The Wolfen

Wilson waited five minutes to be certain she wouldn’t call back. The phone didn’t ring again. His rudeness had evidently made her mad enough to ignore him for the rest of the night

Fine. He went into his bedroom and unlocked a chest he kept in his closet. Inside were a number of highly illegal weapons—a sawed-off shotgun, a WWII vintage BAR in working order, and an Ingram M-11 Automatic Pistol. He pulled the automatic pistol from its case and got a box of shells. Carefully he worked the pistol’s action, then hefted it in his hand. Its balance was a pleasure to feel. It was unquestionably the finest automatic handgun ever designed, lightweight, sound-suppressed, with a 20-round-a-second punch. It was not designed to frighten, slow down, or confuse, but purely and simply to kill. One bullet would blow a man’s head apart. The best automatic weapon ever made. The fastest. The most murderous. He opened the ammo box and snapped a clip of the special .380 subsonic velocity bullets into the gun. Now it was heavier but the balance hadn’t changed. Only three and a half pounds of weapon, it could be hefted nicely. And aimed. The sights were precise. For a handgun, its range was almost incredible. You could shoot a man at a hundred and fifty yards with this weapon. A burst of three or four bullets would get him even if he was on the run.

He laid the pistol on his bed and put on an overcoat he rarely wore. When it was on he dropped the M-11 into a pocket which had been especially tailored to fit the nine-inch pistol. Wilson had had the coat modified when he had acquired the pistol. The pocket carried the M-11 almost invisibly. Despite the size and weight of the pistol only a careful observer would note that he was carrying a piece at all. His hand felt the weapon in his pocket, his thumb triggering the lever that moved the mechanism from safe to fire. A single press of the trigger could now deliver from one bullet to a full clip in a matter of seconds. Good enough. Now he got out his winter hat, old, wrinkled, perfect for both protecting the head and hiding the face. Next the shoes—black sneakers, surprisingly warm with two pair of socks, surprisingly agile even in the snow. They had been winterized with a polyurethane coating, and the soles scored to provide traction. The sneakers gave him the advantages of quiet and quick movement, most useful on an icy winter night. The last item was a pair of gloves. These were made of the finest Moroccan leather, softer and thinner than kid. Through them he could feel the M-11 perfectly, almost as if the gloves weren’t there at all.

As a final precaution he took out the pistol and removed fingerprints. Not even a gold shield policeman goes around printing up a weapon like the Ingram. There isn’t anything in the rule book about policemen carrying machine pistols, but that’s only because there doesn’t need to be. You need a special permit to own one, and permission to move it from one premises to another. As far as carrying one around in the street fully loaded, that is illegal for policeman and civilian alike.

He replaced the M-11 in its pocket and stood for a short time in the middle of the room. Mentally he checked himself out. He was ready to move. Too bad his plan to de-scent himself had been wishful thinking. Now the M-11 was really his only advantage. That and the fact that hunters aren’t used to being hunted. Or at least he hoped they weren’t. His logic seemed strong—how suspecting would a human hunter be if the deer suddenly turned on him, or a lion if it was attacked by a gazelle?

While he saw the danger of what he was doing he nevertheless felt that he had to act to give Becky some kind of a chance of survival. She deserved to live, she was young and strong; as for him he could take a few chances. And it was a hell of a long chance he was taking. The thought of being killed—by things —made clammy sweat break out.

But he knew that he and Becky had to have help if either of them was going to live much longer. And to get the kind of support they needed, they had to have a specimen. Irrefutable, undeniable evidence that would force Underwood to act, to assign this problem the kind of manpower it demanded.

Wilson was going to get that evidence if he could. And if he got killed trying—oh. God, he wanted to live! No matter how old, how beat-up, he still wanted to live! But he was going after a carcass anyway. Had to.

He left his apartment after making sure all the lights were on. He triple-locked his door and moved quickly to the rear of the dim hallway, where a fire escape was barred by an accordion gate. He unhooked it and pulled it back, then raised the window and stepped into the winter night. He took some putty out of his pocket—carried for just this purpose—and pressed it into the locking mechanism so that when he closed the gate again the latch fell into place but could be raised if you jiggled it just right. If you yanked at it or shook it hard the putty would give way and the lock would secure itself. Then he closed the window and moved his bulky body down the ice-covered fire escape to the street.

The snow was becoming heavier. Not good, impeded his vision but not their sense of smell. Perhaps the muffling effect would reduce the acuity of their hearing a little.

He put his hand in his pocket, closing his finger around the trigger of the M-11. It was a mean weapon, designed for anti-guerrilla work, the kind of police work where you killed it if it moved. Right now it felt good. It was the right pistol for this hunt—the bullets would knock a man ten feet. A hundred-pound animal should go considerably farther.

He set out to find his quarry. He reasoned that the creatures would be more likely to hit Becky first because she was younger and presumably stronger, therefore more dangerous to them. Wilson, slow, old, sick, would be second in line. His theory was borne out by the fact that they had gone to such great lengths to get to Becky and had left him pretty much alone. Of course they had come in the basement window, Wilson was well aware of that. He had left it ajar as an invitation. His dusting of the basement of the rooming house last night had revealed two sets of pawprints as distinctively different as human fingerprints. They had gone up the basement stairs to the door. There were marks on the lock where they had tried to spring it with their claws.

But they had reserved their best effort for Becky, of that he felt reasonably sure. If he was wrong, if they were around him now… with luck he would take a few with him.

He walked through the deserted late-night streets with his hand in his pocket clutching the M-11. Despite the gun, he kept close to the curb, away from any trashcans and shadowy entranceways, out from under overhanging fire escapes. And every few steps he stopped and looked behind him. Only once did he see another human form, a man bundled against the snow and hurrying in the opposite direction.

When he reached the lights of Eighth Avenue he felt much better. He was safer out here under the bright sodium-arc lamps, with the passing cars and the more frequent pedestrians. Somehow he felt more anonymous taking the bus, so he waited at the bus stop instead of hailing a cab. Ten minutes passed before a bus came. He got on and rode it far uptown, to Eighty-sixth and Central Park West. Now all he had to do was cross the park and he would be in Becky’s neighborhood. Upper East Side cardboard box neighborhood… well, if that’s what she liked…

He thought better of crossing the park on foot— in fact he never really considered it at all. To the danger of the creatures he would add the dangers of the park, very foolhardy indeed.

After what seemed an hour a crosstown bus appeared, moving slowly in the deepening snow. Wilson got on, glad for the heated interior. He let himself relax in the bus, but he never took his hand out of his pocket.

When he got off he spotted Becky’s building at once. He counted the balconies. Good, she had left her lights on, an intelligent precaution. She would probably be furious at him for coming out alone like this, but it had to be done. If you’re going to take crazy risks, you take them alone.

He moved toward the alley where the creatures must have congregated. The snow had, of course, covered up all trace of them. They would be coming back here sooner or later, of that much he felt sure. But if their sense of smell was as good as Ferguson had implied they would know he was here long before they were even in sight. So what, let them move in on him. He hefted the M-11 a little in his pocket, then settled down behind a garbage bin to wait.

One o’clock. The wind moaned out of the north. Two o’clock. The snow blew in great waves past the streetlights. Three o’clock. Wilson flexed his toes, rubbed his nose hard, listened to his heartbeat. He began to fight sleep about three-fifteen. Taking his cheek between thumb and forefinger he pinched hard. The pain startled him into wakefulness.

Then it was quiet. The snow had stopped. Involuntarily he gasped—he had fallen asleep. What time—four-twenty. Damn, over an hour out. And across the street, through the alley, standing in the light, were six of the ugliest, most horrifying things he had ever seen. He didn’t move a muscle, just his eyes.

These things were big, big as timber wolves. Their coats were dusky brown, their heads perched on necks much longer than that of a wolf. They had large pointed ears, all cocked directly at this alley. He could practically feel them listening to him. Somewhere his mind began to scream, Fire the Goddamn pistol, fire the pistol! But he couldn’t move, he couldn’t take his eyes off those faces. The eyes were light gray, under jutting brows. And they were looking where the ears were pointing. The faces were… almost serene in their deadliness. And they had lips, strange sensitive lips. The faces were not even a little human but they were clearly intelligent. They were worse than the faces of tigers, more totally ruthless, more intractable.

Fire the pistol!

Slowly the pistol started coming out of his pocket. It seemed to take an hour for it to be raised, but at last the long barrel swung up and… without a sound they were gone.

Not a trace, not even the rustle of a foot in the snow. They had moved! Goddamn, he hadn’t counted on speed like that. Then he was running too—as fast as he could out of the alley and into the middle of the snowy street, running frantically, feeling like an old, old man as he wheezed along, running toward a lighted window, an all-night deli, and then through the door.

“Jesus, don’t scare me like that, man!”

“Sorry-sorry. I—I’m cold. You got coffee?”

“Yeah, comin’ up. You runnin’ your ass off out there. You in trouble, man?”

“Just trying to keep warm is all. Trying to keep warm.”

The counterman held out the coffee—and held on to it. “You got fifty cents, daddy? That’s fifty cents in advance.”

“Oh, yeah, sure.” Wilson paid him, took the hot coffee cup in his hands, moved it to his face, and sipped.

Great God I’m alive! I got that Goddamn gun out f-a-s-t! One second later and they would have had me, the s.o.b.’s! It was exhilarating—it might have felt slow but he had drawn that gun Goddamn fast. Fast enough to save himself from them and they were fast beyond imagining.

He sipped again, noticing how his hand trembled. That had to stop. Long ago he had learned how to overcome the special fear that came with the close proximity of death. Now he went through the routine, a system that had been taught to him by his first partner, back in the forties when he was a rookie cop. There was a man—shot dead by his oldest son in ‘52. Now wait a minute, Wilson thought, you’re digressing. You’re shocked. Come on now, policeman, snap out of it! Relax shoulders, let them fall. Let your gut hang out. Slack your lips. Breathe deeply… one… two… and think about nothing, just let it roll over you.

Now when he sipped the coffee he tasted it, and for the first time noticed that it was black and unsweetened.

“Hey, I said light, this coffee’s black.”

“You need it black, man. You don’t need no light coffee. You drink that, then I’ll give you a light.”

“Thank you, Doctor, but I’m not drunk.” The counterman laughed softly, then looked straight at Wilson. “I wouldn’t say you were. You scared. You the scaredest motherfucker I’ve seen in a good long while. Maybe that coffee’ll help you get it back together, man.”

“Well, it is back together, man. And I want a light coffee. I can’t drink this stuff.”

“Sure, you got money I’ll fix you a carbonated coffee if you want it. I don’t give a damn. But don’t say you can’t drink what you got.”

“Why the hell not! What are you, some kind of a nut? I said I wanted light. I can’t drink this junk.”

“Look in the cup, man.”

It was empty. He hadn’t even been aware of swallowing it! He shut up, returned to his thoughts, to how incredibly fast they had been. It was almost as if they had vanished; but he had glimpsed flashes of running bodies. Then it occurred to him that if they were that fast they would have gotten past his defenses before he had even realized they were there.

Why hadn’t they? For some unknown reason this particular gold shield had been allowed to live. The M-11 still felt good in his pocket but it had been no protection at all. None at all. It certainly hadn’t been the speed of his draw that had scared them away. Something, then… almost but not quite like a memory. He almost knew why they had run, then—he didn’t. “Shit.”

“You ready to go, mister?”

“No.”

“Well, you notice we ain’t got no chairs in here. This is a deli, not no coffee shop. You got to buy and go in a place like this, that’s the rules.”

“So what if I don’t go?”

“Nothin’. Just I feel like you got trouble all around you. You gonna bring it in here with you.”

Wilson debated whether to go back outside or to flash his shield. What the hell, outside probably wasn’t the healthiest place for him to be right now. Whatever had stopped them before might not again. So he flashed. “Police,” he said tonelessly, “I’m stayin’ put.”

“Sure enough.”

“There a back room, some place I can bunk out? I’m tired, I’ve just been in a bad spot.”

“I’d have to agree, judging from the way you look. We got a storeroom. It’s good, there’s plenty of place to lie, and it’s pretty warm. I get a little back there now and then myself.” He showed Wilson into a low-ceilinged room, obviously a shed attached to the rear of the old brownstone building that housed the deli. There was one window, barred, and a triple-locked door. Very good, very cozy, very safe until the morning brought crowds back to the street and he could safely go out. As he settled back he reviewed his strange, terrifying failure. Obviously they were way, way ahead of him—fast, smart, in complete control of the situation. There was only one reason that he wasn’t dead right now—they wanted him alive a little longer.

When he closed his eyes he saw them, their steady, eager eyes, the cruel beauty of their faces… and he remembered the moose and the wolves. What did the spent old moose feel for the ravening timber wolf—was it love, or fear so great that it mimicked love?

When they realized who was concealed in the alley they were full of glee. He had come to protect the female, just as the father had said he would. The father knew man very well and could detect nuances of scent that the younger ones could scarcely imagine. And Father had detected the fact that the man who had seen them loved his female coworker. Father had said, we can move against them both at the same time because the male will try to protect the female. And Father had selected the place and time: where the female was most defenseless, when she was most vulnerable.

And they went and there he was. Asleep! The second-mated pair prepared for the attack, moving into position across the street. They were just about to move when the man raised his head and looked at them. The pack froze and smelled it all at the same time: sweat from the hand that held the gun.

It was a hard decision, instantly made by Mother —we leave; we do not risk moving so far against the gun, we get him another time.

Now the pack ran, rushing through the streets to the ruined building where they would spend the day. Each heart beat with the same agonizing knowledge: they live, they live, they live. And they know about us. Even as the sun rises they must be telling others, spreading the fear that the old legends speak about, the fear that would make life among men hard and dangerous for future generations.

The second-mated pair was especially anguished: in the spring they would litter, and they did not want to bring forth children if man knew of the hunter.

Not that they feared anything from single individuals, or even groups. But endless numbers of men could overwhelm them or at least force them into furtive, tormented lives unworthy of free beings. As they moved warily through the deserted streets one thought consumed them all: kill the dangerous ones, kill them fast. And it was this that they talked about when they reached their sanctuary, a long, intense conversation that left them all shuddering with a furious urge for blood, all except Father, who said, we have won. Soon he will give himself to us as men did of old, for the death wish is coming upon him.

Wilson opened his eyes. The light coming in the window was yellow-gray. A steady tapping against the windowpane indicated that it was snowing again.

“Who the hell are you?”

A man was standing over him, a fat man in gray slacks and a white shirt. He was bald, his face pinched with the long habit of unsatisfied greed.

“I’m a cop. Wilson’s the name.”

“Oh Christ almighty—why’d you let this damn bum in here, Eddie? Throw the fucker out, he’ll get weevils in the Goddamn bread.”

“He got a gold shield, man. I’m not gonna say no to a gold shield.”

“You can buy a Goddamn gold shield on Forty-second Street. Get the jerk out.”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart, I was just leaving. Thanks, Eddie, from the NYPD.”

Wilson left to a snort of scornful laughter from the white guy, a disgusted stare from the black. Sleeping over in storerooms was pretty unorthodox behavior for a cop. What the hell, he didn’t give a damn.

It was still pretty damn lonely on the street. Lonely and snowy too. This was practically a blizzard, must be five or six inches by now. He started to walk back by Becky’s building, then stopped himself. It hit him like a haymaker—they had come when they did because they knew he would be there. They were hunters, for Chrissake, they knew damn well where he’d be. Oh, they were beautiful! They had him figured from way back. It was probably exactly what one of them would have done—protect the one he loved.

What the hell, the bitch was beautiful. Fair cop too—but so beautiful. Becky had creamy skin, Irish coloring. Wilson was partial to that kind of coloring. And she had those soft, yet piercing eyes. He thought of looking into those eyes. “Becky, I love you,” he would say, and she would open her mouth slightly, inviting the first long kiss…

But not now. Now it was cold and he was hungry. He trudged toward the Lexington Avenue subway to ride down to headquarters. His watch said six-thirty. The Merit Bar was open by now, and they served up a fair breakfast. Then he felt the M-11. You didn’t go into Police Headquarters with a loaded M-11, you just did not do that. He’d have to stop by his rooming house first and exchange it for his regulation piece.

The subway wasn’t much warmer than the street, but at least it was well-lighted and there were a few people around. Not many at this hour, but enough to keep the things away from him. They were after him and Becky because they had been seen—certainly they wouldn’t attack except when their targets were alone. But you can be alone enough for just a few seconds. That he had to remember.

He got off and returned to his rooming house, entering this time by the front door. At the top of the stairs he carefully removed the putty he had left in the fire escape lock and returned to his room. He dropped off the overcoat containing the M-11 and put on the one containing the .38. That was all. The way he kept his place locked, he wasn’t worried that a burglar would rip off the pistol, or anything else in his apartment for that matter.

He double-locked his door, tested it, and left the building as quickly and quietly as he had come. And as he did it he laughed at himself. There was no need to be so quiet, it was just that it was second nature to him now. Unless he was acting the part of an unconcerned civilian he was always wary, always stealthy. He walked the short distance from his place to headquarters the same way, like a thief or someone tracking a thief.

He went through the quiet, brightly lit corridors of Police Headquarters until he got to the little office occupied by him and Neff. When he opened the door, his eyes widened with surprise.

There sat Evans.

“Hiya, Doc. Do I owe you money?”

Evans wasn’t interested in bantering with Wilson. “We got another one,” he said simply.

“What’s the story?”

Evans looked at him. “Call Neff. Tell her to meet us at the scene.”

“Anything new?” Wilson asked as he dialed the phone.

“Plenty.”

“Why didn’t you call Neff yourself?”

