Highways to Hell (26 page)

Jack was silent for a long moment. He looked up at the sky and tried to see any stars through the haze of city lights and pollution. He didn’t see any. Not a single one. He could almost believe this world he inhabited was the only world, that the billions of living things inhabiting this sphere were the only living things in all existence.

But, of course, he knew that wasn’t true.

He looked at the unconscious drunk again and said, “Okay.”

Because tonight he knew only one true thing for absolutely certain.

Tonight they were heroes.

8.

Unfinished Business

Lucy Martin grinned and plunged her fangs into the girl’s tender, exposed neck. The euphoria hit her immediately, faster and more powerful than the strongest drug rush, and she slurped the girl’s blood greedily, drinking and drinking, until she’d drained her. She relinquished the girl’s limp form reluctantly, allowing it to fall to the bloodied sofa.

Lucy stood up and released an exultant hiss of satisfaction.

She heard a sudden sound, the creak of a floorboard, and whirled to face the interloper.

Jack Grimm sighed. “You killed her.”

Lucy grinned. “Yes. And now I’ll kill you.”

Jack moved further into the room, his deliberate movements indicating wariness of the vampire’s power but no fear. “Tell me something, Lucy. How does it feel to become what you hated. Do you think it’s right? Is there even one shred of humanity left in you, one tiny piece of your soul that doesn’t want this, that wants you to stop?”

Lucy grinned again. She licked blood from her lips. “No. The weak, helpless little girl who came begging for your help is no more. I’m better now.” She took a step toward Jack. “You shouldn’t judge me. You have no clue how good it feels to drink and kill. Maybe I’ll show you. Maybe I’ll turn you, make you my slave. Did you know vampires can enslave those they turn?”

She kept coming at him, her dark, soulless eyes gleaming.

Jack said, “Yeah, I know that.”

Lucy laughed. “And maybe that’s why you came back. Maybe you want to live forever like me. Or maybe you just want
me
.” She giggled. “Oh, don’t think I didn’t see the dirty old man lust in your eyes every time you looked at me. Give in to it, Jack. Let me take you, let me make your darkest, fondest dreams come true.”

Jack shook his head. “You’re wrong, Lucy.”

The vampire smirked. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Jack brought the crossbow from behind his back, aimed it with as much precision as he’d ever aimed his .45, and said, “You’re not gonna live forever.”

He clicked the trigger and the wooden bolt shot forward, piercing Lucy’s heart.

She glanced at the protruding bolt, then looked at Jack with an expression of wide-eyed, beseeching terror. “No.”

Jack sighed and lowered the crossbow.

Lucy’s eyes went blank and she fell dead to the floor.

Jack regarded her a moment longer, then walked out of the house. He stood in the backyard and smoked a cigarette, silently contemplating the starry night sky.

9.

Angst

The next afternoon Jack and Andy were sitting at the bar in the Sherlock Holmes Pub. Andy was drinking Irish whiskey and Jack was nursing his second pint of the day. They’d already laid down their usual big tips, their way of thanking the bar’s staff for their usual lack of cooperation with the authorities after the big shootout in the street the week before.

Andy said, “You did what you had to do.”

Jack sipped his stout. It tasted bitter. “You’re always saying that.”

Andy chuckled. “And I’m always right.”

Jack nodded. “Maybe.” He looked at his brother. His friend. “They’re still after me, you know. Satan’s people.”

Andy stared into his dwindling glass of whiskey. “They’ll always be after you, Jack. Until your dying breath. But you already knew that.”

Jack sighed. “Yeah. But sometimes I think how nice it’d be to…” He signed again. “I don’t know, live a normal life. To not feel constantly hounded and hunted. To not feel the weight of worlds on my shoulders.”

Andy finished his drink and pushed the empty glass forward for a refill.

He looked at Jack, smiling but with a hint of sadness in his eyes. “It’s okay to dream, brother, but you and I both know you were born for this. So was I.”

Jack chuckled bitterly. “Slaves of destiny?”

Andy received his refilled glass with a smile and a nod, then raised it for a toast. “To the very end.”

They clinked glasses.

Someone sounded a few tinkling notes on the piano. Jack and Andy swiveled on their chairs and grinned at the sight of Raven sitting on the piano bench. She played a few more notes, her confidence growing, then began to sing the opening lines of “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life.”

