Bestiary (38 page)
Authors: Robert Masello
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers
As she carried Joey upstairs, she noted that Carter still hadn’t turned on any of the lights. She went into Joey’s bedroom, changed him, and left him in his crib, then crossed the hall to the master suite.
“Carter?” she said softly, stepping into the darkened room. She’d expected to see him lying on the bed, damp from a shower. But no one was there. And there was a fragrance in the air—the scent of a forest, after a heavy rain—that made her stop in her tracks. It was the scent she remembered from New York, from the terrible and difficult days preceding Joey’s birth. The days when their lives had been shadowed, even endangered, by the malevolence of a creature who went by the name of Arius.
She fumbled for the light switch and turned it on. The bed was unrumpled, the room was empty.
But the bathroom door was closed.
She put her ear to it and, holding her breath, listened for any sound within. There was a low swishing sound, of the plastic shower curtain crackling. “Carter?” she said, still hoping against hope that she would hear him answer.
But there was nothing.
She tried the handle; the door was unlocked. She opened it slowly, and yes, the shower curtain was billowing in the breeze from the open window. At dusk, a wind often came up off the valley below. But no one was in the stall.
Only the scent of wet leaves—more powerful here than it had been in the bedroom—suggested that someone might have been in here.
Someone who might even have exited, moments before, by the open window.
Downstairs, she could hear the sound of the front door opening.
“Honey?” Carter called out; she could hear his backpack hitting the floor of the foyer. “Guess who I brought home for dinner?”
“You decent?” Del called out. “’Cause if not, come on down!”
Beth closed the bathroom window tight, then stepped back into the bedroom.
“She must be upstairs with Joey,” she heard Carter saying to Del. “There’s beer in the fridge; help yourself.”
Carter came up the steps two at a time, and when Beth turned to him, she knew he could tell something was wrong.
And then the scent must have hit him, too, because he quickly took her in his arms and looked all around. “You alright? Joey alright?”
She nodded.
Then he ran to the nursery, and came back with Joey nestled against his shoulder.
“When did this happen?” he asked. “Just now?”
“Yes. Right before you came home.”
“Did you . . . see him?”
“No.” She shuddered involuntarily. “It was only that smell.”
He didn’t have to ask how Arius might have gotten in. They both knew that he could come and go wherever he pleased. And now they knew something more—that whatever their hopes, and their suspicions, had been, he was still a presence in this world. And in their lives.
“You mind if I have one of the expensive foreign brews?” Del shouted up from the foot of the stairs. “I don’t normally drink a beer that had to come all the way from Holland.”
“Have whatever you want,” Carter answered, still holding the baby and looking deep into Beth’s eyes; they didn’t have to say a word for each of them to know exactly what the other was thinking.
Little Joey looked from one to the other, with his usual expression—so incongruous for a toddler—of placid understanding.
“I should have called ahead,” Carter murmured. “To tell you about Del.”
Beth shrugged; she was used to Carter bringing home his buddies. At one time it had been Joe Russo—the baby’s namesake. Now it was Del.
“And when do I get to see the kid?” Del called out. “God knows I didn’t come all the way up here just to hang out with Carter some more.”
Carter put his free arm around Beth’s shoulders and shepherded his family toward the stairs.
Del was waiting at the bottom, one hand on top of Champ’s head and the other holding a Heineken. “Now you’re talkin’,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
ALTHOUGH REGGlE STlLL had the envelope that that other security guard, the one who’d shown up with Stan Sadowski, had given him, he’d already spent the fifty bucks. Sadowski had once handed him a Free Drink coupon for a place called the Blue Bayou, and after the free drink Reggie had used the money for a lap dance.
As for the envelope, he’d been waiting for the right opportunity to give it to Mr. al-Kalli himself—he’d read in a book on personal improvement that if you wanted to get ahead, you needed to make sure that you got on the boss’s radar—but he just hadn’t found it. Once the car had sped out so fast he could barely get the gate up in time, and the last few times al-Kalli must have come in and out by the back gate, over near the riding ring.
But tonight looked like it was going to be his night—the headlights of the Mercedes limo were approaching fast, up the hill, and Reggie dug the envelope out of his pocket. A couple of times he’d debated steaming it open and seeing what was inside, but he was afraid that al-Kalli would be able to figure out what he’d done. And from everything he’d heard, al-Kalli was one dude you didn’t want to mess with. Just those frickin’ peacocks alone, with their screeching and squawking, was enough to give him the willies at night.
As the car pulled up, Reggie stepped out of the gatehouse and raised a hand at Jakob, the driver. The tinted window rolled smoothly down, and Reggie said, “I have something for Mr. al-Kalli.”
