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The officer’s eyes were a furious red set in dark pits of bruised flesh. His mouth was a gaping, laughing impossibility of wicked white teeth. His throat was a ragged ruin caked with blood.
Darkness swarmed around Josh; his senses became confused. He thought he saw two more figures rush out of the darkness beneath the trees that lined the side of the road. His mind was closing down and all that he could be sure of was a vagueness of white faces and empty eyes, and beneath the roaring in his ears he thought he heard a desperate, hungry moaning. These shapes did not come to rescue him, nor did they come to hurt him—they moved away from the police cruiser, toward the Jeep. Dimly, distantly he heard Deb yelling his name, and then she began screaming in long inarticulate wails. She jammed her hands against the horn and the blare rose like a banshee.
Josh tried to call her name, tried to reach for her, but he could feel his own strength fading away. He saw the figures tear open the car doors, saw the shapes come at Deb from both sides. They grabbed her arms and for a moment Josh’s darkening brain thought that the attackers were playing a kids’ game. Tug-of-war. And then Deb’s scream rose to a supersonic shriek as the monsters tore her apart. Her blood splashed against the inside of the windshield and painted it an opaque red-black. Deb’s screams gurgled to a wet nothing and all Josh could hear was a sound like lions tearing apart a zebra with their teeth.
The hand holding him gave a tighter squeeze and Josh saw, with fading vision and awareness, the name tag on the cop’s uniform: D. MCVEY. It meant nothing to him except that it was the last thing he ever saw before the pain in his throat blossomed into a dripping darkness tinged with scarlet.
2
Vic’s cell phone rang and he picked it up from where it lay on a table, saw that the screen display said POLK, and flipped it open. “Yeah
?”
“Back door. ”
Without comment Vic flipped the phone shut and went to open the door, pausing only long enough to peer through the spy hole to confirm that it was Polk, and that he was alone.
“Hope this ain’t a social call, Jimmy. ”
Licking his lips nervously, Polk held up a finger and then retreated to his parked car, which was angled in toward the garage door, and removed a large cardboard box from the trunk. Vic noted that Polk had used enough common sense to remove the bulb from the trunk light, and decided that was worth some Brownie points. Polk handed the box to Vic and in a hushed voice said, “Detonators, rolls of fuse wire, and some timers. Everything you asked for, plus I got a couple extra of each. ”
Nodding in appreciation, Vic turned and set the box inside the door. He did not invite Polk in. Turning back, he said, “And the dynamite?”
“I’ll have it next week, but I don’t want to bring it here. I can meet you somewhere out of town, if that’s okay. ”
“Yeah, that’s good. Keep your cell handy and once you get it, give me a call. I’ll tell you where and when to meet. ”
“Okay. ”
Polk’s face was shining with sweat despite the chill, and he kept licking his lips in a way that reminded Vic of a nervous Chihuahua. If he’d had a dog biscuit he would have bet he could have made Polk sit up and beg.
“Kenny said he needed seventy-five percent up front before he turns over the stuff, though, and the rest on delivery. ”
“Fair enough,” Vic said. “Wait here. ” He left Polk standing outside in the cold darkness while he went back into his den and to a wall safe that was behind a framed photo of Heinrich Himmler, punched in a code, and when the door popped open he took out several stacks of bills that had been bundled into five-thousand-dollar bricks and secured with green rubber bands. He counted out two hundred thousand and dumped the bills into a zippered vinyl bag that read STRIKE IT BIG AT PINELANDS LANES. As an afterthought he took more bricks of bundled twenties and carried them and the bag back outside. Handing off the bag, he said, “This is for your cousin Kenny. And this,” he added, holding out the ten grand, “is for you. ”
Polk looked at it narrowly as if expected some kind of nasty trick. “Why?”
“Because you’re doing your job, Jimmy-my-boy. Unless you don’t want it?” Vic pretended to pull it back, but Polk snatched at it, catching one bundle of five thousand and causing the other to fall. He bent down and picked it up off the ground from in front of Vic’s feet and as he rose he unzipped his jacket and stuffed the money inside.
“Now, what do you say?” Vic asked mildly.
“Um…thanks, Vic. ”
“Good dog,” Vic said, and turned and went back inside.
3
Ruger absently wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, caught sight of the bright-red smear and licked it off, savoring the taste. Blood was so much sweeter when it was still fresh, before the cells thickened and died. After that the taste was drab, like sucking on wet cardboard. He’d known that even before the change, and now he felt like a connoisseur.
On the ground, the young woman moaned, struggling to turn over, fighting to find a thread of breath amid the smashed debris of her throat. Red bubbles formed on her lips and popped, staining her face with tiny misty droplets. She lifted a fluttering hand to her throat, touching with featherlight fingers the irregular line of blood-drenched skin that should have been smooth. Blood seeped in sluggish pulses; her life pushed out of her with each fading beat of her heart.
Ruger squatted down and looked at her. The fluttering hand entertained him; it reminded him of a hummingbird, and he smiled. He reached out and scooped another fingerful of blood from her throat, licking it the way a kid would lick a finger’s worth of cookie batter.
“Please…” the woman whispered and just managing that single word cost her breath she didn’t have left to spend. Ruger smiled and brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. She had pretty eyes—honey brown with gold flecks. Even now, even after all that he’d done to her, her eyes still held a glimmer of innocent hope, as if he could take it all back, make it all better again. “Please,” she said again and even tried to give him a trembling, hopeful smile.
Karl Ruger looked into those brown eyes and gave her a smile of his own, warm, encouraging, and he could see her spirit rise toward it, her hope blossoming as he pressed his fingers to her throat, closing the wound.
“H…help me…” she whispered in what was left of her voice.
