Bad Moon Rising

Chapter 12

(1)

Weinstock glanced at Crow and then turned a hard look on the caretaker. “There’s some risk of contagion here. Please, stand back.”

“Contagion?” the man said, eyes flaring wide as he did indeed step back. “From what? I thought this fella was murdered.”

Weinstock’s eyes were hard as flint, but even so they had a shifty flicker to them. Crow wore Wayfarers against the glare of the Sunday morning sun and he kept his face blank. Weinstock wore a heavy topcoat; Crow was in a bomber jacket and jeans. He held the clipboard with the exhumation papers on them, signed by Weinstock himself right over the signature of Nels Cowan’s wife. Her hand had trembled when she’d signed it and it made her handwriting look like that of a five-year-old. There were two small circles on the page where her tears had fallen and puckered the paper.

Weinstock licked his lips. “Not all of the blood work on Officer Cowan was completed at the time of interment. Our tests detected traces of a highly dangerous virus.”

“Virus?” The caretaker’s name was Holliston and his seamed face was a study in skepticism. He rested his shoulder against the bucket of the front-end loader and folded his arms. “Nels Cowan didn’t die of no virus, he was killed by that Boyd fellow.”

“I didn’t say he did, Mr. Holliston,” Weinstock said frostily. “I said traces of a virus were detected in his blood. Tests have suggested that the alleged killer may have been infected, and that during the struggle he was wounded. There may have been an inadvertent exchange of blood during the struggle. It is vitally important to establish if this is the case. Among other things, I am the liaison between the town of Pine Deep and the local office of the CDC.”

“What’s that?”

“The Centers for Disease Control. So, it’s important that I conduct this test under the proper conditions.” He pulled a surgical mask out of his bag and slipped it on, and then began squirming his hands into latex gloves. Holliston yielded and walked a few dozen yards away.

Crow waited until Holliston was far enough away and then said, “We are so going to go to jail for this shit.”

“Joanie Cowan signed the paper and I’m the county coroner. It’s all more or less legal.”

“More or less is not a comfortable phrase.”

“It’s what we have.”

“Any of that CDC stuff on the level?”

Weinstock shrugged. “More or less.”

“Swell.”

They looked around. For a Sunday morning the cemetery was remarkably empty; church probably hadn’t let out yet.

“You ready?” Weinstock asked, and Crow slipped his hand inside his jacket and pulled his Beretta nine half out of the shoulder rig. “If there’s anything in that coffin except a dead guy I’m going to empty this thing in it.”

“Just don’t shoot me.”

“Don’t get in the line of fire.”

“Fair enough.”

On the drive home from the hospital they’d cooked up the plan, going on the basis that if something was still happening in Pine Deep they needed to know sooner rather than later, so by the next morning they were ready. Weinstock printed out the exhumation papers and cooked up the infection story—he’d deal with chain of evidence later—and then called Joanie Cowan at seven-thirty on that Sunday morning, waking her out of a deep sleep in order to break her heart all over again. Overwhelmed by Weinstock’s medical double-talk, she had disintegrated into tears and signed the papers, and the two of them slunk away like thieves.

“This is so wrong,” Crow said as they approached the coffin, which sat on the bucket of a big front-end loader. He brushed away clods of cold dirt and started twisting the wingnuts that held the lid on. His hands shook so bad his fingers slipped on the cold metal.

Weinstock stopped him and handed him a mask. “He’s been dead for two weeks…this is going to be bad. You don’t want to breathe it. Remember…smell is particulate.”

“Oh man. I really could have gotten through the day without knowing that.”

“Welcome to the field of medicine.”

“This isn’t medicine, brother,” Crow said, adjusting the rubber band that secured the mask. “This is black magic.”

They worked together to make a fast job of it. Even without opening the lid it smelled bad. Like rotting meat and raw sewage poured over molasses. Crow gagged.

Weinstock glanced around. The caretaker was ten rows down busy with the task of cutting the turf to dig a fresh grave. The doctor looked across the casket to Crow. “You ready?”

“Not really. You?”

Weinstock tried to laugh and bungled it.

Crow said, “We’re burning daylight, Saul. Let’s do this or go home.”

