Love Bites (22 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY

Ovsanna wouldn’t spend the night, and I didn’t push it. I figured she’d had four hundred years or so of getting to know herself, and if she said it was dangerous, it was probably dangerous. Besides, I needed some sleep. I took a fast shower and threw on some sweats, then went out to the guesthouse, knocked to make sure SuzieQ wasn’t there, and slipped in to borrow something for Ovsanna to wear home. Suzie must have found a date who didn’t mind snakes; it looked as though she’d had a pretty wild party in the house. She’d stripped the sheets off the bed, and her room was messier than usual. One of the snake cages was lying open and upended on the bathroom sink. I found a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt and a pair of jeans in a pile on the floor. Ovsanna would have to roll up the cuffs.

My cell phone was ringing when I came back. Three thirty in the morning only means one thing. I opened it, expecting to hear the Captain’s voice.

“Peter?” It was SuzieQ.

“Suz?” She sounded strange. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the duck pond in Franklin Canyon. Can you come here . . . by yourself? I need your help.” The phone went dead.

What the hell was she doing at the duck pond? Not feeding the ducks, that’s for sure.

“Another case?” Ovsanna asked. She’d showered while I’d been in the guesthouse, and she was waiting for me to hand her Suzie’s clothes. I didn’t realize I was still holding them.

“No. It was SuzieQ. Something’s wrong.” I pulled off my sweats and grabbed my jeans and a pair of hiking boots. “She wants me to meet her in Franklin Canyon.”

“Car trouble?”

“I don’t think so. She wouldn’t have called me for that. She said she’s at the duck pond, but that doesn’t make sense; she can’t drive her car into the park at night. She must be in the parking lot. I don’t know . . . maybe it’s a guy. Somebody gave her trouble on a date or something. She asked me to come alone, so whatever it is, she doesn’t want anyone else to know. Will you be okay?” I had my gun and my keys and my jacket, and I needed to go. Ovsanna followed me into the living room. She was nude. I didn’t want to leave.

“I’ll be fine. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

“Okay. The front door locks automatically, so make sure you’re dressed before you walk out the door.”

“Yes, Officer. I think I can remember that.” She reached up on her toes and kissed me. “And if I don’t, it really won’t be a problem. Bats, remember?”

That made leaving a little easier.

The streets were empty. A heavy fog had settled in, and the Jag’s headlights barely cut through it. I put the flasher on the ragtop and kept my speed down to forty on the curves up Beverly Glen, then opened it up a bit on Mulholland. Franklin Canyon covers more than six hundred acres on the edge of Beverly Hills, but the entrance near the duck pond is on the north side, closest to the Valley. It was four o’clock in the morning. The park was gated closed. The more I thought about it, the less I thought it was a date gone bad; SuzieQ is far from naïve.

I was about a mile away when my cell phone rang again.

“Suz?”

“No, sir, this is Dispatch. Detective King?”

“Hey, Amanda, yes, I’m here. What’s up?”

“I just got a call from Patrol. They’ve got a sighting on that citywide you put out this evening. Car’s parked and empty in the Three Hundred block of Saint Cloud. Anything you want them to do?”

I nearly ran off the road. “Not if it’s empty. Thanks, Amanda, I’ll take it from here. Thank the guys for me.”

The 300 block of St. Cloud. That’s two blocks from my house. Maral McKenzie’s black BMW, the one DeWayne Carter had been driving, was parked two blocks from my house. I thought about the mess in Suzie’s bedroom, and suddenly it didn’t seem like the aftermath of a hot date.

I pulled up received calls on my cell and hit redial for Suzie’s phone. A recorded voice said the customer was out of range. Then I tried calling Maral and got her voice mail. Ovsanna didn’t answer, either. Three women I wanted to talk to and I couldn’t reach one of them.

