Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (24 page)

It turned. The door was unlocked, and he pushed it open and stepped inside.

The apartment was immaculate, no sign at all of a struggle or any kind of foul play. But the place was empty as he had thought, and that burnt smell was much stronger inside, trapped in the air-conditioned room. Castillo walked through the apartment once and then went out again, deeply troubled. He closed the door and went down to his car, and wondered whether or not he should risk putting an officer on to watch the building for Cantwell’s return.

Lieutenant Boggs would not like that. The boss wanted to keep anything relating to Prowlers limited to vital personnel only. Already they were stretched. A restaurant massacre in Wellesley looked an awful lot like a Prowler attack, and the mayors of Boston and Wellesley were putting their heads together with Lieutenant Boggs to spin it for the papers and put it into Boston P.D. control without
really
ticking off the Wellesley homicide boys.

So for now, Castillo would go it alone. If it turned out he needed more men, Boggs would have to give him a few from the Wellesley detail. Particularly if there seemed any indication that the restaurant killings were in any way related to the murder of Paul Manning. Castillo knew most of the cops in Boston who had dealt with Prowlers before and who could be trusted. But the lieutenant had been clear that no one should be involved with the truth in this case, or any case involving those monsters, unless they absolutely had to be.

Castillo would come back and check on Cantwell’s apartment again.

Meanwhile, he would take a ride out to Newton to try to meet the late Paul Manning’s girlfriend.

When he got back, he would phone Courtney Dwyer with the bad news. If they were all really lucky, Cantwell would have turned up by then in one piece with a big apology and a good excuse for his girlfriend. If not . . . Castillo was pretty certain that this whole thing was not going to end well.

Any animal could kill. Any animal lurking long in the darkness could find likely prey, stragglers among the herd of humanity. But Dallas had always relished the difference between murderer and assassin. To mark a target, particularly a difficult one, to track that target, isolate it and bring it down, that took more than savagery. It took skill.

There was an exhilaration in the triumph of assassination, of murder for hire. There had been times in the past, working for government agencies or for various independent contractors, when Dallas had found utter glee in the successful completion of an assignment. The truth of it was, assassination could be fun. But there was no fun left in this job.

From the moment he had seen Bill Cantwell come out of Bridget’s Irish Rose Pub, Dallas knew that this assignment was going to get ugly, messy. Jasmine was never going to be completely content with the fact that he would only take three of the four targets she had hired him to eliminate. But she understood the importance of the pack, the nature of it. And though they had not seen each other for many years, though they had never really been part of the same pack, the fact that Dallas’s own daughter was Cantwell’s niece would be enough of an explanation for Jasmine.

She might not like it, but she would accept it.

Now with Bill out of the way, it would have been simple enough to track the others. Dallas could have taken them in quiet moments, one by one. He could relish the hunt, the chase, the prowl. Or he might have been able to if he did not have his daughter Olivia and her mother Claudia on his mind. It was not supposed to be like this. In all the years he had been working as an assassin Dallas had never had an assignment bring him so close to home. It wasn’t merely a question of whether he was willing to kill Bill Cantwell, but whether or not his daughter would ever forgive him. He did not want to kill Cantwell; he liked the guy, no matter how he had behaved in response to Cantwell’s fury and pleas, his words had not fallen on deaf ears.

There was no pleasure in this now for Dallas. He just wanted it over with as soon and as fast as possible, even if that meant it was going to get messy. There would be no game to it now, no challenge, no lingering in the shadows waiting for the perfect moment. He would have to make the moment.

Any animal could kill.

Night was falling over the city of Boston, shadows creeping along the streets. It was a war that was waged every single day all over the world. Despite the strength of the sun, the power of daylight, the onset of darkness was inexorable.