“Shit.” Weinstock steeled himself and gripped one corner of the lid as Crow told hold of the other. “God help us if we’re wrong about this.”

But Crow shook his head. “God help us if we’re right.”

The lid resisted for a moment, but then it yielded to their combined strength and opened; they pulled it up and daylight splashed down on the silk-lined interior.

They stood there looking into the coffin for over a minute, saying nothing, lost in their own thoughts, each of their faces set into heavy frowns.

“Well,” Crow said. “Now we know.”

“Yeah,” Weinstock said hoarsely.

“What does it mean?”

The doctor shook his head. “As God is my witness, Crow, I honestly don’t know.”

Nels Cowan had been buried in his Pine Deep police uniform. His hands, bloated with decomposition, lay folded on his stomach with the brim of his uniform hat set between the thick, white fingers. The flesh of Cowan’s face was purplish, distended with gas.

“There’s no chance this is not him” Crow ventured.

“It’s him.” Even so he took a sample of skin tissue just in case they needed a DNA match.

Crow lowered the lid.

“So—what’s happening, Doc?” called the caretaker. He was wiping his hands with a rag as he strolled across the graves toward them. “Did he have something catching?”

Weinstock began tightening the wingnuts. “Apparently not,” he said.

“Well, hell,” Holliston said with a grin. “Guess we can all be happy about that. With all that’s happening ’round here we don’t need no new troubles, now do we?”

Weinstock wore a poker face as he tightened one nut and started on the next. “No, we don’t,” he said.

Across from him, Crow worked in silence.

When they were back in Weinstock’s car they sat for a while, sipping Starbucks coffee and staring out at the morning. The trees seemed unusually thick with crows and the birds sent up a continuous cackle. John Lee Hooker was singing “Boogie Chillen”—from the only blues CD Weinstock owned, a gift from Crow that only came out of the glove box when Crow was riding shotgun.

“I don’t know how to think about this, Crow. I mean…I know what I saw on those morgue tapes. I know I saw Castle and Cowan walking around after they were dead. I’m not hallucinating.”

“I believe you, Saul. You showed me the tapes. I know what you saw.”

“But that was definitely Cowan in that coffin, and he is in a state of decomposition consistent with having been dead for a couple of weeks.”

“Which means that he’s dead.”

“So what did I see on those tapes?”

“I don’t know…I believe you, of course, but I don’t know what it means. Maybe Ruger or Boyd tried to convert them into vampires and it worked for a while but somehow, and for some reason, they died again. Died for real.”

“Maybe. We don’t know enough about this stuff to understand if that’s even possible.”

“I know one thing, though,” Crow said and he pulled his sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on.

“What’s that?”

“Before I move one inch toward believing that this whole thing is over I want to see Jimmy Castle’s body.”

Weinstock started the car. “Me, too, and I want to get that done while we still have daylight. I’m not going anywhere near his body at night.”

(2)

Mike worked at the store all day Sunday, gradually phasing in and out of lucidity. There was a steady stream of customers and Mike was able to wear a smiling face, answer their questions, fill their orders, and ring up their sales; but below the surface his mind was blank more than it was filled by thought. He knew it, too, but on some other level. It was like standing on a balcony and looking down on his life, and the feeling totally creeped him out.

“I’m really going crazy,” he said to the cash register at one point.

The customer he was ringing up—Brandon Strauss, a kid from Mike’s own class—said, “Mike…hello? Earth calling Mike.”

Mike blinked at Brandon. “Huh?” He realized that instead of bagging the Robert Jordan novel his friend had bought he was trying to stuff it into the drawer of the cash register.

“You bent the cover, man,” Brandon said.

“Um…sorry.”

“I’ll get another off the rack.” Brandon swapped the battered copy for a new one and peered at Mike while he finished ringing it up and bagging it. He held it out and Brandon plucked it from his fingers as if afraid Mike would mangle this one, too.

“Sorry,” Mike said.

Brandon paused, his scowl softening. “You okay, Mike? You sick or something?”

Mike pasted on a smile. “Sorry, I just started a new allergy medicine. Makes me kinda goofy for a bit.”

