R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning (13 page)

He dropped his gloves to cock that big right hook and I uppercut him so hard that his entire frame lifted a foot off the mat and when his legs came back down they may as well have been made of mashed potatoes.

Officer Rico crumpled like a shitty suit, right into the fetal position, and the ref didn’t even bother counting. I walked back over to my corner, packed up my bag, and returned to make sure the kid wasn’t dead.

He was just waking back up.

“You ever say anything to me about Burke, show any attitude to senior police, or I hear you’re playing hot-shot quarterback out on the mean streets, we’re coming back here and I am going to beat every square inch of pretty off that sexy face before lights out. You’ll be so bruised and deformed the next shift they’ll think you’re the Elephant Man. Learn a lesson here. Be a good cop. I’m going to be checking up on you. You’re my new favorite project.”

I gave him the two fingers in the eyes “I’m watching you” sign. I guessed he was still seeing about eighteen fingers and I don’t know how many sets of eyeballs. I looked at his partner—Gibbs, the guy who had his shit squared away—who was trying to get Rico to come around to his senses.

“You tell him,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

He’d be all right. That was why I changed my plan, last second. Kid like that wasn’t going to be humiliated taking a beating. His squad would probably start calling him Rocky or Balboa and he’d be hitting the streets every day thinking he could take on the whole wide world. What stung a guy like that—what taught Mr. Ego to wake up and smell the coffee beans—was being one hundred percent knocked the fuck out.

It doesn’t get any more humbling in boxing than the one-punch down and out.

I wasn’t even sweating anymore.

Somehow I knew Burke was looking down, laughing, and it made me want to sit down in the middle of the ring and cry.

Three nights earlier the humanoid had appeared for no reason—okay, Spence admitted to himself, no reason of which he himself was aware. It was changing, morphing, and if Spence wasn’t bat-shit crazy, becoming even more human.

Yet it still held its control over him. That first night milling around the apartment, just to prove a point, the humanoid forced Spence into a twenty minute Irish jig. It sat in a chair in complete silence—expressionless—the entire time. There was no music, no happiness, no comedy—just Spence jigging around the open spaces in the apartment like a complete moron and the humanoid demon watching him.

When the thing relinquished control, it told him not to ever think for a moment that he was free of his bond with the creature, but that they’d entered a new stage of the grand plan—a plan to which Spence was most definitely
not
privy—and that the possessive occupation of Spence was no longer required.

Now, three nights later and a busload of children murdered, Spence wanted more than anything to garner a pat on the back or a “good work” or “well done.”

“I did good, right?” Spence said to the creature.

The demon, of course, had no name, though as it changed, Spence knew exactly who the humanoid was. He’d not say it of course. Such a declaration would likely have him as dead as that fat bus driver and her gaggle of damaged children. Spence didn’t care one way or the other who or what the humanoid would become nor what the master plan entailed, but the creature had been wandering around the warehouse, looking in on Melissa while she slept, which not only made Spencer sick to his stomach but also angry as hell—but what was he going to say?

“You did fine.”

The creature spoke as if just recovering from a cold, phlegm and mucus still clinging to the insides of the throat. The eyes were striking. So blue they glinted like the sharpened edge of a surgeon’s blade—and it was in those eyes Spence saw who it was. The thing’s skin was beginning to form and it looked reptilian: cracked and broken. Like a kitchen tile smashed into a hundred pieces.

“Soon he’ll know,” the thing said.

“Macaulay?”

“The number. Judas, of course, as if a school child could not have figured that brainless clue. All of it. He knows it already, his subconscious simply won’t let it loose inside his brain. The truth is too traumatic.”

“Are you going to tell me what this all means?”

“Never.”

“Won’t I find out when your—when Macaulay figures it out?”

“If you’re still alive to witness it.”

Spence didn’t say anything after that. He simply sat in the darkness and listened to the thing wheeze and gurgle and hate.

I FINALLY got a callback from Father Meyer West, my cousin, where he was volunteering in Cambodia alongside a congregation of Asian monks building homes made of the earth and bringing in fresh drinking water to the horde of homeless whose entire village had been decimated by a mudslide. I had sent multiple emails but heard nothing. There was no cell service in the remote area but he was able to call from a satellite phone that was slated for “emergency use only”.  According to him, the priests, nuns, and other volunteers used it when they became lonely and needed to hear a loved one’s voice.

“Meyer?”

“Bobby. I can’t believe it’s you.”

“We’re in a bad way here in Denver,” I said. “Serial killings, little girls. It’s Spencer Grant.”

“If Grant’s involved, so is Father Rule,” he said. “You realize this.”

“I do realize it, although I’m not sure there’s much of a distinction,” I said.

“I don’t know what I can do from here.”

“When we were in Idaho you did a lot of research. You talked once of the real reason Rule could do what he does; why we’d not seen him before.”

“You’re breaking up,” Meyer said. “Rule did what?”

“No, you said there was a reason he was here now.”

“Not a reason,” Meyer said. “A time. There’s always been evil in the world, just as there’s always been good. But that’s the metaphysical; the intangible. Not devils walking the earth.”

“But you thought you knew why it was real now. Physical demons and Rule and all of this other nonsensical shit. In the waking world with us.”

“I said I had some thoughts on the subject.”

“Well let’s hear them. I am at the end of the killer’s rope out here, Meyer.”

“In the Book of Ossian there was foretold a betrayer in the Clan MacAulay. One who would not stand for Good but for the forces of Evil.”

“And you were going to share this with me when?”

“Things have been so hard on you. I-I just didn’t want to add more gloom where there was nothing to be gained. Even if it’s accurate, it doesn’t change much. I think we know enough to piece that part together.”

“It still changes a lot, Meyer.”

