He had to get out of here. The door. He had to get to the door. Get into the apartment.
He let out a roar of fury and kicked a clutch of the giant, chiggering creatures out of his way. He stumbled forward, feeling waterbugs gathering in a rising pool at his feet, catching glimpses of them as they tumbled over one another to get their huge mandibles into him. He crushed one of them underfoot—his shoe sinking in yellow gunk—and he fell sideways against the wall so that the swarm there snapped at his face. One fell onto his neck, its quick feet scrabbling at his skin there. He gave another scream and knocked it off.
He reached the open door. Charged through it. Kicked it shut behind him, spinning into the room, pulling another squirming monster off his shoulder. The bug went skittering away out of sight, and Zach, in a full panic, desperately passed the flashlight beam over his body—and screamed out “Fuck!” as he saw one of the insects clinging to his thigh by its mandibles. He struck it with the butt of his gun. It would not let go. He struck it again, hard. It lost its grip, fell to the floor, and scurried away.
Gasping, Zach passed his hands over every part of himself, feeling for more of the insects. There were none. He began to gag, acid coming into his throat. Then, quickly, he realized his danger and stopped himself. He turned his flashlight on the room, here, there, scanning for any other killers. A man with a gun—or with a sword—any of Abend’s thugs could already have killed him three times over. But no, there was nobody in sight. He was alone here.
His shoulders sagged. He staggered slowly out of what had once been the front hall into the main apartment. Bright light from the windows here showed a gutted wreck of a room. In that first moment, it seemed empty. But then, trying to steady himself, Zach drew a deep breath—and the thick, rich, coppery, overwhelming scent of violence washed into him. He knew full well what he was about to find.
Johnny Grimhouse. The thief was strung up naked, his wrists tied high to a beam in a broken wall, his bare heels scraping the ruined floor. With his body stretched out like that, his wounds showed plainly. He had been sliced to ribbons, mutilated head to toe. His mouth was gaping and his eyes were wide—he seemed to be horrified by the sight of the half dozen or so foot-long roaches that were feeding on him, like piglets nursing at their sow. But that expression on his face—it only seemed to be horror, Zach knew.
Grimhouse was beyond all mortal horror. He was clearly dead.
13
HAUNTED
Later that evening, six-thirty or so, Zach sat at his dinner table watching Grace coax a meal-time prayer out of little Ann: “Thank you, God, for our dinner.” He thought they looked like angels from heaven, the two of them. Really. Grace, with her cheerful plump cheeks and bright faithful eyes framed by her honey ringlets, smiling across the table at the child. The child bowed over her clasped hands, making her earnest effort to shape the words that she could barely speak. The boy, too, Tom, with his head bowed and hands clasped too and his eyes closed: beautiful. So patient with his sister’s efforts—though when it was his night to pray, Zach knew he would take such pride in showing her how it was done. Just look at them, he thought. And okay, he knew he was being mawkish. But all the same, there they were: the most mawkish greeting-card drawing of mother and children could not have done them justice, truly. He felt an aching hunger of love for all of them, almost an anguish of yearning, as if they were somehow beyond his reach: off in a sweet world of ideal and innocent goodness that he could only see far off from where he was, mired deep in the hellish images inside his mind.
“Very good, sweetheart,” said Grace when the little girl’s prayer was finished.
They began to pass the meatloaf around. The meatloaf and the mashed potatoes and the greens. Good food in great abundance, Zach thought sentimentally—and the very fact that Grace had made this meal for them, that she had stood in the kitchen and cooked it for them, wife-and-motherly, struck him just then as a thing of impossible beauty, impossibly beyond the dark country of his thoughts. There, out there, was the family dinner, bright and far away. And here, in here, was Abend grinning at him through the gray light and gunsmoke. The swarming roaches on the walls and floor. The chattering hum of them and the wriggling touch of them—especially that one that had gotten tangled in his hair. He couldn’t forget the feel of that. And Johnny Grimhouse—he couldn’t forget the sight. The bloody body; the gaping mouth; the eyes staring at the insects . . . like piglets . . . Christ!