“You’re the senior man on the case. I tried you first. When you didn’t answer I came over. I figured you were on your way in.”

“Emergency, Doctor. You could have called Neff when you didn’t find me.”

“I have no emergencies. My line of business only concerns emergencies after they’re over.”

Somewhere out there the phone was ringing. Dick was subvocalizing a few choice curses each time the bell burst the silence. Ring and curse, ring and curse. “It could be for you,” Becky said.

“Nah. I’m burned, remember. It ain’t for me.”

“Then it’s for me.”

“So answer the fucker. One of us has gotta do it.”

She picked up the receiver. Wilson didn’t waste hellos. “Oh, Christ. OK, see you there.” She hung up. “Gotta go. Homicide in the park.”

“Since when are you assigned uptown?”

“Evans called us in. He says it looks like our friends got hungry again.”

“The big bad wolves.” He raised himself up on his elbow. “What about our picture-taking expedition, will it be on?”

“I hope. I’ll call you.”

“OK, honey.”

She was dressing as quickly as possible, but the gentleness in his voice made her stop. They looked at one another. The delirious, unexpected intensity of the night before was written in Dick’s face. She saw clearly: he was grateful. It touched her, made her think that maybe there was still something left after all.

“I—” The words seemed to die in her throat. They were so unfamiliar, so long unsaid.

Dick had come to her wordlessly, in the dark, just as she was falling asleep. He had embraced her, his body hot and trembling, and had awakened in her a painful rush of feeling. Maybe she did care—so much that she just couldn’t face it. Maybe that was the true source of the wall that was being built between them. And realizing that she had responded to his intensity with passion of her own and had enjoyed the violent insistence of his body, finally crying out with the pleasure.

“What, Becky?”

“I don’t know. Just wanted to say good-bye.” But not I love you, not that again, not yet. And she felt like a heel for holding back, a selfish heel.

“Don’t make it sound so final.” He chuckled. “The worst I’ll get is early retirement. If the shooflies are real good they might give you a five-day. Don’t let it bug you, darling. And by the way, there’s something else I want to say to you before you go.” He rolled over on his back, throwing off the covers, exposing his naked body and erect penis with delightful lack of modesty. “You still remain one of the great American lays, darling.”

And she was beside him, bending over him, kissing his smiling face. “Dick, you silly fool, look at you. You never get enough.”

“I’m a morning man.”

“And a night man and an afternoon man. I wish I didn’t have to go! I’ll call you when I get the chance.” She drew herself away from him, full of a confusion of emotions. Why couldn’t she make up her mind about this: did she still love Dick Neff or didn’t she? And what about Wilson, what did her feelings for him mean?

She rode the elevator down to the garage level and got in her car. As soon as she started driving her mind closed around the case. The night with Dick receded, as did the welter of emotions she had been feeling. Like a murky, ugly fog the case rose and recaptured her. Wilson hadn’t said much over the phone, not much. But he had sounded uncharacteristically upset. Evans had been with him at Police Headquarters. She glanced at her watch: seven A.M. An early hour for Doctor Evans. She stepped on the accelerator, racing across Seventy-ninth Street in the snow, heading for the point of rendezvous, Central Park West and Seventy-second.

The streets were empty as she maneuvered the car around the corner at Seventy-ninth and CPW. She was now in the 20th Precinct. Ahead she could see the flashing lights, the dismal little crowd of emergency vehicles that always marked a crime scene. She pulled up behind a parked radio car. “I’m Neff,” she said to the lieutenant on the scene.

“We got a funny one,” he intoned. “Anticrime boys found this bench covered with frozen blood about an hour ago. We took it to pathology and sure enough it’s human. O-negative, to be exact. But we got no corpse, nothin’.”

“How do you know it was a murder?”

“There’s evidence enough. First off, too much blood, whoever lost it had to die. Second, we can see where the body was pulled across the wall.” Her eyes went to the indentations in the snow that lay along the wall. More snow had fallen since the murder, but not enough to completely obliterate the signs. “By the way, Detective Neff, if I may be so blunt, why are you here?”

“Well, I’m on special assignment with my partner, Detective Wilson. We’re investigating a certain M.O. When the M. E. finds a case that seems to fit he gives us a call.”

“You take your orders from the M. E.?”

“We were instructed by the Commissioner.” She hadn’t wanted to pull rank, but she sensed that he was needling her. He smiled a little sheepishly and strolled away. “Lieutenant,” Neff called, “is this blood all you have? No body, no clothing, nothing?”

“Hold on, Becky,” a voice said behind her. It was Evans, followed closely by Wilson. The two men came up and the three of them huddled together under the curious eyes of the men of the 20th and Central Park precincts. “There’s more,” Evans said, “there’s some hair.”

“He’s examined some hairs that were stuck in the blood.”

“Right. This is my interpreter, Detective Wilson. I found hairs—”

“That match the hairs found at the DiFalco scene.”

Evans frowned. “Come on, Wilson, lay off. The hairs match the ones we’ve found at every scene.”

“They’re pretty voracious if they only left blood,” Becky said.

“They didn’t. Don’t you see what happened? They hid the remains. They’ve learned that we’re on their tail and they’re trying to slow us down. They’re very bright.”

“That’s for certain,” Wilson said. Becky noticed how haggard he looked, his face waxen, his jaw unshaven. Had he slept at all? It didn’t look like it. He cleared his throat. “Are they searching for the corpse?” he asked the Lieutenant, who was standing nearby.

“Yeah. There’s some sign of something being dragged, but the snow covered most of the evidence up. We’re just not sure what happened.”

Becky motioned to Wilson and Evans. They followed her into her car. “It’s warmer here,” she said, “and the Loo won’t overhear us.”

Evans was the first to speak. “Obviously they were hiding behind the wall when somebody sat on the bench. Judging from the blood it happened five or six hours ago. They must have jumped over the wall, killed fast and dragged the corpse away.”

“Not in one piece,” Wilson said. “There’d be more marks. I think they tore it up and carried it.”

“Jesus. But what about the clothes?”

“That’s what we ought to be able to find. The bones, too, for that matter, there aren’t too many places they could have hidden them.”

“How about the pond?”

“You mean because it’s frozen over? I doubt if they’d think of busting the ice in the pond, that’s too smart.”

“We need to find clothes, some kind of identification.”

“Yeah. Where the hell to look, though? This friggin’ snow…”

“I have the hairs. I don’t need anything more to convince me. They came here last night and they killed this person. I’m certain of that. It was them. Their hairs are unique, as unique as a fingerprint.”

“So they kill a lot. That’s to be expected for a carnivorous animal.”

Becky corrected her partner. “Carnivorous humanoid.”

Wilson laughed. “From what I’ve seen they could hardly be described as humanoid.”

“And what have you seen?”

“Them.”

Becky and the M. E. stared at him. “You’ve seen them?” Evans finally managed to ask.

“That’s right. Last night.”

“What the hell are you saying?” Becky asked.

“I saw six of them outside of your apartment last night. I was hunting them, trying to get Ferguson his specimen.” He sighed. “They’re fast, though. I missed ’em by a mile. Lucky I’m still alive.”

Becky was stunned. She looked at her partner’s tired face, at his watery, aging eyes. He had been out there guarding her! The crazy, sweet old romantic jerk. At this moment she felt like she was seeing a hidden, secret Wilson, seeing him for the very first time. She could have kissed him.

Chapter 7

« ^ »

Carl Ferguson was horrified and excited at the same time by what he was reading. He seemed to drift away, to a quiet and safe place. But he came back. Around him the prosaic realities of the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library reasserted themselves. Across from him a painfully pretty schoolgirl cracked her gum. Beside him an old man breathed long and slow, paging through an equally old book. All around him there was a subdued clatter, the scuttle of pen on paper, the coughs, the whispers, the drone of clerks calling numbers from the front of the room.

Because you could not enter the stacks and because you could neither enter nor leave this room with a book, its collection had not been stolen and was still among the best in the world. And it was because of the book that he had finally obtained from this superb collection that Carl Ferguson felt such an extremity of fear. What he read, what he saw before him was almost too fantastic and too horrible to believe. And yet the words were there.

“In Normandy,” Ferguson read for the third time, “tradition tells of certain fantastic beings known as lupins or lubins. They pass the night chattering together and twattling in an unknown tongue. They take their stand by the walls of country cemeteries and howl dismally at the moon. Timorous and fearful of man they will flee away scared at a footstep or distant voice. In some districts, however, they are fierce and of the werewolf race, since they are said to scratch up graves with their hands and gnaw poor dead bones.”

An ancient story, repeated by Montague Summers in his classic The Werewolf. Summers assumed that the werewolf tales were folklore, hearsay conjured up to frighten the gullible. But Summers was totally, incredibly wrong. The old legends and tales were true. Only one small element was incorrect—in the past it was assumed that their intelligence and cunning meant that werewolves were men who had assumed the shape of animals. But they weren’t. They were not that at all, but rather a completely separate species of intelligent creature. And they had been sharing planet Earth with us all these long eons and we never understood it. What marvelous beings they must be—a virtual alien intelligence right here at home. It was a frightening discovery, but to Ferguson also one of awesome wonder.

Here were legends, stories, tales going back thousands of years, repeating again and again the mythology of the werewolf. And then suddenly, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, silence.

The legends died.

The stories were no longer told.

But why? To Ferguson’s mind the answer was simple: the werewolves, tormented for generations by humanity’s vigilance and fear, had found a way to hide from man. Their cover was now perfect. They lived among us, fed off our living flesh, but were unknown to all except those who didn’t live to tell the tale. They were a race of living ghosts, unseen but very much a part of the world. They understood human society well enough to take only the abandoned, the weak, the isolated. And toward the end of the nineteenth century the human population all over the world had started to explode, poverty and filth had spread. Huge masses of people were ignored and abandoned by the societies in which they lived. And they were fodder for these werewolves, who range through the shadows devouring the beggars, the wanderers, those without name or home.

And no doubt the population of werewolves had exploded right along with the human population. Ferguson pictured hundreds, thousands of them scavenging the great cities of the earth for their human prey, rarely being glimpsed, using their sensitive ears and noses to keep well distant of all but the weak and helpless, taking advantage of man’s increasing multitudes and increasing poverty. Their faculties combined with their intelligence must make them fearsome indeed—but what an opportunity they also represented to science—to him—as another intelligence capable of study, even perhaps communication.

But there was something else about Summers’ book, something even more disquieting, and that was the continual references to men and werewolves in communication with one another. “Two gentlemen who were crossing a forest glade after dark suddenly came upon an open space where an old woodsman was standing, a man well-known to them, who was making passes in the air, weaving strange signs and signals. The two friends concealed themselves behind a tree, whence they saw thirteen wolves come trotting along. The leader was a huge grey wolf who went up to the old man fawning upon him and being caressed. Presently the forester uttered a sing-song chant and plunged into the woods followed by the wolves.”

Just a story, but tremendously interesting in the context of the information that the two detectives had brought him. Obviously the references to signs and a “sing-song” chant referred to human attempts to mimic the language of the werewolves, to communicate. Why did men once run with the werewolves?

Summers said that vampires were often connected to werewolves. Vampires—the eaters of blood. In other words, cannibals. To a less knowledgeable person such an idea might have seemed fantastic, but Ferguson knew enough about old Europe to understand the probable truth behind the legend. Men did indeed run with werewolves, and those men were called vampires because they fed off human flesh like the wolves themselves. Cannibalism must have been common in the Europe of the Dark Ages, when grinding poverty was the fate of all except a tiny minority. When men were the weakest and most numerous creatures around it must have tempted the hungry… to go out and find the werewolves, somehow build up a rapport, and then hunt with them, living like a scavenger off the pickings.

So much for the image of the vampire as a count with a castle and a silk dinner jacket. The truth was more like Summers’ description—a filthy old forester scrabbling along with a pack of werewolves to glean the leavings of their monstrous feasts.

Man the scavenger, in the same role among werewolves that dogs play among men! And the human prey, unsuspecting now, but in those days it knew. People approached the night with terror crackling in their hearts. And when darkness fell only the desperate and the mad remained out of doors.

What, then, was the role of the human scavenger, the vampire, that ran with the werewolves? Why did they tolerate him? Simple enough, to coax people out of their houses, to lure them into the shadows where they would be ripped apart. It was ugly but it also meant that there had been communication of a sort between man and werewolf in the past, and could be again. And how immeasurably richer communication between this extraordinary species and modern science might be. There could be no comparison between the promise of the future and the sordid mistakes of the distant past.

It had gotten much easier for the werewolves in recent centuries. No longer were the human vampires needed. Nowadays the werewolves could do it on their own. Just take up residence in any big city, live in abandoned buildings among the city’s million byways, and prey on the human strays.

Man and wolf. It had been an age-old animosity. The image of the wolf baying at the moon on a winter’s night still calls primitive terrors to the heart of man.

And with good reason, except that the innocent timber wolf with his loud howling and once conspicuous presence was not the enemy. Lurking back there in the shadows, perhaps along the path to the well, was the real enemy, unnoticed, patient, lethal beyond imagining. The wolf-being with its long finger-like paws, the werewolf, the other intelligent species that shared this planet.

We killed off the innocent timber wolf and never even discovered the real danger. While the timber wolf bayed to the oblivious moon the real enemy crept up the basement steps and used one of those clever paws to throw the bolt on the door.

Ferguson ran his fingers through his hair, his mind trying to accept the fearful truth he had uncovered. That damn detective—Wilson was his name —had an absolutely uncanny intuition about this whole matter. It was Detective Wilson who had first said the word werewolf, the word that had gotten Ferguson really thinking about that strange paw. And Wilson had claimed that the werewolves were hunting him and the woman down. With good reason! Once their secret was out the life of the werewolf would be made immeasurably harder, like it was in the old days in Europe when humanity bolted its doors and locked its windows, or in the Americas where the Indian used his knowledge of the forest to play a deadly game of hide and seek, a game commemorated to this day in the traditional dances of many tribes. The werewolf undoubtedly followed man to this continent across the Bering land bridge eons ago. But always and everywhere he kept himself as well hidden as he could. And it made good sense. You wouldn’t find beggars sleeping on sidewalks if the werewolf was common knowledge. A wave of terror would sweep the city and the world unlike anything known since the Middle Ages. Unspeakable things would be done in the name of human safety. Man would declare all-out war on his adversary.

And at last he would have a fair fight on his hands. With all our technology, we have never faced an alien intelligence before, have never faced a species with its own built-in technology far superior to our own. Ferguson could not imagine what the mind behind the nose and ears of the werewolf must be like. The sheer quantity of information pouring in must literally be millions of times greater than that reaching a man through his eyes. The mind that gave meaning to all that information must be a miracle indeed. Maybe even greater than the mind of man. And man must, this time, react responsibly. If there was intelligence there it could be reasoned with, and eventually the two enemy species could learn to live together in peace. If Carl Ferguson had any part in this at all it was as the missionary of reason and understanding. Man could either declare war on this species or try to come to an understanding. Carl Ferguson raised his head, closed his eyes and hoped with every fiber of his being that reason would for once prevail.

He was surprised to notice somebody was standing beside him.

“You’ve got to take this call slip to the rare books department. We don’t have this book in the reading room. All of our stuff is post-1825 and this book was written in 1597.” The call clerk dropped the card on the table in front of Ferguson and went away. Ferguson got up and headed for the rare books collection, card clutched in his hand.

He moved through the empty, echoing halls of the great library, finally arriving at the rare books collection. A middle-aged woman sat at a desk working on a catalogue under a green-shaded lamp. The only sound in the room was the faint clatter of the steam pipes and the snow-muted mutter of the city beyond the windows.

“I’m Carl Ferguson of the Museum of Natural History. I’d like to take a look at this book.” He handed her the card. “Do we have this?”

“It’s catalogued.” She got up and disappeared behind a wire-covered doorway. Ferguson waited standing expectantly for a few moments, then found a chair. There was no sound from the direction the woman had gone. He was alone in the room. The place smelled of books. And he was impatient for her to return. It was urgent that she produce the book he needed. It was by Beauvoys de Chauvincourt, a man considered an authority on werewolves in his day, and more interestingly, a familiar of them. The manner of his death was what had excited Ferguson—it indicated that the man may indeed have known the creatures firsthand. Beauvoys de Chauvincourt had gone out one night in search of his friends the werewolves and had simply disappeared. The dark suspicions of the time notwithstanding, Ferguson felt that he almost certainly had met his end observing the ancestors of the very creatures whose work the two cops had uncovered. “Do you know books, Mr. Ferguson?”

“It’s Doctor. Y-yes, I do. I can handle antique books.”

“That’s exactly what shouldn’t be done with them.” She eyed him. “I’ll turn for you,” she said firmly. “Let’s go over there.” She placed the book before him at a table and turned on one of the green-shaded lights.

“Discours de la Lycanthropie, ou de la transformation des hommes en loups,” read the title page.

“Turn.”

She opened the book, turning the stiff pages to the frontispiece. And Ferguson felt sweat trickling down his temples. What he was seeing was so extraordinary that it was almost too much to bear without crying out. For there on the frontispiece of the ancient book was engraved a most amazing picture. In this ancient engraving a sparse plain was shown lit by a full moon. And walking through the plain was a man surrounded by things that looked somewhat like wolves but were not wolves. The man appeared at ease, strolling along playing a bagpipe that was slung over his shoulder. And the werewolves walked with him. The artist had rendered his subjects faithfully, Ferguson guessed. The heads with their high, wide brain cases and large eyes, the delicate and sinister paws, the voracious, knowing faces—it all fit the image Ferguson had created in his own mind of what the creatures must look like. And the man with them—incredible. In those days there must certainly have been communication between humans —some humans—and werewolves. De Chauvincourt himself must have… known them. And in the end they destroyed him.