You can take Franklin Canyon Drive all the way through the park from Coldwater Canyon at the north end to Beverly Drive at the south. Both ends of the road are residential, but where the park starts, a few blocks in, gates prevent access. The gates are open from sunrise to sunset and then closed and padlocked shut. But they’re just gates running across the road. No walls or fences on either side of them. All you need to do, if you’re intent on getting into the park after dark, is walk around them.

SuzieQ’s SUV was parked by the side of the road, in front of the locked gate. It was empty. I pulled in next to it and shut off the lights. The duck pond was about a mile away.

I called her name but got no answer.

I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me, even with the flashlight. If there was a moon, I couldn’t tell; the fog was too thick to let any light through. Felt like walking into wet cotton candy. I concentrated on the dirt path that led around the gate and joined up with the road on the other side.

Fifteen minutes later, I was at the duck pond. I called Suzie’s name again and heard a pounding from the far side of the water. I unholstered my gun and slid down to the water’s edge. Using the pond to guide me along the bank, I aimed my flashlight into the tall reeds that covered most of the slope. I could hear ducks splashing, but I couldn’t see them.

The fog distorted the direction of the sounds I was hearing. Twice I started back up the slope, thinking that’s where the pounding was coming from; then the direction changed, and I slid down again and headed toward the trees farther to my right.

That’s where I saw her. Bound in strips of a sheet and lying half in the water. Her mouth was gagged. She was pounding her bound feet against a tree trunk.

I raced to her, stumbling in the mud. Whoever it was hadn’t just tied a gag around her mouth, he’d shoved it halfway down her throat. I got it off and she started retching. I struggled with the knots in the sheets around her arms and legs. “Jesus, SuzieQ, what happened?! Are you hurt?”

“That fuckin’ prick! He killed Dick Nixon! Oh, Peter, he killed Dick Nixon—I don’t even know how he did it. And then he forced me into my car and made me drive here, and made me call you. That fuckin’ prick!”

“Who? Did he hurt you? Are you all right?”

“Fuck me, no, he didn’t hurt me. ’Cept for my pride. And killin’ Tricky Dick! Fuckin’ little no-neck weasel!” I got her untied. She picked up a rock and hurled it into the bushes.

“Who is it and what did he want? Why?” I put my arms around her to help her up. She was wet and muddy and starting to shiver.

“Hell, sugar, I don’t know. He came lookin’ for you! I heard somethin’ in the bushes by the hot tub and I went out there thinkin’ a coon was trackin’ my babies. Instead there was this no-neck guy with pus all over his face, talkin’ like a Florida cracker. He said Maral McKenzie sent him to find you. I said it was two in the mornin’ and he sure as shit better get off the property. That’s when he jumped me. Do you know who he is?”

“Oh yeah, I know who he is.” DeWayne Carter. Aka Vernon Cage. Maral’s buddy and my prime suspect in the Graciella de la Garza case. “We haven’t met, but I recognize the description. Let’s get you out of here.”

I wrapped my jacket around her. She was still shaking, but it wasn’t from the cold. I wanted to get her back to the car before she went into shock.

Something rustled the bushes behind me, and Suzie screamed. I pushed her down on the ground and spun around to block her with my body. “Police! Stay where you are!” I yelled, aiming toward the movement. I couldn’t see a damn thing through the fog.

“That’s him, Peter! That’s him! That dickweed! He killed my snake!” She picked up more rocks off the ground and fired them at the form that was barely visible coming through the sage. It was DeWayne, all right. He ducked the rocks and kept on coming. I couldn’t see his features, but the guy had no neck, just like the guy in the picture—his head just sat on his shoulders.

“DeWayne Carter? Get your hands in the air!” I couldn’t see a weapon, but that didn’t mean anything, I could barely see him.

“Hey,” he said, “you’re Peter King, ain’tcha?”

“Detective King, Beverly Hills Police Department! Now keep your hands in the air and get down on the ground!”

