Malus Domestica (44 page)

The machine log-rolled the policeman and carried him away on his back. Bursting out of the bathroom, Joel leapt the treadmill, vaulted the banister and landed halfway down the stairs, popping a couple of stitches. Hellfire raced up his leg, but he ignored it, jumping again straight down to the bottom and darting through the open door.

He juked to the right to get out of the videotape room and shot across the comic shop toward daylight. Ashe was standing behind the counter, leaning on the glass. The vet started to say something, but Joel shoved the door open and threw himself outside.

Lieutenant Bowker turned around in surprise, reaching up to pinch the cigarette in his mouth.

Joel froze, his heart dropping into his stomach.

“Good morning!” the officer said cheerfully, throwing down the butt and shoving him in one fluid motion, bouncing his head off the doorframe.

Lightning flashed behind Joel’s eyes and then he was facedown on the sidewalk, rough grit sandpapering his naked chest. The sun cut the brisk October air like a hot knife, turning the cement into a griddle. Objectively he knew that the monster’s scratches were burning, but the pain in his thigh was extravagant, bright as a cattle-brand, and it eclipsed the world.

Bowker wrenched his arms up behind his back, zip-tying his wrists together. “Nice to see you again, boy.” The officer turned him on his side and allowed him to get his feet underneath him. “You thought you was gonna get away?”

Looking up and down the street, Joel saw a few people on the sidewalk stop to rubberneck. Of course, they were all white.
Go ahead and look, assholes. Look at me. You like it, don’t you?
Salt tainted his mouth and he licked at it, found blood from a busted lip. Twisting, he tried to stomp Bowker’s knee, but the cop threw his ass out like a cabaret dancer, scooting out of range.

“Help!” Joel shouted into the morning stillness, trying to wrest his arm away. “They’re gonna kill me!
Help me!”

“Ain’t nobody gonna kill you, y’idiot,” growled Bowker, hauling the back door of the police cruiser open and bundling Joel inside. To his relief, the lieutenant didn’t bang his head on the roof on the way in.

“Help!”
Joel shrieked, and Bowker slammed the door in his face.

He was on his side. He wallowed and kicked to a sitting position and pressed his forehead to the window, wedging his bare feet into the cramped footwell. Fisher and Ashe came out of the comic shop, the tall veterinarian supporting Euchiss.

Next to Ashe, the policeman looked like a little boy. Euchiss sat down on the exterior windowsill, hunched over and cradling his head in the bowl of his hands.

Cool wind breathed through the mesh partition. The front windows were rolled down, so Joel could hear what they were saying. “Opie! What the hell happened to
you?”
asked Bowker, hovering over the other cop.

Euchiss looked up, squinting into the sun. “I fell.”

“You fell,” sneered the lieutenant. Euchiss gave him a glare that could melt steel. Joel was abruptly all too aware of who wore the pants in this partnership, even though the physically imposing Bowker technically outranked the redheaded patrolman. “Assaulting and evading a police officer,” said LT Bowker, turning his attention to Fisher. “Attempted murder with a freakin shotgun. Your brother’s got his plate full, ain’t he? Would you like to explain why you were hidin him?”

Instead of taking the bait, Fish leaned into the passenger-side window of the cruiser. “I don’t know what the hell happened to my cat, but I’m gonna follow you to the police station and bail you out.”

“Ain’t no bailin me out. They ain’t gonna put me in jail,” Joel said, pleading with his eyes. “They’re gonna take me somewhere and put a bullet in my head.” He thrust his knee up for emphasis, wincing at the stab of pain. “They already tried to shoot me once. They’re gonna—”

A look of irritation dawning on his face, Bowker pulled another zip-tie out of his patrol belt and came up behind Fish. “Hey, no!
No!”
cried Joel. Fisher started to turn, but the lieutenant had snatched one wrist and twisted him back around, pressing him against the side of the car.

“You’re fit as a fiddle, huh?” the cop asked, zip-tying his wrists together.

“What are you doing? Let me go—”

“Arresting you for harboring a fugitive and resisting arrest.” Joel leaned back as Bowker opened the door and crammed Fisher inside, piling them on top of each other. He wriggled backward, trying to get out from under his brother.

Fisher was livid. “When I get out of these cuffs,” he said, baring his teeth, his breath redolent of the protein shake he’d had for breakfast, “I’m going to kick your ass.”

