The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) (38 page)

No one answered.

“Go ahead, search the place,” Robichaux ordered, though this was a bit puzzling. “Then we can get out a fugitive warrant. Informant says there should be quite a stockpile of dope here, somewhere.”

And then they heard the small click out by the front door, which indicated said door had been standing open for precisely 30 seconds.

The driver of the van that had delivered the Phil Robichaux SWAT team to the West Providence address above the liquor store had just lit a cigarette when Phil Robichaux and his squad found out what 15 sticks of dynamite can do to the second floor of an 85-year-old wood frame building. The heat wave of the blast was enough of a shock, even down at the curb, that the driver fumbled his just-lit cigarette, dropping it in his lap.

He’d just recovered it, fortunately quick enough to keep it from burning a hole in his uniform trousers, when someone rapped with their knuckles on his driver-side window. He rolled down the window, his attention still mostly focused on the top half of the building, which was not so much on fire as, well … gone, though flaming beams and pieces of wallboard were now starting to rain down on the sidewalk.

“Yeah?” he asked, jumping a little as something landed on the hood of the van. It appeared to be a severed human arm, no longer wearing a shirt sleeve, but still complete with hand and wristwatch, and bearing a brand-new tattoo of two shell casings under a leering black-and-red skull and crossbones.

“So,” asked the large, smiling young black man in the sweat pants and windbreaker — guy had to be over 300 pounds and none of it fat, looked like a linebacker for the Patriots — “How’s that War on Drugs going?” Whereupon he put two rounds from his .357 magnum revolver into the forehead of the befuddled police driver, who promptly dropped his cigarette again.

* * *

The cell block was never really quiet. Some of the men snored, and they hadn’t all exactly been selected for their fine mental balance, so it wasn’t real rare for one of the inmates to do some banging and raving. But after midnight, with the lights down, it got as quiet as it was going to get.

“Drug Kingpin” Windsor Annesley, a bit of a celebrity who had shown he wasn’t going to be anybody’s boy toy, and now had several new sets of stitches to show for it, was alone in his cell when convicted IRS embezzler Joey “The Iceman” Calibria, in the adjoining cell, heard a sudden rush of air, and then the voices of two persons who sounded for all the world as though they were right there in Annesley’s cell with him, instructing him to put on some kind of headset.

“How’re things going on the outside, boys?”

“I’m sure you heard Judge Crustio is dead.”

“I did.”

“Some other operations went down last night and today. Probably took out at least 30, 40 of the bastards in the six-state area. But the, um … gentleman who sent us wanted to make sure that all happened while you were still in here, safe and sound, with a nice alibi. He says to tell you, ‘The other side doesn’t know they’re beat yet, but they do know they’re in a war.’”

“Reprisals?”

“We’re waitin’ for ’em. They’ll run into a few surprises. We’ve hacked into their systems, purged all their records of church members, replaced them with the names and addresses of relatives of their
own cops and judges and prosecutors, all according to plan. So that’s gonna make for some colorful raids and suspects getting shot for making ‘furtive movements.’ But right now they’re reeling. It actually seems like they never believed anyone would ever hit back. He says the key now is to keep ’em on the ropes.”

“I wouldn’t have expected anything less. The other regions?”

“All the cells have gone dark, of course, so we don’t really know. They’ve generally been told to take it slow, though. Better one successful hit than a bunch of half-assed mistakes.”

“Good.”

“You understand what this thing is?”

“I knew our … associate was looking for the plans. Yes, I understand the principle.”

“Good. You’ve got the thing so it fits comfortable? Take one of these, too. The new orders are that we all wear one of these .45 subguns; the area we’ll be transiting has some pretty active wildlife. The magazine is loaded but it won’t fire till you rack the slide. That’s it, keep the sling where you can grab it easy. Normal procedure now would be for you to take a dose of one of the sacraments, too, but in this case, there’s just no time.”

“That’s new.”

