Any Given Doomsday (4 page)

I’d been a state champion in high school gymnastics, and a few times a month I still practiced at the Y. I was nimble and quick. I did all sorts of cool things.

Back flips, kips, round off after round off. I could swing on a parallel bar and walk across a very thin balance beam. Sadly, none of that was going to do me much good here, so I snatched up the lamp.

Yanking the cord out of the wall, I smashed it into his face. He bled, but he didn’t go down. He did let me go, and the horrible images stopped.

Then he rose. And rose, and rose. Yep, naked all the way from his head down to his toes—a particularly long distance since I put him in the vicinity of six seven. And that adage about big feet, big—well, you know the one—this guy appeared to have invented it.

He started toward me. I backed away. He didn’t have a weapon, but then a guy his size had a pretty good weapon in his fists.

I bumped against the nightstand, set my hand down, and felt something sharp and cool and foreign. A knife when I was a gun kind of girl.

“Jimmy,” I whispered, and the mammoth tilted his head like a dog that had heard a word it recognized amid so many it did not.

“Sanducci,” he snarled, then threw back his head and roared. The sound was so loud, so feral, it made me cringe. I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but then I’d have to drop the knife, and that wasn’t happening.

But something else was. The man in front of me had begun to change.

The first indication was the shift in the tenor of his voice, lowering from a man’s wordless anger to a beast’s primal growl.

He dropped onto all fours, hunched, shook his huge head, and fur sprang out everywhere.

I blinked, and when my eyes opened a man no longer stood in front of me but a bear.

He opened his mouth and emitted a bellow that should have shattered my window, maybe my eardrums. Then he rose onto his hind legs and swiped at me with one massive paw.

He wasn’t as quick in this form as he’d been as a human and I jerked out of the way of his sharp claws. Of course if he caught me with one of those blows I’d be dead, so I couldn’t take the time to pat myself on the back for my agile avoidance. Instead, I scurried away, clutching the knife. He lumbered after.

As I watched him waddle, I got a sense of deja vu so strong I wavered with it. I’d seen this very thing in the dream I’d had at the hospital. This man-bear had been at Ruthie’s.

Of course she
had
said they were coming.

They? Hell. I hoped there weren’t more of these hanging around.

He swiped at me again, and I realized it didn’t matter how many there might be. This one was going to kill me if I didn’t do something.

All I had was the knife, so I gripped it tightly, waited until he took another swing, and after I ducked, I came back up knife first.

The instant the tip entered his body he erupted outward, covering me with a fine layer of ash, the rest floating in the gray-tinged darkness like dust motes in the sun, then cascading downward to coat the floor.

I stood covered in fine gray powder, uncertain what to do. No reason to call the cops. There was nothing left to arrest, and I really didn’t want to talk about how the big, naked man had turned into a huge, snarling bear.

Something weird was going on—something much weirder than anything that had ever gone on in my life before, and that was saying a lot.

I threw on my clothes, grimacing at the feel of ash on my body. To be on the safe side, I removed my gun from the safe and then, keeping tight hold on both it and the knife, I crept downstairs and took a tour of the area surrounding my building. Neither man nor beast lurked about. Apparently “they” had only sent one assassin after me tonight.

Back inside, I locked up and went directly to my laptop, connected to the Internet, typed in
berserker
.

“Old Norse for bear shirt,” I read.
Got that right
. “Germanic warriors who, in the frenzy of battle, literally became an animal, usually a wolf or a bear.”

I paused, trying to take this all in, but I was still having a hard time believing what my eyes had clearly seen. A man turning into a bear—then disintegrating into ash. I forced myself to read on.

“Since the only way to kill a berserker was with pure silver, and silver was a rarity at that time, these warriors understandably gained the reputation of being indestructible.”

I picked up the knife. Must be silver, which meant it was Jimmy’s.

I needed to find him. He had a few questions to answer.

For instance, why had the man-bear known his name and really seemed to hate it?

Why had Jimmy thought I might need a solid silver knife?

Why had that thing, and a whole lot of others if my bizarre post-coma vision were true, been after Ruthie, and why did they now appear to be after me?