“You’re always goofy,” Brandon said, but he smiled back and shot Mike with his finger. “See you in school. Ms. Rainer’s subbing for Donaldson again. Woo-hoo!” Natalie Rainer was the favorite substitute teacher for all the boys in the county. She looked like Kate Beckinsale and always wore tight clothes. It didn’t matter that she taught math, no one’s favorite subject; she could have taught advanced calculus and not one of their friends would have missed her class.

Mike promised he’d be there and smiled as Brandon left. As soon as the door jingled shut, Mike leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. It was getting harder and harder to stay focused, to stay present.

“I really am going crazy,” he said aloud, and this time there was no one to comment on it, or to refute it.

(3)

“Father! Why have you forsaken me?”

The silent emptiness in Tow-Truck Eddie’s heart was enormous, vast. Tears streamed down his face as he drove down A-32 in his police cruiser. Yesterday he had gone into Crow’s store to confront—he thought—the Beast, but instead all he saw was a boy. Just an ordinary boy. Not the Beast, not evil incarnate, not the Antichrist. It didn’t make sense to him.

“I am still your Sword, Father. I am still the avenging lamb!” He cried out these words, but they lacked conviction, even to his own ears. “Please, Father, show me the way.”

The boy in the store—Eddie had not even been able to see him very clearly. The light must have been bad, or something. How different from the Beast: Eddie had always been able to see the Beast with total, holy clarity. When hunting for him on the road, or searching for him in the town, Eddie had never faltered in the purity or certainty of his sacred purpose. His Father had told him that this boy, the child in the store, was the Beast, but when Eddie looked at him he could not see the evil there.

Doubt was a thorn in his brain, a spike in his heart.

(4)

Weinstock got the call while he and Crow were heading back to the hospital. He listened for a minute, said, “Thanks, we’ll be right there!” and hung up.

“They found Boyd’s body. Turn around, it’s down by the Black Marsh Bridge.”

“Damn,” Crow said and spun the wheel.

(5)

She stood in the shadows near the foot of Terry’s bed for days. No one saw her. No one noticed her, even though her little dress was torn and her face and throat were streaked with blood. They walked right by her, and sometimes they walked right through her. When that happened, whoever did it—nurse, orderly, visitor, or doctor—would give a small involuntary shiver as if they had just caught an icy breath of wind on the vulnerable back of their neck. The feeling would be gone in less than a heartbeat and they would forget about it because there was nothing, and no one, in the room to take note of.

Since they had brought Terry in here in the evening of October thirteenth and hooked him up to all of the machines, Mandy Wolfe had been there, keeping her silent vigil. Sometimes she wept, and then the tears would flow and mingle with the blood, diluting it, turning it pink on her cheeks. Most of the time she just stood and watched her brother, aching with guilt and grief. Now that he had tried to do what she wanted, now that he had thrown himself out of his window but failed to kill himself, Mandy didn’t know what to do next. No one else could see her, no one else could hear her.

The fear that reared up in her was immense.

“Terry,” she said in a voice quieter than the soft rustle of dried leaves on the autumn trees outside his window. “Terry…I’m so sorry.”

Terry could not hear her. No one could. Except him. And as Mandy wept for her failure, Ubel Griswold listened, and laughed.

(6)

With the Sunday tourist traffic it was twenty minutes down to the Black Marsh Bridge and they could see the knot of police and crime scene vehicles as they crested one of the last hill. “Looks like a party,” Crow said.

Tow-Truck Eddie Oswald was directing traffic, his uniform uncharacteristically rumpled and his face haggard. Eddie was usually neat as a pin. Once he recognized them, he waved them through and told them where to park. As they got out they could see Chief Gus Bernhardt standing at the crest of the embankment that led down to the river and beyond him the near leg of the old iron Black Marsh Bridge. Smoke curled sluggishly up between Gus and the bridge. Crow shot a look at Weinstock, who shrugged, and they crunched over gravel to the grassy hill to join Gus, who was in animated conversation with a couple of firefighters.

“Hey, fellas,” Gus said as Crow and Weinstock joined him. “I hope you brought some weenies for roasting.” His pink face was alight with pleasure as he turned and swept an arm down the hill like an emcee introducing a headline act. “Voilà!”

