Nocturnal: A Novel

  Rex’s heart beat so fast. He looked at the bloody man standing in his bedroom. The man held a gun in one hand, a blood-dripping hatchet in the other. Two red spots dotted the chest of his white tank top, at least where Rex could see it beneath the tangled beard that hung down to the man’s belly. The man’s green baseball hat said JOHN DEERE in yellow letters.

  Rex recognized him — the man from the street, the man who had tried to stop Rex from getting the bum’s change.

  The bloody man should have seemed like a walking nightmare. He’d just killed a cop in Rex’s hallway. He had weapons. Rex had nowhere to run. But instead of feeling afraid, Rex felt a warmth blossom inside his chest, a vibration that went ba-da-bum-bummmm.

  The vibration told Rex that everything would be okay. He just knew it.

  “Hello,” the man said.

  “Hi,” Rex said.

  The man stared down. He looked nervous. “My name is Marco.”

  “I’m Rex.”

  The bearded man quick-peeked back into the hall. He nodded, as if satisfied with what he saw or didn’t see out there. He faced out the door, his hands in front of him. Was he …

  Was he undoing his pants?

  He was. Rex heard a quick trickle of pee hitting the body in the hall, then the man zipped up and turned back into the room.

  “You peed on him?”

  The bearded man nodded. “Yeah. Had to mark it, you know? Uh … I think you should maybe come with me.”

  “Why?” And why wasn’t Rex afraid?

  “Sly told me to watch over you,” Marco said. “I saved you from those cops. But cops are like bugs, there’s always more on the way.”

  Sly. Rex knew that name. He had sketched it on one of his drawings.

  “You’re very important,” the man said. “Please, come with me. I’ll take you home, to your family.”

  Rex stared at the stranger. Family? That was crazy. His dad had died when Rex was little. Roberta was also dead — Rex had seen to that. That was his “family” … so why did Rex know this bearded stranger was telling the truth?

  The man quick-peeked again. Seeing nothing in the hall, he continued. “We’ve waited a long time for you. A real long time. We can protect you.” The man pointed to Rex’s desk, to the drawing of Alex and Issac lying there. “We can protect you from them.”

  Rex looked at his own drawing. He felt raw fury blossom up again, push out the good thoughts, the nice feelings.

  “I hate them,” he said. “I want …”

  “You want to what, my king?”

  King?

  Long live the king.

  Rex stared at the stranger, looked into his eyes. In there, Rex saw love, acceptance and devotion.

  “I want to kill them,” Rex said. “I want to see Alex and Issac die.”

  The man smiled. “Then come with me.”

  Rex felt a new sensation, one he knew from his dreams.

  He felt the thrill of the hunt.

  Rex made his decision. “Okay, let’s go. The backyard opens up into—”

  “I know,” Marco said. “I’ve been watching.”

  Marco’s hands moved faster than Rex could see, lifted him, tucked him under one blood-splattered arm like a running back tucking a football.

  Rex’s old world rushed by in a blur.

  He couldn’t wait to see his new one.

  They moved through another alley, into yet another building’s dark basement. The fourth building so far, and Rex hadn’t seen a person in any of them. Marco moved like he knew the places, like he’d been through these paths a hundred times before.

  They came out the other side of the basement into a strange space: long, narrow, filled with brown plastic trash cans and bits of garbage. Rex could see the sky through metal grates about ten feet above his head. Was he under a sidewalk or something? He didn’t have time to look because Marco moved fast. Rex followed, his shoes grinding damp dirt against the uneven concrete.

  Two steps down on the right led to a dented metal door set in an old stone archway. On the door, Rex saw a shiny, new Master Lock. Had they hit a dead end?

  Marco reached. Not for the door’s locked handle, but for the outside edges of the door’s frame. He slid his fingers between that frame and the stone arch surrounding it, then grunted as he swung the whole thing open. That was so smart — everyone would try the handle and find it locked; they wouldn’t think to move the whole door, frame and all. Even if someone did figure that out, they probably couldn’t budge it — it looked really heavy.

  Marco stepped aside, holding the thing open for Rex.

  “Through here, my king.”