“Turn.”

Ferguson cursed his French. Here were lists of names—no, they were invocations of demons. Nothing to be learned here. “Turn.”

More invocations.

“Keep turning.”

The pages rolled past until something caught Ferguson’s eye. “The Language They Assume.”

Here followed a description of a complex language composed of tail movements, ear movements, growls, changes in facial expression, movements of the tongue and even clicks of the nails. It was as if human language had consisted not only of words but also of myriad gestures to augment those words.

And Ferguson knew something he hadn’t known before. The creatures had vocal cords inadequate to the needs of true verbal language. How fast their brain must have evolved! Perhaps it took only fifty or a hundred thousand years and there they were, strange intelligent beings roaming the world in pursuit of man, engaged in the age-long hunt that occupied them to this day.

“Turn.”

Here the book had another engraving—hand movements. “Can I get a Xerox of this page?”

“We can’t copy this book.”

He had brought paper and pencil and made rough sketches of the positions shown noting the meaning of each: stop, run, kill, attack, flee.

Stop—the tips of the fingers drawn down to the edge of the palm.

Run—the hands held straight out before the face.

Kill—the fists clenched, held against the throat.

Attack—the hands clutching the stomach like claws.

Flee—the palms against the forehead.

But these were human signals. Obviously the werewolves did not use such gestures among themselves because they were four-legged. There must have been a mutual language composed of signals like these between the werewolves and—

“Les vampires.” The book said it. And there was the source of another legend, the vampires again. This must be the language they used to communicate with the werewolves. The vampires, those who followed the wolves and scavenged the remains. And the wolves needed them to induce people to come out of their locked houses.

What a different world it had been then! Werewolves and vampires stalking the night, the vampires luring people from their homes to be devoured. No wonder the Middle Ages were such a dark and cruel time. The terrors of the night were not imaginary at all, but stark realities faced from birth by everybody. Only as the sheer numbers of mankind had increased had the threat seemed to disappear. Man grew so numerous that the work of the werewolves was no longer noticed. In the days of de Chauvincourt the human helpers must already have been unnecessary in most places… and so as soon as the vampire weakened with age the werewolves turned on him. The librarian turned the page.

Ferguson jumped up. He tried to stop himself, but took an involuntary step backward and knocked over the chair.

“Sir!”

“I-I’m sorry!” He grabbed the chair, righted it. Now he felt like a fool. But the engraving that covered both of the pages facing was so terrible that he almost could not look at it.

He was seeing the werewolf close up, face to face. This would be a reliable rendition of the features. Even in this three-hundred-and-eighty-year-old engraving he could see the savagery, the sheer voraciousness of the creature. The eyes stared out at him like something from a nightmare.

And they were from a nightmare. His mind was racing now as he remembered, an incident that had occurred when he was no more than six or seven. They were in the Catskills, spending the summer near New Paltz in upstate New York. He was asleep in his ground-floor bedroom. Something awakened him. Moonlight was streaming in the open window. And a monstrous animal was leaning in, poking its muzzle toward him, the face clear in the moonlight.

He had screamed and the thing had disappeared in a flash. Nightmare, they said. And here it was staring at him again, the face of the werewolf.

The librarian closed the book. “That will be enough,” she said. “I think you’re upset.”

“Those engravings—”

“They are horrible but I don’t think it quite calls for—hysterics.”

This amazed Ferguson. How dare she accuse him like that. “What would you say, madam, if those were engravings of real animals?”

“These are werewolves, Mr. Ferguson.”

“Doctor. And I assure you that those animals are very real. You can imagine my shock when I saw them engraved in a book of that age, when the discovery was supposed to have taken place only a few weeks ago.”

He left her to sort that one out. Too bad, too, she was a nice-looking woman, he wouldn’t have minded getting to know her. But not now. He went down to the basement cloakroom and picked up his coat. Outside it had stopped snowing and the pedestrian traffic had transformed the sidewalk into gray slush. He turned the collar of his coat up against the surging wind and walked toward Sixth Avenue. He was going to see Tom Rilker, to get his help in determining a logical forage in the city for these creatures. There must be some area where lots of homeless people congregated. Not the Bowery, it was surrounded by heavily populated areas. Rilker would have some ideas.

Then he stopped. “My God,” he thought, “those two cops have a point, what if the damn things are hunting me too?” Had they seen him with the cops last night? No way to tell. But if they had made the connection then he could be in mortal danger right now, even here in the middle of Forty-second Street.

He jammed his hands into his pockets and walked more quickly on. And he remembered the face of the nightmare in the moonlit window.

Dick Neff padded naked into the kitchen to fix himself another drink. He glanced at the kitchen clock—nearly noon. A shaft of sunlight shone in the kitchen window, as sharp and silver as a blade. First the snow had stopped and then the clouds had blown away. Now the wind moaned around the corner of the building and a bright dust of snow glittered through the sunlight. The glare hurt Dick’s eyes, and he fumbled as he fixed his third Bloody Mary.

His mind was working, turning in a haze of anguish that would not go away. Becky, shooflies, burns, sorrow. He took a long pull on the drink and went into the living room. Goddamn, he couldn’t believe what had almost happened to him, how close he had come to death. Burned and didn’t even know it. He had been moving with Andy Jakes for six months, really working in with him. Hell, the guy was the biggest dealer in the Northeast. The Goddamn biggest fuckin’ dealer. And Andy Jakes had been playing with Mr. Narcotics Cop. Jesus Christ! If he had collared Andy Jakes the shooflies would have laid off out of respect. Let it ride. But now he was just another victim of that brilliant crook’s mind.

He had been about to enter Jakes’s apartment, just heading toward the elevator when his teammates had gotten to him. Hold it, Dick, we got trouble. Bobby says the bug’s pickin’ up a lot of movement in there. Jakes’s supposed to be alone?

—Yeah, he’s alone. He’s got the stuff in there. Ten kilos, let me go.

—Not alone. Don’t go in. There’s people in there, lots of people movin’ around, not talkin’.

—Not talkin’? Shit, that must mean—

—They suspect a bug. And they suspect you. They’re waiting for you, Dick.

—Oh, shit shit shit.

And he had stopped. He had not gone in. Follow your instincts, boy. Don’t go in there. Another man might have shrugged it off and gone in. But not Dick.

And then they were off trying to get a warrant to bust the place when another call had come from the wire man. They were leaving. Christ! They had left. Surveillance followed them to Teterboro Airport, to a flight plan filed for Guadeloupe, Honduras, Brazil. Shit.

And they got the warrant and entered the apartment. So it’s empty, of course, completely empty except for the Goddamn note. A note on nice engraved stationery, just as nice as you please. “Sorry, Richard,” says the note. “I know how much of an embarrassment this will be to you. You be careful now. Cordially, Andy.”

The guys got a whoop out of that note. “Hey Richard, Andy’s some cool sonofabitch! Hey, beautiful, what a shit-heel.”

The other guys were almost happy that Dick hadn’t made his collar. Robin Hood. Sam Bass. The beautiful crook. Although there was also the other thing. Every gold shield in the division lusted after Andy Jakes and now it was open season on him again. Now other guys could take a crack, now Neff had blown it.

“Dick, you know what was waiting for you in there,” Captain Fogarty had said. Good old Fogarty, always looking on the bright side. “A Goddamn arsenal. Wires says six or seven people were in there creepin’ around as silent as cats. Waiting for you, Dick. Blown you away. I doubt if we’d ever laid eyes on you again, old buddy.”

Maybe that would have been better. Because another captain, Captain Lesser of the Internal Affairs Division, was closing in on Dick Neff. Another job blown. Somehow or other IAD had gotten wind of Dick’s little deal with Mort Harper. What the hell was it anyway, a nice clean gambling establishment. The best clientele, even the fuckin’ DA was there once. The fuckin’ DA playing blackjack and lovin’ it. Mort was protected! But he had put the finger on Neff, had built up his City Hall connections to the point that he didn’t need Neff’s silence anymore. “Hey, Mr. DA, y’know I got this monkey on my back, a little shit shakin’ me down—”

“What the hell, this is a decent place.” Movie stars. Politicians. Stockbrokers. Marble bar. Crushed-velvet carpets. Honest tables.

“Takin’ out a grand a month, Mr. DA.”

“Oh stop singin’, Morty, I’ll take care of it.”

Oh, Morty was beautiful too. Smarter than Dick Neff. Everybody was smarter than Dick Neff. Even the shoofly Captain with his funny questions. “How many bank accounts you got? Your wife? Fine, could we see your income tax returns? Just routine. Somebody turned up a little dirt, Dick. Nothing really. Just routine. I got to go through the motions is all.”

Go through the motions like hell! Dick Neff was due for a Board. Early retirement—hell, he’d be lucky to stay out of Attica! “You have a right to remain silent. You have a right to an attorney.”

Silent, damn right. An attorney, damn right. He swallowed the last of the Bloody Mary and went to the sliding doors, looked out on the bright snow that covered the balcony.

And what he saw there made him gape. Pawprints as nice and clear as you please. He stared at them confused and disbelieving. Pawprints? And on the glass door a smear of another print. He squatted down and examined it. It could just be… a smeared pawprint… where something had tried the door. These prints must have been laid in the early morning after the snow had stopped. Shit, Becky wasn’t imagining things after all. These damn prints were real. No way to deny it, and they didn’t belong here.

He felt suddenly exposed in his nakedness and returned to the bedroom to dress. He shook his head, physically trying to shake out the welter of thoughts that clamored for attention. Dressing automatically, he fought for clarity. Those two crazies were right then? That scabrous old shitkicker Wilson wasn’t senile after all. It seemed impossible, a trivial detail suddenly expanded to fill his whole consciousness with its importance. If she was in danger! If she was in danger and he didn’t help her he would kill himself. That was the size of it, he would take out his Goddamn .38 and put the barrel in his mouth and pull the Goddamn trigger. Let the department face that one.

He put on a conservative suit and brushed down his hair until he looked reasonably presentable. He had to get that Starlight camera out of Yablonski in the Photo Unit. He had to look the part. Would the good news about Dick Neff have traveled as far as Yablonski? Probably not. Just routine, gimme the camera. Orders? Shit, c’mon man, I got to use this thing tonight. Easy. Peaches.

He left the apartment, then returned. As soon as he had gotten into the hall he had felt the absence of his pistol. Like he wasn’t wearing underpants or something. The gun. He dropped off his overcoat and his jacket and pulled the holster containing the .32 out of his bureau drawer. The larger .38 he left behind. This pistol fitted neatly into a holster nestled in the small of his back, easy to get to, hard to spot. You weren’t too comfortable when you sat down in a hard chair but other than that the small of the back was a beautiful hiding place for a weapon.

Now he glanced at the pawprints again. They were ugly, frightening. He tested the door and then pulled the curtains closed. This time he left and did not return. Outside the wind hit him with the force of a powerful shove. It bit right through his coat and made his muscles grow taut with cold. He wanted another drink, better make a pit stop on the way down. What the hell, make it now. Across the street was O’Faolian’s where he usually made a stop on his way to the apartment. He went there now.

“Hiya, Frenchie,” he said as he slipped up to the bar, “gimme a Bloody.” The bartender made it and set it in front of him. Instead of going about his business, though, he hovered there fooling with glasses.

“You want something?” Dick asked. Frenchie was not a friendly guy, not the type to make small talk.

“Nah. A guy’s been in is all. A guy wantin’ to know about you.”

“So?”

“So I don’t say nothin’.”

“Good. What else is new?”

“You don’t wanna know what he’s askin’ about?” Frenchie looked surprised, a little disappointed.

“I can pretty well guess,” Dick said expansively. “He wanted to know if I had ever been seen in here with a little kike five-two, greasy black hair, wire-rimmed glasses, name of Mort Harper. And you said no.”

“Hell I didn’t say nothin’. Not yes or no.” He looked pleadingly at Neff. “The guy, he flashed on me, see. What could I do? You don’t get ’em flashin’ unless it’s serious business.”

Dick chuckled. “Thanks, Frenchie,” he said. He put a five on the bar and left. Damn decent of the little jerk to tell him that Captain Lesser had been in here confirming that this was where Dick met Mort Harper to take the pass. How long had it been going on? Dick couldn’t remember exactly. God, though, it must be years. All that money right up to the Stranger Nursing Home. Right up there to keep the old man in cigars.

The old man. A pang of sentiment went through him, thinking of the old senile man who had once been so powerful, so determined. Drove a bus for the Red and Tan Line. Retirement pay plus Social Security: $177.90 a lousy month. Senile decay, Parkinson’s disease, helplessness had turned to violence, periodic seizures, a thousand-dollar-a-month problem. You don’t give your old man over to the tender care of the State, not when you’ve seen the inside of those places firsthand. “Gonna make you go naked for a day, you old fart, you don’t stop that shakin’. Stop it, you gettin’ on my nerves. OK, fuck you, gimme that gown!” That’s the kind of thing that went on. A bunch of monsters making life hell for the old and helpless. “Come on, guinea, light my cigarette! Fuckin’ old shit.” Dick had seen what it was like in those State hospitals, a playground for sadistic perverts masquerading as attendants. No place for his old man.

All of a sudden he was shaking uncontrollably, standing there in the doorway of the bar. He grabbed at the door handle to steady himself, then reeled back into the bar. He dropped to a table. “Shit, Frenchie,” he said, “get some food in me. I feel like shit.”

Frenchie produced a hamburger and some stale fries and as soon as he bit into the food Dick found that he was ravenously hungry. He wolfed down the burger, ordered another. Now he leaned back, relaxed into the mild fog that the drinks had produced, that and the ease of the food.

What the fuck had he been doing? Oh yeah, going to get that damn camera for Becky, his kid bride. Kid, hell, she was only a year younger than him and he was no kid. She was still a damn good lay, though, especially the way she came. Like a Goddamn female freight train. She made you feel like you were worth something. None of the others ever really did that. They were all pretending, wanting to fuck a cop for reasons that had nothing to do with love. Pros that needed a friend, most of them. What the hell, they threw it at you. Becky didn’t know and never would if Dick had anything to say about it. What they had together was something special, something no pro was going to take away from them.

Well, what the hell, what she didn’t know wasn’t going to hurt her.

“Frenchie! Bring me another Bloody.”

Frenchie came over. “Nosir,” he said, “can’t do that.”

“Why the fuck not! What is this, a Salvation Army Shelter?”

“You’re on duty. I’m not gettin’ you drunk in here. Shit, you came in here half looped. Now you go on about your business. I don’t want no cops gettin’ drunk in here. It’s a bad rap with the department and you know it. Go somewhere else.”

“I’m not on duty. I’m graveyard this week.”

“You’re carryin’ a piece, Lieutenant Neff. I can’t serve you any more booze.”

“Jesus Christ, Mr. Hot Shit—OK, I’ll take my trade elsewhere. But don’t say I didn’t warn you, Frenchie. You look out for your ass, hear. Just look out real careful, you never know what’s gonna come up your back.”

Frenchie walked away shaking his head. Dick left, wanting at once to say something to appease Frenchie, wishing he hadn’t been so nasty, yet still feeling in himself the urge to be even nastier, to strike out at somebody. He hailed a cab to go to headquarters.

Yablonski’s office was a clutter of photographic equipment, report forms, pictures tacked to walls, half-empty coffee cups. “Hey, Dick,” the little man said when he looked up. “What brings you down here?”

“Your beautiful face. I need some night photography equipment.”

“Yeah? You got infrared uptown. If you need a photographer forget it until next week, my guys are—”

“Hooked up. No, we don’t need a photographer.”

“You guys take up time. I can’t spare men to spend days and days sitting in cars doing what any moron—”

“Like me can do.”

“Yeah. So why don’t you just use your own infrared equipment and let me the fuck alone.”

“Because I don’t need infrared. I need high power and long range. You know infrared’s no good over fifty yards.”

“No, I didn’t know that. Hell, Dick, it’s my business, don’t take that tone with me.”

Neff closed his eyes. What made this little fart so Goddamn difficult to deal with? He always talked in arguments. “I need the Starlight camera.”

“Like hell.”

“For one night.”

“I repeat: like hell. That camera doesn’t leave this Bureau without a trained operator, meaning me. And I’m not takin’ it out without a signed letter from somebody I can’t turn down.”

“Come on now, don’t get crazy. I only need it for one night. Think if you don’t give it to me and I lose an important collar as a result. Think how that’ll look.”

“It won’t look like nothin’. Officially you don’t even know that camera exists.”

“Oh, cut the crap. We got an eyes only on it in 1975. That thing’s been goin’ in and out of Narcotics ever since.”

“Well, I didn’t know that.” Yablonski glowered, pugnacious, aware that Dick was somehow edging him into a corner.

“How’s the wife?”

“What’s she got to do with it? She the suspect?”

“Just trying to be friendly. Look, I’ll level with you. I got a big collar coming up but we need evidence. We got to have pictures.”

“Big deal. Use fast film. There’s plenty of light in the streets.”

Dick sighed, pretended to give up on something. “I guess I gotta tell you more than you need to know. We got a big pass comin’ up. We just can’t risk missin’ it. We gotta have that camera.”

Yablonski glared at him. He did not like to let his precious Starlight camera out of his personal control. On the other hand he had no intention of spending the night on some dangerous narcotics stakeout. He stood up, brought out his keys and went to a bank of lockers that covered one wall of the office.

“I’m gonna be a sucker,” he said, “let you take this thing out and get it smashed. You know how much this thing cost the City of New York?”

“Nothin.”

“About a hundred grand. Hardly nothing.”

“It’s CIA surplus circa Vietnam. You know damn well we got it for nothing.”