Before long, everyone in the Sherlock Holmes Pub had joined in.

Jack’s voice was the loudest of them all.

The last day of John Marlowe’s mortal life began with a hangover. He woke up, opened his bleary eyes, took a good look around, shuddered at the disarray in the bedroom, and went back to sleep for a few more hours. When he got up again, he shrugged into the clothes he’d worn the day before, stumbled into the kitchen, and opened the fridge.

It was still there.

The severed head sat in an aluminum pie tray, the ragged stump of its neck buried in a layer of cookie dough. Strands of blood-flecked blond hair dangled through the shelf slats, brushing the plastic lid of a bowl of tuna salad.

“Fuck. I really did it.”

John Marlowe was forty-two. He hadn’t killed anyone since his early twenties. In those days, he’d had some level of ambition, as well as a young man’s elevated sense of his own importance in the grand scheme of things. He’d wanted to make his mark in the world. Do something big and become famous. As a teenager he learned to play guitar and tried starting a band. The rock star life seemed like a good gig. Groupies and all the drugs you could handle. Problems set in when he discovered he couldn’t sing or write even one half-decent song. So he gave that up and decided to become a novelist. A celebrated man of letters. He imagined a different kind of fame and fortune. National Book Awards and interviews on NPR. The bigger literary names even had their own kind of groupies. Brainy women who would pin their hair back and wear owl’s-eye glasses, hide their sleek and wanton bodies in modest clothes. The sexy librarian type. But in the bedroom they’d be foul-mouthed, dominating hellcats. If anything, it was an even more appealing prospect than the abandoned dream of busty, miniskirt-wearing rock star groupies, all of whom would have been empty-headed bottle-blond bimbos straight out of a 1980’s Poison video. Not that there was anything wrong with empty-headed bottle-blond bimbos. It was just a question of whether you more enjoyed the refined taste of an expensive wine or the simpler taste of a cheap domestic beer. There was a time and place for both, and at that point in his young existence John had decided he was going to be the kind of man who preferred the finer things in life. All he had to do to make this happen was sit down and write the Great American Novel, and perhaps follow it up with maybe half a dozen lesser novels over the course of the next thirty years or so to keep the cash and lit-slut groupies rolling in.

He sat down to write the novel.

Wrote one page.

Read it through a dozen times or so.

And decided it was again time to reevaluate his goals in life.

Still thinking in terms of groupies and fame and fortune, he toyed with the idea of becoming an actor. He went so far as to take a few acting classes. Three classes, to be exact, each of them a study in awkwardness and boredom.

By then he was close to accepting he had no ability whatever in any of the creative fields. He could maybe go into politics. He was young and good-looking, and possessed more than enough personal charisma to get by. He could be a congressman. A senator. Hell, he could be president. The job clearly didn’t require brains. If anything, he was overqualified.

But politics bored him even more than acting, so fuck that.

The reality that banging bimbos could be something of a potential liability in the political arena was somewhat of a deciding factor, as well.

And then it happened, the moment that changed his life.

The goddamn epiphany.

He could be a serial killer.

And not just any ordinary dumb bastard of a serial killer. The usual guys in that field were greasy dullards. Ugly bastards who wore over-sized glasses with thick lenses. Sexual predators driven by anger and frustration, who killed because no woman in her right mind would ever voluntarily give up the goods to a guy like that. Those guys, they didn’t exactly stir the imagination. Sure, every once in a while someone more interesting came along, someone like Ted Bundy. Now there was a guy who was legitimately a legend in the annals of serial killing. Some guys had killed more women than Ted, but few had ever done it with the pizazz of the Deliberate Stranger. But even he had botched it all in the end. John decided he would follow in Bundy’s footsteps only to a degree. He would do everything his new hero had done right, avoid his missteps, and elevate the killing game to a whole new level. And by the time he was done, he meant to be the world’s most prolific and creative serial killer ever. Books would be written about him. Movies made. He would finally be a celebrity of a sort. And, hell, some of the more interesting and charismatic serial killers, Ted included, even had their own groupies.

Yep, on paper it all looked very positive.

