Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (52 page)

A sign identified it as Angliisky Prospekt. 
Angliisky Avenue
.  He searched it on his phone, found it, and then looked around at the street itself.

There were few people on
Angliisky.  A tall woman walking her two children was approaching him, and she had a long black coat with a tall collar.  He reached inside his jacket and pulled out the Uzi.  The woman gasped and froze for a mere instant, then put herself in front of her children.  “
Kurtka
,” he said.  He didn’t want to squeeze the trigger; that would only attract more attention, and put blood on his new coat.

A low, mournful howl on the wind.

Then, Spencer pointed the weapon at one of her children.  “
Kurtka
. 
Seychas
.”  She gave him her coat.

It all happened so fast, neither Shcherbakov nor Roman had any time to react.  The Cruiser had smashed into the Cadillac, which set off a chain reaction and created a barricade at the intersection.  Roman had tried to go around, but their speed was too great, and tire chains or no, the roads were just too slick.  They smashed into the hydrant and overran it.  Now, Roman threw the car in reverse and found it wouldn’t budge.  Its undercarriage was hung.

“Come on!”
Shcherbakov shouted, bailing out of the car.  He was out way before the bigger man, bolting through the jammed traffic lanes and shoving over a man on his way to check on the safety of those in the pile-up.  The wind pushed him to one side.  Through the storm and darkness, he was starting to lose sight of the Cruiser.  Though all around him things were moving in the blizzard, four-legged predators weaving through the crowd and knocking people over.  A woman stepping out of her car had her legs taken out by a pair of them, darting into another alley. 
They’re after him, too
, he thought, as insane as that sounded.

He spotted an elderly woman stepping
out of her car to go and check on the injured, and was about to steal her car when he spotted the Cruiser veer over onto the sidewalk and smash into the bakery.  When he saw Pelletier staggering out on foot, Shcherbakov smiled.  He jumped over the hood of the car, slid and darted around a slow-moving van that was trying to get around the multiple wrecks.

Shcherbakov looked over his shoulder.  Roman, overweight and awkward, was falling way behind.

Sirens were approaching.  When he looked west, he spied three squad cars speeding angrily towards the wreckage.  He hid his pistol by his side and jogged up behind the Cruiser.  He peeked inside, saw no one and nothing besides a large spill of blood on the seat, and then moved along.

The Grey Wolf paused w
hen he spotted the trail of blood in the snow.  No easier trail in the universe to follow.

Rounding the alleyway he’d seen Pelletier
run down, he brought his weapon back up.  He moved slowly in a crouch, aiming his pistol at every corner, at each dumpster, at a mound of empty cardboard boxes, half crushed, forming the frozen roof of perhaps someone’s home.  The trail of blood continued beyond this—

A howl.  A loud one, and it was answered by at least a dozen others.  They were all around, yet invisible, hidden within shadows or around the next corner.  The howling grew in intensity, as close as the police sirens.

Then, Shcherbakov heard a scream.

Shcherbakov turned his gun in the direction of the woman’s cry, jogged to the end of the alley, and nearly fired w
hen a woman came bolting from behind another dumpster, holding the hands of her two children.  She spotted his gun, gasped, and leapt back, instinctively pushing her children behind her and up against the bakery’s walls.

Shcherbakov, gifted at assessing a situation,
noticed something immediately wrong about her.  It was freezing out tonight, yet she had no coat.  “He took your coat?”

The woman nodded hesitantly.

“What did it look like?  What kind of coat?”  The woman stammered, muttering that it was long and black.  She held up a beseeching hand.  “Which way?” he asked.  Quiveringly, the woman raised a hand and pointed left down the alley.

Shcherbakov dismissed the woman
outright and covered the corner, slowly “slicing the pie” as he was taught to do in tactical approach, moving a few inches at a time around the corner, before he was sure the way was clear, then moved down the shorter alley and came out onto Angliisky Prospekt, which he knew pretty well.  A few specks of blood, then a long tendril of it in the snow.  He followed it along the sidewalk, then jogged in the middle of the the street, looking for a man in a tall black coat, but didn’t spot him.  He looked at the ground, saw only a single speck of blood.  Either Pelletier was done bleeding, which was not likely, considering how much blood Shcherbakov had spotted earlier, or he had staunched the flow somehow.

The wind chased snowflakes and leaves across the street. 
Shcherbakov searched the ground for footprints, but the salt trucks had been through this street and turned much of it into slush, and what snow there was had various vague footprints that were ruined by tire tracks.