“Well, I’m not sure we’d get another if we lost or busted this one.” He removed a metal case from the locker and placed it gently on his desk. “You used this before?”

“You know I have.”

“Well I’m gonna go through the drill anyway!” He opened the case and pulled out a boxy object made of gray, burnished metal. It was about the size and shape of a two-pound can of coffee with binocular eyepieces on one end and a large, gleaming fisheye of a lens on the other. The body of the thing was entirely featureless, except for a barely visible indentation obviously intended for a thumb.

“You open the control panel like this,” Yablonski said, pressing on the indentation. A three-inch square of surface metal slid back to reveal a panel containing two black knobs and a small slit. “You slide in the film.” He pushed a small black rectangle into the opening. “That gives you two hundred shots. That’s the bottom number in the readout you’ll see in the lower right quadrant of the frame when you look through the camera. Above that’s the ambient light reading. You set the top knob so that it reads the same value. Here—” He held the camera out. Dick took it, put it up to his eyes. The image was blurred but the three numbers were clear. “Read off from the bottom up.”

“The bottom number says two hundred. The middle one sixty-six, the top point-oh-six.”

“Meaning you’ve got two hundred shots left, the ambient light level is sixty-six and you are pointing the camera at an object point-oh-six meters away. Now gimme.” He took it back. “You set the top knob at sixty-six and the bottom one at point-oh-six. Now look.”

“What the hell is it?”

“The top corner of the locker, dummy. It’s magnified so much you can’t tell what you’re seeing that close. Point the camera out the window.” Dick swung the camera around. The top two readings flickered and changed as he moved it, then the limbs of a tree down near street level leaped into view. He could see where ice adhered to the twigs and where the sun had made it drop away. Yablonski guided his hand to the thumb indentation. “Pull back on it.” There was a click. The little door had closed on the side of the camera and a red light had gone on above the three green numbers of the readout. “You get a light?”

“Right.”

“Ready to shoot. Push forward.” The camera made five shots in quick succession. The film indicator now read 195.

“It always shoots in increments of five. Now press inward on the indentation.” The scene pulled back and revealed the sidewalk below. “You go down to fifty millimeters. Fifty to five hundred, that’s the lens. If you push forward and down at the same time the camera will take a series of shots while the lens is moving. No problem. Just remember to always close the control housing before you try to shoot.” Dick took the camera from his eyes. Yablonski was pointing at the control housing. “That activates the camera. And if you change position always check focus. In operation it doesn’t matter too much, but remember that the camera is at its sharpest focus when the object you are shooting is exactly as far away as that little indicator in there says. You want it to change, you’ve got to adjust it with the knob.”

“That’s all? I remembered everything.”

“Well, aren’t we wonderful. Just don’t bring it back to me in a shoebox, for Chrissake. And get the fucker back here before noon tomorrow or I’ll be on your ass.”

“Oh, yes sir, Mr. Commissioner, just like you say.”

“Come on, Dick, take it easy. How much film you want?”

“Another couple of boxes. That stuffs really compact. You sure there are two hundred shots?”

“Of course. You think the camera would lie?”

Dick put the machine back in its case and hefted it. He left Yablonski staring after him.

As soon as he was gone, Yablonski was on the phone. “Captain Lesser,” he said crisply, “you told me you wanted a call if Dick Neff came around here for anything. Well, he did. He checked out the Starlight camera.”

Chapter 8

« ^ »

The search teams kept coming back empty-handed. It looked as if the park wasn’t going to yield any worthwhile clues. A bench covered with a slick of red ice— human blood. Some tattered remnants that might have been the victim’s clothes. That was all. No body, no ID, no witnesses. And so far, no report of a missing person. The cops were waiting for orders to move them out. The precinct wasn’t going to spend much more time on this, it was just another one of those mysteries that the city tossed up. Obviously somebody had died here, but in the absence of anything except blood there wasn’t much that could be done to find the killer.

“Maybe it’ll tell us something,” the Medical Examiner said as a patrolman handed him a clear plastic bag full of tattered cloth.

Becky Neff said nothing. More vague evidence. Even Wilson’s experience last night was nothing but hearsay. Hell, maybe he got panicked by some dogs. The trouble was, you weren’t going to get headquarters to take a chance on the theory. The man who sanctioned an investigation of werewolves in this city was headed for early retirement if that investigation didn’t prove itself.

“Do you believe me?” Wilson said into the silence in the car.

“Yeah,” Becky replied, surprised at the question.

“Not you, dummy. The genius. I want to know if he believes me.”

“If it wasn’t delirium tremens, I’d say you saw what you saw.”

“Thanks.” Since relating his story Wilson had fallen into a silence. Becky didn’t know whether he was thinking something out or simply sinking into depression. If possible he seemed to be getting more morose.

When Wilson turned to stare again out of the car window, Evans raised his eyebrows. “Listen,” he said to Wilson’s back, “if it makes any difference I really do believe you. I just wish to God I could do more for you than that.”

“Every little bit helps,” Becky said acidly.

“I’m sure. It must be hell.”

“Yeah,” Wilson said, “it’s that.”

Suddenly there was a flurry of activity. A couple of park cops jumped on scooters; guys from the 20th Precinct piled into squad cars. Becky flipped on the radio to catch the activity. “—thirteen, repeat, thirteen to Bethesda Fountain.”

“Jesus—” Becky started the car and followed the others into the park. They slurried in the new snow, heading for the emergency. A signal-13 was the most serious call a policeman could put out: it meant that an officer was in distress. It would cause immediate response from all nearby units—and often some from farther away. It was the call that cops hated most to hear and wanted most to answer.

The area around Bethesda Fountain was once elegant. Once, during summer, there was an open-air restaurant where you could drink wine and watch the fountain. Then the sixties had come, and drugs, and Bethesda Fountain had become an open-air drug bazaar. The restaurant had closed. The fountain had become choked with filth. Graffiti had appeared. Murders had taken place. Now the once-bustling spot was the same in summer as in winter: empty, abandoned, destroyed. And crumpled on the esplanade overlooking the fountain was a blue uniform, its occupant bent over almost with his forehead touching the snow. The scooter cops were the first to get to him. “Shot,” one of them shouted. An ambulance could already be heard screaming over from Roosevelt Hospital.

Becky pulled the Pontiac up behind the scooters and the three of them jumped out. “I’m a doctor,” Evans shouted pointlessly. There wasn’t a person in the NYPD who didn’t know that the Medical Examiner was a doctor. Evans reached the wounded man, followed closely by Becky. He was a middle-aged cop, one of the guys who had been out beating the bushes for evidence, one of the searchers. “Fuckin’ dog,” he said almost laughing, “fuckin’ dog bit a hole in my side.” The voice was anguished and confused. “Fuckin’ dog!”

“Holy shit,” Evans said.

“Is it bad, Doc?” the man said through gathering tears.

Evans looked away. “I’m not movin’ you till the stretcher gets here, buddy. You aren’t losing any blood out of it, however bad it is.”

“Oh, fuck, it hurts!” he shouted. Then his eyes rolled and his head slumped to his chest.

“Get some pressure on it, he’s passed out,” Evans said. Two of the man’s friends applied a pressure bandage to the gash in his overcoat. “Where’s that friggin’ meatwagon!” Evans rasped. “This man’s not gonna make it if they don’t hurry.”

Just then it pulled up and the medics piled out with their equipment. They cut the coat away and for the first time the wound was visible.

It was devastating. You could see the blue-black bulge of the man’s intestine pulsing in the blood. Becky started to sob, stifling it as it came. They had done this! Just now, just minutes ago. They were right around here! She put a trembling hand on the M. E.’s shoulder.

“Leave me alone.” He was examining the wound. “Move him out,” he murmured to the orderlies. He looked up at Becky. “He ain’t gonna live,” he said simply.

They got the man on the stretcher and took him to the ambulance, heading for the emergency room as fast as they could go. There was an M.D. on the wagon so Evans returned to Becky’s car.

The other cops were still standing in a little clump, staring at the blood-smeared thrash marks in the snow. For a moment nobody spoke. What could you say? A man had just had his intestines laid open— and he claimed it had been done by a dog. The Precinct Captain came up puffing hard. For some reason he hadn’t made it into a car. “What the fuck— what the fuck happened?”

“Baker got hit.”

“What by? Hit and run?”

“Something took about nine inches of hide off his gut. Laid him open.”

“What the fuck—”

“You said that, sir. He says it was a dog.” Becky felt Wilson’s hand grasp her shoulder. A sharp pang of fear ran through her. “Listen, kid,” he said in an unnaturally calm tone, “stroll real easy-like over to those two scooters.” He breathed it into her ear. “You can ride a scooter?”

“I suppose.”

“Good, because you gotta. Just go real easy.”

“What about our car?”

“Stay the hell away from our car! And when you get on that scooter, move.”

She didn’t ask questions even though she didn’t quite understand why he wanted to do this. You get to trust a good partner, and Becky trusted Wilson more than enough to just do what he said without asking why. He’d do the same for her. Hell, he had often enough.

As she walked she noticed that he was meandering in the same direction, getting closer and closer to the scooters without making it particularly obvious. “Now, Becky!”

They leaped, the scooters coughed to life, they skidded onto the snowy pavement, Becky swayed, righted herself and headed straight down the Mall, which stretched to Park East Drive and the safety of the streets. She heard a shout behind, an incredulous shout from one of the scooter cops who saw the two detectives suddenly hijack his transportation. Then something else was there, a gray shape moving like the wind, a furious pulsing mass of hair and muscle. And she knew what had happened. “Oh God God God,” she said softly as she rode. She turned the gas all the way up and the scooter darted through the snow, bouncing and shaking, threatening from instant to instant to go into a skid. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. Was the thing dropping back? She risked a glance. God, it was right there. Its teeth were bared, and its face, something unbelievable, twisted with hate and fury and effort—animal, man, something. She choked out a sob and just held on. The thing’s breathing was clearly audible for a moment, then it fell back, fell back making little sharp noises, sounds of pure anger! It was gone and the scooters bounded off the Mall, crashed through ripping naked shrubs, shot into the roadway and tore down toward the park entrance at Fifth Avenue. Ahead the Plaza Hotel and the General Motors Building. General Sherman with his permanent toupee of pigeon droppings. Horse-drawn carriages waiting in rows, the breath of the horses steaming. Then stopping, bringing the scooters to a halt at the bustling entrance to the hotel. “We’re at the Plaza,” Wilson was growling into the scooter’s radio, “come get us.”

A squad car appeared. “What’s the problem, Lieutenant?” the driver said. “You just got reported for stealing two scooters.”

“Fuck that. We were under orders. We thought we saw a suspect.”

“Yeah. So get in. We’ll drive you up to the Twentieth.”

They left the scooters for the men from the park precinct who were approaching in another car. Wilson and Neff were silent as they rode toward the precinct, Wilson because he had nothing to say, Becky because she couldn’t have talked if she had wanted to. It felt funny to her to be alive right now, like she had just broken through a wall into a time she was never intended to see. “I was supposed to die back there,” she thought. She looked at her partner. He had figured it out just in time—a trap. God, what a clever trap! And they had slipped out just as it had been sprung.

“You know what happened,” Wilson asked.

“Yeah.”

He nodded, silent for a few minutes. The squad car wheeled up Central Park West. Wilson touched the door lock; the windows were closed. “They’re very smart,” he said.

“We knew that”

“But that was a very neat trap. Wounding that guy… knowing that we would respond… setting an ambush. All very smart.”

“How did you figure it out? I’ve gotta confess I was completely taken in.”

“You oughta start thinking defensively. They wounded that guy, didn’t kill him. That’s what tipped me off. Why wound, when killing is easier? It had to be the same reason a hunter wounds. To lure. When I figured that out, I decided we ought to go for the scooters. Frankly I’m surprised we made it.”

The squad car pulled up to the precinct house. After a long look up and down the street the two detectives got out and hurried up the steps. The desk sergeant looked up. “Captain’s waiting for you,” he said.

“Must be antsy as hell,” Wilson muttered as they walked into the Captain’s office.

He was a trim, neatly turned out man with steel-gray hair and a deeply wrinkled face. But his movements, his posture, belonged to a younger man. He had just taken off his overcoat and sat down at his desk. Now he looked up, raising his eyebrows. “I’m Captain Walker,” he said. “What the hell’s going on?”

“We saw a suspect—”

“Can that bullshit. Everybody saw those dogs come out from under your car and chase you halfway to Grand Army Plaza. What the hell was that all about?”

“Dogs?” Wilson was no actor. The fact that he was hiding something was perfectly clear to Becky. But maybe she underestimated him.

“Yes, dogs. I saw them. We all did. And Baker said it was dogs that laid him open.”

Wilson shook his head. “Beats the hell out of me.”

“Look, I don’t know quite what’s going on here— I mean you two are some kind of special team, that’s OK by me—but I got a guy hurt bad down at Roosevelt and he says a dog did it. I saw you two light out like you were runnin’ from death itself. And you were chased by two dogs. Now I’d like to know what the fuck’s goin’ on.” His phone rang. A few muttered words, a curse, then he hung up. “And so would the New York Post. They got a photographer and a reporter waiting out front to see me right now. What do I tell them?”

Becky stepped in. Wilson had tucked his chin into his neck, squared his shoulders, and was about to blow it. “Tell them what’s probably true. Your man was wounded in an unknown manner. I mean if somebody’s colon is lying on the sidewalk they might get a little delirious. He passed out right after his statement, didn’t he? And as for dogs chasing us, it might have happened, but it was a complete coincidence.”

The man stared at them. “You’re bullshitting. I don’t know why but I’m not gonna push it. Just get one thing straight: I don’t owe you two a Goddamn thing. Now take off. Go wherever you go.”

“What about the reporter?” Becky asked. That was important. You couldn’t leak this to the press, not unless the problem could be solved.

“So I’ll tell the reporters what Baker said. And I’ll tell them that he was delirious. Is that sufficient?”

“What do you mean, sufficient? How should we know?”

“You’re the people keeping this thing under wraps, aren’t you? You’re the ones who go around and make sure no shaggy dog stories get into the paper, aren’t you?”

Wilson closed his eyes and shook his head. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “We got better things to do.”

They left the precinct and hailed a cab. Obviously there was no point in asking the precinct for transportation back to Bethesda Fountain where their car was waiting. As they approached the car Wilson craned his neck out of the cab window to make sure nothing was under it. But he needn’t have bothered. The car wasn’t going anywhere.

The doors were open. The interior of the car was ripped to shreds. And it was full of bloody pulp. “Jesus,” the cabdriver blurted, “this your car?”

“Yeah. It was.”

“We gotta get a cop.” He gunned the motor. “Who’s in there? What a fuckin’ mess!”

“We are the police.” Becky held her shield against the bulletproof glass separating the passenger seat from the driver’s compartment. The driver nodded and headed for the Central Park precinct house on Seventy-ninth Street. A few moments later they pulled to a stop in front. Neff, Wilson and the driver got out and approached the desk sergeant through the worn double-doors of the building. “Yeah,” he said looking up. “You two. I hear you’re a couple of mean motherfuckers on a scooter.”

“Get your guys back over to the Fountain,” Wilson rasped. “The Chief Medical Examiner just got himself killed.”

Becky felt the blood drain out of her face. Of course, that must be who was in the car. It had to be. Poor Evans, he was a hell of a good man! “Goddamn it,” Becky said.

“We were stupid,” Wilson said softly. “We should have warned him in advance.” He laughed, a bitter little noise. “They missed out on the main event. So they went for the consolation prize. Let’s get Underwood on the phone.”

Wilson took on Underwood. Becky watched him, annoyed that her usual role was being usurped. “Look,” Wilson said into the phone, “you got problems. You got a cop on critical at Roosevelt with his guts laid open. Says dogs did it. You got that? Dogs. Plus you got a reporter from the Post on it, and more to follow. So listen, dummy. You got one Chief Medical Examiner just murdered out by Bethesda Fountain. And you’re gonna find it was done by claws and teeth. And if you want this one wrapped up real good—”

“Oh my God, what about Ferguson!”

“—just sit on your can and wait for it.” He slammed down the phone. “You’re right! Let’s go!” They headed for the motor pool.

“Get a car,” Becky snapped at the dispatcher.

“Well, you gotta—”

“Matter of life and death, Sergeant. What number?”

“Let’s see—two-two-nine. Green Chevy, you’ll see it against the wall out near the gas pumps.”

They headed for the car. To the south the sorrowful moan of sirens sounded their dirge for Evans. “Lot of fucking good they’ll do,” Wilson said quietly. “That guy was just goo.”

“You’re sure?”

“What?”

“It was him.”

“Just drive the car, Becky.”

God, he was a condescending bastard. Even if it was self-evident to Wilson, she could still hope. Evans was a great man, a civic institution in New York City for forty years. Probably the best practitioner of forensic medicine in the world. Plus he was a good friend. His loss left a damn big hole. And the manner of his death was going to stop the presses even over at the Times.

“This story’s gonna get out.”

“You don’t say. By the way, Ferguson’ll be at the museum.”

“Look, I don’t give a damn how bad things are, it’s no excuse to pretend I’m some kind of a dummy. I know where the hell he is.”

“Yeah, well—”

“Well nothing, just keep your jerkoff opinions about lady cops to yourself and do your Goddamn job.”

“Oh, come on, Becky, I didn’t mean that.”

“You did, but I don’t mind. I guess I’m just nervous.”

“That’s funny. Can’t imagine why.” They got to the museum, stopped the car right in front of the main entrance and ran in as quickly as possible. It was necessary to go through the drill of getting downstairs to see Ferguson. When they were finally on it the elevator seemed to take hours to reach the sub-basement.

