“Don’t,” the boy said. He didn’t sound that tough anymore.
Bryan heard the flap of fabric, of things falling from above. The others landed on either side of the boy. One remained tucked under a dark blanket, his face hidden save for the glint of a yellow eye.
The other let the blanket slide free.
Bryan saw a nightmare. A man with purple skin, with big black eyes. It stared at the boy for a moment, then smiled wide a mouth full of big, white, triangular teeth.
The one still hidden inside a blanket spoke. “Pierre,” he said in a voice that sounded like sandpaper on rough wood. “This one is yours. Take him.”
Sly had kept his promise.
Hail to the king, motherfucker.
Bryan rushed in. He took the bully from behind, teeth sinking into the prey’s shoulder. Bryan’s mouth filled with the vibrations of crunching bone, the nylon taste of the crimson jacket and the sweet heat of squirting blood.
Bryan opened his eyes. His heart mule-kicked in his chest.
Adrenaline pumped cactus-prickle through his veins and muscles and skin. His pulse blasted away, undeniable in one place more than any other. He sat on the edge of the bed, staring off into the dark room, his rock-hard erection pitching a tent in his underwear.
The dream had gone farther than the last. Bryan hadn’t just stalked, he’d attacked. He had tasted blood. He could still taste it. So why was he vibrating with excitement when he should be vomiting in disgust? Why did he have a boner so hard a cat couldn’t scratch it?
And why did he feel like he was being watched by someone who wanted to kill him?
“What the fuck is wrong with me?”
No one answered, because there was no one else in the room. There was never anyone else. He was alone in his silent apartment, as he had been every day since he’d moved out of Robin’s place.
He reached over to his nightstand to grab the pen and the notebook he’d left there. He drew. A few scraggly lines. He didn’t even know what it was, only that it wasn’t quite right. Still, that feeling, that being watched feeling, it faded away.
Bryan let out a long, deep breath, then set the pad and pen back on the nightstand.
He stared at it for a moment, then picked it up again and wrote down two words.
Meacham Place.
He set the pad down a second time, then snuck a peek in his underwear — boner diffused. He felt better, but there was no point in trying to go back to sleep: he could still taste that kid’s hot blood in his mouth.
And it tasted good.
He pulled the bed’s comforter tight around his shoulders and stumbled to the living room, feeling a sudden urge to watch Creature Features on cable.
Pleasant Dreams
Rex woke suddenly, sat straight up in bed. His chest heaved, his face dripped with sweat that cooled in the night air.
In the dream, Rex hadn’t feared Oscar.
Oscar had feared Rex.
Then the grabbing, the biting, and that taste …
The taste of blood.
Rex pushed back the damp covers. The air cooled his sweaty skin. It also cooled a spot down there.
He looked to his bedroom door. It was closed. He looked at the clock — 3:14 A.M. Roberta would be asleep.
He pushed the covers down past his legs. In the alarm clock’s faint red light, he saw a darker spot on his underwear.
Rex reached down and touched.
Wet.
He looked at the door again. In his sleep, he had done the bad thing, the naughty thing. Would she find out? If she did, she would beat him.
Rex started to shake. He slid the underwear off, then stuffed them in the bottom of his book bag. He grabbed three sheets of Kleenex and cleaned himself up. Eyes constantly flicking to the door, he put on a fresh pair of underwear.
So weird that he’d dreamed about Oscar.
Rex quietly walked to his desk. A streetlight outside his window cast a dim glow on his most recent drawing — a pencil sketch of Rex using a sledgehammer to crush the skull of Oscar Woody.
How he wished that was reality, that he could strike back at them, make them pay. But drawings and dreams weren’t real life. Rex felt tears welling up in his eyes. He grabbed the paper, crumpled it into a ball and threw it in the trash.
He then crawled back into bed, his sheets still wet with his own sweat.
Rex threw his head down on the pillow and pulled the covers up tight. His eyes squeezed shut. Shaking and alone, he cried.
Bryan Clauser: Morning Person
The brown Buick cut across three lanes of traffic. Bryan covered his face, trying to ignore the chorus of horns sounding in the car’s wake.