“Okay. Yes, I know. But that was my rationalization. The text was difficult to decipher at best, Bobby. You know that. The rest was more my supposition and intuition than printed in ink.”

“I want to hear it anyway,” I said. Meyer’s lack of self-confidence could be trying at best.

“If a weak link in a chain weakens enough—”

“Broken chain,” I said.

“The book also implied that somewhere around the fourteenth century the Clan was at its most powerful in both numbers and will and physical Evil was banished or put back somehow; back to whence it came.”

“Hell?”

“Maybe, by one group’s definition. A different place to someone else. We’re way past the boundaries of any one or two religions, Bobby.”

“So how can we find this rogue Macaulay?”

“I have no idea,” Meyer said. “I told you, this is barely a pet theory.”

“You’re the smartest man I know,” I said.

“No, Bobby.
You’re
the smartest person you know.”

“You know how much I hate that, Meyer.”

“But sometimes you have to stop putting up the fight, cousin.”

“If I’m so fucking smart, why can’t I figure out a way to end this?”

“I’m betting the idea has already sprouted inside that thick skull of yours,” Meyer said.

The ironic thing was, it had.

“I really feel in my being that you need to be here. Something beyond important is going down. That much I wouldn’t hesitate to say, and I don’t. We’ve won before but we’ve won together. There’s significance in that, Meyer. Strength in numbers, power in blood.”

“What I’m doing here, Mac. It fulfills me. Frankly, our previous encounters scared the shite right out of me. I’m not you, cousin. I’m an academic. A weakling. And a bit of a coward, I’m afraid.”

“You are one of the bravest men I know, Meyer, and it’s you alone who’ve taught me time and again that the mind is the strongest organ in the body. By
far
. I’m asking you to come.”

“Then I will put aside my terror and find a way to be there for you, my cousin and friend,” Father Meyer West said.

I had grown up despising my intellect. Could there be anything more egotistical than to think such a thing? It wasn’t
my
label; I’d been labeled long before I had any memory of it. Two, three years old maybe. There were the tests and the examinations and, later, the special classes (those I
did
remember).

I wasn’t exactly the nerd or the brain—I was tough and strong and an athlete, too, but Jax got to be the star and the ladies’ man and the normal kid who got reprimanded by the teacher and, later, pummeled by our father for skipping class or pulling a “D” on a paper.

The dumb jock
, he used to called himself, which was his way of joking to defend who he was against whatever jealousy or shortcomings or underachievement his ego claimed defined him. It was ridiculous. Jax was my best friend—not just a brother.

My best friend.

God how I missed him. I didn’t know how or why or even when any longer that we’d allowed our differences to define and divide us, but we had. Our personalities were vastly different but much of that came from my own inability to put up with Jax’s hatred of himself, his inability in his own eyes to live up to me, and the reality that there was no way for me to tell him that thoughts like that were bullshit or prove to him that I didn’t feel that way or believe any of that at all.

I’d promised myself that when the shit was done in Idaho that we would talk—brother-to-brother, friend-to-friend, and figure everything out. Get back to where we used to be.

And then he was gone.

You spend a lifetime ignoring someone while they are but a phone call or an email away and then when they die you miss them every minute of every day. We couldn’t connect to the afterlife, assuming there even was one.

It made no sense for me to disbelieve something after all I’d seen evidence of it, but I still had too much baggage to really accept all I’d been through. I wished my sharing of what I’d been told—what I’d witnessed—with the task force would have unburdened me somehow, but when I saw
that look
in their eyes, it was the same as back in the days of elementary school when the other kids realized I could read
Tom Sawyer
or
Ulysses
in the second grade.

The oddball.

The one who was different from the rest of them.

The child reading the classics, textbooks on Physics and Chemistry when he was ten.

Hell I couldn’t just read them, I could recite them verbatim.

How was my brother ever supposed to compete with that?

My own father despised it. My abilities made my father feel like there was a superiority that came from my mother’s side of the family, since all his kin had been laborers and blue-collar folk. So whom did he punish?

The son most like him.

Jax.

I could remember every blow, every whip of the belt, every slap.

And I could recall the agony in my brother’s voice, right down to the decibel.

My own personal Hell.

A flawless memory.

Melissa Grant sat on her bed, ear buds in, listening to the Dropkick Murphys song
End of the Night
and wondered, not for the first time—not
nearly
—why she’d lived her life more as a prisoner than a daughter. Her father loved her, she knew that, but he could never come to explain the place they lived, where the rest of the family was—except to tell her they were patiently awaiting an arrival and that all these years it was she who was the most important piece in a thousand—even million—year struggle.

She sensed at times that her father was different now, but her memories of him
before
, well, they were too foggy most of the time—not unlike being in a dream state then waking and trying to remember the dream but literally watching it fade, second by second, in the mind.

Idaho she remembered.

That was the only memory that Melissa had that was strong. She could actually see the state’s outline in her mind, the focus on the tallest top—the panhandle—where they used to live. Beyond that, not a lot. However there were memories there that, unlike her clouded memories of who her father used to be, felt blocked or locked away.

Memories of her mother and sister. They were more on the outreaches of her mind, constantly moving but finding all the doors and windows locked against them entering and Melissa, too, without the keys.

But Idaho was a place. At least she had that. Wherever she was now, there had to be a path toward Idaho. The world was finite. That meant there was nowhere from which she could
not
find a way home.

And she sensed that home was where the answers might be, or at least the beginning of the trail of breadcrumbs that would eventually lead her to the keys to unlocking her mind.

Which is why she decided that before her birthday she was going to run away. Or escape. Or whatever meant she didn’t have to wonder any longer about the dark basement and the terrifying dreams of creatures visiting their home—a warehouse, she corrected herself, not even a home.

Idaho.

Home.