cipher between the ears. Come
'Mommy . . .' he heard somehow, on a wavelength man has yet to discover, imagining he could hear Lee saying to her mother, 'It's wet here,' and the horror of it was beyond him and miraculously it all just passed over him and he had shrugged off the paralysis and personal fear and just stood on the brakes, a Charger slamming into him and a potential whiplash case trying to see his license to report him to the police even as he Brodie'd and swung into a hard U-turn against the honking, furious traffic, the wildly angry Chicago motorists—as he started back toward where he should have headed all along to get what he needed to make the horror do as he would wish.
The thoughts he had in the interminable six or seven minutes before he finally got to the place where the monster was waiting for him were all business thoughts. He had his main weapon now and it was loaded in a box with a handle that sat on the seat beside him. And in the backseat was a crudely hacksawed riot gun which he was debating about shoving down into his belt. And in the seat he had a box of twelve-gauge 00 buck 'maggies' open and he had his speedloaders out and even as he was pulling the car over to the curb he was putting a speedloader in each pocket and pulling the shotgun over to him and getting out.
And he took the shotgun, which wasn't even a Remington, just some old pawnshop Winchester Defender that he'd taken a hacksaw to, and pulled his belt as tight as it would go and shoved it down in back, pointing down. It was nothing more than the grip, trigger assembly, and the hot loads. Two ugly mags in between his fingers like cigars, five of the hot twelve-pellet loads inside, and he racked it back, fingering the safety off and dropping both the extras he had in his left hand in the street in his nervousness. Easing the piece out of his nice leather holster and letting it slide in gently as it could, wondering if the S.W.A.T. boys and a tac unit would be coming up smoking and ruining everything any second as he removed the carrying case from the front seat. It was heavier than he had expected and the movement inside made it even harder to carry the weight.
'Hey!' the deep voice shouted to him. 'Get over here.' And it was all happening in broad daylight and it wasn't a monster at all, but a regular human being he had just seen, and the head disappeared back down into the manhole. How the hell had he crammed his bulk through that tiny hole? Eichord wondered. And he sat his box down by the side of the open manhole and gently eased the shotgun out, knowing now that it would be useless, and he placed it beside the box. Then the man called up to him from the darkness below, the voice like a peal of thunder, a deep, strong, metallic clapping boom.
'I don't know what you have in them but don't touch it again. Climb down the ladder unless you want me to twist the head off this skinny cunt,' he shouted up savagely to Jack.
'I can't see, please! Wait!' Jack shone a flashlight down into the hole, shouting, 'You want me to climb down