“Jesus, Pooks. Try not to kill me before we go back on nights, will ya?”
“Pussy,” Pookie said. “Hey, I have some more ideas on our series bible.”
“It’s your TV show, Pooks, not ours. I’m not writing anything.”
“You’re an executive producer,” Pookie said. “No one knows what the hell executive producers do, anyway. Here’s my idea — we make the chief’s wife this smoking-hot MILF. She’s ignored by her work-obsessed husband, so to fulfill her need to feel sexy and wanted she uses her feminine wiles to tease the Young Rebel Detectives. But it backfires on her when the good-looking detective — based on me, of course — finally beds her with the Chang Bang.”
Bryan couldn’t help but laugh. The Chang Bang was from Pookie’s previous pet project, a coffee-table book called 69 Sex Positions the KamaSutra Forgot.
“Is the Chang Bang the one with the trapeze?”
“No, the trapeze is only used in Granger’s Golden Snitch. The Chang Bang is the one with the hula hoop and the semi-inverted angle on the bar stool.”
Bryan sighed and looked out the window. “The hula hoop. How could I forget?”
“Anyway, we check-mark-yes for hot sex scene, but we also get ongoing dramatic tension as our one-night fling turns into a torrent love affair.”
“Torrid.”
“What?”
“Torr-id, not torr-ent.”
“That too,” Pookie said. “The Staff Sergeant with the Heart of Gold finds out and tries to give wisdom to the Young Rebel Detective. And it makes things dicey between Young Rebel Detective and his nemesis, the Crotchety Old-Guard Chief of Police.”
“Your show seems to be more about sex than police work,” Bryan said. “You getting laid these days?”
Pookie shook his head. “Nope. I put Junior and the Twins into a hiatus while I work on the series bible.”
“Well, then maybe you should lay off the torrid scenes for a while, or you’re going to wind up with blue balls.”
Pookie’s head snapped to the right. He stared at Bryan. The car swerved into the left lane.
Bryan pointed at an oncoming truck. “Dude!”
Pookie saw the truck, slammed the Buick back into the proper lane as the truck shot by, horn blaring.
“Pooks, what the fuck?”
“Sorry,” he said. “But that’s it. You did it.”
“I did what?”
“Came up with the name.”
“Of?”
“Of the TV show,” Pookie said. “You know, the thing we’ve been talking about for the past fifteen minutes?”
“And that name is?”
“Blue Balls.”
It would have been a good joke, but the man looked serious. “Pooks, you’re going to name your TV show Blue Balls?”
Pookie nodded.
“You can’t name a show Blue Balls.”
“Like hell I can’t,” he said. “Half cop drama, half soft-core porn. Just think of all the classic TV shows that have lasted more than three seasons — which puts them into syndication, where the big bucks are, by the way — that have the word blue in the title. Hill Street Blues. NYPD Blue. Blue Bloods. Rookie Blue.”
“Those are cop terms,” Bryan said. “Blue balls has, like, a totally different meaning.”
“Right, it’s sexier. That means H
BO might pick it up, then we can show titties. Holy shit, Bri-Bri, this is the ticket. I got to email that to myself.”
Pookie drove with one hand, thumbed his cell-phone keys with the other.
Bryan’s gaze nervously flicked between the road ahead and Pookie’s phone. “Is there any point in me reminding you texting and driving is illegal?”
“No,” Pookie said. He hit the last button and put the phone back in his pocket. “Speaking of plot lines, Bri-Bri, any more of those dreams last night?”
Bryan paused, then shook his head.
“L-L-W-T-L,” Pookie said. “Let me hear it. Similar to the first one?”
Bryan closed his eyes. The tangy taste of blood echoed on his tongue. “No. Worse.”
“Talk to a brotha. What happened?”
“Not really sure,” Bryan said. Then, in barely a breath: “I think I tore his arm off.”
He couldn’t bring himself to say what he really remembered: I BIT his arm off, and it tasted better than anything I’ve ever known.
