Naked, I jumped out of the bed; she was poised there, on all fours, as if mimicking the panther on the wall looming over her.
“You are from a privileged, moneyed family, aren’t you, Miss Radclau?”
Her response was a deep, throaty snarling sound; I wasn’t sure she was capable of speech, at this point.
“You think just ’cause I’m a bum, I can’t do a damn anagram?” I asked, and I swung viciously at her, and it landed.
A punch on the jaw, even with all my weight behind it, wouldn’t be enough to knock her out-she had metamorphosed into something beyond human, stronger than a mere man-but it had surprised her, and threw her on her back, which was where I wanted her.
The kit bag was out from under the bed in a flash and the pointed stake and the mallet were in my hands in another flash, and I drove my knee into her stomach, and the stake into her heart. She yowled with pain; it was a wolflike sound. Blood bubbled from around the stake, and I hammered it again, and it sunk deeper, and she yowled again, but her eyes weren’t yellow anymore.
And they weren’t savage, anymore, either.
Her expression was sad, and maybe even grateful.
She was still alive when I raised the machete-heaving under the pain, her hands clutching the stake but unable to remove it, slender fingers streaked with her own blood, a perfect match to her nail polish.
“I know you acted out of compassion,” I said. “I know you gave me, and the other men, the best night of their lives, before taking those lives, when you wouldn’t have had to. You could have just been a beast. Instead, you were a beauty.”
She seemed to be smiling, a little, when the machete swung down and severed her head from pale, pale shoulders.
I had no trouble getting out of the place. I took the elevator down to the wine cellar passage to the garage with the bloody machete in hand in case I had to ward off the gorillalike chauffeur or any other minions of the night who might appear.
But none did.
I found a button in the garage and pushed it and the door swung up and open and I ran out into a cool, clear night. At the first farmhouse, I called in to the station, and told them to wake the chief.
“He’s not going to like it,” the desk sergeant said.
“Just
I could hear the shrug in his voice: “If you say so, Lieutenant Van Helsing.”
Road Dogs by Norman Partridge
Kim Barlow was two months in the ground when her brother first learned she was dead.
Glen got an e-mail from a deputy sheriff up in Arizona. Of course, the message had been gathering virtual dust for a couple of months in Glen’s inbox, because Glen hardly ever checked his mail. Not because he couldn’t. Sure, the rig was forty miles off the Texas coast, but there were computers around. What there wasn’t was anyone Glen Barlow heard from that way. Except for Kim, and Kim had been pretty quiet since Glen tossed her boyfriend through her living room window last Christmas Eve.
Glen had only clocked a couple months with the company, but the Installation Manager liked him well enough to okay emergency leave. Some young suit from Houston was headed back to the mainland after touring the rig, and Glen caught a ride into Galveston on the company chopper. Seventeen hours later he parked his truck in front of the El Pasito sheriff’s office. He’d already talked to that emailing deputy on a cell phone he’d forgotten in the Ford’s glove compartment when he ditched the mainland for his time offshore. Glen used that cell phone about as much as he used his e-mail account.
The deputy-whose name was J. J. Bryce-had spent most of the day waiting for Glen to show up. One look at the guy and Bryce shook his head. He shook his head when he saw Glen’s pickup, too. Try to describe that old hunk of Ford in a report, he’d note the color as rust or primer, take your pick. And the guy who drove it was pretty much the same way. Headed towards forty with the years starting to show. Bryce was real familiar with the type. A drifter-one of those guys who was wiry as a half-starved animal. And that might mean you were talking jackrabbit, or it might mean you were talking coyote. Sometimes it was hard to tell going in.
But Bryce already had an opinion about this guy. He’d heard all about Barlow tossing Kale Howard through that living room window last Christmas Eve. In fact, he’d heard more about it than the talk that went around the cop shop. Not that any of that mattered right now. The way the deputy saw it, right now things were all business.
The two of them sat down in the deputy’s cramped office and ran the drill. There wasn’t much to look at. Not in the office. Not in the file Bryce had on Kim Barlow’s death. But Glen looked, and he took his time about it, and that wasn’t something the deputy much liked.
After a while, Glen closed the folder and slid it across the desk.
“Having a hard time buying this,” he said.
“No buying it, really. It’s what happened.”
“You don’t have a suspect?”
“You read the report, Mr. Barlow. You don’t have a suspect in a case like this.”
“You talk to that asshole Howard?”
“Yeah. I talked to Kale. Read his file, too.”
“Then you know he used to beat up my sister.”
“I know that. But I also know that Howard didn’t do this. No man could have.”
Glen just looked at the guy-kind of grinned, didn’t say one word-and Bryce all of a sudden felt his pulse hammering, because it most definitely wasn’t the kind of look you got from a jackrabbit.
Glen Barlow said: “You’d be surprised what some men can do.”
There it was. Cards on the table, and all in the space of ten minutes. But the gents named Bryce and Barlow hadn’t quite played out the deck, so they went a few more hands. Bryce reminding Glen about the restraining order, warning him how hard he’d go if Glen went after Kale Howard. Glen asking questions, the deputy batting them off or not answering them at all. The words exchanged weren’t getting either man anywhere he wanted to go, or anywhere he wanted to take the other. The two of them were running neck and neck, and neither seemed to like that very much.
Finally, Glen said: “I want to see the pictures.”
“Look, Barlow. I understand that your sister was your only living relative. You know the land out there. As far as we can figure it, she was alone, rock-climbing at Tres Manos. She must have taken a fall. After that… well, she was hurt pretty bad. She had a broken leg. It was a couple days before anyone found her. Something got hold of her before then… a pack of coyotes, or maybe a big cat. We had some experts in and they said-”
“I don’t care what they said. Kale’s mixed up in this some way. Wouldn’t surprise me if he wanted a little protection after I tossed him through that window. Maybe he got himself a pit bull.”
“We checked that out, Mr. Barlow. Kale doesn’t have a dog.”
“That doesn’t change anything. I still want to see the pictures.”
“Trust me on this. You don’t.”
“How many times you want to hear me say it?”
The deputy drew a deep breath and tried to hold his temper.
“You want me to, I’ll say it again.”
Bryce was so pissed off, he could barely unclench his jaw, but he got the job done. “Okay, Barlow. You want pictures, pictures is what you’ll get.”
The deputy yanked open a file cabinet harder than he should have and tossed another manila folder across the
