Low Midnight

  He didn’t know if Ben was going to answer with something serious or flippant. He hoped flippant, because Cormac wasn’t much up for serious.

  “I guess that makes you just like everyone else, huh?” Ben said after a pause.

  “I guess so.”

  A long silence while Ben waited for him to say more, when he knew very well that Cormac wasn’t going to say anything.

  “Be careful,” Ben said finally. “Call me if I can help.”

  Cormac hung up.

  He hit the south end of Colorado Springs and exited the interstate at Highway 24 to head into the foothills. He’d seen Kuzniak’s old claim during daylight hours. Now it was time to see it at midnight. See if any ghosts came wandering out.

  The moon was half full. He always knew the moon’s phase, had paid close attention since he was a kid and his father started taking him hunting. His father always bought almanacs that marked the phases and circled the nights of the full moon with a thick black marker, because he almost always went hunting then. You kept track of the moon long enough, you could almost start to feel it. You always knew where to look for it, and knew if it was going to be just a smidge past full, or a sliver of new, hanging like a smile in the western sky. He still kept track, partly because it was habit and partly because of Ben and Kitty. He wanted to know when they were going out, on full moon nights.

  He had a small flashlight to light his way up the path, so he wouldn’t trip on rocks or tree roots. Mostly, he kept the light turned down and his gaze up, to preserve his night vision as well as he could. Moving carefully in the dark, he made slow progress. When he reached the plateau, he shut off the flashlight and put it in his pocket.

  In the moonlight and nighttime shadows, the plateau looked wider, more barren. Like the scrub oak and pines were figures, creatures rising up from the ground and peering at him suspiciously.

  He felt that prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck—the feeling that something odd was going on. But did it really come from something being off, or from his knowledge that something had happened here back in the day? That creeping feeling didn’t provide any detail.

  “You’re a ghost,” he said out loud. “You know any spells that find ghosts?”

  Technically, I’m not a ghost. I’m merely disembodied.

  He chuckled. “Semantics.”

  Do be polite, won’t you?

  “I gotta say, I wish Crane’s ghost would just show up and tell us what happened.” Then he could ditch Layne, skip the werewolf hunt, and go back to just worrying about the book of shadows and Roman. Like that wasn’t enough.

  Crane may not have known what happened to him. It’s likely he was struck dead before even realizing that his spell had failed and Kuzniak had killed him.

  “Poor guy, yeah?” He kicked at a rock and kept looking over his shoulder. His breath fogged, but he didn’t see anything unusual.

  I have no sympathy for him, I’m afraid. He was meddling.

  “Any ideas?”

  I know we found signs of magic, but that just means spells were cast here. I don’t think there are any ghosts, Cormac. Not of any distinct beings. Only the ghost of magic. A strong trace of magic, to last more than a hundred years.

  “You’d know about that, wouldn’t you?”

  Indeed. If we want to know more it would be useful to have a medium here, Amelia said. A good one whom we can trust.

  “Kitty knows one, but she’s on the West Coast, I think.”

  Ah yes, the young lady on television. Do you suppose the people on her show would be interested in this?

  “We don’t have time to get them involved. We have to keep an eye on Layne and Kuzniak before they blow something up.”

  Then we’d best get to work.

  He arrived back in Denver around three in the morning and slept.

  * * *

  CORMAC DIDN’T want Ben listening in on this conversation, so he called Kitty at work. She had her radio show on Friday nights, but during the week she kept office hours at the KNOB studios, prepping for the show or cleaning up after it.

  “Hey, what’s up?” she answered after a couple of rings.

  “You know of any lone werewolves causing trouble down south of Cañon City, around Walsenburg maybe?”

  “Not since I holed up down there,” she said. He could almost hear her brow furrowing as she thought about it. “I know of a couple of guys who move around the high country and the Western Slope—one of them works the ski resorts, but he’s stable. He’d call me if he was having problems. That’s right on the south edge of our territory, we don’t go looking there very often, but I haven’t heard about any problems.”

  This didn’t surprise him. A werewolf working for a criminal element would necessarily keep a low profile.

  “I’ve heard some rumors. Friend of a friend kind of thing.”

  “You think there’s a rogue wolf out there? Do we need to check it out?”

  He took a deep breath. “As a matter of fact, I could use your help on this.”

  “Of course, all you had to do was ask. I’m sure Ben can take the time—”

  “Actually, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Ben about this.”

  Her tone became brusque. He smiled at the familiarity of it. “What, you think I’m not going to tell him? How am I supposed to explain my heading out to the other side of the state? ‘Oh, I don’t know honey, I thought I’d go shopping in La Veta for the hell of it.’”

  “He’s been getting kind of … protective.”

  “That’s how he is. I’m not going to lie to him. And what exactly are you trying to hide from him? You didn’t take a contract to hunt down this werewolf, did you?”

  He couldn’t come up with a sensible response to that in time for it to make a difference, so the long pause turned into an answer.

  “Cormac, you didn’t,” she declared, with a deep sense of betrayal.

  “No, I didn’t,” he huffed, frustrated. “Not exactly.”