“Holy jumping frog shit,” Crow said.

Gus clamped Crow on the shoulder. “I think we can pretty much close the file on Kenneth Boyd.”

At the base of the bridge support, tied to the concrete block that anchored the big steel leg, a body stood wreathed in wisps of smoke, the arms and legs twisted into dry sticks, the skin black and papery, the head nothing more than a leering skull covered in hot ash. A crudely lettered and soot-stained sign had been affixed to the support by bungee cords. It read: DON’T FUCK WITH PINE DEEP!

Weinstock whistled softly between his teeth. “Ho-lee shit.”

Gus beamed. “I guess the local boys got sick and tired of that Philly piece of shit kicking up dust out here. Pine Deep,” he said with pride that threatened to pop the buttons on his straining shirtfront, “you can hurt us, but you can’t beat us.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Crow muttered and pushed past him. Weinstock shot the chief a look as he followed.

“What?” Gus asked, totally perplexed.

“You sure that’s Boyd?” Crow asked.

“I sure as hell hope so,” Gus said.

A state police criminalist, Judy Sanchez, was working the scene and turned when she sensed Weinstock and Crow approaching. She knew Weinstock from when Boyd had broken into the morgue to steal Ruger’s body; she knew Crow from AA, though they just acknowledged each other with a slight nod.

“What can you tell me?” Weinstock asked, nodding at the corpse. “Any ID?”

She gave a short laugh. “Beyond the fact that he’s probably male and probably human, no. Those college boys torched him good.”

“They want to know if that’s Boyd down there,” Gus said, still having a blast with this.

“You figure college kids for it, Judy?” Crow said.

“Looks like it. We got joints, beer cans, lots of sneaker prints. Little Halloween doesn’t let go around here very fast, does it?”

Little Halloween was Pine Deep’s unique holiday, celebrated only when Friday the 13th occurred in October; it was like Mischief Night on steroids. Each one was legendary, and when it showed up the kids at the college went out of their way to outdo the pranks of previous classes. The current tally included three bonfires—two of them built around cars belonging to hated teachers—a game of nude touch football between a sorority and a frat that was likely going to end in expulsions and, very probably, a lawsuit; a rock concert played so loud that fish in the Floyd Pond died; a spate of bricks thrown through store windows; a school bus being completely disassembled, with all of the parts placed neatly on the high school soccer field; the vandalizing of the Pinelands Hospital Morgue; and the subsequent burning—in fact rather than effigy—of Kenneth Boyd.

“It’s a fun-loving town,” Crow said sourly.

“Pine Deep,” Weinstock said sotto voce, “a great place to visit. Bring the whole family.”

They stood there looking at the corpse, thankful that the breeze carried the cooked-meat stink out toward the river. Sanchez said, “So…yeah, it’s probably Boyd. Even with all the charring you can tell that the head has received several gunshot wounds.” She looked at Crow. “Your fiancée’s doing, I hear.”

“Yep.”

“Tough chick.”

“She is that,” Crow agreed.

Weinstock blew his nose noisily, “We’re going to need dental records or DNA on it.” He cut a look at Crow, but Crow was wearing his best poker face.

Back in the car they drove in silence for several miles before Weinstock said, “So, are we buying that this is a fraternity stunt?”

“I don’t know. Does it seem like something a vampire would do?”

Weinstock looked at him. “Not really. Somehow I don’t equate the living dead with juvenile prankishness. Even cruel-hearted and extreme juvenile prankishness.”

“In the movies, do vampires come back from the dead if they’ve been incinerated?”

“Not usually. Fire’s always one of those fallback plans. Like beheading.”

“So, Boyd’s toast in real point of fact.”

Crow grinned. “I guess.”

He took a tin of Altoids out of his pocket and put three of them in his mouth, then offered the tin to Crow, who shook it off. Crow put a Leonard Cohen CD into the player and they listened to that while the cornfields—lush or blighted—whisked by on either side.

They were back at the hospital by sunset and the two of them sat in chairs on either side of Val’s bed. A night’s sleep had transformed her from an emotional wreck back into a semblance of her stolid self, and her strength helped steady Crow and Weinstock.