Little Tom had been patient long enough. He wanted to tell Daddy about his day now. He wanted to tell about the autumn leaves his kindergarten class had collected and pressed into a book. Zach managed to make the appropriate noises, nods, and smiles. He did the best he could, but he always suspected that children, his children at least, could tell when their father was really listening and when he was merely going through the motions. Or maybe that was just his guilt talking. He would have given the world to be fully present for the boy, his son whom he loved. He longed to slog up to him out of the gut-muck of ugliness inside him. But he was stuck down there in the dark, in the memory of those long minutes before backup arrived, long minutes when he had been alone in the room with Grimhouse’s mutilated corpse and with the smell of death and with the sounds, the awful sounds of those insects feeding on him.
It wasn’t just the gruesomeness of those minutes that held him. It was also their morbid mysteries. How had he known the things he knew, standing there? Sure, his senses were heightened—he’d always had that ability to go into what Goulart called hyper-focus mode, that elevated level of perception that helped him spot things in a crime scene other investigators missed. But just how heightened could his senses be? How could he smell the fading aroma of Johnny’s helpless agony—and understand that it was helpless agony because Grimhouse hadn’t known what Abend wanted him to tell? How could he not only smell Abend’s frustration at being interrupted mid-torture, but remember that smell, match it to the smell of frustration he had picked up in the storage bin? Abend hadn’t found what he wanted here either—Zach knew that. And he knew that Abend had been in such a hurry to get out without being seen that he had left a fingerprint on the doorknob. Zach would tell the Crime Scene Unit to search for it and they would find it sure enough. But how did he know? It wasn’t normal. Nothing was normal about him anymore—he was different—he had been different ever since he’d come back from Germany, ever since he’d awoken from his fever.
“Did you collect leaves when you were in school, Daddy?”
Zach caught the questioning tone just in time, and went back through his mind until he could remember what the boy had asked him. “I did,” he said. “I remember doing just that thing. We glued them in a big book with colored pages.”
“That’s what I’m going to do,” said Tom. “Mommy, can we get colored pages so I can glue the leaves too?”
And while she answered him, Zach returned compulsively to his memories like an addict to his drug. He remembered the roaches on Grimhouse’s body fleeing as backup arrived, clattering away into the broken wall as the door burst open and the uniforms charged in. The roaches were gone from the hallway too; that whole sea of them had receded, and there was no sign of them anywhere. No trace that they had ever been there except for the bites on his calf and ankle, the only bites that had really broken through the skin. He had gotten one of the EMS guys to disinfect them for him.
What the hell did that?
Some sort of gigantic cockroach or something.
These buildings, man. The stuff that comes out of them. I swear, there’s things been growing in the walls here since dinosaurs walked the earth.
Maybe so. But that didn’t explain the way they’d attacked him, the way they’d poured out of their secret places, scrambling toward him, scrambling in his direction only, while Abend walked calmly away. It was as if the bugs were acting in service to the gangster’s will, as if they were instruments of his malice. Zach knew that could not have been true, and so he felt it must not have been
true, that he must have imagined it. And yet, though he kept going over and over it in his mind, he couldn’t bring his memories into line with the requirements of reality. He told himself it might have had something to do with his fever, might have been an aftereffect of that wave of fever that had hit him on the bridge. But he wasn’t convinced. He had seen what he’d seen—it was no illusion. And if the bugs had been real—if the malice of their attack had been real—what else was real that couldn’t be, what else was real that he had chalked up to the fever? What about that impossible executioner standing on the bridge? What about that meeting with Gretchen Dankl in the clearing in the woods? He had let that memory slip away as dreams slip away, but if the attack of the roaches in the hall was real. . . . What the hell? What the hell was going on?
When he put his boy to bed, Zach lay down beside him. He read him The Cat in the Hat while Tom snuggled up on his chest. Even when the book was done, Zach continued to lie there with his arm around his son. He knew the boy was breathing him in, whether the boy himself knew it or not. Zach’s own father had died when he was only eight. A Green Beret missing behind enemy lines in Afghanistan—Zach could never learn much more. He still remembered the smell of the man when he would tuck him in at night. You got to get the smell of your father in you when you’re little, he thought, lying there until the boy was snoring softly. It’s what makes your spine grow strong.
