Sacrifice (17 page)

Malloy grabbed Mohammed by the shoulders, forcing his partner to look at him. “You want to drag your wife into this? Come on, man. Think about it. This shit, whatever it is, is dangerous. Don’t get her involved. Don’t risk your marriage and your career over this.”

Mohammed sighed deeply. “I don’t know if any of this is real, but I know two things. My marriage is fucked up, and that guy’s story explains a lot of the weird shit we’ve seen in this case. Mary Wells is spotted at a schoolyard. Her teacher talks to her and the next thing you know everything within yards of the guy is trying to murder him. Makes sense if what Frank Wells said is true. That kid transferred something into her teacher that made everything instantly want him dead. I think it’s whatever this voodoo chick took out of her followers and so do you. If she can do it then I have to try. It’s either that or I just sit back and wait for my marriage to fall apart. If you ever loved anyone the way I love my wife then you’d understand.”

Malloy thought for a moment and then shook his head. “I think it’s stupid and reckless and will probably mean the end of your career.”

“Better that than the end of my marriage. I can always be a private detective or something.”

“Bro, I can’t let you do this.”

Mohammed shook his head. “I’m doin’ it, John. With or without you.”

“Fuck! Mohammed, what the fuck are you doin’ here?”

“I’m tryin’ to save my marriage, expose a dangerous cult, and catch a child abuser and possible murderer at the same time. You tell me, John. What the hell is wrong with that?”

Malloy shook his head. He looked around the room trying to find the words as if they were floating in the air somewhere and he just had to pluck them out, hand them over to Mohammed, and everything would be okay again.

“Call ahead to the municipal court and see if you can get Judge Applegate on the line. If she’s working, she’ll give us the warrant.”

“Let’s go now, John. The court’s only two blocks away. We can have the warrant and be on our way in fifteen minutes.”

They left the building and drove to the courthouse, not because it was far, but because driving was a habit. They were lucky. The judge was in her chambers. Malloy knocked on her door.

“Let me handle this. She’s sort of got a crush on me.”

Mohammed rolled his eyes. “Okay, but hurry. You can break her off a piece later.”

Chapter 28

“Did you get the warrant?” Mohammed had a glow in his eyes that Malloy found more than a little disturbing. It was a look of obsession. Finding the voodoo woman was no longer about breaking the case for Mohammed. He clearly had his own agenda.

“Yeah, I got it. I still think this is stupid though, Mo.”

Mohammed shrugged. “The heart has reasons that reason never knew. And I wouldn’t do this if I thought it would hurt the case. You know that, John. If everything goes as planned, I’ll save my marriage and gather enough evidence to convict this voodoo bitch.”

Malloy nodded.

“And if it goes wrong you might end up just like that school teacher.”

Mohammed stared at Malloy with a blank expression, eyes hollow and void, not seeing his partner but the brutalized corpse of the teacher who’d been mauled by his own students and stung by a thousand bees.

“Let’s just go pick up Mr. and Mrs. Wells. I’m not going to change my mind,” Mohammed said.

Malloy stared at him like he was seeing him for the last time.

“Don’t look at me like that, John. It’s not a funeral.”

“After what we’ve seen the last few days, can you really be sure of that, Mo?”

The uncertainty on Mohammed’s face spoke volumes.

“I-I have to do this.” His voice wavered when he spoke.

“Okay, but we’re going to talk about this some more. Let’s just go get Frank Wells.”

They left the police station with the warrant and climbed into their patrol vehicle. Mohammed was already on the phone with his wife. “Em? Yeah, it’s me. Hey, I’ve got a surprise for you. We’re going to see a … well, you’re going to come to work with me. You’re going to go undercover with me to crack a case. You’ll get to spend the whole day with me. It’ll just be for one day but it’ll be fun. No. It won’t be dangerous. Not at all. We just have to go watch this religious ceremony and pretend like we’re believers. It’s kind of kooky, spirits and stuff. The hardest part will be trying not to laugh. I’m not sure when. It’ll be a day or two. John and I have to set up a few things first. You excited?”

Malloy was staring at Mohammed, shaking his head in obvious disapproval. Mohammed jabbed a finger toward the road and mouthed the word “Drive!” Malloy pulled the car out of the parking garage and headed toward the freeway.

