Evil Eternal (10 page)

After two more brief stops to catch his breath, Shane arrived with the priest at Aimee’s apartment. She lived in the basement of a brownstone on the Lower East Side that had seen better days. He remembered asking her why she’d picked there, of all places, to live. She had replied that she liked being close to CBGB’s, a legendary punk rock club. Even though it had closed years ago, it was still regarded as a holy site for the countless people who went or played there. For a professional girl raised in a wealthy section of Westchester, Aimee had a wild streak that at her age had faded from teenage rebellion to a bona fide lifestyle choice. Which is why, Shane assumed and was grateful for, she bothered with him at all.

Shane knocked at the door and rang the bell simultaneously. There was no answer.

“Jesus, I’m an idiot,” he said.

Father Michael tilted his head. Shane wondered what was going on in the priest’s mind. It was hard to tell behind the dark glasses.

“I forgot, it’s Monday. She’s at work. She won’t be home until six or later.”

“Then we must go to her place of work.”

“Easier said than done, Padre. She works in the mayor’s office over in city hall and security is tight. I’m not sure they’ll let a guy like me and a knife-throwing priest the size of Jason into the building, much less her office. Do you think that thing will definitely come after her?”

An icy gust of wind slammed into them, freezing the sweat on Shane’s exposed skin.

Father Michael adjusted his coat and walked back onto the sidewalk.

“Well, do you?”

The steady hum of the copy machine was slowly putting Aimee DeCarlo to sleep. Preparing for the graduating class of police cadets called for enough paperwork to deplete half the remaining rain forest.

“Paperless work zone, my ass,” she muttered at the copier.

She had worked from home until well past three in the morning and was back in the office at eight o’clock. The past three weeks had been murder and coffee was no longer having an effect on her overwrought senses. She had considered popping a Dexatrim but remembered how much it had screwed her up in college. Sure, she could stay up and work harder and longer hours studying. The kicker was, she always seemed to crash just moments before she sat down to take the test she had strived so hard to prepare for. This wasn’t school. She needed this job and could not afford to crash and burn at a crucial moment.

Patty Wilson, her best friend at the office, came into the copy room, her arms filled with papers and folders. Her curly, red hair was pinned up, with a few stray locks uncoiling around the sides of her face.

“You still at it in here?” she asked.

“Not much longer,” Aimee replied with a yawn.

“You need a vacation.”

“If I can get through the next week, my regular workload will seem like a vacation. The graduation is Saturday and I already took a couple of days off after that so I can do nothing but sleep.”

Patty unceremoniously dropped her bundle of paper onto a table.

“Does that mean you won’t be catching the Underbelly show at Roseland’s Saturday night?” Patty asked, a hint of hope in her voice.

Aimee gave her a mischievous smile.

“Of course I’ll be there. I’ve been dying to see them for two years now. You know I have a weakness for British punk-ska bands. You sure you don’t want to come? I have an extra ticket.”

“That’s okay. Pop bands are about as hard core as I get when it comes to music. I’m touched that you offered your extra ticket to me, though.”

“Don’t say I didn’t ask,” Aimee said. The copy machine went quiet. Aimee collected the collated packets and placed them in a cardboard box. “I’m sure Shane won’t have a problem scalping that ticket.”

Patty bristled at the mention of Shane but Aimee ignored it. She had heard every complaint about him from everyone who knew about their relationship. She loved him, and that was all that mattered. He was also very proud and it was his pride that kept him on the streets and not living with her like she’d asked countless times. Shane was literally a starving artist. The one concession he made was to store his paintings, because of Aimee’s insistence, at her place. It was fabulous work and Aimee hoped above all that it would be discovered well before his death, unlike so many of the great artists of the past.

“I’ll bring you back a T-shirt,” Aimee said and lugged the box back to her desk.

“And here I was hoping for a belly chain or spiked choker,” Patty said and laughed.

“You let me take you to get your bellybutton pierced and I’ll get you the chain,” Aimee called from her desk, which was unfortunately positioned near the busy and noisy copy room.

Her phone rang and Aimee never heard Patty’s reply.

“Here’s a list of requests I received from my radio show last night. See that everything I’ve outlined gets done, especially in Mrs. Winston’s case. You tell her landlord that if he doesn’t get up there to fix her heat, I’ll personally wring his neck.”

Mayor Peter Spinelli was a flurry of activity, handing over files, loose papers, discs and anything else on his desk that required immediate attention. Brendon Smythe, his most trusted staff member, watched the pile grow by the second. It was a nightly ritual that had taken him over a year to adjust to and now, five years later, had become just another task easily completed or at least delegated.

The mayor paused for a moment, looking Brendon in the eye.

“Scratch the wringing his neck part,” he said.

“I figured,” Brendon replied, “but with you, I never know.”

That brought a smile to the mayor’s face.

“This being your last term and with your sworn vow to retire to Maine so the public could recover from your two terms as mayor, why not have some fun?” Brendon added.

Mayor Spinelli was a tough man running a tough city. He had his detractors but even they had to admit he did a great job cleaning up a city that had been quickly turning into a cesspool. He’d said worse things to people early in his first term—damn the opinion polls. Time and experience has a tendency to soften even the hardest edged man and Spinelli was no exception. He had learned the intricate dance of politics but sometimes an outburst of honesty could feel better than sex.

“Here’s a compromise,” Spinelli said. “Don’t say that I’ll wring his neck. I’ll just actually do it if I find out that woman is still freezing come this time tomorrow.”

“Got it, chief.”

