They were standing in a doorway close by a convenience store, hand in hand: a man and a woman, both in their early thirties. The woman had mousy hair that brushed her shoulders, and she wore no makeup. She was slim, and dressed in an old-fashioned black skirt that clung to her legs before flaring slightly at her shins. A matching black jacket hung open over a white blouse that was buttoned to the neck. The man wore a black suit with a white shirt and black tie. His hair was short at the back and long in front, parted on the left and hanging greasily over one eye. Both of them were staring up at the window of Caroline Carr’s apart R asquo;s apment.
Strangely, it was their very stillness that drew Will’s attention to them. They were like pieces of statuary that had been positioned in the shadows, a temporary art installation on a busy street. Their appearance reminded him of those sects in Pennsylvania, the ones who frowned upon buttons as signs of vanity. In their utter focus on the windows of the apartment, he saw a fanaticism that bordered on the religious.
And then, as Will watched them, they began to move. They crossed the street, the man reaching beneath his jacket as he went, and Will saw the gun appear in his hand.
He ran. He had his own .38 with him, and he drew it. The couple was halfway across the street when something in the manner of the stranger’s approach drew the man’s attention. He registered the approaching threat, and turned to face it. The woman continued moving, her attention fixed only on the apartment building before her and the girl who was hiding within, but the man stared straight at Parker, and the policeman felt a slow tightening in his gut, as though someone had just pumped cold water into his system and it was responding with the urge to void itself. Even at this distance, he could tell that the man’s eyes were not right. They were at once too dark, like twin voids in the pallor of the gunman’s face, and yet too small, chips of black glass in a borrowed skin pulled too tightly over a larger skull.
Then the woman looked around, only now becoming aware that her partner was no longer beside her. She opened her mouth to say something, and Parker saw the panic on her face.
The truck hit the gunman hard from behind, briefly pitching him forward and upward, his feet leaving the ground before he was dragged beneath the front wheels as the driver braked, his body disintegrating beneath the massive weight of the truck, his life ending in a smear of red and black. The force of the impact knocked him out of his shoes. They lay nearby, one upside down, the other on its side. A tendril of blood seeped out toward the shoes from the broken form under the truck, as though the body were trying to reconstitute itself, to build itself once again from the feet up. Somebody screamed.
By the time Will reached the body, the woman had disappeared. He glanced under the truck. The man’s head was gone, crushed by the left-front wheel of the truck. Will showed his shield, and told an ashen-faced man standing nearby to call in the accident. The driver climbed down from his cab and tried to grab hold of Will, but he slipped by him and was only barely aware of the driver falling to the ground behind him. He ran to Caroline’s building, but the front door was still locked. He inserted the key and opened the door by touch, his attention fixed on the street, not the keyhole. As the key turned he slipped inside and closed the door hard behind him. When he got to the apartment, he stood to one side, breathing hard, and knocked once.
“Caroline?” he called.
There was no reply for a moment, then, softly, “Yes.”
“You okay, honey?”
“I think so.”
“Open up.”
His eyes searched the shadows. He thought that he could sm R a he couldell a strange perfume on the air. It was sharp and metallic. It took him a few seconds to realize that it was the smell of the dead man’s blood. He looked down and saw that it was on his shoes.
She opened the door. He stepped inside. When he tried to reach for her, she moved away.
“I saw them,” she said. “I saw them coming for me.”
“I know,” he said. “I saw them too.”
“The one who got hit…”
“He’s dead.”
She shook her head.
“No.”
“I’m telling you, he’s dead. His skull was crushed.”
She was leaning against the wall now. He gripped her shoulders.
“Look at me,” he said. She did as he asked, and he saw hidden knowledge in her eyes.
“He’s dead,” he said, for the third time.
She let out a deep breath. Her eyes flicked toward the window.
“Okay,” she said, and he knew that she did not believe him, although he could not understand why. “What about the woman?”
“Gone.”
“She’ll come back.”
“We’ll move you.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere safe.”
“This place was supposed to be safe.”
“I was wrong.”
“You didn’t believe me.”
He nodded. “You’re right. I didn’t. I do now. I don’t know how they found you, but I was wrong. Look, did you make any calls? Did you tell anyone—a friend, a relative—where you were?”
Her eyes turned back to him. She looked tired. Not frightened or angry, just weary.
“Who would I call?” she asked. “I have no one. There’s only you.”