They hadn’t driven more than a few miles when a call came in from dispatch. There was a man calling 911 claiming he was being attacked by everyone and everything in Green Valley.

“What?”

“First it came in as a report of shots fired, and then the shooter called. He’s on his cell phone. He says he’s being chased by birds, cats, dogs, and little kids. He’s running down Eastern Avenue. Patrolmen are en route.”

“We’re en route.” He turned to Mohammed. “We’ve got another one.”

“I’ve got to go, Emily. I’ll tell you more tonight.”

“There’s a guy running down Eastern Avenue being chased by dogs and cats and … get this - little kids.”

“Little kids?”

Malloy nodded.

“Just like the school teacher and the guy who got eaten by his dog.”

“Sounds like it.”

“We’d better get over there. This shit is about to get ugly,” Mohammed said.

“No shit.” He could see in his partner’s eyes that he was disappointed he’d have to delay his interrogation of the Wells and, subsequently, his meeting with the voodoo priestess. Malloy wondered just how desperate his partner was to save his marriage. The story Frank Wells told them about people giving up their daughters to this Delilah chick in order to be happy again, to feel love again, had seemed far-fetched. He thought it was more likely she’d been feeding them some sort of drug that made them feel peaceful and blissful - opium, or some sort of super weed. Her followers were probably all addicted to whatever she was giving them, and it was the addiction that made them give up their children. Anything to get high. Just like every other junkie he’d run into during his years on the force. Drug addiction made sense.

It had been hard for Malloy to imagine anyone being so desperate to save a marriage they’d let their kids go through whatever those girls had been put through, not with so many marriages ending in divorce, all the married women he’d slept with, the married men he’d seen sneaking around the strip clubs. But seeing how Mohammed was acting over the mere possibility of being happy with Emily again made Malloy wonder.

He pulled the dash light from the glove compartment and flipped it on, turning onto the freeway with lights flashing. He piloted the vehicle onto the shoulder and pushed the accelerator to the floor. What the dispatcher described was eerily similar to what they’d seen at the elementary school. There was no doubt in his mind that if they didn’t get to Green Valley in the next few minutes, they’d be scraping another corpse off the street.

The car came close to scraping the median a few times as Malloy maneuvered it past the bumper-to-bumper traffic, going ninety mph. He slowed briefly as he approached a traffic accident, waving to a motorcycle cop as he skirted past, and then stomping down on the accelerator once more when he was safely out of traffic.

A few moments later he and Mohammed exited the I-15 onto Eastern Avenue, where all hell was breaking loose.

Chapter 29

Traffic on Eastern Avenue was not moving. Everything had come to a halt. People were standing outside their cars, covering their eyes, hands over their mouths, weeping, gasping, shouting, and screaming.

“They’re killing him!”

“Oh my God! They’re eating him alive!”

“What the hell is going on?” Mohammed asked. “What the hell are they all looking at?”

“I think they’re looking at that,” Malloy replied, pointing.

There was a dark cloud in the center of Eastern Avenue - and it was alive. Malloy drove the unmarked police cruiser onto the curb to get around the cars parked in the middle of the street. He steered into the dense fog seconds before he realized what it was. Flies. Bees. Hornets. Moths. Gnats. Hundreds of thousands of insects formed a living barrier, a turbid miasma so dense Malloy couldn’t see beyond the hood of the car even with the high beams on. The fluid and viscera of hundreds of insects splattered the windshield as they drove into the cloud, further obscuring the view. Malloy slowed the vehicle to a crawl as he concentrated on keeping the wheel steady, driving forward in a straight line through the cacophonous swarm.

“Where did they all come from?”

“There must be all kinds of bugs running around down here, especially with all these restaurants on this street now.”

“But why are they all
here?
” Mohammed asked.

“I have a feeling we’re gonna find the guy who placed that 911 call at the center of this swarm …”

“This is too much, Malloy. Can you believe this shit?”

The chitinous clicking and buzzing of insects was deafening. Wings fluttered, beating on the vehicle’s windows, doors, hood, and roof as flocks of birds joined the riotous mass, adding their screeches and caws to the electric hum of insect wings. And there were other sounds as well - growling, hissing, snarling.