And, most importantly, just what in hell had happened to make me see monsters when all I’d seen before was the truth?

Unfortunately, Jimmy was hiding. Conveniently, I was very good at finding the missing.

I needed to talk to Laurel and Hardy—I mean Ham-mond and Landsdown—and find out what, if anything, they’d learned since our last encounter.

I swept up the remains of my attacker, tossed him into a plastic garbage bag and deposited everything in the Dumpster. Then I washed that man right out of my hair. It took a lot of shampoo.

By nine a.m. I was headed past the heart of the city.

Like most ethnic towns, Milwaukee had sections— what had once been called boroughs or ghettos; hell, they still were. But along the river, the same one that divided Friedenberg from the rest of the world, the ultrarich occupied brand-new condos.

The only thing more expensive than living in one of those was living in a high-rise on Lake Michigan. Water—even water that’s icy eight months out of twelve—does a number on the real estate values.

I cruised by the courthouse, glanced at the Bradley Clock—the largest four-sided clock in the world—caught a glimpse of Miller Park to my right, and drove over the Hone Bridge. Ten minutes later I left my Jetta in the visitor parking lot and walked into the police station where I’d once worked.

At the desk 1 asked for Landsdown and Hammond. Just my luck, they were in.

“If it isn’t Sixth Sense,” Landsdown greeted, using the nickname I’d come to loathe.

I ignored him. Sometimes it helped.

“Have you been in contact with Sanducci?” Hammond asked.

“Not lately,” I said, skirting the truth with a lie.

His face fell. “Why are you here?”

“Maybe she saw him,” Landsdown murmured, “with her X-ray vision.”

“Why did you ask me to help if you think it’s all BS?” I demanded.

“You’ve come up with some extremely convincing BS.”

I had, at that.

“Either way,” Landsdown continued, “if you’re the real thing, which I doubt, or you’re bogus, which gets my vote—you’ve got a history with Sanducci. Even if you can’t tell us where he is, maybe we’ll stumble over him coming out of your place after a long night of the horizontal bounce.”

I hadn’t horizontal-bounced in so long I got distracted a minute just thinking about it. Sanducci had been a damn good bouncer.

“I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that,” I said. “I’ve got a few questions.”

The two men glanced at each other and together they shrugged, which I took as a green light.

“Any word on the autopsy?”

“Not yet.”

Rats.

“Do you know why Sanducci was in town?” Maybe knowing that would help me find him.

“According to his manager,” Landsdown said, “Sanducci was here to do a shoot with Springboard Jones.”

“The basketball player?”

“You know a lot of guys called Springboard?”

Excellent point.

Springboard—given name Leroy—was Milwaukee’s own Michael Jordan. He’d taken City High to the state championship at the Kohl Center, dragged the Badgers along with him to the Final Four, then been picked number three in the draft and would soon begin playing for our very own Milwaukee Bucks. Springboard had made good, and everyone loved it. However—

“Jimmy’s not a sports photographer.”

“Assignment was a portrait for the cover of
Sports Illustrated.”
Hammond explained. “Man of the year or some such shit. They wanted the best.”

Jimmy was that—in more ways than one.

“Did he take the picture?”

“No. It was scheduled for tonight at eight.”

“Where?”

“City High.”

I frowned. Only a few miles north of the bright lights and little city, the neighborhood changed—a lot. Tenements. Burned-out houses. Scrabbly grass, broken sidewalks. Boarded windows if they didn’t have steel bars. I had a hard time believing Jimmy would cart his precious cameras past Third and North after dark, even for
Sports Illustrated
.

“I thought they tore that school down.”

Asbestos in the ceiling and floor tile—a common occurrence in buildings constructed in the fifties and sixties—was making a lot of contractors a lot of money.

“Next week. I guess Sanducci wanted to work his magic in the gymnasium where it all began.”

I could see it—dusty faded court, broken wooden bleachers, old school uniform, the photo in black-and-white. Stark, beautiful, as only Jimmy Sanducci could make it.

Hammond studied me. “You don’t think he’ll actually show up there, do you?”