Joel pressed himself against the opposite door; Fisher looked like he wanted to rear back in the seat and kick him to death. The situation was almost funny, if it weren’t so dire—reminding him of sultry summer evenings in their parent’s car as children, Mama and Daddy in the front seat, Joel and Fisher in the back.
Stop touching your brother! Don’t make me turn this car around!

His head tilted back and he licked dry lips. “My leg is killin me. Look, man, I didn’t kill your cat. I swear to God it turned the garbage disposal on by itself. I don’t know why, but it did.” He looked up and nodded toward Euchiss sitting on the windowsill holding his head. “And that guy,” he said, in a confidential mutter, “is the serial killer I got away from. The one Bowker called ‘the Serpent’.”

Fish stared.
“That
guy? But he’s—”

“Yeah, a cop. Like I told you, they’re all in it together. They’re workin for those witch-bitches out in Slade. The ones that lived across—”

“I’m fully aware of who they are. Mama died thinkin they were coming after her like they did that Martina lady.”

“Maybe Mama wasn’t so crazy after all.” Joel shifted in the seat, inching his fingers up to the waistband of the jeans he was wearing. He pulled it down, revealing the right cheek of his ass and the scar on his skin. “I’ll be damned. It all makes sense now.”

“What does?”

Bowker’s cellphone rang, cutting into their conversation with the theme to
Bonanza!.
“Y’ello.”

Glancing pointedly down at the ass-cheek he was displaying, Joel said, “Look. The brands Mama burned into our asses when we were kids. They weren’t a chicken-foot at all. They were ‘protective runes’ like what that Robin girl’s got tattooed on her chest.” A four-lobed Y about an inch long had been scarred into the flesh of his rump.

ᛉ

The middle lobe of the rune was longer than the other two, making it look like a rooster’s footprint. “Robin Martine called it Al-Jazeera.”

“The Arabic news network?” Fish winced in confusion. “What have
they
got to do with this? That woman’s daughter is in town? You been talkin to her?”

“Yeah. I don’t know, maybe your cat committin suicide was those witches tryin to do something to me, and this thing on my ass saved me. Maybe I was supposed to kill myself and Selina got it instead.”

Fish pursed his lips, giving him a wry look.

“Yes ma’am,” said Bowker on the phone. “You want me to do
what?
…No, I wasn’t questionin you, not at all, ma’am. A little taken back, I reckon. Struck me as a funny request. …No, I don’t think it’s funny at all. Nothin’s funny. Yes, I do have a sense of humor. No, I don’t bring it to work.”

“This ain’t a joke, man,” Joel was saying to Fish. “I promise. We in real trouble here.”

Bowker hung up the phone. “Change of plans,” he told Euchiss, who seemed to be shaking off the blow to the head. The redheaded scarecrow got up and put on a pair of sunglasses. “Boss called and gave us a job to do. Come on.”

“What about these two?”

“We got bigger chickens to pluck.”

The pear-shaped lieutenant lumbered around the back of the cruiser and got into the driver’s seat, and Euchiss plopped down on the passenger side.

“What about that guy?” asked Euchiss, jerking a thumb at the veterinarian as he put on his seatbelt.

Joel glanced out the back window and saw Ashe Armstrong standing in front of the comic shop, a keyring full of keys in one hand, looking confused and dour.

“We’ll take care of him later. We ain’t got the room in the car for his big ass anyhow.” Bowker put the car in gear and backed out into traffic. “He’ll be all right until we get back, he thinks we’re goin to the station. When we get done with this, we’ll grab somethin quick to eat and come back here, have a word with him.”

Euchiss turned and glared at Joel through the partition screen. Joel stared back, wary. “I bet you thought that was funny, huh? Runnin that treadmill with me standing on it?” Euchiss asked, venom in his voice. “I almost got a concussion.”

“What, you expect me to be sorry about it? Bitch, you had me chained up in a garage. You were gonna cut my throat.”

Euchiss pointed a jittery finger at him. His lips stuck together as he spoke. “Blood for the garden, asshole. Forget cutting your throat—I’m gonna string you right back up and cut your head clean off with a hacksaw like one’em raghead terrorists. Won’t
that
be—”

“Hey, enough of that,” warned Bowker, backhanding him across the chest and jamming a finger at his face. “We ain’t no damn Taliban.”

Discomfited, Euchiss turned around and folded his arms, sitting back like a little boy throwing a tantrum.