On the horizon, the sky was still deep blue, darkening, but along the streets lined with towers of steel and stone, ominous shadows grew longer and deeper. Unlike werewolves of myth, legends of which had sprung up among mankind’s tribes to explain the existence of the Prowlers, Dallas’s kind had no need for the night or the moon. Yet there was freedom in darkness, in the anonymity it provided. Primal, brutal things ran wild under cover of night. Thus had it always been, thus would it always be.

It cradled him, the night protected him. The world changed its face from light to dark, and to Dallas it always felt as though the sunlight was the false face, like the human skin he wore to cover the animal within.

Shortly after eight o’clock, he stepped through the front door of Bridget’s. The clash of scents and sounds was almost overwhelming. Voices and music, food and human musk. It would be difficult for him to separate out the scents of his targets in this crowd, but all he really had to do was sit and wait. He did not need to scent them when he could see them.

When he first walked in he had thought for a moment that the redheaded girl at the front of the restaurant taking names and reservations was Molly Hatcher. But the impression lasted only a moment.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

Her voice was too singsong, too high, too pleasant. Forced, but that was considered professional in the service industry. Dallas could sense it, he could read humans from their scent, from every twitch. It was part of what he was, and partly what he did.

“Dinner,” he said.

“Oh,” she replied, apparently taken aback. “You’re dining alone?” She seemed genuinely surprised at the prospect.

Dallas gave her his broadest smile, and he could practically feel her reacting to him. There were certain women he had an immediate effect upon, and this girl was apparently one of them. A bit of cruel irony swept through him.
Animal magnetism,
he thought. And she did look tasty.

“It’s just me,” he confessed.

“If you want to eat at the bar, I can seat you now. Otherwise it’ll just be a few minutes.”

Dallas decided to wait for a table and took up a position next to the door from which he could see most of the restaurant and part of the bar.

Only a few minutes after he had arrived he saw Molly Hatcher emerge from the kitchen with a tray in her hand. She went about serving her customers, patrons of the restaurant, chatting with people. The girl hustled to take orders, bring meals, settle bills. A short time later, Courtney Dwyer emerged from the back room, hobbling on her cane. She came to the front of the restaurant and chatted briefly with the hostess. The woman passed within inches of Dallas’s hands. The urge to kill her then and get it over with was strong.

But now was not the time. Not yet. There were enough people in the restaurant that they might get in his way, might interfere with his chances of killing all three, and that would be a disaster. More than that, however, he wanted to wait for Jack. The Dwyer boy had shot him, and Dallas was not going to forget about that easily. Whatever reluctance he felt about killing these people because of Bill Cantwell seemed to evaporate with every throb and dull ache he still felt in his shoulder. But there was another reason to wait for Jack Dwyer. He might be barely more than a boy, but he had killed Owen Tanzer and other Prowlers as well. Jack was dangerous, and if there was one thing Dallas knew, it was that when you had more than one target, you took down the most dangerous one first.

So he would sit and he would eat and he would keep his eyes on the doors and the stairs that led up to the apartment. When the moment came he would take Jack Dwyer first.

And then there would be screaming.

The seconds ticked by on the moon-and-stars clock in the kitchen. Jack sat at the table across from Eden and fidgeted awkwardly. She sat almost primly, slightly on the edge of her chair with her hands folded on the table in front of her as though she’d come for afternoon tea rather than to confront and hopefully destroy a savage spiritual entity.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked her. “A cup of coffee, a soda . . . tea?”

“No thank you,” she said pleasantly, patiently. Eden seemed content to just sit there waiting, satisfied with the silence and with his company.

Jack knew he ought to have a thousand more questions for her, things about history, her lives, and the things she had experienced. The girl was fascinating, and the way she held herself—somehow both confident and innocent—just drew him in. He hoped that in the not so distant future he would have a better opportunity to talk to her about those things, to learn more about her. Not because of the attraction he felt toward her—for it was Molly he loved—but simply because he had never met anyone quite like Eden before.