The room was full of people working on the birds. There was a smell of glue and paint, and an air of quiet intensity. Ferguson’s office door was closed. Becky opened it and stuck her head in.

“You! I’ve been trying to call you all over town!” They went in, closing the door behind them. Wilson leaned against it. “I wish this cubicle had a ceiling,” Becky said, “it’d be more secure.”

“Secure?”

“We’d better fill you in. I’m afraid you’re in great danger, Doctor. Evans—the Medical Examiner—he’s just been mauled to death.”

Ferguson reacted as if he had been hit. His hands moved trembling to his face. Then he slowly lowered them, staring into them. “I’ve found out a lot about the werewolves this morning,” he said almost inaudibly. “I’ve been down to the public library.” He looked up, his face impassively concealing the determination he had formed to try to communicate with the creatures. “It’s all there, just like I thought it would be. The evidence that this species is intelligent is pretty strong. Canis Lupus Sapiens. The Wolfen. That’s what I want to call them.”

Wilson didn’t say anything; Becky didn’t want to. She stared at the scientist. Wolfen indeed. They were killers. Ferguson’s expression betrayed his innocent excitement at his discovery. It was obvious that he still didn’t understand the extremity of his danger. She felt sorry for him—sorry in a detached, professional way like she felt sorry for the people left behind after murders. Residue, Wilson called them, the red-eyed wives and numbed husbands who were usually found slobbering over their victim’s body. Most murder is a family affair. But far worse were the cases where you had to call some frantic soul who had been waiting hours for a loved one to come home—somebody who wasn’t on the way anymore. “Hello, Mr. X, we’re detectives. May we come in? Very sorry to tell you, Mrs. X was found murdered at blah blah,” the rest of it said into a fog of grief beyond communication.

“Join the hunted,” Wilson said, “and welcome. Maybe we’ll form a co-op.”

The humor was strained but it seemed to get a positive reaction from Ferguson. “You know,” he said, “the damn thing of it is, these creatures are so murderous. That’s what makes them unusual. Canines are a notably friendly race. Take the timber wolf—all the legends, the Jack London stories, that’s mostly crap. I mean, you threaten a wolf and you know what'll happen? That wolf will turn over on its back like a dog. They aren’t dangerous.“ He laughed. ”It’s ironic. Science just figured that out about the wolf in the past few years. Here we were so sure that the great canine predator was just a myth—and now this. But I think we have an extraordinary chance here—there must be some point of communication between us and them.“

“To a deer, Doctor Ferguson, the wolf is incredibly dangerous. No wolf is going to turn turtle if it’s threatened by a deer. The wolf isn’t dangerous to man because he doesn’t count us among his prey. But look at the deer—to them the wolf is a scourge from hell.”

Ferguson nodded slowly. “So these… things are to us as wolves are to deer. I agree. They are also an intelligent species and as such represent an extraordinary opportunity.”

Wilson laughed out loud. The sound sent a chill down Becky’s spine. It was not the laugh of a normal human being but that of somebody deeply frightened, bordering on hysteria. She wondered how much longer she would have his help. And his mind! He had saved them in the park by bare seconds. How many more times would he do it? Or could he? Would the traps just keep getting more and more subtle until finally the hunted were down? As far as Ferguson and his ideas about communication, she dismissed them. He hadn’t seen what these creatures did to people.

“Let’s plan out our next moves,” she said. “We’ve got to be very damn careful if what just happened is any example of what’s on the way.” Ferguson asked for the details of Evans’ death. Wilson related the story, very factually, very coldly, how the werewolves had wounded a patrolman out searching for evidence, how this had lured them into an ambush, the escape on scooters just at the moment Wilson pieced the thing together, the subsequent discovery of the M. E.’s body in the car.

“So they missed you and took him instead.” Wilson was silent for a long moment. “Yeah,” he said at last, “I wish to hell I had realized—but I didn’t I just never thought of him being in danger.”

“Why not?”

“In retrospect I suppose it’s obvious. But I didn’t think of it then. That’s the damn truth.” He breathed a ragged sigh. “The old s.o.b. was a good man. He was a hell of a pro.”

Coming from Wilson that was a soaring epitaph indeed. “Let’s plan our moves,” Becky said again. “Plan what! We haven’t got anything to plan!”

“Oh come on, Wilson, take it easy. We might as well try. I thought we were going to try to take pictures tonight. Let’s plan that.”

“How about planning how to survive until tonight? Wouldn’t that be a better thing to plan, since it looks kind of hard to do?”

She shook her head and said nothing. He was a petulant bastard. Up to now she had relied on him, had always assumed that he would pull them through. And be had. This morning was an example. But he was cracking now, getting closer and closer to the edge. Wilson had always been afraid of life, now he was afraid of death when it came close. And how did Becky herself feel? As if she didn’t intend to die. She was afraid and not sure that any of them would survive—least of all herself—but she wasn’t about to give in. Wilson had taken charge of this case so far and he had done fine. But he was getting tired. It looked like her turn now.

“Wilson, I said we were going to plan our moves. Now listen. First, we’ve got to let Underwood know the score. We’ve got evidence that’s going to be Goddamn hard to ignore. I mean, Evans getting murdered is international news. They’ve got to say something about it. And you can be damn sure the TV stations and the papers are on the scene. How are they going to take it? Medical Examiner mutilated beyond recognition. It’s going to require a damn good explanation.”

“Don’t breathe a word of this to the papers,” Ferguson said, suddenly understanding the significance of Becky’s statements. “You’ll cause all kinds of trouble—panic, fear, it’ll be hell. And the Wolfen will be threatened in just the way we don’t want— grossly, by idiots with shotguns. Some might get hurt at first but they’ll adapt quickly, and when they do they’ll be that much harder to find. Our chance will be lost—maybe for generations to come.”

“How hard to find are they now?” Wilson asked bitterly.

“Well, obviously hard. I wasn’t saying that they were easy to deal with at all. But you might not realize it, Detective Wilson—if these creatures get it into their heads to completely disappear, they can do it.”

“You mean become invisible?” Wilson’s voice was rising. He seemed about to lunge at the scientist.

“For all practical purposes. Right now they’re being very careless. Witness the fact that you’ve seen them. That’s a sign of carelessness on their part. And there’s a reason. They know that it’s a risk to allow themselves to be seen by you, but it’s very limited because they also know that you will in all likelihood not live to describe them to others.”

“Maybe and maybe not.”

“They’re predators, Detective, and they have the arrogance of predators. Don’t expect them to fear man. Do we fear hogs and sheep? Do we respect them?”

“We damn well aren’t sheep, Doctor! We’re people, we have brains and souls!”

“Sheep have brains. As for souls, I have no way of measuring that. But we know every possible move a sheep might make. There is no way a sheep can fool a man. I suspect that the analogy holds true here too.”

“Wonderful. Then what am I doing alive? Wouldn’t they have killed me last night in the alley of Becky’s building? Wouldn’t that make sense? But they didn’t. They weren’t fast enough. I got my gun out before they made their move.”

Becky broke in. “I hope they are arrogant, frankly. It’s our only chance.”

Ferguson raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Yes,” he said, “unless they’re playing a little game with you.”

“A game,” Wilson said, “what do you mean a game?”

“Well, they’re intelligent, they’re hunters, creatures of action. Most of their hunting must be pretty damn easy. You’re different, though, you’re a challenge. They might be spreading it out for fun.”

Wilson looked as if he would like to throttle the scientist. “Fine,” he said, “if they’re playing games with us let ’em play. Maybe we’ll get the fuck out of the trap in the meantime.” He spat. “Who the hell knows?”

They ran, desperate for cover. Humanity was pouring into the park, policemen by the hundreds swarming down every path, passing over in helicopters, roaring along in cars and on scooters. The sharp scent of human flesh exposed to cold air mingled with the suffocating sweetness of exhaust fumes. And they came from every direction. All around the park the sirens shrieked, the tone causing sharp agony in the ears of the fleeing pack. Voices called back and forth over radios; men shouted to one another. And then there was a new smell, thick and putrid—a parody of their own scent. It was dogs. The pack stopped, cocked ears: three dogs by the sound of their claws clattering on ice; eager to be unleashed by the exciting rasp of their breathing. Three dogs, heavy, strong, excited. And they had the scent, the pack could practically feel them yearning on their tethers, choking themselves with eagerness to give chase.

Very well, let them come and die. Dogs could no more hunt the pack than chimpanzees could hunt men. Defense against these animals was based on established procedures because the pattern of the animals’ attack never varied. The only trouble was that it meant more time wasted in this accursed park— more time for the swarm of policemen to get closer, more time for their luck to run out.

And the pack was divided now: on one side were the two old ones and the second-mated pair. On the other was the third-mated pair. This pair, the youngest, had run after the two humans who had escaped just an instant too soon, and given up the chase a few moments early. Another breath, another footstep and the quarry would have been down. The beautifully laid plan was wasted—or almost wasted; the old man in the car had been all they could kill. Very well. Certainly he had known of the pack. They had heard him in the car, his booming old voice muttering human words with the others… words like wolf… wolf… wolf…

Human language, so complex and rapidly spoken, was hard to follow, but they all knew certain words that had been handed down from generation to generation. Among these was “wolf.” Traveling between cities the pack sometimes encountered these gentle things of the forest. They had soft, beautiful faces and sweet eyes, and the blank expressions of animals. Yet one almost wanted to speak to them, to wave the tail or knock the paw, but they had not the brains to answer. They would trot along behind a pack for days, their empty smiling heads wagging from side to side— and cower away when the pack took a man for food. After that the wolves would slink out of sight, fascinated and terrified by the ways of the pack. But wolves were wild and never accompanied the packs into the cities. Among men only the packs were safe— and so safe! Such a huge quantity of food in the cities, all of it blankly oblivious, as easy to hunt as a tree would be.

The wolf looked not unlike the werewolf. And in the car they had been saying the word over and over —wolf… wolf. So the little old man was contaminated by the other two, the two who knew. He died instantly. They had crept up to the car the moment the other cars had left in search of the two on the scooters. They had crept closer and closer, and one of them had opened the door. The man’s hands fluttered up before his face and his bowels let loose. That was all that happened. Then they were on him, pulling and tearing, ripping full of rage, spitting the bloody bits out, angry that the two important ones had been missed, angry that this one also dared to confront them with his evil knowledge. They had cracked open the head and plunged their claws into the brains, plunged and torn to utterly and completely destroy the filthy knowledge.

And in their anger they had also shredded the interior of the car, ripping at the seats for sheer hate, feeling the red pulse of their frustration well up inside them as they tasted the very salt of the two that were to be killed. They tore the interior of the car apart, and would have done more to it if they had known how. Somehow the humans made these things move, and they made other similar things fly in the air. Humans flew in these. And then one of them caused this thing to make a noise. They abandoned it at once, afraid that it would begin to move with the pack still inside. Man was of two faces: naked and weak, clothed and powerful. The same man who had no defense on his own might be completely invulnerable in a car with a gun.

The pack had speed and hearing and eyesight and most of all smell to protect itself. Man had metal and weapons. They envied man his big flat paddles that could do so much more than their hands. The things looked clumsy but they were flexible. It was with his paddles or hands that man fashioned these mysterious objects that rolled and flew, and the guns that shot. And it was because of them that man had been able to inhabit the cities. No pack knew how these cities came about, but man inhabited them, keeping for himself the warmth they produced in winter, and the dryness that was not affected even by the most violent rain. While the sky poured water or snow man sat comfortably in the cities. How these things grew and why man possessed them nobody could say.

Just as well—it kept the herds of men closely gathered so that hunting was easy.

But hunting could also be fun, if, for example, you left the city and went into the forest during the season of dead leaves. Then you would find men armed with guns, men stalking deer and moose, men who could be dangerous if you let them. It was a good game—you made a little extra noise and let the man become aware of you. Then you hunted him, letting him see just enough so that he would try hard to escape. And they tried so hard! They swam into rivers, climbed trees, covered themselves with leaves. They tried all manner of stratagem, doubling back, leaping ravines, swinging through forests in the tree-tops. And all the time their scent followed them like a blaring noise. But the pack made conditions for itself during these hunts. If the man got to a certain point, he couldn’t be chased again for a hundred heartbeats. If he got to another point, two hundred. So the better he was, the harder they made it for themselves. Finally, with the very good ones there was a last desperate chase before he reached his car, a chase that ended with him rolling up useless windows, fumbling with keys, and dying there, being eaten while the blood still pulsed through his exhausted heart.

But not many of them were fun to hunt. For the most part it was the same routine as it would be with these eager, stupid dogs. Certainly the humans were closing in, but it was very hard to believe that a man not encased in metal was a threat. Killing the three dogs would waste a little time, but in the end the pack would escape from these human beings. Only if the whole city was aware would humanity become dangerous. Everybody knew that this was possible, that the two enemies could contaminate all the men of this city with the dirty knowledge. Then the pack would be endangered, then the pack would flee. But it wasn’t necessary just yet.

The dogs were released. Their voices pealed, communicating the crazed, heedless excitement that was characteristic of the creature. Their breath began to pulse, their feet to pad faster and faster as they ran madly toward the pack.

They had chosen their stand carefully. A tree overhung the path, which was itself choked by heavy underbrush. The only way to the pack was up a slope, through this brush. The second female went down to the base of the low hill. She sat on her haunches, waiting to trot into the trap as soon as the dogs saw her. They were stupid animals, and you had to make it very clear what they were supposed to do if you expected them to do it.

They swarmed up the path howling, saw the female, who growled and leaped to make sure, then ran into the underbrush. The dogs were hot behind her when the rest of the pack dropped out of the trees onto them. Their bodies writhed, the howls of excitement changed to shrieks of agony, and then nothing. The carcasses were hurled deep into the brush and the pack moved quickly on.

They went in the direction where the smell of man was the least, coming out onto a snowy roadway and moving to the stone wall that surrounded the park. A short trot down the wall was where they had made their kill the night before. Already it was afternoon and their minds were turning to food. But they would not kill anywhere near their last hunt—that might awaken man’s understanding. Best to spread the kills far apart, as far as possible.

As one the pack stopped. They raised their muzzles and inhaled deeply. Across the street was a large building with a statue in front of it. And in the air was the faintest whiff of… the two.

Had they passed by here recently or were they just possibly inside that building? It was hard to tell by the quality of the odor, it was too faint. Just the slightest trace, not enough to tell even whether the body was hot or cold, indoors or out.

They crossed the snowy street and went into the grounds around the building. Yes, that scent was now a little stronger. Caution! These creatures were not dumb and they knew that they were being hunted. Better be very slow and careful. They trotted around the building, three in one direction and three in the other, easily leaping the small balustrades that surrounded the place. In this way they identified by scent which doors were in use and which were not. Without even needing to converse they came together again, then spread out to watch the doors that might be used. They hid themselves wherever they could, crouching along fences, curling up in the small clumps of bushes, lying behind stone retainers. And the scent hung here, that distinctive sweet smell that went with the woman, the denser smell of the man. And there was another familiar odor, lighter and more salty: one they had smelled near the two before.

Each human’s distinctive odor separated him from all the others, and the pack separated these three from the great mass of odors around them. And they settled down to wait. Waiting was easy for them. It added the excitement of anticipation.

Sam Garner pulled his car to a stop in front of the Museum of Natural History. He got out, relying on his press ID in the window to ward off the tow-away patrol. He paused before the imposing building, looking up at the statue of Teddy Roosevelt. The Great White Hunter with a guilt complex. Sweet guy. Sam trotted up the stairs. Two detectives were in there whom he wanted to see. He didn’t know exactly why he wanted to do this. He didn’t especially like detectives, and it hadn’t been easy to track these two down. But here he was and here they were, and he wanted very much to find out how they would react when he gave them a certain piece of information.

He had it planned. He would say, “You understand that Medical Examiner Evans was mauled to death in the park this morning.” They would say yes to that. Then he would say, “The incident occurred in your car.” He was very interested in watching their reaction to that. Somewhere along through here there was some kind of a story, maybe big. And these two just might have some idea what it was.

Chapter 9

« ^ »

Carl Ferguson’s phone rang. He picked it up, then handed it to Wilson. “For you. Underwood.”

Wilson took the phone. “Jesus, Herb, how’d you know I was here?”

“Lucky guess. Actually I’ve made about six calls. This was a last resort.”

“That’s accurate. What’s on your mind?”

“Evans. What killed him?”

“You know perfectly well, Herbie-boy.”

“Wolves?”

“Werewolves. Same as killed the other six.”

“Six?”

“Sure. The bloody bench we found this morning was all that remained of number six. O-negative blood. No ID as yet beyond that.”

“Look, I gotta tell you there’s a hell of a lot of press out pounding the pavements on this one. We’re crawlin’ with ’em down here, plus the park’s full of ’em . Reporters from every damn where—Evans was a famous man. So far nobody’s made the connection between his death and the other murders. I mean, obviously there’re similarities. So don’t, if you know what I mean.“

“Oh, I won’t. I haven’t got enough proof so it might not embarrass you as much as it should. There’s a cake, but I ain’t got icing.”

“Like what?”

“Like evidence that will convince even you. When I’ve got that, I’ll go to the papers, but not before. That much you can count on.”

“Goddamn you, George. If it weren’t for Old One Forty-seven I’d sign your fuckin’ walking papers.”

“Well, Herbie, now what can you expect? You were a dumb kid and you’re a dumb grown-up. You should have given in a long time ago, when you first knew I was right.”

“Which was?”

“The first time you heard my story. It’s dead right and you know it. You’re just too damn stubborn to admit it, or too dumb. Probably both.”

This was followed by a silence at the other end of the line that lengthened until Wilson thought that Underwood had hung up on him. Finally he spoke. “Detective Wilson,” he said, “have you ever considered, if your story is true, what kind of public reaction it will cause?”