The lieutenant shook his head. “You can pitch a fit if you want, son—I don’t give a rat’s ass who y’know. But I got lines, and you steppin on em. My mama raised me to be a God-fearin man, not no heathern savage.”

“God-fearin men don’t do what you do,” said Joel.

“Did I ask you for your opinion?” Bowker snarled over his shoulder. “I ought to shoot you right now for what you did last night with that scattergun. But we got things we got to go take care of, and you can help us.”

“What kind of things is that?” asked Fisher.

The policemen didn’t respond. Bowker drove them west along Broad and south onto Main, cutting through the heart of the downtown commercial district. Restaurants and gas stations scrolled past the windows in a parade of colorful logos. Lunchtime traffic surrounded them in a scrimmage of lights and steel.

Fisher pressed them. “Where we going?”

No answer.

Joel leaned forward. “Why you call yourself the Serpent, anyway?”

Euchiss cut a deadly glance over his shoulder and went back to burning a hole in the windshield with his eyes. The wind buffeting through his open window smelled like French fries.

“Stupid-ass name. Who gives theirself a nickname? That’s lame as all hell. Nobody does that.”

Euchiss’s upper lip twitched and he smoothed back his hair, putting his patrol cap on. “You better shut your mouth, fag, or we’re gonna be shorthanded one Negro.”

Lieutenant Bowker regarded him for an instant and went back to driving.

“What?” spat Euchiss.

“Nothin, man.”

The redhead fired another pair of eye-daggers at Joel and slid the panel in the vinyl partition shut, rattling the steel mesh.

“What are you trying to accomplish, there?” asked Fish.

Joel just stared out the window, trying to come up with a plan but able to think of nothing but Mexican food.

Burritos would have been a good last meal.

❂

The police Charger slithered through downtown Blackfield, passing the university and its thirteen-story library, leaving the surface streets for more and more obscure neighborhoods.

Bowker’s convoluted path cut through subdivisions Joel had been to a number of times, mostly to buy weed. Dealers and hookers milled up and down the sidewalk in front of rundown tract houses with boarded windows, and weeds sprouted from the walls of abandoned, broken-eyed factories. They drove past several convenience stores with iron bars on the windows. Grimy, slat-sided cottages on overgrown lawns strewn with dirty toys.

A googly-eyed old woman in a nightgown stood at the roadside with an oxygen tank, screaming gibberish at passing motorists.

The lieutenant finally slowed and pulled into a side street that wound into a wooded area, and the houses became fewer until there were none at all, only dead brown trees reaching for the sky and leaf-litter on rolling hills. Exposed hips of granite jutted from hillsides. Joel was beginning to think they were leaving the city altogether when the car grumbled into a gravel parking lot. A metal sign zip-tied to a chainlink fence told him that they had arrived at Blackfield Animal Shelter.

The only other vehicle was an unmarked box truck. Bowker pulled in to the side and the two cops got out, letting themselves into a large brick building. Euchiss came back and opened the cruiser’s trunk, taking out a hunting rifle. Joel wasn’t sure what caliber, but it had a bolt-action and a scope.

Euchiss took out a box of cartridges, slammed the trunk shut, and disappeared into the shelter.

Once they were gone, silence fell over the car, broken up by indecipherable garbage honking out of the police-band radio. A legion of dogs barked behind the fence.

Fish’s eyes were full of fear and confusion. “What are we doin at the animal shelter?”

“Beats me.”

“What were you saying about protective runes and witches and Robin Martine?”

Joel pressed his forehead to the window at an angle, trying to see through the windows of the shelter’s main building. Inside the fence enclosure was a labyrinth of chainlink panels: smaller pens for individual dogs. From where he sat, he could see dozens of large-breed canines: Rottweilers, German Shepherds, a small army of pitbulls.

“Well, according to what Robin Martine told me, the witches’ magic is guided by words and symbols.” Joel went on to explain to his little brother what Robin had told him and Kenway in the truck after leaving the hospital. “The symbol on our hips is the same one that’s tattooed on Robin’s chest. It protects you from their magic…like bug spray protects you from mosquitoes, I guess. Hell, I don’t know.”

The two of them sat in frustrated, anxious silence. After what felt like half an hour, Bowker and Euchiss finally came out. The lieutenant went to the far side of the building, opening a large swing-gate in the fence. Euchiss carried the hunting rifle out to the box truck and reversed the lumbering short-hauler into the enclosure.