Always deal with the boss himself, never a middleman—that’s what the advice book had said.
“Give it to me,” Jakob said, holding his hand palm out.
Reggie tried to look into the back of the limo, but it was so dark in there he couldn’t see a damn thing.
“My instructions were to—”
Jakob opened the door and Reggie had to step back just to get out of the way.
“Give it to me, whatever it is. Now.”
Jakob towered over him, his eyes as black as his shirt.
Reggie handed it over, and Jakob turned it back and forth in his hand. “Who brought this?”
“One of the Silver Bear Security guys.”
“When?”
“Um, I don’t know exactly when.” He didn’t want to admit that he hadn’t found a way to give it to al-Kalli immediately. “Maybe a day or so ago.”
“And it took you till now to hand it over?”
Reggie wasn’t sure what to say. What would that self-improvement book tell him to do?
Jakob got back in the car, and as the gates swung open, he said through the still open window, “What time do you get off tonight?”
“Six A.M.”
“Don’t come back tomorrow.”
The car took off, and Reggie stood there, flat-footed, so long the gates nearly hit him when they closed again.
AT THE HOUSE
, al-Kalli waited patiently in the kitchen while Jakob held the envelope up to the light, sniffed it for plastique, shook it gently for anthrax powder or any other substance. There was no return address, but that was to be expected. Jakob let some water collect in the kitchen sink, then opened the envelope just above it, ready to drop it and hit the disposal button in a second.
“It’s probably nothing,” al-Kalli said, impatiently.
Jakob thought he was probably right, and he carefully opened the envelope at one end, then drew out the single, typed page inside. He saw the salutation—a simple
Mr. al-Kalli
—and several brief paragraphs below it. There was a scrawled signature at the bottom, and below it the words
Capt. Derek Greer
. He made a small “huh.”
Mr. al-Kalli
—and several brief paragraphs below it. There was a scrawled signature at the bottom, and below it the words
Capt. Derek Greer
. He made a small “huh.”
“What is it?” al-Kalli said, taking the letter Jakob was now extending to him.
“It’s from the one you hired, the American soldier, in Iraq.”
Al-Kalli took a pair of gold reading glasses from the breast pocket of his suit coat and put them on. “He knows I’m here?” al-Kalli said, as he began to read.
Jakob didn’t reply, but simply waited. Still, just watching al-Kalli’s face told him most of what he needed to know.
In less than a minute, al-Kalli had put his glasses back in his pocket, folded up the letter again, and said, “We may have a small problem.”
Jakob knew that when Mohammed said small, he meant large.
“What would you like me to do?”
Al-Kalli looked thoughtful. “We must first have a word with Rashid.”
A few minutes later, they found him where he always was—in the bestiary.
But al-Kalli, already in a black mood, only grew blacker as the doors whooshed shut behind him.
The odor in the air was unhealthy, the cries of the animals strained and plaintive. Rashid himself, in a soiled lab coat, was playing a hose over the mottled hide of the basilisk. When he saw his employer, he quickly shut off the water and came forward, drying his hands on the tails of his coat.
“Mr. al-Kalli,” he said, but before he could say another word, al-Kalli had backhanded him, hard, across the mouth. His sapphire ring cracked against a tooth.
Rashid fell against the bars of a cage, and the creature within suddenly sprang upward, spittle flying in all directions.
Al-Kalli grabbed the spindly Rashid by the collar of his coat and dragged him clear. Rashid, in terror, simply slumped to the ground.
“Who have you been talking to?” al-Kalli hissed, and Rashid’s eyes went wide.
“No one,” he sputtered; there was blood smeared like lipstick across his mouth.
Al-Kalli drew back his hand and smacked him again, so hard Rashid’s head spun on his neck.
“Someone knows about the animals.”
“I have never . . . told anyone.”
“Someone has
seen
the animals.”
seen
the animals.”
Now Jakob knew how serious the problem had become.
“Who have you let in here?”
“No one . . . only Bashir. To clean.”
Bashir was a teenage boy, one step above an idiot, whom Rashid had brought from the bombed-out ruins of Mosul. He barely spoke, lived in a shed behind the bestiary, and was a virtual slave.
“Who besides Bashir?”
Rashid simply shook his head, in terror and denial. “No one ever comes here . . . unless it is to . . .” He didn’t know how to complete that sentence, nor did he want to. The only other people who came here were prisoners, men al-Kalli planned to feed to the beasts. Was he about to become one of them? Rashid thought. Words of the Koran began to tumble like a fast-moving stream through his head.
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