“It’s the new navigation protocols. We’ll explain later. For now, we’ve got you covered. Just turn on the headset here, set your teeth if you’re not used to the vibration. The three of us focus at the same point on the wall there, and then we bring up this rheostat on the multiplier circuit till you see the vortex start to open …”

There was a shimmering and another sudden breeze, a small “pop,” and Windsor Annesley’s cell was empty.

* * *

The John F. Kennedy Federal Building on Boston’s New Sudbury Street was a huge, secure facility in the old historic downtown, across from Boston City Hall and two blocks from the historic Paul Revere house. It was a measure of what “government” had become in
America that in most of the old East Coast downtowns, the colonial-era statehouses in which a nation had been formed looked like little dollhouses next to the gigantic monoliths of concrete and marble that it now took to house even small portions of the ravenous federal bureaucracy.

The twin 20-story towers of “the JFK” housed the offices of the state’s U.S. senators, who were big sponsors of the lucrative War on Drugs and all the government contracts it generated, as well as the regional office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which was technically a division of the U.S. “Department of Justice.” No one was supposed to get into any of these offices — even hobbled, aging veterans visiting the regional office of the Department of Veterans Affairs — without passing through a rigorous security check including metal detectors and smiling blue-gloved goons ready to grope your gonads.

Precisely because all entrances were so thoroughly secured, however, the old practice of having night watchmen visit every darkened hallway and office in the building between 2 and 6 a.m. had long since been abandoned. So when the ten members of the Church of Cthulhu stepped through the vortex into the darkened main lobby of the DEA’s fancy office suite, carrying the several-days dead and thus already highly odiferous carcass of a stockyard steer resting on a cradle of heavy canvas with ten convenient hand-holds riveted in place, they knew they were unlikely to be interrupted in their work.

The stinking remains of the hefty beast were carefully set to rest on the carpet in the middle of the room, covering the stylized, brown-blue-and-green eagle shield reproduced there. Armed with sets of duplicate keys acquired from sympathetic members of the janitorial staff over a period of weeks, several of the operatives now set to work unlocking and propping open every door on the floor, including those that led to the senators’ offices.

When that was done, the real work of the pre-dawn visit got underway. The large portable resonator was set up not far from the steer carcass in the middle of the office carpet, and a good-sized vortex quickly opened to the Sixth Dimension, where an earlier deposit
of several more extremely strong-smelling stockyard purchases had already been made, hours before. Sure enough, a half-dozen large meat-eaters were clearly visible in the moonlight, their jaws stained black with blood as they looked up at this new interruption, licking their chops. Eight of the Cthulhian operatives now quietly slipped away to the stairwell from which the whole party would soon make their exit from the building. But two volunteers stayed behind a little longer, calling softly to get the attention of a couple of smaller, eight-foot-high tyrannosaurs.

“Come on, big boy. Here’s a fresh one for you. Come on through. That’s the way.” Hesitantly, drawn by the smell of the additional ripe carcass, two of the big meat eaters entered through the vortex, looking left and right, growling softly. Once the giant reptiles were in the dimly lit DEA lobby, hard at work tearing big chunks of raw steer from this latest gift in the middle of the carpet, shaking their heads and splattering coagulating beef blood in all directions as they chewed, the final two Cthulhians shut down the resonator. They stayed only long enough to watch the vortex iris down and close, trapping the big predators inside Boston’s John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Building.

By sunrise, these two tyrannosaurs were going to be somewhat irritated by their new and somewhat restricted environment, and thus highly likely to attack and eviscerate whatever came out of the elevators at the end of the hall. It would probably not be a good day to be a high-ranking staff member of one of Massachusetts’ two U.S. senators, or an agent of the New England regional office of the Drug Enforcement Administration — though some of them might still have time to ask, as they ran screaming for their lives, “I wonder what would happen if we fought a War on Drugs … and someone fought back?”

The last two Cthulhians quietly packed up their equipment and slipped away down the hall toward the stairwell. Behind them, they could hear their large reptilian visitors continuing to rather messily tear and chew their morning meal.

* * *

“This is Brittany Watson, Action News, on the grounds of the state Department of Corrections maximum security facility in Cranston, where officials have now confirmed Windsor Annesley, head of the outlawed Church of Cthulhu, sentenced only a few months ago to multiple life terms on more than a million counts of trafficking in outlawed hallucinogenic drugs, has escaped.”

