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Vic took a drag, eyes narrow and hard, said nothing. Smoke leaked out of his nostrils. Ruger snorted. The girl he carried could not have been more than thirteen. Her T-shirt was torn, exposing one cup of a functional white bra. Her blond hair hung over Ruger’s arm and nearly to the floor. He hefted her like she weighed nothing. “Well, maybe we can whet her appetite. ” He put one foot on the bottom step and glanced back at Vic. “Your face looks like shit. ”
“Blow me. ”
“Maybe the kid’s turning into something like his old man after all. ”
Vic picked a fleck of dried blood from his nostril and wiped it on the arm of his chair. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe. Maybe that’s the only way a pussy like him’d ever get a sly one in on me. ”
“Good thing you didn’t cut him,” Ruger said, nodding to the knife on the coffee table. “If Lois hadn’t stepped in…”
“I wasn’t going to kill him, asshole…I was just going to carve my initials on his balls. Maybe take an ear off, or a finger. I wasn’t going to kill the little shit. ”
“The Man’s going to really be pissed. ” He gave Vic a wink and carried the girl upstairs. Vic and Polk stared at the ceiling for a long time. They could hear Ruger’s muffled voice and Lois’s scream, high and shrill. Polk cut his eyes toward Vic and saw an expression he didn’t expect to see: hurt. When Vic caught him watching he put on a poker-face scowl.
“We have to find the kid,” Vic said, “before Halloween. ”
“I put Tow-Truck Eddie on it. He’ll catch him. ”
Upstairs Lois gave another long scream, and this time it rose like a banshee wail, filled with such horror that Polk lowered his head and pressed his palms to his ears until it stopped. The scream rose and rose and then suddenly cut off. For a long while there was no sound at all except the vague creaking of the timbers and the twilight wind outside whispering through the slits in the shutters.
Polk rubbed his eyes. “This is getting to be too much,” he said. “I don’t know how much more I can take. ”
Taking a long drag, Vic squinted at him through the blue smoke that filled the living room. “Yeah, well…it’ll all be over soon,” he said.
Those words tightened around Polk’s heart like a vise.
5
Iron Mike Sweeney was the Enemy of Evil.
At least, that was how he had once thought of himself, back when his inner fantasy life was a safe and exciting escape hatch from the real world. That was before, when evil was an abstract concept from comic books and TV and movies—granted a concept enhanced by the hard hands of his stepfather, but still abstract. That was before evil had become an actual thing, a presence, a force, a reality that chased him through the gloom of the cold October afternoon and the darkness of his cold, shrieking thoughts.
Now evil was a thing that drew a knife and came at him with burning eyes and a whispering voice. Now evil was a thing that roared at him with his mother’s mouth and a monster’s voice. Now evil was more than just real, it was unreal. Titanic, overwhelming, impossible—and he fled before it.
He tore along the roads, not aiming for any particular place. Just away. Away from town. Away from Vic. Away from home and from what that word no longer meant, and what it now meant.
The farthest away he had ever been by himself was the dark stretch of A-32, and so he went that way. Not because he chose to, but because the path was programmed into him and his mind was a small cringing thing that hid from conscious thought. Inside him the chrysalis writhed. Cracks appeared in the cocoon that was wrapped around his transforming soul.
Behind him, Mike felt the vastness of nowhere to go; back there was everything he had ever known and nowhere that he wanted to be. A sudden realization blindsided him with the force of a runaway train and he skidded and slewed his bike to a stop on the verge, kicking up gravel and a plume of dust.
He could never go home again.
Never.
Not just because of Vic, but because of Mom. Tears fell like hot rain and he bent forward over the pain, buried his face in his arms as he hunched down over the handlebars. His lips tried to speak, but they were twisted with weeping, streaked with phlegm. He managed only one word, but he said it over and over again, trying to rediscover its lost meaning.
“Mom!”
The gathering twilight painted him and the surrounding fields in shades of bloody red. He was still crying, oblivious to the rest of the world, when the police cruiser crested the hill behind him.
Chapter 24
1
He still had his face buried in his arms, so Mike did not even know he was in mortal danger until the cruiser leapt over the crest of the hill and hurtled at him.
Then he heard it: a fierce and immediate bellow as the police car’s heavy engine revved to a screeching pitch. Mike jerked his head up and twisted around to see the white dragon’s eyes of the headlights not twenty yards away; the lights flared to high-beam brightness, piercing him like lasers.
“No,” Mike breathed. “Not now. ”