“Panic, mayhem, blood in the streets. Plus heads will roll. The heads of the people who didn’t do anything about it when they could.”

“My head. You’d sacrifice this city for that? Can you imagine the economic loss, the destruction? Thousands of people would pour the hell out of the city. Mass exodus. Looting. This is a great city, Detective Wilson, but I think that would break it”

“Yeah. And you along with it. People will come back when they realize that the werewolves aren’t just a local attraction. But you won’t come back, Herbie. You’ll be completely retired.”

Underwood’s voice was bitter. “I must say, I hope to hell you’re wrong. Right now I can’t think of anything that’ll give me more pleasure than kicking your ass off the force. Now that would be a hell of a good feeling.” This time Wilson was sure that he had hung up because of the bang the phone made.

“Good God,” Becky said, “what in hell ever possessed you to talk to him like that!”

“He’s a jerk. He was always a fuckin’ jerk. Hell, he was a jerk when he was runnin’ around in a dirty bathing suit half the summer. A fuckin’ two-bit jerk.”

“That doesn’t give you the right… I mean, I know you grew up together and all that… but my God, you’ll destroy both of us!”

“What in the world are you two talking about?”

They turned, surprised at the strange voice. A small man in a cheap raincoat stood there smiling more than he should. “Name’s Garner. New York Post. You folks Detectives Neff and Wilson?”

“Come back later. We don’t want any right now.”

“Oh, come on, Wilson, let him—”

“We don’t want any now!”

“Just one question—how come Doctor Evans was murdered in your car? You have any comment on that?” His eyes watched them. Of course he didn’t expect a straight answer. It was how they looked that counted. One way, he would know there was a story. Another way, he would know zip.

“Get the hell out of here!! Whassamatter, you deaf! Move!”

He scurried away, down the hall and up the stairs, smiling from ear to ear. He loved it! There was going to be a damn good story! As soon as he got back to his car he called in for a photographer. A couple of pictures of them as they left the museum wouldn’t hurt. Nice pictures, come in handy later.

“Sometimes I think maybe we should tell them something,” Ferguson asked when the reporter was gone. “I think it’ll help us if we got more people involved.”

“You tell them.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly. I haven’t got enough—”

“Evidence. Neither have we, and that’s why we can’t tell them either. We’ve got to wait until we get that clincher. Once we have it, we can blow the story from here to Moscow for all I care, but I’m certainly not going to break it early. Can you imagine—detective alleges werewolf killed M. E.? Underwood would dearly love that.”

His own voice made Wilson suddenly very tired. The long night ahead was bearing down remorselessly; he felt a knot growing in his stomach. Already the light in the room had changed. This time of year the days were quick, the nights long. And tonight moonrise would be late. Despite the lights of the city there would be shadows everywhere in just a few hours. The world around him seemed to be frowning, looming down at him, revealing within its softness a savagery he had never suspected. You think that the world is one thing, it turns out to be another. What appeared to be a flower is actually a gaping wound. The fact that time was passing ate at him, drove him closer and closer to—the truth, and the truth was they were going to die. Soon he would feel it, he knew it. He would feel what Evans had felt, the sensation of those things pulling him apart with their teeth. And Becky too, that beautiful skin torn open—he could hardly tolerate the thought

He had always had a knack for prophecy—now he had a premonition. He was standing in the middle of Becky’s bedroom when one of them jumped out of the curtains and buried its head in his stomach. As the sheer pain killed, he saw its tail wagging.

Then something hit him.

“Come on! Good Christ, kid, what the hell’s got into you?” Becky? Becky was shaking him.

“Now, now calm down—here, sit him down. It’s a stress reaction, that’s all. Call his name, don’t let him get away.”

“Wilson!”

“Wha—”

“Call a doctor, you jerk! What the hell’s the matter, he acts like he’s made of rubber!”

“Stress did it, extreme stress. Keep calling him, he’s coming back.”

“Wilson, you motherfucker, wake up!” In response he pulled her down to the chair and clumsily embraced her, held her against him. A choked noise started in his chest. She felt his stubbly beard rub against her cheek, felt his dry lips come into contact with her neck, felt his body trembling, smelled his sour, rumpled jacket. After a moment she drew back, pushing at his shoulders, and was immediately released.

“God, I feel awful.”

Ferguson gave him some water in a little paper cup, which he spilled at once. “Hell, I—”

“Take it easy. Something happened to you.”

“It was a stress reaction,” Ferguson said. “It’s not uncommon. People in crashing planes, burning buildings, trapped people, experience it. If the situation isn’t terminal, the condition passes.” Ferguson was trying to smile but his face was too pale to make it seem very real. “I’ve read about it, but I’ve never seen it before,” he added lamely.

Wilson closed his eyes, bowed his head and put his fists to his temples. He looked like a man shielding himself from an explosion.

“Goddamn, I wish to hell we were out of this!” He had shouted it so loud that the faint hubbub beyond the tiny office came to a halt.

“Please,” Ferguson said, “you could cause me problems.”

“Sorry, Doctor, excuse me.”

“Well, you have to admit—”

“Yeah, yeah, save it. Becky, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry too.” His eyes pleaded up at her, and she met them with what she hoped was a look of reassurance.

“Don’t think about death. You thought about death. Think about—our camera. Tonight we’ll get our pictures and then things’ll start to move. All the evidence, plus the pictures—nobody will be able to deny it.”

“And we’ll get some protection?”

“Damn right. Whatever the hell happens, it’ll be something. Better than this, God knows.”

For the first time Becky allowed herself to imagine it What form would protection take? A cold stab of realization went through her—about the only thing that would help would be virtual imprisonment. At first it would mean a good night’s sleep, but then it would get stifling, finally unendurable, and she would give it up—and every moment outside would hold danger, every shadow the potential to kill. It was hard to turn her mind away from this train of thought. And now death flashed into her own imagination—how does it feel to be ripped to pieces: will there be desperate agony or will some mechanism of the brain provide relief?

She couldn’t think about that either. Think about the next moment, not the future. Think about the camera. Men in battle must do it that way, keeping their minds fixed on the next shell hole, shutting out the deadly whisper of bullets, the groans of the unlucky, until they themselves…

She turned her mind from it again and said in a tired voice, “Dick probably has the camera by now. It’s nearly three. What say we get over there and plan the stakeout? It’s gonna be a long night.”

Ferguson smiled a little. “Frankly, I think it’ll be exciting. Obviously there’s danger. But my God, look at the magnitude of the discovery! All of history mankind has been living in a dream, and suddenly we’re about to discover reality. It’s an extraordinary moment.”

Both the detectives stared at him in amazement. Their lives and habits of thought emphasized the danger of the quest, not its beauty. Ferguson’s words made them realize that there was beauty there too. The presence of the werewolf, once proven, would completely change the life of man. Of course there would be panic and terror—but there would also be the new challenge. Man the hunted—and his hunter, so skilled, so perfectly equipped that he seemed almost supernatural. Man had always confronted nature by beating it down. This was going to require something new—the werewolf would have to be accepted. He wasn’t likely to submit to a beating.

Becky felt her inner resolve strengthening. She knew the feeling. It often came when they were confronting a particularly rough case, the kind of case where you really wanted to find the killer. The ones where a drug pusher was knocked off or some other scum—those you didn’t really care about. But when it was an innocent, a child, an old person— you got this feeling, like you were going to make that collar. Vengeance, that’s what it was. And Ferguson’s words had that effect. It damn well was an extraordinary moment. Mankind was already in this situation and didn’t know it, and had a right to know. There might not be much that could be done about it, not at first, but the victims at least had the right to see the face of their attacker. “Let’s call Dick, make sure he’s ready. No point in moving through the streets until we have to.” She picked up the phone.

“Make sure he’s got walkie-talkies,” Wilson rumbled. “Civilian models. I don’t want them on the police band.”

Dick answered on the first ring. He sounded grim. His voice was subdued as he answered Becky’s questions. Unspoken was the fact that he also had heard of Evans’s death and knew what had killed him. She concluded the brief conversation and put down the phone. “He’s got the camera. The radios he’ll pick up this afternoon. A couple of hand-held CB’s.” Becky had felt something new when she heard Dick’s voice. There was a strong warmth in her, a sensation of closeness that she never remembered, not even when they were first married. If he had been here she would have embraced him just to feel the solid presence of his body. Too bad for Dick, he was a better human being than he was a cop. Too good to tough out life on the force, that was Dick. God knows it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to the Board of Inquiry when it came along, but there was a hell of a lot of justice to shaking down organized crime to help an old man in an honest nursing home. His old man. It was going to be hard when he got his Board, Goddamn hard.

Wilson was now staring off into space, vacillating between competent involvement and numbness.

“Come on, George, snap out of it! You’re a million miles away. If we’re gonna organize a stakeout we’d better get it together. We need to take sightings with that camera, set up observation points that are damn well covered, all of that. We’d better go over there and do what’s gotta be done before it gets dark.”

Becky hadn’t allowed herself to think about all that had to be done because it meant leaving the momentary safety of the museum and facing the streets. But it looked like nobody was going to think about it if she didn’t. Wilson sure as hell better hold up his end later, when it was going to count.

“I hadn’t realized we were so close to leaving,” Ferguson said. “There are some things I want to know from you two. A couple of things I don’t quite understand. I’d like to get them cleared up before we move. It might be important.”

Becky raised her eyebrows. “So OK, shoot.”

“Well, I don’t quite understand the sequence of events this morning. How exactly did Evans get killed?”

Becky didn’t say so, but she would be glad to hear Wilson’s explanation as well. The werewolves were obviously superb hunters, but how exactly they had accomplished their feats this morning was still fuzzy in her mind.

Wilson replied, his voice a monotone. “It must have started when we were at Central Park West and Seventy-second investigating one of their homicides. Obviously, they had us under observation at that time.” A chill went through Becky, remembering the morning, the crowd of men and cars, the blood-soaked bench. All that had saved them was the presence of so many other cops. Wilson went on. “They knew that they couldn’t get to us easily unless we were in a more isolated situation. So they arranged a lure. It’s a technique human hunters have used for generations. And it worked beautifully in this instance. They went into the park, found an isolated patrolman beating the bushes for evidence and wounded him. The fact that he died later made no difference to them. In Africa hunters tether wildebeest to lure lions. The wildebeest might think it’s unfair, but they aren’t expected to survive. Neither was our lure. As soon as our car pulled up, the werewolves must have started creeping toward it. When we returned to it they would have been underneath, jumped out and—two dead detectives. I guess I got it figured just in time.” He fumbled in his pockets. Becky handed him a cigarette. Something seemed to be coming over him. For a long moment his face kept getting grayer and grayer, then he took a deep, ragged breath and continued. “I was lucky, but them leaving that guy half-killed just didn’t add up. Then I figured it. We were in their trap. That was when I told Becky to take off on the scooter.”

“And Evans—”

“The last I saw he was sitting in the car. You’d have thought he would have locked the doors. I guess he didn’t think of it in time.”

“They opened the doors?” Becky asked.

Wilson shrugged. “What’s surprising about that?”

He was right. It was just hard to accept, even with all she had seen. Somehow you just couldn’t see animals behaving like that. But then, they weren’t animals at all, were they? They had minds, that qualified them as… something. You couldn’t include them as part of humanity. They were fundamentally our enemy. It was in their blood, and in ours. Although they were intelligent they couldn’t be called human. Or could they? Did they have civil rights, duties, obligations? The very question was absurd. Despite their intelligent nature there would be no place for them in human society.

Except as hunter. There was a very definite place for the hyena in wildebeest society, for the leopard in baboon society. Their presence was respected and accommodated because there was no choice. No matter how hard they tried, the wildebeest and the baboon were never going to defeat their predators. So the social order reflected their presence. Baboons protected the young, exposed the weak. They hated it but they did it. You would too, in time.

Ferguson was the first to speak after absorbing Wilson’s explanation. “It fits,” he said. “That’s a very clever plan. They must have been amazed that you got away.”

“Unless they’re playing games.”

“Not likely. You’re too dangerous. Can you imagine how it must feel, knowing that your way of life is about to be destroyed by just two human beings? Hell, they probably knock off one or two people a day for food. Hunting you down must have seemed easy at first. No, I don’t think they’re playing games with you. You’re damn hard to get, that’s all. Like all predators, when they come up against competent members of the prey species they have a hard time. They aren’t equipped to deal with determined resistance. Among animals, this nets out to a trial by strength. The young moose kicks hell out of the wolf. With us it’s wits—ours against theirs.”

Wilson nodded. Becky noticed that what Ferguson was saying was having a good effect on him. And her too, for that matter. It didn’t change the fear, but it added some perspective. You began to get the feeling that the werewolves were almost omnipotent and you were like mice in a trap, just waiting there until they got tired of toying with you. But maybe Ferguson was right. After all they had thus far defeated the werewolves every time. They could go on defeating them. But then another thought came to her, an ugly one that had been hiding in the back of her mind untouched. “How long,” she asked, “will they keep up the hunt?”

“A long time,” Ferguson said. “Until they succeed —or get talked out of it.”

Becky pushed hard at that thought, got rid of it. They couldn’t afford an ambivalent attitude. “OK, kids, let’s hit the road. We have work to do.”

Herbert Underwood was troubled. He was sitting in the Commissioner’s outer office. The last cigar of the day was in his pocket but he resisted the impulse to smoke it. Commissioner didn’t like cigars. Again Herb went through his mind, touching each point of the case, weighing it, trying to see how it could be used to strengthen his position and weaken the Commissioner’s. Word from Vince Merillo, the new mayor’s first deputy-to-be, was that the Commissioner still had an inside track to reappointment. That would mean that Herbert Underwood would reach retirement before he reached the top job. And he wanted that job bad. Wanting the next job up the ladder was more than a habit with him. He deserved the promotion, he was an excellent cop. A good man too, good administrator. Hell, he was a better man than the Commissioner. All he needed was a nice, ugly embarrassment for the Commissioner and Merillo would start mentioning the Chief of Detectives as successor. He was sure of Merillo’s support. The guy owed him. Merillo was into a bank in a very ugly way and the Chief of Detectives knew it. The DA didn’t—and wouldn’t as long as Merillo played on the right side of the net.

“Come in, Herb,” the Commissioner said from the door of the inner office. Underwood got up and went inside. The Commissioner closed the door. “Nobody here but us rats,” he said in his singsong voice. “I got two mayors screaming at me. I got reporters hiding in my file cabinet. I got TV crews in the bathroom. Not to mention the Public.” He added in a more clipped tone, “Tell me what happened to Evans.”

“Oh come on, Bob, you know I’m up against a brick wall.”

“Yeah? I’m sorry to hear that, very sorry. Because it may mean I’ll have to replace you.”

Underwood wanted to laugh out loud. The Commissioner was crashing around like a wounded elephant. The pressure from upstairs must be hell. Bad for him, very bad. “You mean that? It’d be a relief.” He chuckled.

The Commissioner glared at him. “You know, our new mayor is a very smart man.”

“I know that.”

“And so is Vince Merillo, your good buddy.”

Underwood nodded.

“Well, here is what the Mayor and his first-deputy-in-waiting think about this case. Want to hear?”

“Sure.”

“They have got the Wilson theory on their brains. I mean, essentially the Wilson theory. The DiFalco mess, the Bronx mess, the bloody bench, the gutted patrolmen and Evans—”

“All the work of hybrid wolves. I know. I’ve talked to Merillo.”

“So what’s your position?”

“The theory is total bullshit. I’ve known Wilson since we were kids and I think he’s pulling a fast one on us, trying to get us to buy bullshit so we’ll look like fools. Especially me. You I don’t think he gives a damn about.”

“OK. So what else are you working on?”

“I just organized a special squad. They’re going to be under Commander Busciglio of the Fifth Homicide Zone. Goddamn good guy. Good cop, lot of smarts. They will be investigating the three incidents that happened today in Central Park. We’ll be working on the assumption that these incidents are entirely separate from the Bronx case and the Brooklyn case. I think that makes sense. It’s not out of the question that they’re all related, but it’s very farfetched. That enough to keep me from getting fired?‘

“You know I’m not gonna fire you, Herb. Hell, you’re the guy slated to kill me off. If I fire you it’ll look like sour grapes to the Mayor.” He laughed. “Can’t let that happen.” He had been standing in front of Underwood, the two men in the middle of the office. Now he went over to a leather chair and sat down, motioning the Chief to follow. “Herb, you and I, we’ve been buddies a long time. I gotta tell you though, I’ve been hearing some things about you that’ve made me very sad. Like, you’re trying to get me dumped, to put it bluntly. Why are you doing that, Herb?”

The Chief smiled. He had to hand it to the Commissioner, the man didn’t play around. “No, sir, I’m not trying anything of the kind. In fact, like on this case, I’m doing everything I can to strengthen your position. I think we’ll get a good solution very quickly. It’ll help you and because of that it’ll help me. That’s as far as my ambition goes.”

Now it was the Commissioner’s turn to smile. He turned on a crinkly, jolly one, wore it for a few seconds, then nodded, seemingly satisfied. He spread his hands in a gesture of meekest assent. “OK,” he said, “just keep up the good work. Glad you’re still on the team.”

Underwood left after further protestations of loyalty, capped by a solemn handshake. The Commissioner watched him go. Hell, with technique like that the guy would make a damn fine commissioner if he won out. Good projection of sincerity. Handles himself well.

But he ain’t gonna fuck me. He must think I’m some kind of schoolboy. He closed the door behind Underwood and stood there a long moment. Soon the Chief would be blown so high and wide he wouldn’t have a political future of any kind. So the son of a bitch wanted to kill off Bob Righter. Fine, let him try! Now the Commissioner’s face set. He leafed through a report on his desk. It was titled “Project Werewolf. Eyes Only.” It had been seen only by Merillo, the new mayor, and the current mayor. It had been written by Bob Righter, in longhand.