I shook my head. Jimmy wasn’t that dumb. But if not there, then where?

“Anything else I should know?” I asked.

Hammond tensed. Landsdown scowled.

“What?”

“There’ve been odd disappearances in some of the cities he’s frequented,” Hammond said.

“There are always odd disappearances in cities. You know that as well as I do.”

Joe Citizen had no clue how many people disappeared each year and were never seen again.

“You know why there might be ash residue at Ruthie’s?”

I kept my face carefully blank. “She didn’t even have a fireplace.”

“Right. Looked like someone tried to clean up in a hurry, but they didn’t do a decent job.”

I knew exactly where the ashes had come from. The bizarre shape-shifting monsters I’d seen in my coma. But who had killed them?

I had a pretty good idea.

Chapter 6

“Thanks for your time, Detectives.” I rose. “Could you let me know when you get the autopsy report?”

“Anything special you’re interested in?” Hammond asked.

“Cause of death would be nice.”

“Considering the state of the body and the presence of the knife, we’re going with knife wound.”

I nodded, but I didn’t believe it. Not anymore.

“This is an ongoing homicide investigation, Phoenix. We aren’t going to give you any autopsy results, and you know it.”

I had, but it never hurt to try. I had my own sources anyway.

As I headed out of the police station I caught sight of the Yankees cap, encased in plastic as all evidence should be and perched on a filing cabinet.

I knocked it to the ground, then knelt to tie my shoe. Shielding my movements with my shoulders, I slipped a finger into the bag and brushed the bill. Then I rose and continued on my way, leaving the cap on the floor. Better for someone to find it there later and think the evidence had fallen than for them to see me picking it up, wonder if I’d touched the thing, decide I had and start to follow me.

Where I was going, I didn’t need an audience. Just in case I gave in to temptation and kicked the living hell out of Sanducci.

I should have known where he’d run. If I hadn’t been off my game—between the coma and the cops, the visions and the berserker, being off was kind of understandable—I’d have figured it out on my own. Jimmy had gone to
his
safe place.

I jumped in my car and took the grand tour of the town to make certain I hadn’t picked up a tail. Sliding slowly past City High, I noted several unmarked cars. Even if Jimmy was dumb enough to show up, he’d never be blind enough to miss the stakeout.

I waved at the detectives, earning a scowl, and in one case a rude hand gesture, before I headed west.

While at Ruthie’s, each of us had spent a month every summer between the ages of thirteen and eighteen working for someone or learning something. Ruthie believed in that almost as much as she believed in reading the Bible before bedtime.

I’d been sent to New Mexico, to the edge of the Navajo Reservation, to learn more about what I was and how to use it.

Jimmy had been sent only an hour away, to a dairy farm between Milwaukee and Madison. He had loved it.

Not so much the milking, the plowing, the planting, but the place, the people and the animals. The photos he’d taken at that farm had been some of his best, and had led to his receiving a scholarship in photojournalism from Western Kentucky.

Not that he’d ever used it. When he’d left, I don’t know where he’d gone, but it hadn’t been to college. The lack of a degree didn’t seem to have hurt him any.

He’d always had an unbelievable way of looking at things, and when he’d looked at me, I’d wanted to give him everything I had. Back then all I’d had was me.

Shaking off those memories, I accelerated around a semi and set my cruise control at seventy. I wanted to get there fast, but I wanted to get there in one piece, without a ticket that would broadcast to every last cop in the land where I was.

Though I hated to, I called Megan and left a message. “I won’t be able to come back to work right away.” I paused, unwilling to ask for a favor, but I had to. “Would you get me a copy of Ruthie’s autopsy report?”

If anyone could do it, Megan could. Max had been a highly decorated officer, a stunning loss to the community and the force. I didn’t think there was a cop in the city who’d deny Megan anything that she asked.

I reached the farm just after noon. No one was there. I hadn’t realized the Muellers had packed up their cows and sold the place.

I got out of the car. “Hello?” I shouted, though I really didn’t expect anyone to answer.

The house was locked, the windows unbroken. Such would never have been the case any closer to town.