“Okay, that’s everything. I’m on my way home for a shower, change of clothes and then to the Children’s AIDS Benefit. If you need me…”

“I’ll page you. Good night, you prince of Maine…”

He winked. “Sometimes being mayor feels like running a colossal orphanage. Be good and be here tomorrow at eight for that meeting with the P.B.A.”

Mayor Spinelli grabbed his winter coat and briefcase and headed for the elevator.

Shane and Father Michael sat on a bench in Battery Park, just outside city hall. Bitter-cold air blew off the slow-moving Hudson River. Father Michael had insisted they be there when Aimee left work to escort her home. There was no telling what could happen to her along the way and, after all he had seen, Shane was quick to agree.

The priest had not spoken a word the entire time they’d sat in the park. Never one for uncomfortable silences, Shane filled the void blabbing about anything that came to mind. He had hoped to elicit some kind of response, anything to make the priest seem less spooky. If the man hadn’t saved his life, Shane was sure he’d have run screaming hours ago. Something about him seemed so otherworldly, just as much as the thing with the changeable skins in the alley. But there was also a pain, something deep down that fueled this man that Shane could feel, almost as if it were his own.

Lazy snowflakes peppered the sidewalk. A hot dog vendor pulled his cart up just a few feet away. Shane still hadn’t eaten all day and the extra exertion of their morning together had burned off any stored energy he might have had.

“There isn’t any chance you have a couple of bucks for a hot dog or two?”

The priest reached into his coat and retrieved a five dollar bill without taking his eyes off the front entrance to city hall.

“Hey, thanks. You want anything?”

“No,” Father Michael replied, his voice rumbling like a runaway subway car.

“No dog for the man in black,” Shane said as he trotted over to the hot dog cart. He was grateful for the money and more so for the chance to step away from the priest and relax his mouth, not to mention his nerves. It was like talking to a wall.

Returning with a handful of hot dogs, he found himself standing before the priest, prattling on about the painting he did last summer of a hot dog vendor outside Bryant Park and how the vendor paid him for it with free dogs for a month. For some reason, he couldn’t allow for any silence between them. It was almost as if he was afraid of what Father Michael would say if given a moment to speak.

Father Michael simply stared at him, mute and immovable.
 

Little did he know that the distraction he provided was enough to blind them both to Cain’s arrival as the demon, in his latest skin, strode past the steps of city hall and into the parking garage,
 

Chapter Eleven

Mayor Peter Spinelli exhaled the day’s insanity once he had the elevator to himself. Being mayor was a 24/7 job and he was damn glad there was such a thing as term limits, because he couldn’t well trust himself not to run for a third term. If the law allowed, his luck would have kept him in office. He had never lost an election bid and polls still showed a decent approval rating.

The reality was he desperately needed the time off, to get to know his wife, Susan, all over again and spend as much time as he could with Wendy and Fred. The day he was sworn in as mayor, they were both in grammar school, one year and one grade apart. Now they were in high school, Wendy a senior and going off to Penn State in the fall. Fred was ready to take his SATs and asking for a BMW. Jesus, he had missed so much.

The elevator stopped at the lowest level of the parking garage where only his cars were kept. The security detail far outnumbered the cars in this section of the underground garage, for which he was grateful. If people only knew how many death threats he received each week, he might have gotten a little more sympathy from the city’s populace, but that might also have inspired more wack jobs to do the same.

“Evening, Ed. How’s life treating you?” the mayor asked as he approached the glass-enclosed office of the man responsible for the upkeep and security of the mayoral auto entourage.

“Just another day in the frigid apple,” said Ed, a graying attendant who was just a year from retiring himself. “You want the SUV?”

“Sounds good to me.”

This was no standard SUV. It had been specially built by Ford and equipped with bulletproof glass, tires that couldn’t be punctured and a host of other gadgets and safeguards that Mayor Spinelli prayed would never have to be employed.

Ed made a quick call into his microphone and the silver SUV appeared moments later. The mayor stepped inside, shut the door himself and leaned back in the seat.

“Home, James,” he said. His driver’s actual name was James and it had been an inside joke of theirs for the past several years. He pulled a black binder out of his briefcase and read over a report on child safety window guards in New York City apartments.

He didn’t notice Cain’s eyes flash red within the face of James in the rearview mirror as they pulled out of the garage.

Shane was considering hitting Father Michael up for some more cash for another hot dog when he spotted Aimee emerging from the double doors of city hall. Her laptop bag and pocketbook rested on one shoulder while another tan bag bursting with papers weighed down the other. She was trying hard to juggle a sizeable stack of binders with both hands. It looked like she was going to be working from home tonight. That or she had gone mad and stolen a king’s ransom in office supplies.

“That’s Aimee,” he said, pointing her out to Father Michael. “Looks like she could use a little help. Good thing I’m here.” Shane dashed across the street to relieve his girlfriend of her burden, ever the chivalrous hero.

Father Michael sat glued to the bench, his ivory eyes behind the sunglasses transfixed by the vision that was Aimee. For the first time in his life after death, he was shocked to his core.

This cannot be. My eyes and heart must be deceiving me. Please, dear Father, do not test me with the impossible, not now.

Shane and Aimee walked over to Father Michael. It had been agreed that they not tell her their true intentions. Shane would ask to stay at her house because of the extreme cold, which she would wholeheartedly agree to. Father Michael, the story would go, had befriended Shane at a soup kitchen and happened to run into him in Battery Park. Their goal was to stay by her side as much as humanly possible because Father Michael was sure that slaughtering Shane and everyone he cared for was a challenge too great for Cain to ignore. The connection that bound them all was too strong to ignore. While Shane stayed inside with Aimee, Father Michael would remain outside, waiting for Cain like a tiger in the bush.