“You tore his arm off,” Pookie said, nodding as if that was the most normal thing in the world. “Nice. And what did you do with said arm?”
Bryan closed his eyes, trying to crystallize his fuzzy dream-memories. “I don’t know. I woke up after that part. It was weird in another way, too.”
“How so?”
“I woke up sporting wood.”
Pookie let out his pfft sound. “That’s new? I wake up with wood every day. Can’t even pee in the toilet. It won’t point down. Gotta whiz in the shower or it’s golden rainbows for all.”
“Thanks for sharing.”
“So you woke up with a rager, so what?”
Bryan chewed on his bottom lip. “Because I’m pretty sure I was turned on by the killing.”
Had the first dream also aroused him? No, not that he could remember. But murdering the kid, all that hate mixed up with lust, lust for pain, lust for fear … Bryan tried to push the thoughts away.
“Was it in the same place?” Pookie said. “The dream, did you recognize the location?”
Bryan started to talk, then paused, remembering the red blanket at Fern Street — he’d seen it in his dream, and then, impossibly, found it in real life. What if there was something from last night’s dream waiting for him, something far worse than an abandoned red blanket with yellow duckies and brown bunnies?
All it would take was one quick trip to set his mind at ease.
“Post and Meacham Place,” Bryan said.
“Roger, Adam-12,” Pookie said. “See the man, see the man at Post and Meacham.”
Pookie suddenly changed lanes for no reason, cutting off a Volkswagen as he headed for Post Street.
Bryan’s Dose of Reality
Pookie eased the Buick to a stop. Meacham Place looked quiet, empty. Beyond the black gate, the alley seemed undisturbed. Bits of trash dotted the cracked pavement. On the alley’s right side, four narrow trees stretched up, waiting for the brief window of time when the sun would be overhead and send light down between the two buildings.
Bryan stared at the abandoned, one-story building on the alley’s left. Paint- and graffiti-covered boards covered the old laundromat’s three arched windows. Across the alley from the urban ruin was a three-story, narrow brick building — well-kept, neat as you please. Decay on one side of the street, finery on the other: plenty of that to go around in San Francisco.
At the bottom corner of the abandoned building, where the sidewalk turned under the black gate and into the alley, Bryan saw the place where he had hidden under
[a hunter’s blind]
a blanket watching for
[the prey]
the boy to walk past.
Bryan rolled down his window … and smelled it.
A scent, thick and rich, billowing out of the alley, carried by a breeze that slid into his nose. It was the same odor that had made him dizzy up on the roof with Paul Maloney and Polyester Rich.
The same, but also unique.
“Pooks, you smell that?”
He heard Pookie sniff. “Maybe. Smells like piss?”
Piss. Yes. Piss, but also something else.
Bryan looked to the four scraggly trees growing out of the narrow sidewalk. At the base of the farthest tree, wedged between the trunk and the building …
A blanket, dark and rumpled.
“Bri-Bri?”
A blanket, covering something about the size of a man.
A man … or a big teenage boy.
No. It was a dream. Just a dream.
His tongue tasted the memory of hot blood. His mouth salivated.
“Hey, seriously,” Pookie said. “Are you okay?”
Bryan didn’t answer. He got out of the car and walked to the black gate. He held the square bars the way a prisoner holds his jail-cell door. The pointed tops of the bars were a good three feet above his head. In his dream, an effortless, standing jump had carried him over this gate, but in the waking world he saw that would be impossible.
The dark blanket looked … wet. Wetness on the sidewalk. Streaks of it. Wetness on the brick wall, in lines and patterns, in symbols and words. He vaguely recognized these things, but only saw bits of them out of the corner of his eye — he could not look away from the blanket.
The gate rattled as Bryan climbed it.
The sound of a car door shutting.
“Bryan, answer me, man.”
Bryan dropped down on the other side. He walked toward the blanket.
Behind him, the gate rattled again, followed by sound of big dress shoes hitting the pavement.
“Bryan, this is blood. It’s everywhere.”
Bryan didn’t answer. That scent, so overpowering.