He wanted the coat for a reason
, and not just because he’s cold
. 
He can’t walk around openly bleeding like that
.  Here was no casual fiend.  Here was a predator at the acme of his skill and career. 
So where’s he going?  Right now, right this instant, where could he—

Then, Shcherbakov had it. 
Hospital
. 
He’ll hail a cab, or hop a bus
.  While pulling out his phone, he tried to recall the nearest bus stops to Angliisky Prospekt.  Then, he realized that wouldn’t work. 
Why would he take a bus when another car will do just fine?
  He decided Pelletier would boost another vehicle within the next ten minutes.

He dialed up Roman.  “Where are you?”

“I lost you down the alley.  Where—”

“Angliisky
Prospekt.  Do you have a car?”

“A car?  I…no…no, it’s stuck in—”

“Call the others, tell them he’s probably heading for the nearest hospital.  That will be Chelyabinsk Emergency Medical Center.  Tell them—” More howling, from up and down the street.  People walking on the sidewalks all heard it, stopped, and looked around.  “Tell them to send an anonymous tip to local police with this description: man with black hair, scar across his face, possible gunshot wound, wearing a long black coat.”

“I can do that.”

Shcherbakov hung up and walked to the center of the street, where a Ford Escort was moving slowly through the storm.  He stood in front of it and held up his hand.  The driver honked, but stopped nevertheless.  He rounded the car, aimed his pistol at the driver’s head, and said, “Get out.”

Spencer opted out of the bus.  He happened upon the bus stop quite by accident, and for two reasons immediately discounted it.  First, there was no telling when the next bus would be coming, and it may never come on a night like tonight.  And second, because the man hunting him was obviously very tenacious and likely knew this town very well, and therefore might guess this mode of escape.

A lone wolf howled somewhere behind him, almost lost in the wind, but not quite.

A few people were on this new street, but none gave him any odd looks.  The coat fit him near perfectly, and he forced himself to walk upright, exuding normalcy.  His arm screamed at him, and he barely noticed.  Years ago, Dr. McCulloch had told him that psychopaths were first and foremost survivors, and that most were capable of putting basic needs and concerns on the backburner until they were free and safe.  Like the night that Dmitry had cut into his face.  Injuries usually filled Spencer with a fire deep inside, an anticipation for the reprisal to come.  Getting shot was almost foreplay.

His first instincts were to turn back around and fight, but he knew that if he did he might bleed out.  Even if he killed his enemy, someone would find him and, if he survived, it would be back to prison. 
I ain’t goin’ back
, he thought. 
First the hospital, then Zverev, then this little blonde-haired fucker at my heels
. 
He’ll follow me
. 
I know it
.

And he was never wrong about people.

Another mournful howl arose from somewhere.  Much closer now.  Three or four others answered in kind.

And
I may even kill those fucking dogs, too
.

What the hell were they, anyway?  Wild dogs and wolf-mutts, no doubt, but why did they have such a hard-on for him?  Spencer had a working theory on that, too, but it might only have been his addled brain trying to make sense out of an otherwise senseless evening.

The wolves of Siberia had been pushed around, some said driven even wilder since they had begun to multiply.  A massive super pack wandering around, unchecked, unchallenged, killing at will.  An answer to man’s push to hunt them down.  They were pushing back, driven mad by the sheer size of their forces.  Gaining in confidence.  Gaining in intelligence.  Turning the streets into a wilderness of their own—perhaps a massive wolf den was somewhere within the city?—and laying out clear lines of new hunting grounds.

But they’re not right in the head
, Spencer thought, searching around for any further sign of them. 
It’s like rabies, only what’s got them all twisted ain’t of this world
.  That might explain the ridiculous size of the pack leader (at least, Spencer assumed the dire wolf was the pack leader, because if he wasn’t, he’d hate to see the animal that was).  Whatever wound Kaley had opened in the quantum foam, in that barrier between worlds, it was poisoning this reality.  It had absorbed Officer David Emerson without care, it had apparently consumed an unassuming school teacher, so who said it couldn’t mutate a demented pack of wolves?

A convergence
, he thought. 
Everything’s drawn to Chelyabinsk tonight
. 
It’s the happenin’ place to be
.

Another howl, much closer now.

