Richard Morrell looked at the man sitting across from him—shaking, pale, covered in blood that the ambulance attendants had sworn wasn’t his own—and said, “Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me your name.” He kept his tone neutral, because he wasn’t sure yet which approach to take. The guy looked too shaky to push really hard, and too paranoid to take well to friendliness.
Businesslike was apparently the right course, because the man blinked at him, ran a blood-smeared hand across his sweaty forehead, and said, “They’re dead. They’re dead, right? My friends?”
“Lets talk about you,” Richard said, very steadily. “What’s your name?”
“Brian. Brian Maitland.”
“Where are you from, Brian?” Richard smiled slightly. “I know you’re not from around here.”
“Dallas,” Maitland said. “We were, y’know, just passing through. We thought, Jeez, it looks like such an easy score, y’know? No big deal. We weren’t going to hurt anybody. We just wanted the money.”
“One thing at a time, Brian. What are your friends’ names?”
“Joe. Joe Grady. And Lavelle Harvey. Lavelle—Lavelle’s Joe’s girl. I swear, Officer, we were just passing through. We thought—we saw the bank open after dark, we thought—we figured—”
“You figured it would be an easy score,” Richard said. “You said. So what happened?”
“I, uh—” Maitland seemed to vapor-lock. Richard motioned over one of the two cops standing in the corner of the room—the human one—and asked for coffee in a low voice. He waited until the steaming Styrofoam cup was in Maitland’s big, bloody hands before prodding him again.
“You’re safe now,” Richard said, which really wasn’t the truth. “Tell me what happened at the bank.”
Maitland sipped at the coffee, then gulped convulsively, not seeming to care that it was hot enough to raise blisters. His eyes had that terrible distance to them, something Richard was way too familiar with.
“There was this girl,” he said. “Pretty little thing, cashing a check at the teller window. Joe took the guard, Lavelle covered the couple of people in the lobby, and I grabbed the girl.”
“Describe her,” Richard said.
“I don’t know, pretty. Brunette. Had a mouth on her—I’ll tell ya that.” He shook his head slowly. “She kept telling me we were in the wrong place, wrong time, wrong damn town. Pissed me off. But she was right.”
He gulped more coffee, eyes darting nervously from Richard to the night visible in the barred window of the room. He hadn’t once looked at the cops standing behind him. Richard figured he was blocking it out, the knowledge that one of them might not be entirely human.
“This girl,” Richard said softly. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing,” Maitland said, and then corrected himself. “Okay, I hit her. Just to shut her up. And then Joe shot that guard, and somebody triggered the security alarms. These bars came down at the door. We couldn’t get out. Why the hell would they want to keep us inside the bank, with the customers? Ain’t the whole point to get us outside? Don’t you people know nothing about security?”
“You said Joe shot the guard. What happened then?”
“The guard—” Maitland’s voice went tight, and then silent. He shook his head. There were tears standing in his damp eyes. “It ain’t possible, man. I saw him go down. Joe put four bullets right in his chest, and he wasn’t wearing no vest. I saw the blood.” Maitland choked down his fear. “And then he got up. I never seen anybody do that. Sure, you see guys on drugs or something who just don’t really know they’ve been shot—they can go for a while before they fall down, but it ain’t like they’re normal, y’know? This was just some working guy. He shouldn’t just—get up like that.”
Maitland started to shiver again, and gulped more coffee. When he put the cup down, it was empty. Richard motioned for a refill, and waited. Maitland didn’t seem to need prodding now. He wanted to get it out.
“Joe, he emptied the gun, but the guard just kept coming. I was watching them, so I didn’t see what happened to Lavelle, but I heard her start yelling. And then she just—stopped. Joe—that guard, there was something wrong with him, man—I don’t know—it was like he was possessed or something, like, call-the-exorcist wrong. His eyes got all red, and he—he . . .” Maitland looked down. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
Richard sat back in the straight-backed chair, eyes half-closed, and said, “The guard bit your friend in the throat and drank his blood.”
“Um . . .” Maitland seemed surprised. “Yeah. Just like that. And then he, uh . . .”
“Broke his neck.”
“Yeah.”
“Same thing happened to Lavelle, right?”
“Yeah. One of those bank people, the teller I guess, she was . . . like the guard. Y’know, wrong. And then the girl—”
“The one you hit.”