“Oh yeah, I kin do that. I jes’ wanted to make sure you’re who I was lookin’ fer. I kin git down on the ground, no problem.” He had his hands in the air, and they seemed to be pulling back into his body as he began to kneel. Then a sound came out of his throat, like a metal toilet tank flushing, and something happened to his face. It looked like it was cracking in half across his jaw. His chin pulled back toward his missing neck. His upper gums stretched forward, tens of teeth pushing out of them, flattening and elongating into the shape of an alligator’s snout.

SuzieQ screamed and grabbed my arm. I couldn’t control my gun. DeWayne was growing a tail, huge and armor-plated. He whipped it from side to side and then rocked back on it, like a man sitting on a stool, and his legs split his pants as they changed into haunches—wolf haunches covered with hair.

“It’s a rougarou, Peter!” Suzie screamed. “A rougarou!” I didn’t know what the fuck a rougarou was, but I knew what it wasn’t. It wasn’t DeWayne anymore, and I wasn’t going to worry about reading him his rights. I broke Suzie’s grasp and fired, just as the thing lunged at me and clamped his jaw around my leg. My shot went wild. He got a mouthful of leather and Gore-Tex, my hiking boot, and I got pulled to the ground and slung into the water. I still had my gun in my hand.

He hadn’t let go of my leg. He dragged me down and held me there, maybe twenty feet or so. My gun wasn’t marinized; if I fired underwater, I could blow off my hand and blow out my eardrums. Instead, I jackknifed my body up and pounded him in the head with the butt, trying to get him to loosen his grip. I had maybe forty-five seconds before I needed air. This was how he’d killed Graciella de la Garza, drowning her before he chewed her up. I’d read somewhere that alligators can’t chew, but this thing was something more than an alligator, some kind of hybrid alligator/wolf man with tiny little human hands and a mouth full of razor fangs. That’s what those prints at the Sportsmen’s had been, this thing’s hands. What the hell had Suzie called it—a rougarou?

I kept pounding, pulping one of his eyes. He released my leg, turned, and thrashed out with his tail. It caught me across the back and sent me surging upward. He followed me, coming at me with his jaws wide open. I raised my gun to fire—forget losing a hand—and saw SuzieQ through the water behind him. She was climbing onto a boulder above us, with a thick tree limb in her hand. Right in my line of fire. I hesitated. If I missed DeWayne, I’d hit SuzieQ. In that instant, she jumped off the rock and landed on his back, crashing the limb across his upper jaw. She had a strip of sheet draped on her shoulders. She whipped it over her head and wrapped it around his snout, tying those teeth closed momentarily. Man, she was fast. It was like watching a rodeo rider. He bucked her off, unable to open his mouth, his plated tail thrashing inches from her face, and I surfaced and fired with the gun out of the water. Two shots hit his neck and the third hit him right behind the eye. The fourth misfired, but it didn’t matter; he was done. He thrashed for a few more seconds, and then his body began coming apart, separating into pieces of alligator and wolf and little bitty human hands. The pieces sank to the bottom and disappeared.

SuzieQ swam to the side of the pond where he’d first tied her and crawled into the weeds. She was shaking uncontrollably. I grabbed the second sheet, the one DeWayne had used to tie her legs, wrapped it around her, and held her close.

“It was a rougarou, Peter. A real one.” She rocked back and forth in my arms. “I didn’t think they existed for real.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

I had a bad feeling about SuzieQ’s phone call to Peter. It didn’t sound right. He said she didn’t want him to bring anyone with him, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t follow behind without either of them knowing it. Just in case.

I pulled on the sweatshirt he’d borrowed from Suzie and rolled up the cuffs on her jeans. My boots were still wet from the shower. I’d noticed Suzie’s feet when she was dancing. She’s a big girl; I couldn’t borrow any shoes.

Peter had a pair of rubber flip-flops in his closet. I put those on and threw my boots in the backseat.

My phone rang as I was pulling out of the driveway. I didn’t answer. Caller ID said it was Peter, and I didn’t want to have to lie to him if he asked if I was on my way home. It was sweet of him to call, though. We’d only just parted, and maybe he was missing me already. I wouldn’t mind that. I planned to follow him to the duck pond, stay out of sight until I was sure he didn’t need my help, and call him when the sun came up.