  “That’s not helping!”

  “This whole thing with trying to solve the mystery with Crane and Kuzniak has gotten complicated. It turns out whatever went on out there back in the day, whatever Kuzniak was doing and whatever magic those guys used up there might still be around. I’ve got a lead—but I’ve been told they’ve got a werewolf working for them, and I’m looking for confirmation. I just need to check it out. You feel like taking a drive?”

  “You’re hunting a werewolf and you want me to help?”

  She was deliberately being thick about this, he knew that. Best thing to do was not take the bait. “Norville, every single one of my guns is still in the storage locker, and don’t think I haven’t noticed that Ben hasn’t given me back the key. I’m just going for a drive, and I could use your help. Your opinion.” Best way to handle Kitty was to appeal to her vast altruism. It was one of the most charming things about her, but it got her into trouble more often than not. He was fully aware he was getting her into trouble with this. He kept on, because he was confident she could handle it.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’ve been told there’s a werewolf involved, but you don’t believe it’s true, and you want me to check it out. Sniff around, as it were.”

  “Right. Simple.”

  “And you want me to help, but not tell Ben, is that it?”

  “I can’t tell you what to do,” he shot back. So yes, Ben would find out. He hoped Anderson Layne’s name would stay out of it, because Ben would definitely remember Layne. Cormac would deal with that later.

  “Just what exactly are you getting mixed up in?” Now she was curious.

  “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Some things about you haven’t changed at all, you know that?”

  He did. He tried not to think about it.

  Chapter 12

  CORMAC’S FATHER and uncle had been involved with—had gotten in trouble with—the previous heyday of the militia movement in the nineties. He should
n’t have been surprised when the whole thing started up again. He listened to the rhetoric, and it sounded the same as it ever did.

  The politics of it all was irrelevant, as far as Cormac was concerned. These things moved in waves. There’d always be radicals, there’d always be discontent. The degree rose and fell, and he figured the government now wasn’t any worse than the government of a hundred years ago, and mostly it was like any other bureaucracy—too big to do any good, and too ponderous to do any real evil as well. All you could do was stay out of its way, take care of you and yours. That was his real problem with most of these guys—they wanted to take care of them and theirs, and everyone else’s as well. They weren’t any more immune to corruption and stupidity than anyone else. And there was no worse combination than stupidity and a lot of guns.

  This was the problem with these movements. They talked a big talk and their spiel sounded good, especially if you were someone who’d been screwed over by the government one too many times like a lot of these guys had been. But they ended up being a cover for bullies who saw a way to make money and get other people to take the fall for their crimes. Like Layne buying up foreclosures. Who knew what Jess Nolan was up to.

  According to Layne, Nolan and his presumed werewolf held court in a bar down in Cañon City. It was a place to meet, to launder money. Likely the same function the biker bar on Highway 24 served for Layne. He picked Kitty up at the radio station, and they’d gotten all the way to southbound I-25 past Denver before either of them said anything. She was slouched in the passenger seat, head propped on her arm. Saying volumes without saying a word.

  Cormac surprised himself by talking first. Kitty had successfully outwaited him. “So what did Ben say?”

  “He said to make sure you stay out of trouble.”

  Cormac just smiled. Ben had been saying that their whole lives. And, well, Cormac was still around, wasn’t he?

  The drive took a couple of hours, and Kitty brought a book with her, something nonfiction about the history of Roman culture in Palestine. Research—know thine enemy, he imagined.

  “Find anything good?”

  “Hm?”

  “In the book.”

  “Don’t know yet. I mean, I can always learn something new. I’m just trying to figure out what he must have been like. Back before Roman became a vampire. Just curious, I guess.”

  She put the book away when they turned off the interstate. Cormac started looking for their destination.

  “Kind of gives me the creeps, making this drive,” Kitty observed. “Reminds me of coming to visit you.”

  Cormac did his time at one of the state prisons in Cañon City. He hadn’t really thought about it until now—he’d worked to compartmentalize it, put it behind him so he could move on. But Kitty and Ben had driven here from Denver once a week for over two years to see him during visiting hours. To make sure he was okay. Kitty probably could have made this trip blindfolded. He’d never be able to show enough gratitude. He couldn’t even articulate it.

  “That’s over and done with,” he said, eyes on the road.

  He found the place without too much trouble. It was even dumpier than Layne’s bar. A straight-up rectangle of a building, it might have been built in the fifties and only had spotty repairs and patching since then. The parking lot to the side might have been asphalt at one time, but the whole thing had crumbled to gravel.

  Kitty stared out the Jeep’s window. “My parents warned me about places like this,” she said, deadpan.

  “It probably looks scarier than it is.”

  “Does anything ever look scary to you?”

  Prison ceilings at night. The door to solitary confinement. The thought of calling Ben and Kitty and them not answering.

  Death …

  That, not so much.

  He got out, slammed the door. Back in the day, he’d have worn a handgun in a belt holster, more for credibility than out of any intention to use it. He wondered if he’d ever get used to not carrying a gun, or if he’d always feel a little too light. Like he’d lost a limb or something.