They, too, were drawn to the strangeness of Kaley Dupré, just as Spencer was.  God help him, she was a fascinating case.  He could forget about her when she wasn’t around, but on the two nights their lives had crossed paths…
She holds a glamour for the wolves
, he thought. 
They smell something strange on her, and on anyone close to her
.

The parking deck
Spencer stepped into was mostly deserted.  It belonged to some ten-storey office building, which had almost every window darkened.  The only vehicle left in the whole lot was a Honda Accord, a 2013 model. 
Probably has an alarm, but it’ll have to do
.

With a swift backwards elbow, he smashed open the window.  The alarm started blaring at once.  He slipped inside, disabled it (which took a bit longer than it should have because he had only one
good hand), and then hotwired it (also taking more precious time).

Spencer was determined to reach The Heights on Fermilov Prospekt before the night was out.  If he didn’t, Vitaly Zverev, or whichever
vor
was staying there and communicating with this Felix Azu person, might be gone as soon as they suspected Spencer was near.  He had a very narrow window of time here, and it was closing fast.

He pulled out of the parking lot, smashing through the gate and set the iPhone to give him directions in English.  “Up…ahead…” she said slowly
, in her heavy robot voice, putting emphasis on different words.  “Turn…
right
…at…next…
intersection
.”

But Spencer was already driving past the road as the bitch in the phone was giving him these instructions.

“You…
missed
…your…
turn
,” she said.

“Why…don’t…
you
…suck…my…
cock
?” he said.  He started laughing, and his arm flared in pain.

11

Principal Manning’s office was familiar to Kaley.  She’d been here before, during her first few weeks at CMS, when she’d been tardy or outright skipped class.  Before she had ever encountered the Mondo Bitches, there had still been those who would not accept a new girl in school, especially one as “ghetto” as they all whispered she was.  It had hurt, feeling their oppressive tribalism, their insecurity with themselves that manifested into a need to berate any newcomer.  It was Kaley’s job to conform to their rituals, become haters such as them, and mock others too weak to defend themselves, but she couldn’t.  That wasn’t her.

Or is it?

The office was as small as Kaley’s bedroom, perhaps smaller.  The desk was a kidney-shaped piece of oak that dominated the room, separating the principal on one side and the admonished-to-be on the other.  Behind Manning’s empty chair, there were awards and plaques. 
IN APPRECIATION FOR 10 YEARS OF QUALITY SERVICE
, one said,
WE RECOGNIZE STEPHEN MAXWELL MANNING
.  It was handed out by the PTA, and signed by school superintendent Laura Hilburg.

Her eyes kept slowly moving over the rest of the office.

There was a clock on the wall showing 1:33
PM
. 
Almost time for third period to end
.  Bookshelves lined the walls on either side of her.  Kaley’s eyes moved over a few of them:
Teaching Tomorrow’s Leaders Today
,
Progressive Teaching Techniques
,
An Administrator’s Guide to Youthful Minds
, and
The Art of War
.  That last one intrigued her the most.  Why did a principal want a book on his shelf that discussed how to fight wars?

That murky water trickled over every wall, spread across the ceiling in an ever-expanding stain,
and even swelled at times, seeming to breathe.  Kaley was both aware of this and ignoring it.

On the desk itself, there were three pictures.  There was Mr. Manning with his family, a wife and two daughters, both about the same age as Kaley and Shan.  She could see the family resemblance all around, especially in their shining smiles.  The other two pictures were of Mr. Manning with a large group of students.  One of the pictures looked very old, Mr. Manning was very young
in it, with a full head of hair and a beard.  The kids all looked like fourth- or fifth-graders.  Perhaps his first class?

Kaley thought the office
felt and smelled mostly sterile.  What
didn’t
feel so sterile, though, was the fear still dripping off these walls, as well as anxiety and rebellion, anger and sadness.  How many students and parents had come in here dreading what the principal had to tell them?  This wasn’t a place for cozy little meetings, even teachers were brought in here to sit exactly where Kaley was sitting and given evaluations on their jobs.  Kaley looked back at the picture of Mr. Manning smiling with his family, and instantly thought of him as a lonely warden, a man who had nothing but love for his prisoners but often had to set that love aside in order to do his job effectively.

Something swam past her leg.
  She ignored it.

The door opened behind her, and Kaley jumped.  The principal walked in and said with a
n affable smile, “Okay.  Kaley.  How are we doin’?”

“How is she?” she wanted to know at once.  “Is Laquanda okay?”