That summer, at the age of twenty-two, he killed three women. He did his homework so well beforehand that he was never a suspect in any of the ensuing investigations. He was never questioned. None of the suspect sketches the police circulated ever looked remotely like him. And yet, the killings had been public and spectacularly gruesome. The corpses were decapitated and mutilated in myriad creative ways. None of this strangling the lass and ditching her body in a remote patch of wilderness never to be discovered jazz. This was to be a very open campaign of shock and awe horror. And it worked. The local media went apoplectic after the first killing. The national press got in on the act after the third victim was discovered. He was dubbed The Little Rock Madman, not a bad serial killer name. All was going very much according to plan.

Except for one little thing.

John just wasn’t enjoying the work very much.

Oh, he’d gotten a real high from successfully pulling off the first job. In those first moments of his new existence as a murderer, he’d been certain he’d found at last his true calling in life. But the high faded faster than he expected and his sleep that night was disrupted by nightmares. He chalked it up to first time pangs of conscience. Not even that, really. This was just social conditioning, a mental and chemical reflex, something that would surely fade as the work became more routine. So he pressed ahead with his plan. But the nightmares and sleep disruptions got exponentially worse after he offed the second and third girls. After the third one, he got blind drunk and woke up in a pool of his own piss and vomit in an alley behind a Little Rock dive bar. He woke up screaming and crying every night for months. Turned out he had a real conscience after all. The faces of the dead women haunted him day and night. His day job suffered. He dropped out of grad school. And his life continued on a grim downward spiral until the night he got down on his knees in yet another backstreet alley and begged God and his victims for forgiveness.

His life changed after that night. He did everything he could think of to atone, short of turning himself in and signing a confession. He went back to school and graduated with honors. He became a very successful man. A wealthy man. He donated tons of money to victims groups and death penalty advocates. He went to church twice a week and continued to pray every day for forgiveness. Years went by. Decades. Enough time that the killings he’d done that long ago summer began to seem like something he must have imagined, something that couldn’t possibly be real. Except that every once in a while, even all these years later, the local media would dredge the whole thing up again, reminding the public that the Little Rock Madman had never been caught. Even so, the passage of time and his acts of contrition combined to convince him that he had truly transformed himself. He wasn’t really a monster. That bloody summer had ultimately been nothing more than a blip in an otherwise exemplary life, a wrong path he’d been wise enough to quickly abandon.

An impression that had lasted until roughly one week prior to today.

John stared at his wife’s severed head and said, “You fucking bitch.”

He’d come home early from work that day and caught her in bed with a much younger man. A large black man with a bodybuilder’s physique and a model’s chiseled face. Later he learned the man was an expensive male prostitute. Which explained Linda’s reaction upon seeing him in the bedroom doorway. There had been no shame. No quick, startled disengagement of the two sleek, sweaty bodies. Instead she’d yelled at him to get out of the room so she could finish. Turned out she’d just wanted to get her money’s worth. John had retreated to his study down the hall, where he cracked the seal on a bottle of very fine old scotch and settled into his leather executive’s chair to listen to his wife’s orgasmic screams. The screams interested him. They were high and shrill, not entirely dissimilar to the screams made by the victims of the Little Rock Madman. The thought made him frown. Linda never sounded like that when he was putting it to her.

He started thinking about killing her after that first sip of scotch. The thought seemed to come from nowhere and sent a shudder of revulsion rippling through his whole body. He’d had no conscious, active thoughts about killing anyone in twenty years. The scotch turned sour in his stomach and he felt bile at the back of his throat.

At some point the screams from the bedroom faded and stopped. A little later he heard muted conversation in the hallway. Then male laughter and feminine giggling. They were laughing at him. The insight did nothing to lighten his thoughts. Then she came into the study, a robe cinched tight around her shapely body, and made several declarations. They were not going to get divorced. Of course not. She enjoyed her position in the community too much. He was never going to breathe a word of this to anyone. She would continue to screw the thousand-dollar-a-pop prostitute twice a week, and she would continue to sample any other strange flesh that caught her fancy, including John’s young lesbian niece, who she’d apparently been corrupting for months. And furthermore, he was never going to have sex with her again, because he was just no good at it. Not only that, but he was not allowed to have affairs of his own. She would not have anyone in town talking about her behind her back. Then she pried the bottle of scotch from his shaking fingers and told him he was not allowed to drink anymore. Still more ultimatums followed, each more galling than the last.