And with nowhere else to turn, Will called Jimmy Gallagher, so that while the cops gathered statements, Jimmy was moving Caroline to a motel in Queens, but not before driving around for hours, trying to shake off anyone who might be following them. When he had her safely checked in, he stayed with her in her room until, at last, she fell asleep, then he watched TV until morning came.
While he did so, Will was lying to the cops on the scene. He told the officers that he’d be R ae’den uptown visiting a friend, and had seen a man crossing the street with a gun in his hand. He had challenged him, and the man had been turning in response, his gun raised, when the truck hit him. None of the other witnesses seemed to recall the woman who had been with him; in fact, the other witnesses couldn’t even remember seeing the man cross the street. It was as though, for them, he had materialized in that spot. Even the driver of the truck said that one second the street in front of him was empty, and the next there was a man being pulled under the wheels of his vehicle. The driver was in shock, although there was no question of any blame accruing to him; the lights had been in his favor, and he had been well within the speed limit.
Once he had made his statement, Will waited for a time in a coffee shop, watching the front of the now-empty apartment house and the bustle at the spot of the man’s death, hoping to see again the woman with the washed-out face and the dark eyes, but she did not come. If she was mourning the loss of her partner, she was doing so elsewhere. Finally, he gave up and joined Jimmy and Caroline at the motel, and while Caroline slept, he told Jimmy everything.
“He told me about the pregnancy, the woman, the dead man,” said Jimmy. “He kept returning to the way the guy had looked, trying to pinpoint what it was about him that was so…wrong.”
“And what did he decide?” I asked.
“Another man’s clothes,” said Jimmy.
“What does that mean?”
“You ever see somebody wearing a suit that isn’t his, or trying to fit his feet into borrowed shoes, ones that are maybe a size too small or too large? Well, that was what was wrong with the dead man, according to your father. It was like he’d borrowed another man’s body, but it didn’t fit the way that it should. Your old man worried at it like a dog at a bone, and that was the best that he could come up with, weeks later: it was almost as if he felt there was something living inside that guy’s body, but it wasn’t him. Whatever he had once been, or whoever he had once been, was long gone. This thing had chewed it away.”
He watched me then, waiting for a response. When none came, he said:
“I’m tempted to ask if you think that sounds crazy, but I know too much about you to believe you if you said yes.”
“You ever get a name on him?” I asked, ignoring what he had just said.
“There wasn’t much of the guy left to identify. A sketch artist came up with a pretty good likeness, though, based on your father’s description, and we circulated it. Bingo! A woman comes forward, says it looks like her husband, name of Peter Ackerman. He’d run off on her five years before. Met some girl in a bar, and that was it. Thing about it was, the wife said it was completely out of character for her husband. He was an accountant, a by-the-numbers guy. Loved her, loved his kids. He had his routines, and he stuck to them.”
I shrugged. “He wouldn’t be the first man to disappoint his wife in that way.”
“No, I guess not. But we haven’t even gotten to the strange stuff. Ackerman had served in Korea, so his prints eventually checked out. The wife gave a R awife gavedetailed description of his appearance though, since his face was gone: he had a Marine tat on his left arm, an appendectomy scar on his abdomen, and a chunk missing from his right calf where a bullet had caught him at the Chosin Reservoir. The body taken from under the truck had all of those markings, and one more. It seemed like he’d picked up another tattoo since he’d deserted his wife and family. Well, not so much a tattoo. More of a brand.”
“A brand?”
“It was burned into his right arm. Hard to describe. I’d never seen anything like it before, but your old man followed it up. He found out what it was.”
“And?”
“It was the symbol of an angel. A fallen angel. ‘An——’ something was the name. Animal. No, that’s not it. Hell, it’ll come to me.”
I was treading carefully now. I didn’t know how much Jimmy knew of some of the men and women I had encountered in the past, and of how some of them shared strange beliefs, convinced that they were fallen beings, wandering spirits.
Demons.
“This man was marked with an occult symbol?”
“That’s right.”
“A fork?” That was a mark I had seen before. The ones who bore it had called themselves “Believers.”
“What?” Jimmy’s eyes narrowed in confusion, then his expression changed and I understood that he knew more about me than I might have wished, and I wondered how. “No, not a fork. It was different. It didn’t seem like anything that had meaning, but everything does, if you look hard enough at it.”
“And the woman?”
Jimmy stood. He went to his wine rack and removed another bottle.
“Oh, she came back,” he said. “With a vengeance.”