“She’s fine, Kaley.  At least for the moment.  The nurses took care of her until the ambulance came, and now she’s off to Kennestone Hospital.  I understand she was doing better when they took her away.”

“Better?  Better how?”

Mr. Manning sighed and shut the door behind him.  “Well, her airway wasn’t blocked anymore, and the swelling came down some.”

“Some?”
  Panic had leapt back into her mind, and she fought back tears.

“Kaley, how are
you
?”

She shrugged. 
“Fine, I guess.”

“You sure?”  He stepped around his desk
, wading through ankle-deep water without realizing it, and took a seat in the squeaky roll around chair.  A pair of glasses hung from his neck, and he put them on to start to thumb through something in his drawer.  He pulled out a file and opened it.  He looked up when the door opened again.  “Mrs. Krenshaw, thanks for coming.  I believe you two know each other,” he said brightly.

And she did.  Mrs. Krenshaw was the school’s counselor, and Kaley had been introduced to her before anybody else
when she started classes at CMS.  Mrs. Krenshaw had been fully briefed on everything she and her sister had gone through, and she had taken intense interest.  “Hey, Mrs. Krenshaw.”

“Hello, Kaley.  How are we?”
  Underneath the water clinging to the wall, something swam past Mrs. Krenshaw.  A great eye looked in on her, and then darted off into the Deep.

“Fine.”

Mrs. Krenshaw took a seat.  She was a skinny-up-top-but-fat-bottomed woman, who waddled more than she walked, and she was equal parts kindhearted and clinical.  She always had a smile plastered on her face, but that smile never touched her eyes.  The smile was for others’ sake, while the eyes were always searching.  Mrs. Krenshaw had an ability to see into people—not exactly like Kaley’s charm, but perhaps a distant cousin?  She’d suffered trauma somewhere in her own life—Kaley sensed a mistrust of males in general, even of Mr. Manning four feet to her left—and had a need to investigate others.  Though she didn’t know it (but Kaley did), in investigating the pain of others, Mrs. Krenshaw was actually attempting to discover her own demons.

Kaley hypothesized that somewhere out there was another Dmitry to Mrs. Krenshaw’s own inner Shannon.  She even had a bit of a charm. 
She doesn’t have a pet psycho, though
.

“Kaley,” said Mr. Manning, clicking his pen and priming it for
note-taking, “we just want to clear up some things regarding what happened in the cafeteria.”

“Laquanda’s not gonna die, is she?”

Mrs. Krenshaw made a note.  Mr. Manning sighed.  “I can’t say for sure, Kaley, all I can say is what I’ve already told you.  She seemed better when she left.”  A pregnant pause filled the office.  Mr. Manning glanced over at Mrs. Krenshaw, then back at Kaley.  “Tell us what happened if you would, Kaley.  What did you see?”

She didn’t know how to respond to that.
 
What happened
, she thought. 
What happened
. 
How could they possibly understand?
  Her eyes wandered.  They touched the pictures on the desk, the plaques on the wall, and finally the books on the shelves.  “You have a book called
The Art of War
,” she said.

Mr. Manning blinked, and looked over at his bookshelf.  He smiled.  “A gift from an old friend, back at Adairsville Elementary School, where I first started.”

“Why do you have it in here?  This office…everything else in here is, like, you know, all school-type stuff.”

The principal shrugged.  “There’s some good advice in it.”

“About war?”

He shrugged again, this time more slowly.  “Kind of.  It’s more about how to approach conflict in any given situation.  It was written for war, but its philosophies
can be applied to other problems in life.”

“Like what?”  To her left, Mrs. Krenshaw was making another note.  No doubt something about Kaley avoiding the topic of what happened in the lunchroom, but Kaley really was suddenly curious, particularly because she sensed that Mr. Manning was genuinely fond of the book.

Mr. Manning licked his lips.  “Well, my favorite passage is one that says, ‘To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.’ ”

Kaley looked at him.  “That sounds…dumb.  And dangerous.”

He laughed.  “Well, it doesn’t mean you have to literally
side
with your enemy, it just means…well…”

“You have to, like, empathize with them?”

“
Empathize
, there you go.  Try to see where they’re coming from, how they became what they became.  For instance, I deal with bullies and even parents who behave like bullies.  My job isn’t to beat them at bullying, but to, you know, sort of understand
why
they’re bullying.”

“And that helps?”