“It’s on the walls,” Pookie said. “Jesus, I think they painted a picture in blood, right on the fucking walls.”
Bryan reached for the blanket. His fingers clenched on fabric, wet fabric.
He yanked the blanket away.
A ravaged corpse. Its right arm had been ripped off. A piece of collarbone jutted out from near the neck. The stomach had been cut to pieces, intestines dragged out then shoved back in like dirt stuffed back into a hole. So much blood.
And that face. Puffy and swollen. Missing eye. Shattered jaw. The boy’s own mother wouldn’t recognize him.
But the hair … Bryan recognized the hair.
Black, curly, wiry.
To the left of the body, a white baseball hat streaked with blood spatter.
“Bryan.”
Pookie’s voice again. Something in his tone forced Bryan to turn. Pookie was staring at the mutilated body. He looked up at Bryan, his expression one of disbelief, perhaps even shock.
“Bryan, how did you know about this?”
Bryan didn’t have an answer. The smell of piss was so strong, it made his head spin.
Pookie’s right hand moved a touch closer to the left flap of his sport coat. “Bryan, did you do this?”
Bryan shook his head. “No. No way, man. You know I couldn’t do something like this.”
Pookie’s eyes looked so cold. Was this the face perps saw when he took them down? A happy-go-lucky man, unless you were in his sights, then Pookie Chang became serious business.
“Step out of the alley,” Pookie said. “Slowly. And keep your hands away from your gun.”
“Pooks, I’m telling you that I didn’t—”
“You knew. How could you know?”
That was the million-dollar question. If there was an answer, did Bryan really want to know it?
“I told you,” Bryan said. “I had a dream.”
Pookie took a breath, then nodded. “Right. A dream. If you had knowingly done this, for whatever reason, you wouldn’t have told me about it, and you sure as hell wouldn’t have brought me right to the body. But it doesn’t change the fact that you knew.”
“Pooks, I—”
“Shut the fuck up, Bryan. Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to believe my instincts
and not my eyes. You’re going to step out of this alley and stay out until I tell you to move. I’m going to call this in. We’re going to gather evidence and see if anything points to you. Meantime, you don’t say a word to anyone about your dreams or anything else. I’m going to wait and pray that my best friend, my partner, is not a fucking murderer.”
Pookie suspected him? But Pookie knew Bryan, knew him better than anyone.
“I’m not,” Bryan said. “I’m not a murderer.”
Pookie raised his eyebrows. “Yeah? Are you sure about that?”
Bryan opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out.
Because when it came down to it, he wasn’t sure at all.
Pookie and His Partner
Pookie Chang had seen a lot of nasty things in his day. He was no stranger to dead bodies. Back in Chicago, his second homicide case involved a man who had killed his mother, then tried to dispose of the body by chopping it into chunks small enough to fit into the kicthen sink’s garbage disposal. You’re never the same after you see something like that — it changes you. He’d handled cases that showed just how evil people could be, cases that made him doubt his faith. After all, how could a loving God allow things like this to happen? Yes, he had doubted God, doubted his own ability to do the job, and on more than one occasion he’d doubted the justice system itself — but in their six years of partnership, he had never doubted Bryan Clauser.
Not until now.
Cops on the scene had cordoned off Meacham Place and just one of Post Street’s three lanes, allowing the one-way morning traffic to continue along. Two SFPD cruisers were parked at the curb. Two more were parked on the sidewalk, one on either side of the alley. A half-dozen uniforms milled about, keeping people away, calmly instructing pedestrians to use the other side of the street. Bubble-lights flashed blue and red. The morgue van sat silently, like a scavenger, waiting for the CSI personnel to finish their work before it could claim the corpse as its own.
Pookie stood on the sidewalk outside the now-open black gate. He stayed close to Bryan. Badges hung from both of their necks. Pookie stared into the alley, watching crime-scene investigators Sammy Berzon and Jimmy Hung do their thing. They wore dark-blue windbreaker jackets with SFPD in white across the back. What they found might nail Pookie’s best friend to the wall.