They told her everything and then watched her process it. Val had a tough, analytical brain and Crow knew that engaging her in a complex problem was one of the best ways to keep her from getting too far into grief for Mark and Connie. There would be plenty of time for that later.

Val said, “Let’s go over it. Every bit of it, step by step.”

They did, and each of them played devil’s advocate for any thought, observation, or experience the others brought up. They picked it apart, dissecting it, chewed the bones of it as the sun burned itself to a cinder and left the sky a charred black. Dinner came and went, friends stopped by to visit or deliver flowers and fruit baskets. The phone kept ringing—friends, relatives, the press. Val and Crow both turned the ringers off on their cells. Every time a nurse left or guests made their farewells, the three of them went right back into it, picking up where they left off.

Night painted the window black and the three of them eventually ran out of things to say. Val probed the bandages around her eye as she thought it through. “The question we keep asking is…is this thing over?”

Weinstock looked at Crow, who shrugged.

“Boyd and Ruger are dead, Castle and Nels Cowan are dead and buried. Mark is not…one of them. You’re sure of that?”

“As sure as I can be. And though my gut tells me that this is all over, I think that we should keep Mark and Connie here in, um…storage…until we find some way of medically determining if they are infected or not.” Val shot him a hard look, but Weinstock held up his hand. “Let me finish. I can stall Gus on this—he’s stupid enough to buy any dumb excuse I make up. Maybe I’ll tell him that there was a chance that Boyd was carrying a disease and I need to do more tests to make sure that it’s nothing that will affect the town.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Val said. “Nobody’d believe that.”

“Gus?” Weinstock said, arching his eyebrows.

“Okay, okay,” she conceded.

“In the meantime,” Crow said, “I think we should make sure the bodies are secure. Locks on their freezer doors and maybe restraints of some kind. Newton’s working on the research. We should know in a few days…a couple weeks tops.”

Val closed her eye for a moment, took a breath, then nodded. “Okay. That makes sense.”

Crow patted her thigh. “I think whatever this madness was, we kind of came at it from an angle, and by the time we knew what it was, it was over. There’s nothing that indicates that this went further than Boyd. As far as the morgue break-in…if college kids did this as a Little Halloween stunt or some macho Pine Deep rah-rah bullshit, then we’re done. Fat Lady’s finished her aria and gone home and we can all take a nice deep breath and try to forget this all ever happened.”

“That’d be nice,” Val said. “On the other hand, if it wasn’t frat boys, then we have to consider that burning the body is the one way to destroy any trace of physical evidence that Boyd was anything more than a psychotic killer.”

“There’s that,” Weinstock agreed.

“Problem is…we might not ever know the truth.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what do we do?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Val. I mean…I still have the videotapes and lab reports, but now I have nothing to back them up, and I don’t know how much mileage I can get out of that stuff. Even if I could make a case for each individual bit of evidence being faulty, or tainted. I’m not willing to risk my whole career on it at the moment, not if there’s a chance this thing is actually over.”

Crow nodded and glanced at Val. “So what do you think we should do?”

Val didn’t answer right away, but her eye was flinty. “I guess,” she said at last, “what I’m going to do is hope for the best.”

“Okay.”

“And from now on, and maybe for the rest of my life…I’m going to keep all my guns loaded.”

Weinstock and Crow looked at her.

“This is still Pine Deep, boys,” she said. “Far as I’m concerned, it’ll never be over. Crow, I think you should see what you can do to beef up security for the Festival, and as often as we can we should brainstorm with Newton. Even if this is over we should all learn everything we can about vampires. From now on we need to be prepared. If—and I only say if because I hope like hell it is over—if we run into another one of these bloodsucking bastards again, then I want the story to have a happier ending. I’m tired of being in the dark, and I’m tired of being blindsided.” When they said nothing to that, she added, “I’m going to have a baby. I want that baby born into a safer world.”

Weinstock smiled at her. “I hear garlic’s good for your health.”

Crow gave him half a smile. “I heard that, too.”

After a moment Val managed a smile. “Then I guess I’d better learn to cook Italian.”