This was the only copy.

He opened it, reading to review. He had written it three hours ago, had taken it to the Mayor and then to the Mayor-elect. There had been a meeting and it had been agreed that not one word of the report would be made public unless absolutely necessary. The Commissioner started to say his thoughts aloud, then stopped, the words unspoken in his throat. How often do I talk to myself, he wondered. Getting old. But not tired, dammit. Let Herb Underwood realize that once and for all. Not tired. Underwood was going off on a hell of a wild-goose chase. That stinking Wilson had been much closer from the start. Brilliant but a creep. A good cop after his fashion. A good cop with a good partner… Becky Neff… no matter how old you get, you’d still like to get into something like that. Hell, stay clear. Her husband was bent—maybe she was too for that matter…

He dismissed them from his mind and returned to the matter of the report. It was the first time in his career that he had written something so secret, and kept its contents so close to the top. In a position like his a man gets into the habit of using advisers, conferees, administrative assistants. He becomes not an individual but an office. He identifies himself as “we.” Not in this case, though. There was too much here to entrust to staff members. It was not only a horrendous crime, it was also a priceless opportunity to completely outdistance Underwood, to crush him. “Herbie’s gonna love me,” he said, this time without realizing he had spoken aloud. Now that he had the endorsement of both his current and future bosses he would begin to draw together the team that would solve the real Werewolf case. He pulled out a yellow legal pad and put it down beside his report. He drew a box at the top, and put the letter C in the box. That’s me, he thought. Then he drew a dotted line to the Chief of Detectives and put a U in that box. And that’s as far as he goes. All alone in his box with his Goddamn U. Now another box, with a full line to the Commissioner. Call him Deputy Assistant for Internal Affairs. DAIA. OK, now give him a staff. Three more boxes under him, all Police Commanders. Now a team. Three squads under the three Commanders, All high power. Now assign a Tactical Patrol Force Group to the Deputy Assistant, the grunt-work department so all these officers don’t have to get their hands dirty. Very nice. About two hundred men. The Mad Bomber had commanded a crew of two hundred and fifty. Son of Sam had tied up three hundred. The Werewolf Killers would be more economical with just two hundred.

Now he pulled a small cassette recorder out of his desk drawer. He rewound the cassette and played it again. Voices, confusion, then a whispered word, unintelligible. Then more. “Mama… hey look out (a sob)… there it is… (Voice: what is it, Jack?) Dog… somethin’ weird… don’t don’t get it… hey… oh, wow that was—oh, hey it cut, cut my uniform… ouch… aaaAAHH! (Voice: Jack, you need more? The doc’s gonna give you more painkiller.) Yeah… OK, there was a dog… big motherfucker… weird, like a human face… a couple of others standing nearby… face, not like a person… you’ll never get it…” More whispers. (Second voice: the patient is expiring.) Tape ends.

The patrolman hadn’t given them much to go on, but it was more than they had gotten before. Enough for a good start. M.O. was established. This added a rough description. He read the first sentence of his report: “The Werewolf Killers are a group of twisted individuals utilizing an extremely skillful disguise…” That was where Underwood was falling down: he didn’t realize that there was a whole group, or that they were disguised.

Outside the museum tension was building. The sun had moved far down the sky. The first, faint smells of cooking were coming into the afternoon air. When the subways stopped beneath the street the sound of more and more feet were heard getting off. Man’s afternoon ritual of moving back to his nest was under way. And this would also be occurring to the hated ones inside the building. There would be no need to take the risk of going inside after them. Soon they would want their food and their nests, and start their movement. Then the moment would come, not so long from now. Waiting like this made your heart soar, knowing that relief and success lay as the reward for patience. Soon they would come out, very soon.

Garner had returned to the scene of the Evans murder and picked up Rich Fields, the photographer the paper had sent to join him on the story. “We’re gonna take some pictures of a couple of cops,” he said to Fields.

“What for?”

“Nothin’. Don’t even waste film. Just flashes. I want flashes.”

“Great. Makes good sense. Keep convincin’ me.”

“Shut up, Fields, you’re too dumb to understand.”

They got into Garner’s car and rattled out of the park, back up to the Museum of Natural History. Garner felt full of vitamins. There was a Goddamn good story in here and these two detectives were the exact center of the whole little cyclone. Ah, a beautiful story, had to be. Let the Times send fifty gentlemen downtown to worry the Police Commissioner, Sam Garner was going to stick right close to these two detectives until he got the story. He parked his car directly in front of the museum and settled back to wait. “Want me to start shootin’?”

“Shut up, Tonto. I’ll tell you when. And make it fuckin’ good if you don’t mind. I mean, run up and flash at ’em. Make ’em mad.”

“You payin’ my hospital bills, honey?”

“The Post‘ll take care of you, darlin’. Just do your thing.”

He stared at the huge edifice. Sometime soon the two cops would appear in the doorway and start down. Fields would get after them with the camera. No words, no more questions. Those two cops were scared already. This would panic them. If they were hiding anything interesting the little picture-taking session would make them think the Post was on to it. So next time Sam Garner got to them maybe they’d start trying to save their own asses by doing a little singing.

It had happened before. Pressure breeds information. The first rule of investigative reporting. Make ’em think you know enough to hang ’em, then they’ll give you what you need. Visions of delicious headlines went through his head. He didn’t know exactly what they said, but they were there. The way it felt, he had a good week of dynamite on his hands. The boss would love it. It must be something really horrible. Whatever was going on, somebody had seen fit to tear the Medical Examiner apart. Not just kill him, but actually tear him apart. The skin had even been pulled down off the skull, the face nearly separated from the body. The throat was gone. The stomach was pulled open and the body severed so completely that the legs fell to the floor of the car when the orderlies tried to move the body. It had been a vicious murder, particularly so, unusually so. A monstrous murder. Hell of a bad thing. All of a sudden he felt kind of chilled, sick inside, like he was going to throw up. “Hurry up,” he muttered under his breath. A drink lay just the other side of this little assignment and he needed it very badly.

“I got some good stuff on Evans,” Fields said. “I mean—that was some mess.”

“I just been thinkin’ about it. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Whoever did that must have hated the hell out of the guy. And right in broad daylight, right in the middle of the park. Strange as hell, weird as hell, you ask me.”

“Look close, boss. The doll and the old guy?”

“That’s them. Get moving.”

Fields opened the door of the car and walked forward to the base of the statue of Teddy Roosevelt that stood before the museum entrance. In this position he would be concealed from Neff and Wilson until they came down the steps and were beside him. They were moving quickly. Another man, hunched, tall, his hands folded before him, walked just behind them. There was something familiar in the way they moved. And then Fields realized why: in ’Nam, people under fire had moved like that.

As they came nearer he could hear their footsteps crunching on the snow. He stepped out from his position near the statue and started shooting. The flash popped in the gray afternoon light, and the three figures jumped away startled. Almost before he knew it there was a pistol in the hand of the old guy. The woman was also pointing a pistol at him. This all happened in the same strange slow motion that things had happened in the war, when an attack was going on. The closer you got to action, the more events separated into individual components. Then an end would come, usually violent, the roar of a claymore going up, the black arcing shapes against the sky, the screams and smoke… “Goddamn, they have guns and all I got is a camera.”

Something else moved and the old guy’s pistol roared. “Don’t shoot!” But it roared again, sending out sparks. The tall man shrieked. Now the woman’s pistol roared, kicking back in her hand, and roared again and again. But there, off in the snow, something black was skittering along—two things. That’s what they were firing at, not him. Then the three of them sprinted toward Sam’s car. “Come on,” the woman shouted over her shoulder, “move or you’re dead!”

Rich moved damn fast, diving into the back seat right across the lady cop’s knees. She pulled the door closed and extricated herself. “Step on it!” the old guy snarled at Sam, “step on it, Goddammit!”

But Sam wasn’t stepping on anything. He turned to face the old detective who was beside him in the front seat. “What the fuck,” he said in a high, silly-sounding voice.

The detective leveled his pistol on Sam. “Move this vehicle,” he said, “or I’ll blow your brains out.”

Sam pulled out into traffic very smartly. Neither he nor Rich had a mind to ask any more questions just now.

“We got one,” Becky said.

“Not dead,” Wilson replied.

Becky turned to Rich, who was sitting beside her, acutely aware of her salty, perfumey odor, of the warm pressure of her hip against his. “Thanks,” she said, “you saved our asses just then.”

“What the hell happened?” Sam managed to bleat.

“Nothin’,” Wilson replied. “Nothin’ happened. Your buddy with the camera got us riled.”

“Oh, come on, Wilson, tell them,” Ferguson said.

“Shut up, Doctor!” Becky said. “I’ll handle this. We don’t need press, we’ve talked about that.”

Wilson turned around in his seat, his face a twisted, mottled parody of itself. “If this gets out,” he said, “we might as well just kiss our asses good-bye right now! We haven’t got evidence, baby, and without it we’ll come across as a couple of kooks. Lemme tell you what’d happen. Shithead downtown would get us retired disabled. Mental. You know what’d happen then? Damn right you do! Those fuckers’d be on us so Goddamn fast!” He laughed, more of a snarl. Then he turned and faced forward. Ferguson glared at his back.

“Take us to One fifteen East Eighty-eighth Street,” Becky said, “and get the hell away from the park. Go down Columbus to Fifty-seventh and over that way.”

“And move the Goddamn thing,” Wilson said hoarsely. “You’re a Goddamn reporter, you can drive!” He chuckled now, a dry, spent noise. “What’re you gonna put in your gunfire report?” he asked her.

“Cleaning accident. Fired three shots while cleaning.”

Wilson nodded.

“Goddammit, I’ve got a right to know,” Sam said. “I have a right. I was the only reporter in the whole city smart enough to figure you two had the real story. The other fucks are down at Police Headquarters tryin’ to get a statement from the Commissioner. Just tell me what happened to Evans. Hell, what was going on just now I won’t even ask.”

Becky had leaned forward as he spoke, Wilson was in no shape to keep talking.

“Evans got killed. If we knew anything more we’d have a collar.”

“Oh. Then I suppose that shootumup was nothin’. I gotta tell you, you are two very funny cops. I ain’t never seen a cop pull out a piece and fire it like that just for a dog. Hell, that in itself is news.”

“I bet. Just keep your mouth shut and drive, please.”

“Is that any way to talk to a citizen?”

“You aren’t a citizen, you’re a reporter. There’s a difference.”

“What?”

Becky didn’t answer. Through the whole exchange Ferguson had sat motionless, leaning toward Becky Neff in the middle of the back seat, leaning away from the window. Sam noticed that Wilson was also sitting well away from the window, almost in the middle of the front seat. You could almost say that they were afraid something was going to come at them through the windows… except the windows were closed.

Chapter 10

« ^ »

This daylight was a curse. The leader of the pack, the one the others called Old Father, waited behind the fence that separated the front staircase of the museum from the surrounding lawn. He had stationed himself here because he knew that the two were most likely to exit the museum by this door. It was going to be dangerous, difficult work, sad work. It was the luck of his race to prey on humanity, but at times like this, when he was forced to kill the young and strong, he wondered very much about his place in the world. His children thought of humanity merely in terms of food, but long years had taught him that man was also a thinking being, that he too enjoyed the beauties of the world. Man also had language, past, and hope. But knowing this did not change the need—call it compulsion—to kill and eat the prey. Every single human being he saw he evaluated at once out of habit. He enjoyed the way the flesh popped between his jaws and the hot blood poured down his throat. Living in human cities he gloried in the heady poetry of the scents. The pack was wealthy, for many humans lived in its territory. He loved his wealth, the wealth he had bought so dearly when the pack had migrated to this city. In his own youth their leader had preferred the isolation of rural life to the harder job of maintaining a city territory. Other packs would never try to take the sparse territory of that old coward. Its inhabitants starved in winter and skulked through summer, always wary, always risking discovery.

When he had grown to his full size he had taken his sister and set out south, toward the storied place where an uncountable human horde dwelled. Often they had been challenged by other packs, and each time they had bested the challengers. There had been fights, daylong, burning with ritual hate under which lay the love of the race. And each time these confrontations had ended with the rival pack leader giving way. Then there would be a celebration, a wonderful howl, and the two of them would be on their way. So it had continued until he and his sister had a beautiful space to themselves. They marked their boundaries and bore their first litter. There had been three, a girl and two boys. The weakest male they killed, feeding his soft flesh to the two strong ones. It was their bad luck not to have a perfect litter of four, but still two were better than none. Two years later they had increased their space again and birthed another litter. This time only one male and female, but both were healthy.

This spring the first pair would mate, as would he and his sister once again. With luck they would gain two pairs of pups. Greater luck would bring three pairs or even four. And next year the second pair would mate and still more would come. Not too many years from now he would lead a goodly pack in a large and wealthy territory. From his wretched beginning in the desolate hills he had come to this and was glad.

The only thing that was wrong was the two humans with their forbidden knowledge. If it became general among the humanity here the size of packs would have to be diminished, and even amid all this wealth they would be forced to scuttle like dumb animals… the hunter would be hunted… and it would be on his head and on the heads of his children. For ages hence all the race would remember their failure. His name would become a curse. And his line, the line he had created out of courage, would wither and die. Others would say of him, “Better he had stayed in the mountains.”

He sighed, turning his attention back to the problem at hand. Bright daylight still and the scent of the hunted was rising. Yes, they were coming to this door. A few moments more and they would be on the stairs. He snapped his jaw, bringing the others to their stations at the main entrance. The second-mated pair crossed the street and hid under parked cars. That way, if the two got past him they would not get far. The youngest, the third-mated pair, came up and waited with him. His own sister, her coat gleaming with the fullness of her womanhood, her beautiful face shining with bravery and anticipation, her every move calm and royal, went into position on the opposite wall.

There would be no escape this time. At last, the hunt was over. And they would get a bonus thrown in—that tall man with whom the two spent so much of their time, he also would be destroyed.

Very well, but it was all an ugly and dirty business. You don’t take life from young. Even the beasts of the forest never preyed on young. Practically speaking it was difficult, but there were also greater reasons. For the pack to live other life must be destroyed. And it was repugnant to do this to the young. When one of their own kind grew old the young gave him death, but before his time he felt a fierce desire to continue and have all of his life. So it must also be for the prey. The few times that he had been driven to kill young he had felt their frantic, struggles, the fierce beating of a life that was hard to still… and had hated himself afterward when his belly was full and his heart heavy.

They appeared at the door, their scent washing powerfully before them. The woman smelled bright and sharp, not like food. And the young man was the same. Only the older one’s scent reminded of food; it had that pungency, that sweetness that was the smell of a weakening body. But still it surged and pulsed with life. Taken together their three scents sparkled. He sighed, glanced at the third-mated pair who were with him. Their faces expressed fear. He had made sure they would be with him for this very reason: from this experience they would learn never to kill the young, and also never to allow yourself to be seen. They saw the pain in their father’s face, a sight they would never forget. He let them see and hear and smell the full depth of his emotions. And he noted with gratification that what had for them been up to now an exciting hunt became what it ought to be: an occasion of sorrow and defeat.

Now their bodies tensed. Instantly their scents changed. His own heart started beating faster when he smelled their anticipation. The three victims were coming down the steps, their movements and smells broadcasting wariness—yet they came on, oblivious to the trap they were in. Despite his familiarity with humanity the fact that men would walk right into the plain scent of danger always amazed him. They had little bumps on their faces for breathing, but these were just blind appendages, useless for anything but passing air in and out of the body.

The three reached the foot of the steps—and the third-mated pair leaped over the fence. Simultaneously a man who had been standing concealed jumped into the path of the three and made flashes. The old father cursed himself—he had known this man was there but had thought nothing of it! Of course, of course—and now his two young ones were stopping—no, go on!— too late, now they were turning away, confused, their faces reflecting a turmoil of questions—what do we do? And guns were rising, everybody running for the park, the crack of the weapons detonating through the air, the pack leaping the stone wall, and each rushing alone into the underbrush.

They regrouped not far away, much closer than was safe. They had all smelled it—somebody in the pack was bleeding.

The youngest male was missing. The father stood with his nose to the noses of his family. They gave him reassurance, all except the youngest female. Her eyes said to him, “Why did you send us?” And she meant, “We were the youngest, the least experienced, and we were so afraid!” In her anger she said that she would not be his daughter if her brother had to die.

Her anger was deep, he knew, and she would not melt to the entreaties of the rest of the pack. Now that such feelings had passed they could never be erased. Even as they trotted toward the place where the young wounded one had hidden himself the father kept shaking his head with grief. “Now look at you,” his sister said with her eyes and ears, “you wag your head like a silly wolf! Are you father or child?”

He was humiliated by her scorn, but tried not to let it show. He kept the hair on his neck carefully smooth, fighting the impulse to let it rise. His anus remained closed with a conscious effort: he would not allow his instinct to spread the musk of danger in this place. His tail he let hang straight out, not as a jaunty flag of pride or tucked humbly between his legs. No, straight out and no wags: this was dignified and neutral, indicating solemnity.

For all his effort his sister said, “Loose your musk, show your grief to your children. You have not even the courage for that!”

His musk burst out, he could not withhold it longer. The clinging smell filled the air. He cursed himself even as it spread, great splashes of it, betraying him, revealing the weakness he felt within.