  Rex stepped through. Marco slid in after him, then pulled the door back into place, shutting off all light.

  “It’s dark in here, but I know the way,” Marco said. “Hold my hand.”

  Rex reached out. His tiny hand vanished inside of Marco’s. The man’s skin felt warm. His hand was rough and calloused. Marco gently pulled Rex along the dark, cramped tunnel.

  Minutes later, Rex heard the grinding sound of an ill-fitted metal door opening against concrete. Marco pulled Rex inside and let go of his hand. The grinding sound again, then the sound of Marco’s steps.

  A light came to life.

  Another basement. This one seemed completely unused. Rex looked around the place. It was a real crap-hole. There wasn’t even furniture, just a back corner strewn with blankets and a beat-up wicker chair. A single naked bulb hung from the ceiling, held up only by its long, black electrical cord. A pile of clothes sat in one corner.

  This place was scary. This was the kind of place you’d think child rapists took children. But Rex knew Marco wasn’t a rapist. Rex also knew you didn’t need a grungy basement to rape a kid.

  Father Maloney hadn’t needed one.

  Since fleeing the house, Rex had been running behind Marco. Now that they were face-to-face, Rex saw that the bloodstains on Marco’s white wife-beater had spread, making the man’s shirt pinkish-red although he didn’t appear to be bleeding anymore. Marco didn’t seem concerned about what looked like a serious wound.

  “Place is a mess,” Rex said. He didn’t know what else to say.

  Marco froze. His eyes grew wide. “I’m sorry. You want me to clean?”

  “Uh, no. It’s fine.”

  Marco let out a huge sigh of relief. How funny — this man had killed a cop with a hatchet, but he was afraid of what Rex thought? It didn’t make sense, but then again, nothing did. So much happening, all of it so overwhelming — Roberta, that cop, Oscar, Jay, the dreams, the drawings, this man, the gun … now this man’s dirty place in the basement of some building Rex didn’t know.

  This strange man, who seemed to … to worship Rex.

  Marco stripped off his ruined shirt. He tossed it to the floor and walked to the pile of clothes. He dug around for a second, then found another wife beater and put it on. It wasn’t “clean” by any stretch of the imagination, but at least it wasn’t bloody.

  “Marco, how long are we staying here?”

  “Until dark,” he said. “Best to move at three or four in the morning. I shouldn’t have killed that cop, my king. Cops will be missed. But I didn’t know what else to do. He was pointing a gun at you.”

  Rex remembered the shaggy-haired, gold-toothed cop kicking in the bedroom door, aiming that gun at his face, telling him to lie down on the floor. That cop had wanted to hurt Rex. Everyone wanted to hurt Rex.

  Everyone except Marco.

  “You saved me,” Rex said. “Thank you.”

  Marco looked down and away. “Anything for you, my king.”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?”

  “Because it’s what you are.” Marco breathed deeply through his nose. “I can smell it. We’ll stay here. Then Sly and Pierre and others will come.”

  Those names again, the names from his dreams. “Are they the ones that killed Oscar and Jay?”

  Marco nodded. “I helped. We want to hurt the people
that hurt you, my king.”

  My king. This wasn’t a trick. This wasn’t a game. These strangers had killed for him. Killed the people who had made his life hell.

  “How did you know about Oscar and Jay?”

  “We felt your hate,” Marco said. “It started a few days ago. Maybe a week — I’m not so good with time. We saw images of the people who hurt you. Only those of us who walk on the streets, though. The others, they ain’t felt nothing. I’ve never felt anything like it, my king. Sly thinks we were seeing parts of your dreams.”

  A week ago. That was about the time Rex got sick. He’d started dreaming a few days after that.

  “We felt your hate for the preacher,” Marco said. “And for those other boys. We searched every night. We found them all. At first, Sly told us to wait, because Firstborn wouldn’t want us to act.”

  Firstborn … had Rex heard that name in his dreams? “Who is Firstborn?”

  “He runs things,” Marco said. “He’ll be so mad when he finds out, but … well, people hurt you. We had to kill your enemies.”

  Marco said that last sentence like it was the most obvious thing in the world, something as natural and inevitable as drawing a breath.