Driving through the fog reminded me of being in Inverness in 1979, when I’d visited the set of
The Fog,
John Carpenter’s film about the ghosts in Antonio Bay. And that reminded me I needed to get John on the phone. I had a project I’d been sitting on for two years, and now that the merger had gone through, I had the budget to make it the way it should be made. John would be the perfect director. I’d have Maral call him in the morning.

If she showed up at work. She’d left the office last night without saying good-bye, and she wasn’t at home when I went there to change clothes. I needed to talk to her about DeWayne Carter. Why had she lied to Peter when she’d seen his picture with that alias? What was she doing in the cemetery? Why was she leaving a devil pod in her office? She could be in danger—and not only from a boxenwolf. The guy she’d brought out here to keep away from her brother could be more than a drug dealer. He could have killed that girl at the Sportsmen’s.

Peter’s car wasn’t hard to find; it was at the entrance to the park. I hid mine around a curve up the street and walked down and stood by the gate in the wet darkness, letting my vampyre senses flare. I could see, just barely, maybe eighty feet through the fog. More, certainly, than any human, but not enough to discern anything save reeds and trees on either side of the road leading down the hill. I knew where the duck pond was, though; I’d filmed there several times. Anyone who’d ever watched
The Andy Griffith Show
’s opening credits would recognize the area. Or
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
. I started walking into the blackness.

I was still a quarter mile from the pond when I heard the sound of ducks in the water. And something pounding against wood. Peter must have found SuzieQ because I picked up his scent and a female scent close by. And something else—farther away; something putrid and briny. The way Maral had smelled when she came home with DeWayne Carter.

The pounding stopped and I heard voices: Peter’s and SuzieQ’s. I couldn’t understand them at first—she was talking about killing President Nixon—and then Peter shouted, “Police!” That briny smell flooded my senses. In an instant, I was at the water’s edge. I knew Peter and Suzie couldn’t see me—the fog was impenetrable—but I moved behind a copse of live oak just in case. I didn’t want them to know I was there. Peter had already gotten pissed when I suggested he might need me to deal with the female were, and it probably hadn’t helped that I’d been right. I didn’t want to challenge that male ego again unless I had to, to save his life. And I definitely didn’t want to expose my true self to SuzieQ.

The briny smell was coming from DeWayne Carter. I watched while he came out of hiding in the bushes and Peter ordered him down on the ground. And then I realized what it was I’d heard when I touched that dead girl’s body in the Coroner’s office. It was the sound of an alligator in a death roll. Now it was coming from DeWayne.

SuzieQ screamed at the same moment I recognized DeWayne for what he was—a rougarou.

Peter fired at him as DeWayne started shifting. The bullet missed DeWayne and grazed my elbow. Damn it, how would I explain that when I gave SuzieQ back her sweatshirt? I barely felt it, but by the time I looked up from the wound, Peter and the rougarou were underwater. SuzieQ was racing towards a huge rock on the side of the pond; she had a sheet in her hands.

I waited. Rougaroux aren’t really vampyre and they’re not werebeasts. They can be killed as easily as a human, and Peter had a gun. If he’d just use it. What the hell was he waiting for? How long could he stay underwater?

Suddenly, SuzieQ was jumping on the back of the roug and tying his snout with the sheet. Then Peter fired, and fired again and again, and the damn thing was finished. I was glad I’d waited. I knew he could do it. And I didn’t really want to get in that water.

More than that, I didn’t want to expose myself to either one of them. SuzieQ wouldn’t know what to think, and Peter would think I didn’t trust him, which wasn’t entirely true. I trusted Peter enough to tell him what I really am; enough to make love to him. I just didn’t trust him to be able to handle anything nonhuman by himself. That’s like asking a piranha to go up against a bear. No matter how sharp his teeth, the fish is going to need help.