“You hear that?” Malloy asked.

“Sounds like wild animals.”

The inside of the car was now as dark as night, a moonless, starless night filled with menace. The massive cloud of birds and insects completely blotted out the sun, choking all the light from the street.

“Get us out of here, man. Get us the fuck out of here!” Mohammed shouted. “I’m getting fucking claustrophobic!”

“I can’t go any faster! I can’t see shit in here!”

The car struck something solid. Malloy and Mohammed bounced in their seats as whatever they’d hit fell beneath the wheels of the car and they rolled over it, crushing it. Something howled and whimpered. Their vehicle collided with several other objects. Something large and heavy bounced onto the automobile’s hood and smashed into their windshield, shattering it. The cloud finally began to lift. The sunlight peeked its way through the crows, pigeons, hawks, bees, flies, and other winged creatures, illuminating the inside of the vehicle. Blood rained down the car’s windows. Malloy turned on the windshield wipers, smearing blood, feathers, and smashed insects across the glass.

The thick mass of insects rose from the vehicle, lifting like a living black veil before slowly dispersing. Mohammed peered through the shattered, gore-streaked windshield and gasped.

“There’s something on the hood of the car, man. I think it’s a body.”

Malloy stopped the car. The windshield wipers were still on. Mohammed reached across and hit the button for the wiper fluid, spraying the glass down with soapy water and washing away more of the accumulated gore. Gradually, a small pane of visibility cleared and the detectives were able to see through it.

What looked like human bones lay draped over the front of the car. It was impossible to tell the age, race, or sex of the remains. The corpse had been eaten down to the bone; skin, fat, organs, and muscle, gnawed away. Only the hands and skull made it identifiable as human. Rats competed with birds and cats for the few scraps of meat that remained stubbornly attached.

“You think that’s our 911 caller?” Mohammed asked.

Malloy nodded.

“How long ago did you get the call from dispatch?”

Malloy looked at his watch. “Eight or nine minutes.”

Mohammed stared into the empty sockets where the dead man’s eyes should have been. Flies and bees writhed in the two hollow cavities. Once again maggots were already crawling over the corpse. Malloy could not even imagine how they had gotten there. There was no way flies could have laid eggs on the corpse in the span of a few minutes. Never mind the eggs hatching. It took days for larva to develop from eggs.

“All of this in less than ten minutes? John, man, we’re out of our league here. This is fuckin’ crazy!”

“This thing is insane. I never really believed in the supernatural - magic and voodoo and stuff - but what else could it be? I can’t think of any other explanation. You sure you still want to bring Emily into this mess?”

“Let’s talk about that later, John. We’ve got a fucking body to deal with right now. How the hell did it wind up on our windshield?”

“We hit it.”

“Yeah, but it would have had to have been standing upright for us to hit it and wind up with it on the hood of the car. There’s no way this thing was standing. It had to have been dead long before we got here.”

Malloy looked around. There were more than half a dozen children standing around the car. He looked closer and saw blood on their hands, face, and clothing. The kids had been involved. He turned toward his partner. Mohammed was looking at the same thing.

“Kids again?” Mohammed asked.

“I think they threw his body at the car.”

“What the fuck? Why?”

Malloy shrugged. “I don’t know. Why does this thing affect animals and kids but not adults?”

“
Little
kids, you mean. No wait - that’s not entirely true. It does affect adults, just not as powerfully. Remember what we felt when we were watching that teacher get attacked? We hated him. You felt it too. For a moment you wanted to hurt him as much as those kids. The witness from the Bruce Martin murder, the guy who was killed by his dog? She said the same thing - she wanted him dead too.”

“So why don’t adults attack then? Why didn’t we just pull out our guns and blast that teacher’s head off?” Malloy said.

“I don’t know. Maybe social conditioning? Adults are more civilized.”

“Seriously, Mo? You’re probably the only cop on the force who’d make that claim.”

“We’re more civilized than kids and bees. That’s why the gangs recruit young kids, because you can get a kid to do just about anything. They don’t have the same inhibitions. You know kids don’t have the same impulse control adults have.”