The petite Miss Watson now walked sideways so the camera could pan with her, picking up the guard towers behind. Movement was always good. And Brittany was good at this kind of strange Kabuki, walking sideways without either looking at her own feet or tripping over them, which somehow looked perfectly natural on the air.

“Warden Jonas Grumby declined to speak to us on camera today, Doug, but the word we’re getting from inside the prison is that strange lights were seen coming from Annesley’s cell last night. Officials have been unable to explain how the inmate could possibly have gotten through multiple locked steel doors, but it appears when guards passed through early today for their morning count, they found Annesley’s cell still locked, but empty, and no sign of the prisoner anywhere inside the grounds.

“Another inmate in an adjoining cell apparently tells a strange tale of lights in the night, and the voices of multiple visitors holding a conversation with Annesley in his cell shortly before he disappeared, as well as a loud mechanical humming sound. But we’re told authorities are dismissing that tale as merely an effort to muddy the waters; that prisoner has been placed in solitary confinement until he agrees to provide more useful information.”

“Brittany?”

“Yes, Doug?”

“Does this bear any relation to that wave of shootings and bombings, yesterday?”

“Not that anyone will confirm, Doug. One of yesterday’s shooting victims, assistant prosecutor Sturm Wulfson, did play a role in the Windsor Annesley persecution. Um, prosecution. But we’re told he
died at his home in the afternoon, many hours before officials believe Windsor Annesley escaped.”

“And what about the judge who sentenced Annesley, Brittany? Fidelio Crustio was assassinated less than a month ago, and there were similar stories in that case of armed assassins seemingly disappearing through solid walls without a trace. Any connection?”

“Not that anyone will confirm, Doug. Though if Windsor Annesley and his missing brother Worthington and other members of the outlawed Church of Cthulhu have found a way to walk through walls, Rhode Island’s judges and prosecutors and police officers may not be resting quite so easy tonight, given the kind of threats we all remember the prisoner made at his sentencing hearing before Judge Crustio. For now, officials say they’re treating Windsor Annesley’s disappearance as an ‘aided escape,’ which means they do believe he had accomplices.

“The Dee Oh See is asking anyone with information about the whereabouts of Windsor Annesley or his brother Worthington, wanted only for questioning, and both shown here, to e-mail them at SNITCH-at-Dee-Oh-See-dot-RI-dot-GOV, or to call the FBI at 617-742-5533.”

“Thank you, Brittany. Big story there, we’ll have more at 6 o’clock. Then after our evening newscast tonight be sure and stay tuned at 7 o’clock for a special Action News documentary, ‘The Church of Cthulhu: Victims of Persecution, Or Drug-Crazed Revolutionaries?’ But right now we take you live to City Hall Plaza in Boston, where we’re told several people are feared dead and National Guard units have been called in to surround the JFK Federal Building, amid reports that some kind of large animal or animals are loose in that building. Further complicating the picture, we’re now told an earlier order that FBI snipers were to enter the building in an attempt to kill or disable the animals has now been rescinded, following the issuance of an emergency Endangered Species Protection Order by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, an order sought by, of all people, the Council of Elders of the Church of Cthulhu.”

* * *

Matthew must have been making up for a lot of lost sleep, because he usually popped awake with no trouble, even if it was just a cat meowing, but this time it was like clawing his way back up from quite a few levels down. At first, he couldn’t even figure out if it was day or night, which of course was Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, “Love Potion Number Nine.” The Clovers, or the Searchers?

“Honey, I don’t think he’s going to quit.”

“Hm?” He had the strangest feeling there was a storm somewhere over the horizon. Was that thunder, or were those distant drums?

“The guy who’s been banging on the door of the shop, downstairs. He’s not going away. I’m going down.”

“Jim Reeves?” Matthew asked.

“What?”

“No, no, I’ll do it,” he said, rolling his feet to the floor. “Assuming I can find my pants.”

“Everything went in the laundry, dear. There’s a clean pair in the drawer. But I go first.”