“Many times, yes.  I’ve found that bullies are mostly insecure, and have a need to be controlling, and when they can’t get that power they act out.  We all feel insecure and want power at times,” he went on, “so all I have to do to understand them is to amplify my own such feelings to guess how out of control the bullies’ own emotions are, and that helps me to deal with them, and sometimes talk them down.  That’s another of Sun Tzu’s teachings: ‘The supreme art of war is to subdue your enemy without fighting.’ ”

“Sun who?”

Mr. Manning chuckled.  “Sun Tzu.  He’s the fellow who wrote the book some thousands of years ago.”

“Oh.”  Kaley thought on all of that for a moment.  “Subdue your enemy without fighting, huh?  How does that work?  Wouldn’t a person just get beat up?”

“Not if they know their enemy well enough,” said Mr. Manning.  In the corner, Mrs. Krenshaw’s pen was working furiously.  “Kaley, may we talk about what happened in the lunchroom?”

They sat in silence while she decided.  Kaley looked at him.  She’d always sensed mostly goodness in Mr. Manning, but now, he
had just gone up a few notches on her trust scale.  “Laquanda and Nancy were talking about my sister,” she confided.  “I told them not to and they kept on.”

Mr. Manning nodded.  “That’s Nancy Boyle?”  She nodded.  “Kaley, did you threaten Nancy and Laquanda?”  She said nothing. 
After a moment, though, she nodded.  “What did you tell them?”

She swallowed.  “I told them…that I would kill them if they kept talking about Shannon.  They kept laughing, and, like, saying Shannon has itchy private spots…because of her vaginitis. 
And I told them to…”  A warm tear trickled down her cheek, and she wiped it away.  More note-taking from Mrs. Krenshaw.  “I told them to stop, or I’d hurt them.”

“And did you do anything to either one of them?”

Kaley nodded.  “Yes.”

“What did you do?”

She had no other recourse but to tell the truth.  “I…I…I felt this
wave
of hate come over me from someplace else.  It was familiar to me, like I knew it, like I had met it somewhere before.”  Another tear, another wipe, another note taken by Mrs. Krenshaw.  “I, uh, I wanted to hurt them, so I, like, willed them to be hurt.  I felt…I felt…
changes
happening.  I didn’t have control over them, so I, like…I pushed and prodded those changes.  I
allowed
them to come through.”

Mrs. Krenshaw looked up, and finally spoke. 
“Are you saying you wished it on Laquanda, and that your wish came true, Kaley?”  Mr. Manning and her exchanged a look.

“I guess so,” Kaley whispered.  She fought back more tears, and looked down at her hands in her lap.  “I was…weak.  I had a moment of weakness and I let the hate just…just…
wash over
me.”  She sniffled.  “And then I heard my Nan’s voice.  That’s my grandmother.  She told me…she said, ‘You stupid girl,’ or something like that.  ‘You let her go now.’  I forget the rest.”  She hadn’t forgotten, she just didn’t want to think on it anymore.

For a moment, the air in the room was bloated with silence.  The principal and the counselor exchanged
another look.  Mrs. Krenshaw spoke, “Kaley, you know that you had nothing to do with what happened to Laquanda, right?  That was a bad wish at a bad time.  The nurses know that Laquanda suffered an allergic reaction—her file says she’s had some reaction to shellfish in the past—”

“We didn’t have any shellfish
for lunch today,” Kaley said.  “It was me.  I did that to her.”

“I’m sure it feels that way,
and it’s understandable that you feel guilty about it, but believe me, you had nothing to do with it.”

Kaley just looked at
Mrs. Krenshaw for a moment, then looked away.  She imagined what might be going on in Chelyabinsk, what Spencer might have done with the children. 
Four in the back, one in the trunk
. 
Did he drive the car into a lake to hide it?  Were the kids still in it?
  Her mind went to the one dead girl wearing the One Direction shirt, the one that the Others had gotten a hold of and torn apart.  She shut her eyes against the mental image.

Mr. Manning finally
sighed, and said, “Regardless of what happened or what you think, Kaley, there does remain the matter of the threat itself.”  Kaley nodded.  “You’re a smart girl, so I’m sure you know it’s a very serious thing.  Threatening to kill or do bodily harm to another student is grounds for suspension…”

As he went on, Kaley felt something licking her heel.  She pulled her feet up out of the water, and saw that Mrs. Krenshaw had noticed and was scribbling something in her little book, probably making a note out of the motion.