He found his wife, as usual after the children’s bedtime, washing the dishes at the kitchen sink. He came up behind her and put his arms around her and held her close.
“Oh my,” she said, leaning back against him.
“Oh my,” Zach breathed into her ear.
She turned around in the circle of his embrace. She reached up to touch his cheek with her wet fingers. “I heard on the radio they found a body that might be connected to the Paz murders. They’re saying it’s some kind of gang war or something. Were you part of that?”
“I found the body.”
She studied his face, concerned. She was already worried about him, back at work so soon after his fever.
“I thought you seemed kind of far away tonight,” she said. “Well, you sit down now and tell me all about it.”
It was the last thing he wanted to do. He didn’t even want to think about it anymore, though he knew he couldn’t stop—and he definitely didn’t want to talk about it. It was too much effort, and there was too much he would have to leave out. The roaches—he couldn’t tell Grace about that, could he? She’d think he was hallucinating. She’d insist on his going back to the doctors. And he wasn’t going to end their evening with a description of Grimhouse either, the body hanging from that beam with the creatures crawling on him.
But this was their arrangement—that he would tell her about his job—so he sat at the kitchen counter with a bottle of beer and said what he could. He told her about the thugs blasting away at him with their cannon-like Dezzies and about his confrontation with Abend.
“He was right there in front of me,” Zach said. “That close, but . . .” he added, vaguely, “I was pinned down and couldn’t go after him.”
As quickly as he could, he got to the part about his confrontation with Goulart in the aftermath. That was good gossip—a woman would like that, he figured. It would distract her from the inexplicable strangeness he’d carefully omitted from the rest of his story.
“Broadway was sorely P.O.’d I hadn’t brought him with me. I can’t rightly blame him. He was sticking his finger in my chest. Whisper-yelling, you know, so the NYPD detectives wouldn’t hear us going at it. ‘Why didn’t you call me? What did you think you were doing coming out here alone?’ I told him I thought it was a bum lead and I didn’t want to waste his time. Pretty lame excuse. I never even called him.”
“Well, it’s just not right of Rebecca to put you in that position,” Grace said. “You can’t work with a partner you don’t trust.”
“I know it.”
“She’s just trying to enlist you against him, because she hasn’t got the courage to stand up to him on her own and she knows everyone respects you. That’s weak leadership.” She plunked a glass in the dishwasher with an extra fillip of indignation. “If those gangsters had blown your head off, it would have been partly her fault for making you feel like you had to go there with no backup ’cause you couldn’t trust Martin.”
“No, it was my fault. It was a dumb play.”
“Well, now that she has put you in that position, you’re gonna have to decide one way or the other. Either y’all can trust him or not, either he’s your partner or not. You can’t go on like this, baby, you’ll get yourself killed. Stupid woman!” she finished, meaning Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell.
Zach tilted the beer bottle to his lips and let a taste of the foam touch his tongue, but really he was watching her over the top of the brown glass. It suddenly occurred to him that she was upset about the gunfire, about the thugs blasting at him. Well, of course she was! It went to show how little insight he had into her inner life, that even an idiotically obvious thought like that struck him with the force of revelation. Sure, he knew a cop’s wife worries all the time and has to be strong and so on—he knew it theoretically. But most of the time he didn’t see it realistically. He didn’t think about it from her side, didn’t think about the effort involved, or the actual anxiety she must feel. Grace was always so cheerful and gentle and good-tempered that it didn’t often occur to him that she might have to struggle to be that way, to fight down her worry and her flashes of temper. He imagined her praying over it. He assumed she did, but now for a moment he actually imagined her on her knees ardently begging God to give her the strength and patience she needed to do her job as his wife. It occurred to him that if she did pray like that, she never told him about it. She never even mentioned it.
“What do you think?” he asked her, letting his bottle hand sink down to the counter.