  Father Maloney. Oscar and Jay. Rex wished he could have seen them die.

  “The people who hurt me,” Rex said. “There are more of them, the ones in the drawing in my room. Alex and Issac. Do you know where they are?”

  Marco looked down again. He said nothing.

  “Marco, are they still alive? Do you know where they are?”

  Marco nodded. “Yeah, we know where they are. Sucka is following them.”

  Rex didn’t know that name, but if Alex and Issac were being followed, maybe Rex could watch them die. They’d beat him. They’d tortured him. And why? He’d never done anything to them. People like that deserved death. Rex thought of the strength he’d felt when he wrapped that belt around his mother’s neck.

  He wasn’t the same helpless kid who couldn’t stop Alex Panos from breaking his arm. That kid was gone forever.

  “Take me to them,” Rex said.

  Marco shook his head so hard his long beard flopped from side to side. “No, my king! Sly would want me to keep you safe. I need to call him when he comes out again, so we can take you home.”

  Rex wasn’t going home, not ever again. Then he realized that Marco wasn’t talking about Roberta’s house.

  “Home? Where is that?”

  Marco looked down again. “It’s where we live.”

  Maybe Rex would live there, too. It was probably a lot different from the only home he’d known for thirteen years.

  “Marco, how did you know where I lived?”

  “Sly told me.”

  “How did Sly know?”

  Marco shrugged. “Sly says that’s not important. But I think maybe Hillary told him where to go.”

  Hillary? Another name that didn’t ring any bells. Who were these people? And why did they think Rex was their king?

  Maybe … maybe because Rex really was a king. Maybe he’d always been a king, and just hadn’t realized it.

  But right now, none of that mattered. What mattered was the hate burning in his chest. Hate for Issac, hate for Alex. He couldn’t stop thinking about revenge. Rex had power now, and those two would pay for what they had done.

  He wouldn’t accept anything less.

  “I want to know where Issac and Alex are,” Rex said. “I want to watch them die.”

  Marco shook his head. “No, no, Sly would kick my ass!”

  “Marco, am I your king?”

  Marco stared, then nodded slowly.

  Rex felt so confident, so strong.

  “If I’m you’re king, then you have to do what I say. Tonight, we’re going to get Alex Panos.”

  Aftermath

  A news helicopter hovered overhead. A uniformed cop waved Pookie’s shit-brown Buick between two black-and-whites that blocked off Pacific Street. Outside this improvised perimeter, a mostly Chinese crowd gathered, staying as far away as they could from the scowling cops while still being able to see the action in front of the house.

  Inside the perimeter, more police cars — marked and unmarked — were already parked, their lights flashing.

  An ambulance sat silently. Its lights were off. The paramedics just stood there.

  Cops were everywhere, and they all knew they were too late.

  Bryan sensed the tone: angry, somber, vengeful. Bobby Pigeon was dead. Every cop here, Bryan included, wanted to find the bastard responsible and make him pay.

  Pookie parked. Bryan got out. He and Pookie ducked under yellow police tape and approached the house.

  Only minutes earlier, most likely, the area had been a flurry of activity bordering on chaos. When the call for officer down had gone out, every cop within twenty blocks had stormed in. Stephen Koening and Ball-Puller Boyd had been the first homicide cops to arrive. They were running the scene.

  Bryan and Pookie started up the seven concrete steps. Atop the steps, there were three doors side by side; the one on the left hung open. Ball-Puller Boyd was standing in the doorway, phone pressed to ear. He saw them coming, then quickly finished his call and put the phone in his pocket.

  “Clauser, Chang,” he said. “Koening and I got this one. He’s inside with the CSI guys. What’s your role here?”

  “We had the Oscar Woody case,” Pookie said. “I’m guessing Sharrow will put us back on it again, considering. Verde was here because the Deprovdechuk kid might be involved. We’ll stay out of your way while you look for Birdman’s killer, and we’ll feed you whatever we find.”

  Boyd nodded. “Works for me until we hear different from Sharrow. The kid’s room is the last one on the left. Okay, here’s what we’ve got so far. Birdman’s sidearm is unaccounted for. Verde said Birdman got off two rounds, and we found two forty-caliber shell casings. We found one bullet in the wall. It went through the perp and into a picture frame. No trace of the other bullet — I hope it’s still in the fucker.”