Now was not the time. There were things that had to be done. But they could not really start without Seth and he did not want to start without Artie. Jack was very concerned that the ghost of his friend was not there. He had expected to see Artie waiting for him when he returned upstairs with Eden. Where the hell had he gotten off to? After all, what else did he have to do?

Jack knew anything he would say to Eden now would just seem like small talk, and yet what else was there for them to do now as they waited. It was odd there in the darkening kitchen, in the dying light of day, the night coming on outside the window and him yet to turn the lights on, for them to just sit alone together, intimate. And he did feel a kind of intimacy with this girl he had only met earlier that same day. Jack felt some sort of connection between them, almost as if . . .

He chuckled softly to himself at the feeling he’d been having, that somehow they’d met before. In light of who Eden was and the lives she claimed to have led, there was a certain irony to that. It was funny, though, Jack could believe that she had led all these lives, but not for a moment would he even entertain the idea that the same might be true of him. He brushed the thought away. They had never met before. It was not déjà vu. It was just the power of her presence, the innate charisma that she had.

“Y’know,” he said as the thought occurred to him, “I never asked what you do with your life. You said you’re finishing with high school but you never mentioned what your plans were.”

She smiled softly. “I had thought about going to college to become a history professor, but I thought that might be cheating a little bit. I think, in all honesty, that I’d like to be an architect. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. Something I tried to do once before, but unfortunately the opportunities did not present themselves.

“With all the chances I’ve had to see the world, I’ve watched buildings go up, and then be torn down. I’ve watched whole cities crumble. And yet so much of architecture endures for hundreds, thousands of years. I think it would be an extraordinary feat to be able to design something beautiful, to be able to build something that would endure, that would last. Something I could return to again and again over the course of my life, and whatever comes after.”

Jack stared at her, unable to find words to respond with. Eden shifted, blushing slightly under his gaze. After a moment he realized he was making her uncomfortable.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve just never had a conversation like that before. I mean, I know people who want to leave something behind, something to be remembered by. But you have to admit your perspective on it is pretty unique. For myself, I never thought about it much. This place has been my whole life up until what happened to Artie, up until the Prowlers. In a way what Courtney and I have done with this place has always been about remembering my mother. Sure we have to live and we have to make a go of it, but it’s all for her, really. For my mother.”

“Have you ever wondered if she knows?” Eden asked. “If she sees and understands?”

Jack glanced away, shuddering slightly.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Was that too personal?”

“No, it’s okay,” Jack said, looking up again. “It’s just hard for me to talk about. Most people aren’t that direct. I do think about it, though. I hope she knows. I hope she understands how much we miss her.”

“I’m sure she does,” Eden said confidently. “I’m sure she knows and sees, and one of these days, you’ll find out for sure. Someday you’ll see her again. The people we love in our lives, the people that matter to us, they crisscross our existence forever. Someday you’ll find out.” Jack paused and took a breath. He did not know if she was right, if what she said was true, but it felt true and he hoped that it was.

“Someday,” he agreed. “Just not today.”

A voice came from across the room. “
Hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

Jack looked over to see Artie’s gossamer spirit coalescing in the corner near the boarded-up windows, not quite whole, not quite clear. Below the knees, the ghost was merely mist.

“Hey, where’ve you been?” Jack asked with a grin. Then he shot an apologetic glance at Eden. He’d forgotten that she couldn’t see him. “Sorry, Artie’s here.”

She turned to look into the corner, but of course she saw nothing. Artie threw back his hair and scratched a bit at the side of his neck as though he still had nerve endings, still had skin to scratch.

“
Thought I’d see if I could find anyone else to help. If the Ravenous can touch us, we can touch it. If it can attack us, we can attack it. Not that we can do much, but as you know a lot of folks around here have a grudge to settle with the Prowlers. You helped with Tanzer and his pack, but the kind of grudge this is? It’s for eternity. A lot of them wouldn’t come, and some of the recent ones are still too whacked to
talk sense about anything. So I still can’t figure out who that was in Bill’s trunk. But those that would come . . . they’re here.”