  Kitty climbed out of the Jeep more slowly, regarding the building with increasing skepticism as she shut the door.

  She said, “If there’s really a werewolf here, he probably considers this his territory, and he’ll notice me before we notice him.”

  He’d thought of that. He wasn’t worried. “If that’s the case, he’ll give you a warning, tell you to leave—and we’ll know what we came to find out.”

  “That’s the best-case scenario. He may not bother with the warning.”

  “I’m sure you can talk it out,” he said.

  Arms loose at her side, she walked across the parking lot, moving parallel to the building rather than heading for the door. She studied the area, and her nose was working—chin tipped up, nostrils wide, her breaths coming slow. He stopped to watch her.

  “I’m not smelling anything,” she said after a couple of minutes.

  If a werewolf had even just walked across the parking lot at any point in the last few days, she’d have sensed it. If one regularly spent time here, she’d definitely smell it. That seemed to be his answer right there. But he had to be sure.

  “Right,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

  “I want to go on record as saying that this makes me nervous.”

  “We’ll go in, sit down, have a drink, and leave. It’ll be fine. I’ll buy.”

  “Well, how can a girl refuse an offer like that?”

  The inside was marginally better looking than the outside. The linoleum floor seemed to be from the eighties rather than the fifties, at least. The wooden tables and chairs were mismatched, as if they’d been acquired at thrift stores over the last couple of decades. The lighting was appropriately dim. There were people here, a sparse collection of working-class-looking men sitting at the bar and at a couple of tables—coming off shift, or working irregular jobs. A worn-out woman in her forties was both bartender and waitress. She spotted Cormac and Kitty as they came in and told them to sit anywhere, she’d be right over.

  “Would you know this guy if you saw him?” Kitty asked.

  “I’d probably recognize Nolan. This guy who’s supposed to be a werewolf, I don’t know who he is.”

  “He’s not a werewolf. I’d smell him. My Wolf would smell him. Who told you he was a werewolf?”

  “Somebody’s spreading stories. Intimidating people, convincing people he uses magic. I think it’s all a put-on. I was told this guy killed somebody by tearing him to pieces. Hence, werewolf.”

  “A dead body can be made to look as if it was torn to pieces. There’re other things than werewolves that tear bodies to pieces.”

  “Well, something’s going on. I want to know what.”

  The waitress came by and they ordered Cokes. Cormac stopped her before she turned away. “Do you know a guy named Jess Nolan? Heard he comes in here sometimes. I’m an old friend.”

  “Yeah, sure, I know Jess. He usually shows up late. Want me to tell him you stopped by?”

  “No, that’s okay, I’ll track him down.”

  Some of the guys in the place looked over, studied him a second, and looked away. Cormac pretended not to notice, but at this point he half expected them all to be familiar faces from the old days. Guys who knew his uncle, his dad, and would saunter on up to him wanting to know if he still killed werewolves. All these old faces, all this talk that was like a scab breaking off.

  “How many of these guys have guns on ’em?” he asked Kitty softly.

  She tilted her head, half closed her eyes. The wolfish gestures took over, as she studied the air the way he might have studied the room’s layout. But the wince and furrowed brow was all human. “All of them? Or a couple of them have more than one.”

  “Right.” He drank most of the Coke, pulled a five out of the inside pocket of his jacket and threw it on the table as he stood to leave.

  “So that’s it?” Kitty added a couple of bucks of her own—a
conscientious tip—before joining him on the way to the door.

  “One other place I want to check out.” Some of the old haunts might very well turn up something. Even though part of him was saying he should walk away. This was trouble, and he was supposed to be keeping his nose clean.

  Just looking can’t hurt.

  Famous last words, he muttered back.

  They got back on the road, traveling west until he turned down yet another county road, rural and unmarked, lined with barbed wire and cattle crossing signs. Graded gravel kicked up to rattle the side of the Jeep. This road wound into the foothills. He was looking for a shed at an abandoned mine. Some friends of his uncle used it to store their stockpile back in the day. He didn’t remember hearing that the Feds had ever cleared this one out, and he had a hunch if anyone in the area was still keeping it up, it might be Nolan.

  “Where the hell are we?” Kitty observed, leaning forward to search out the window. “I haven’t been down in this part of the state in years.”

  “How much has Ben told you about the shit his dad was into?”

  “Not much. He doesn’t like to talk about it. Most of what I know I picked up from the newspaper articles I dug up. He was some kind of bigwig in the local militia movement. His conviction was for illegal weapons stockpiling and conspiracy, some kind of plan to set off a bomb at the state capitol from what I gathered. Didn’t get very far.”

  “That’s because the Feds had so much surveillance on him by then they knew when he brushed his teeth. They waited long enough for him to actually say the plan out loud so they could get the charges on him. But there’s a lot that didn’t make the papers. Not about Uncle David specifically—I think he really believed in what he was doing, but Ben would rather write him off as crazy. Some of those other guys, though—you have to ask how they got the money to buy all those weapons. They like to take capitalism as far as they can, you know? Illegal doesn’t matter as long as they make money off it.”