  Bryan hoped so, too. It would be fitting if Bobby managed to kill his own killer.

  “How about a description?” Bryan said. “Verde get a good look?”

  Ball-Puller stroked his walrus mustache. “Yeah. Six feet plus, long black beard, big gut, white wife-beater, jeans, boots. Might be carrying a hatchet, and/or Birdman’s Sig Sauer. We’ve got a BOLO out on that description, plus one for the Deprovdechuk kid. Looks like the kid strangled his mother with a belt sometime yesterday. His picture is already all over the news. We’ll get him.”

  Pookie nodded. “How’s Verde?”

  “Alive and uninjured,” Boyd said. “Other than that, not good.”

  Rich Verde had failed to protect his partner. Right now, he’d be feeling guilty and worthless, like any cop would feel in the same situation.

  Boyd reached into his pocket for his phone. “If you guys want to take a look, make it fast. Robertson is on the way, I don’t want the house full of feet and fingers when he gets here.”

  He stepped aside and started dialing. Bryan and Pookie walked in.

  Bryan smelled death. Faint and growing, but he knew it was a human corpse.

  Far down the hallway, just past an open door, Bobby “Birdman” Pigeon lay facedown in a wall-to-wall puddle of his own blood. Even from fifteen feet away, Bryan could see the bloody wound that split his body from the right side of his neck down just past his sternum.

  If Zou hadn’t taken him and Pookie off the case, would Birdman still be alive? Or might that have been Pookie lying there instead?

  Bryan looked left, into the living room. There, Jimmy Hung and Stephen Koening were looking over a woman who’d been dead at least twenty-four hours. She was the source of the corpse smell.

  “Rex did that,” Pookie said. “I guess I was wrong when I thought he wasn’t a threat.”

  Bryan nodded. “I guess so.”

  He sniffed again. That smell of death, sure, but there was something
else in this house …

  “Come on,” Pookie said, “let’s check out Rex’s room.”

  They walked down the hall, being careful about where they stepped. This many people in the house was a problem. Feet and hands threatened to destroy evidence, to accidentally trample on some key bit of information that could lead to the perp. But at the same time, everyone knew the hard facts — murders are usually solved with speed and logic, not with weeks of evidence analysis. If a killer isn’t caught in the first forty-eight hours, odds are he won’t be caught at all. They needed as much information as they could get as fast as they could get it.

  Bryan saw blood on the hallway wall, spattering the white paint and some of the picture frames. The picture frame with the most blood had cracks radiating away from a hole just left of center.

  That new smell grew stronger.

  To get to Rex’s room, he had to step over Birdman’s body. Bryan reached out with a big step to avoid walking in the puddle of blood. Once on the other side, he started to turn into the open bedroom but stopped in the doorway. The door — handle ripped off, wood white and splintered where the latch used to be — had a drawing thumbtacked to it.

  The blue-lined notebook paper had been torn out of a spiral binder. A line of frayed holes ran down the left-hand side. On that paper, a symbol:

  It was the same drawing Bryan had sketched after waking up from his hunting dreams. The same drawing found painted in the blood of Oscar Woody, and of Jay Parlar.

  Scrawled beneath the drawing were the words I dream of a better day.

  “Pooks,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

  Pookie was at his side, talking quietly. “I see it. Keep cool, man. Look at the rest of the room.”

  Rumpled red blankets lay twirled up on a twin mattress. A small, beat-up wooden desk sat next to the bed. Sammy Berzon was under the desk, using a pen to poke through a small garbage can. A little TV sat in the far corner, a video-game console on the floor in front of it along with one controller. The room’s lone window looked out on a narrow alley filled with square plastic garbage cans. A dirty brick wall on the alley’s far side was barely more than an arm’s reach away. A three-drawer vertical dresser and a tiny closet were the room’s only other features. Bryan saw two books on the dresser, the tell-tale strip of white on the bottom of the spine showing they came from a library: On a Pale Horse and The Book of Three.