She was using the faucet hose to wash scraps down into the garbage disposal. She was watching the swirl of the water fiercely, intensely—probably focusing on that so he wouldn’t see how upset she was about the gunplay.
“What do you mean?” she asked him. “What do I think about Martin? I think Rebecca ought to get herself some proof before she goes on ahead and opens her big mouth.”
Zach nodded slowly. “But do you think he could’ve gone bad?”
She watched her own hand—fiercely, intensely—as she waggled the hose back into its hole. When she was done, she plucked her hair from her mouth with her fingers and blew it from her eyes, giving her something else to do besides meet his gaze.
“Well, baby, I don’t want to make things any worse for you,” she said.
“But you think he might’ve, then.”
“Well . . . I think he might’ve,” she said. And when he flinched, she said, “Oh, baby, I know how much you like Martin. . . .”
“Well, he’s saved my life more than once, Grace.”
“And God bless him for that, for sure. For sure. And I know how you like how he says all those rude things other people won’t say. . . .”
“Well, it brings out the ugly truth sometimes, that’s all.”
“I know it does. I know. And a man doesn’t like to be told what he can and can’t talk about, like he’s in church all the time. It goes against his natural grain. But . . .” She searched for the words. “. . . I mean, anyone can say a true thing by being mean on people. Can’t they? We’re all sinners, after all.”
“We are. That’s for certain. Still. . . .”
“I know,” she said. “I know. And I don’t mean to talk Martin down. It’s just. . . .”
“What, then?”
“Well, baby, you got a goodness in you he doesn’t have. No, it’s true, anyone can see it,” she said, in answer to the look on his face—because he was grimacing at the memory of that night he’d betrayed her with Margo, he was thinking he had no goodness in him at all. “You got a—integrity in you he doesn’t. Probably ’cause
your mama put The Word in you.”
“Oh, there’s plenty of fine folks without religion, Gracie, you know that.”
“I know,” she said, though she didn’t sound convinced.
“You’ve always been judgmental on Broadway ’cause of his women and the divorce, and all that.”
“It’s not that. . . .”
“That’s just his way, that’s all. He’s suffered for it, Lord knows.”
“It’s not that,” she insisted. “It’s just. . . . Well, there comes a time in a person’s life when doing wrong just makes perfect sense to him. And if he hasn’t got . . . well, something in him—” He knew she was going to say The Word but had amended it to suit his more broad-minded view. “If he hasn’t got something in him that makes him say ‘Well, I don’t care what sense it makes, I’m not doing wrong anyhow,’ then that’s when the Enemy can make his move on him.”
“And you’re saying that’s happened to Broadway—”
“No. I’m just saying it could’ve. It might’ve. It wouldn’t . . . you know, shock me if it had.”
Zach had an awful nightmare that night. He couldn’t remember it later, not all of it, but it had something to do with one of those war documentaries he liked to watch on television sometimes—only, in the dream, he was inside the documentary, walking through its black-and-white scenes. He was in one of the Nazi death camps—he remembered that. There was a bulldozer pushing through a pile of corpses—so many corpses—hundreds and hundreds of marble-gray bodies. They were drained of all color and spirit, but their eyes were still open, their stares lifeless yet somehow accusatory. It was as if they were watching him as he watched them being collected by the ’dozer in ghastly piles of murdered flesh. The stench of offal and rot was overwhelming.
Dominic Abend was not in the scene himself, but Zach sensed him there—sensed in that horrible nightmare way that if he turned around, the killer would be standing right behind him, wearing his Nazi uniform and grinning in amusement as he’d grinned in the hallway just that afternoon. Zach was afraid of that grin—that’s what the dream was about, he realized later. He was so afraid of the mind behind that grin, and the black world inside that mind, that the fear threatened to unman him. He had sensed that black world for a moment in the hallway. He had felt the jolt of its utter emptiness just before Abend had stepped into view. It was a world, it was a mind, in which conscience was the discarded custom of lesser men, in which cutting a child’s throat and nursing a baby were of equal value, depending on what you felt like or who got the benefit. It was terrifying to him.