“I am your father,” he said, now using his tail to its fullest, flashing it in a proud wag, making his ears rise and his eyes glisten. But the scent was that of fear. Its betrayal was complete. His first son stepped forward. “Let me find my brother,” he signaled with the snap of his jaw, and a disrespectful wag of his own tail. The four of them, sister, daughters and son went toward the wounded scent of the youngest male. As soon as they were out of sight their father submitted to an overwhelming impulse and rolled onto his back. He lay there kicking his back legs softly, feeling the warm wave of submission flow over him, relaxing into it, giving up his leadership. But his pack was not there to see, his own son not there to take his father’s throat in his mouth. No, he rolled alone to the unseeing sky. Even if his son replaced him, the boy would never see his father roll.

Now a soft howl arose. The sorrow in it made him tremble. His sister had sounded the note of death! Their youngest boy’s wounds were mortal. Wagging his head he battled himself for control. He trotted toward his next and terrible duty. Although his elder son or his sister would shortly become leader of the pack he was still the Old Father and still must be the one to do this. He stopped his running and lifted his head. Let the humans hear! He would sound his dirge. He did it fully and proudly. And at once he heard the fearful whimpering of his second son. Now he hurried on again, soon coming to the place near the wall where his family stood around a huddled gray shape. Their faces were torn with grief, their mouths dripping with saliva.

They ignored him, deferring to him only outwardly. As soon as this final duty was done his leadership would end. He went to his son, sniffed him. The boy was trembling, cold, his eyes even now rolling up into his head. The Old Father felt the boy’s pain in his very bones. Yet even in his sorrow he felt proud of this boy, who had dragged such painful wounds so far in order to conceal himself from humanity. The young male took a breath and stared a long moment at his father. Then he lifted his muzzle slightly off the ground and closed his eyes.

The Old Father did not hesitate; he killed his son with one fierce bite. The boy’s body kicked furiously in response, his mouth opened wide. By the time his father had swallowed the torn-out tissues of the son’s throat the boy was dead. Immediately the others surrounded him. At once he saw who would assume leadership; his sister.

Now it came down to confrontation: either he would roll or fight. If he fought they would all fight, four of them against him, and all full of rage. Looking at them, he knew that he would nevertheless win such a fight. But at what cost—this pack would become rotten with hate as they followed a father they despised. For the greater good of what he had built he therefore rolled to his sister. She disdained his overture, striding away with her tail held high. Instead his youngest daughter, still quaking with the grief of her loss, took the roll. When she grabbed his throat he closed his eyes, waiting for death. Sometimes those too young for this custom were overwhelmed by their feelings and killed the ones who gave them rolls. Eternity seemed to pass before she released him. Now the whole pack displayed their tails jauntily; his own he tucked between his legs. Leadership lost, his life would become one of risk and danger. The least gesture of superiority would bring them snapping at him. And until his sister, his daughter, and himself had new mates there would be an unsettled, nasty situation in the pack.

There was still a last task to perform before the reorganized pack continued on. They turned the body of their brother on his back and ate him, crushing even his bones in their jaws, consuming every bit of him except a few tufts of fur. He was eaten out of necessity and respect. They would always remember him now, his brave death and good life. Each of them committed the taste of his flesh to precious memory. Afterward they howled, this howl expressing the idea that the dead are dead, and life continues. Then they stood in a circle, touching noses, their joy at being together breaking through all the grief and upset, and finally they opened their mouths and breathed their heavy air together, their hearts transported by their intimacy and nearness.

Still, the old father and his sister were no longer a pair. She now needed a husband, a surrogate-brother who would be willing to accept her as leader. Most males running loose, those with some awful sin on their heads, something so serious that they had been driven from their pack, would welcome such a position. And the daughter who had lost her brother, she also must find a male soon. Already the two females were spreading their scent-of-desire, causing the two males’ bodies to react, causing the old father to hunger woefully for his beautiful sister. But his days of mating would probably be over unless some female as wretched as himself were to happen along. Let some time pass, he thought, and then I will spread my own scent for a new mate. Let time pass… and heal.

His sister watched him as he stood confused, unable to decide what to do with himself now that leadership had been lost. Her heart demanded that she comfort him and share his sorrow, but she kept her tail flashing high and did not look at his face. They had made this pack together but their children could not accept leadership from a father who had planned so badly that one of his own children had been killed. It was just, and they all had to live with it. But she could not stand to see him like this! He cringed back, glancing fearfully from face to face. Gone was his beauty, his boundless pride in this little pack. They had been going to build it together, she could not stand the idea of doing it with another. She could not remember a time when she had not been in love with him. Their own parents had paired them in a litter of four and the pairing was from the first one of love.

Until this curse had come down upon the pack there had been nothing but happiness. They were getting richer and richer. The pack could afford to pass over many possible kills, picking only the best and easiest. They could afford to pass up ten for one! And their hunting was easy, always easy in this rich territory.

The day the catastrophe happened they had been preparing to hunt again. They had warm shelter and many potential victims. They even had a nice place to litter, the best they had ever found. All were looking forward to an easy winter and a fortunate spring.

Then had come the news. The first scent of it had arrived on a clear morning in autumn. This scent had been laid at the territorial boundary by their neighboring pack. And so Old Father had met with the father of that tribe and had learned of the dreadful mistake committed by two yearlings on their first hunt They had taken young male humans, the most taboo of all the taboos, had taken them in a moment of heedless excitement. And the humans had noticed; many had come and investigated. Humanity had taken away the remains the very day after the mistake had been made. So man knew something, more than he should. Then had come the pack’s terrible misfortune, the incident that had led them to the position they were now in. They had somehow sparked an investigation themselves. It was fantastic and impossible, but nevertheless humanity had come to the very lair itself and taken away the remains of some kills. How they had cursed themselves then for not consuming even the bones! But it was too late. They could only hope that man would be confused, but he was not. The two whom they hunted now had come up into the lair, had been sniffing about and had almost been killed then.

Those two were the bearers of knowledge, that was why they had come into the lair.

And since then this desperate hunt had continued. It had disrupted the life of the pack, forcing them to follow their quarry into the center of the city, a place of few abandoned buildings, few good lairs. Now it had destroyed their happiness too. She wanted to throw her head back and howl out pure grief but she would not. Could she lead them better than her brother? She doubted it! The alternative was to give it to her headstrong first son who certainly could not equal the exploits of his father.

This son she distrusted. She looked at him, so happily asserting his newfound status over his father. And her beloved brother cringed before the boy—he was that brave, to do even that to preserve the unity of the pack. But a boy demanding such an act needed a lesson. She went to him, sniffed him under the tail. Her hackles rose and she shoved against him. He was a big, strapping boy of three—his eyes glinted with humor as his mother disciplined him. Very well, let him laugh! She demanded that he roll. He did it willingly enough, too willingly. That was the final straw—she grabbed the loose flesh of his neck and bit it hard. He gasped in surprise—he must have thought that she was killing him. Very good, let him think that a mother would kill her son. Let him know just how far his insolent treatment of his father had driven her! She bade him rise and he scrambled up contrite. His eyes were wide, his face full of pain. Blood oozed down his neck. His sister came up beside him and stood staring at her mother. Very good, she’s loyal. The mother turned and moved off a little way. The others understood that she wanted to be alone with her thoughts and did not follow. The hurts in her heart conflicted with one another for attention. Her youngest son was dead, her brother, humiliated. She herself was forced into leadership at a desperate moment. The order of the pack had been seriously strained.

It was hard for her to accept that her boy was really dead. He had been bright and eager, brimming over with life. And he had been so fast and strong, the fastest pup they had ever seen! The truth was, though, his mind was not so fast as his body. When the pack gathered together to share the beauties of the world there was a definite confusion in his eyes. And when they hunted, his father sometimes gave him leadership, but it always wound up with his sister. But he was a fine, good male and he loved his life!

There was a sound nearby. She turned to see, completely unafraid. If it was nearby it could not be dangerous or she would have sensed it long before. She saw staring from the brush her brother’s eyes. Now why did he do this? It was just like him, flaunting all custom. How dare he stand there staring at her! She tried to raise the hairs on her neck. They would not move. She tried to growl warning but all that came out was a purr.

He came closer, never allowing his eyes to leave hers. Then he shook himself free of the brush and stood there with snow clinging to his fine brown coat. It hurt all the way through her to see him, to smell him so close, to hear the familiar sound of his breathing. Putting her ears back she went to him and rubbed muzzles. She longed to mourn but held herself back with a fierce effort. He sat on his haunches and regarded her. His eyes were full of love and a kind of quiet joyousness that it surprised her to see in so unfortunate a creature. “You take the pack,” he said, “our troubles give it to you.” And she felt afraid.

He sensed it at once and patted his tail on the ground briskly, a gesture that communicated the thought, “Have confidence.” She was fascinated by the way his eyes seemed to sparkle; he didn’t even appear sad. As if reading her thoughts, he lifted his eyes and made a low growl. This meant, “A heavy load has been lifted from me.” Then he inclined his head toward her, closing his eyes as he did so. “You must take it.” The three knocks of the tail and a tongue-lolling smile, replaced instantly by an expression of calm repose. “Have confidence in yourself— I do. I trust you.”

These words moved her deeply. She knew that he was relinquishing his pride, his very life, to prevent discord among the members of the pack. And he was communicating confidence to her not only because she needed it but out of real sincerity. His scent had changed subtly as he talked, indicating that behind his words were love and a certain hard-to-define excitement that revealed his real happiness at her accession to leadership.

She made a series of gestures with her right forepaw, clicking her toenails together. He gestured back, nodded. She punctuated her remarks with brief keening sounds of emphasis. She was telling him that the only reason she had accepted his roll was that their firstborn children would have left the pack if he did not step down. He agreed. Then they rubbed muzzles again for a long time, their eyes closed, their breath mingling, their tongues touching gently. There was nothing but this to express their feelings: long years of companionship, puppyhood together, youth, adulthood. This parting would be the first time that they had not shared life totally. And there was no way to know how long it might last. Although he might become her mate again in the future, it would never be as it was, with the sharing of pack leadership that had so increased their pleasure at being together. Abruptly she turned and trotted away. She could not stay longer with him or she would never turn away again. Full of sadness she returned to the three children. They were standing together in the shadows of the trees, nearly motionless, their dark shapes exuding the smell of fear. Now the truth had begun to insinuate itself into their minds: they dared not trust their father—they did not know if they could trust their mother.

She came up to them exuding an impression of affability and confidence that she did not feel. They rubbed muzzles and the three stood facing her. Just hours ago she had stood thus with them, facing her brother.

Using the language of movements, growls and gestures that communicated so much without the need for articulated words, she outlined the plan of the coming night. It was not an original plan, all it involved was returning to the woman’s place and awaiting any chance that might befall. No better plan presented itself, however. The wonderfully canny ideas of her brother had resulted in the death of a member of the pack at no gain. Simple, straightforward plans would be more acceptable to the others now.

She knew that time was running very short for them. Soon they would have to leave the center of man’s city, to return again to the outer areas where there were more shadows, more abandoned buildings. Not much more time. The truth was that they were about to lose this hunt. Man would learn about his hunter and the greatest of all taboos would be broken. What were the consequences? Endless trouble for all the race, suffering and hardship and death.

What a monstrous burden for the pack to carry! If only… but the past was the past. If it happened failure would have to be accepted. She thought that thought but her heart screamed no, they must not fail. Must not.

Sam Gamer watched the two detectives and their friends rush into the apartment building. They huddled past the doorman and disappeared. The afternoon had become unseasonably warm, and they had splashed through slush as they ran, not even bothering to step around the puddles.

“Unbelievable. Can you beat that?”

“Splashin’ in the puddles?”

Garner closed his eyes. Fields was a nice guy but his was not one of the great intellects. “Let’s have some ideas about what’s going on with these folks.”

“Well, they shot a dog over there at the museum.”

“That was a dog out there in the snow? You sure?”

“Looked like a shepherd to me. And it ran like hell even though it musta taken at least a couple of slugs.”

“I didn’t see it.”

“What can I tell you? It was very fast.” Garner pulled back into traffic. He would return to the museum, examine the snow-covered lawn. Surely there would be blood if something had actually been shot.

They drove back through the streets until they reached the area where the encounter had taken place. “Come on, and bring your camera.” The two men helped each other across the fence that separated the museum lawn from the sidewalk. There were marks there, perfectly plain to see. The melt had distorted their shape, but it was still clear that they had once been pawprints. And there was an area spotted with blood and little clots of meat. Farther on, toward the street, was another tiny drop of blood. Just over the fence more could be seen. With the photographer cursing, the two newspapermen crossed the fence again. Sam Garner loped across the street and trotted up and down before the stone wall that marked the boundary of Central Park. Then he saw what he was hoping to see, a long bloody scrape on top of the wall. “Over here,” he called to Fields, who was busy trying to stomp wet snow off his shoes. On the way across the street he had slipped into a slushy puddle.

“My feet’re gonna freeze,” he moaned.

“Come on! Help me across this friggin’ wall.”

He was only too glad to give Garner a leg up. Sam scrambled to his hands and knees atop the wall and then dropped over into the park.

At once everything changed. Central Park in winter is as quiet as a desert. This was true especially up here near the wall, away from the paths, an area choked by snow-covered bushes. Garner turned and looked back. Fields was not following. “Fine,” he thought, “I’ll get the Goddamn story myself. Better not be any pictures.” He pushed bushes aside. It was cold and wet in here and he wasn’t dressed for a stroll in the shrubbery. Then he saw it again, the little red trace lying on the snow. And there were more pawprints here, at least three sets. Whatever made them had gone tearing through here not too long ago. A pack of wild dogs running from two trigger-happy detectives? What the hell, this was getting interesting.

He followed the tracks a few more yards, then stopped. Before him was a great smear of blood, and leading away from it were heavy splashes, impossible to miss. This trail led up a low rise and into even deeper brush. Cursing, Garner followed it. Low branches overhung, dropping snow on him every time his bent back brushed against them. He clambered along from splash to splash, and came upon a place where branches had been broken, many paws had ground away the sodden snow, and everything was bloody. “Oh God,” he whispered. Bits of meat and fur were scattered all around, lying half-frozen on the ground, stuck in the bent twigs. It was a fearful sight and it made Garner feel suddenly alone and afraid. He peered into the bushes around him. Were shapes moving there beyond the edge of visibility? This place was awfully quiet. It had the sullen atmosphere of a crime scene, a place where violence had been done and gone, and it stank. All around there was a nasty, cloying animal smell. It was musty, reminding him… it was a female odor, mixed with the stench of the blood. “What in hell is this?” he said softly. His mind turned to the two detectives, to the strange events of half an hour ago. What in hell was going on here?

He backed away from the area slowly, carefully. Sweat was popping out all over him. He gritted his teeth, fighting an impulse to turn and run wildly through the trees. Instead he walked as softly as he could. Not far off he could hear the rumble of traffic on Central Park West. Yet it seemed an eternity away right now in this savage, inhuman place. That was the word to describe it—inhuman. There was a powerful and monstrous presence about the spot, the blood, the bits of flesh, the horrible odor—it all combined to produce in Sam Garner an overwhelming dread that seemed to rise up out of his dark core and threaten to reduce him to blind, running panic. He moved faster but he did not run.

“Hey, Sam,” came a distant voice. “Sam!” Garner heard it but was afraid to answer, afraid to raise his own voice. Something was near him, he was sure of it, pacing him, keeping just out of sight beyond the bushes. He broke into a trot, then a loping run. Branches lashed at him, scratching his face, knocking off his old fur hat, cutting his hands as he struggled. Then the wall was before him, too high to scale from this side. “Rich,” he shouted, “Rich!”

The photographer looked down. His eyes opened wide, he let out a high bleat of a scream.

“Help me!” Garner shrieked. He raised his arms, grabbing frantically for the photographer’s outstretched hands. Slowly, painfully he clambered up the wall and with Fields’ help got over onto a bench.

“Good Christ, what the hell was that thing?” Fields babbled.

“Don’t know.”

“Come on—gotta get out of here!” Fields ran to the car, causing traffic along Central Park West to screech and skid as he hurried across the street. Weakly Sam Garner followed him. He was sick with fear. Something unspeakable had been going on in that park, and he had been paced by some kind of hellhound as he had left.

He jumped into the car, slammed and locked the door and leaned his badly scratched face against the steering wheel. “What was it?” he whispered. Then he looked up at Fields, blinking tears out of his eyes. “What was it!”

Fields was embarrassed and looked away. “Dunno. Lots bigger’n a dog.” Now he mumbled. “Had a sort of… face. Good Christ…”

“Describe it! I’ve got to know.”

“Can’t… only saw it for a second.” He shook his head slowly. “No wonder those two cops are trigger-happy. That thing came straight from hell, whatever it was.”

“Bullshit,” Garner replied. His chin was jutting out now, he was regaining himself. He took deep breaths. “Bullshit, whatever it was it was real. A flesh and blood something-or-other. Tasmanian devil, I dunno. But one thing is sure, it’s on the loose in New York City and it’s damn well gonna be big news.”

“So a wild animal escapes. Page two.”

“Ha! Think about it. Mutilation killing in the park. Cops scared to bejesus of something that looks like a dog. Then we get a closer look, and it ain’t no dog that’s spookin’ ’em.” He stopped, a powerful and withering image of that thing in the bushes near him overcoming his pugnacity. He hadn’t seen it clearly but he could imagine— “Rich, there was a fuckin’ bloodbath in there. I mean, I found a place where there was so damn much blood it looked like a slaughterhouse. Something got it bad there, man, not so long ago, and the smell, Holy Christ!”

“Smell?”

“It was obscene. All the bushes were covered with it, like something had been sprayed on them. You couldn’t see it but you could smell it. It was like—”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Never mind.” Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw a fierce, inhuman face peering over the wall so he put the car in gear and moved out. He got away from there, going downtown into the heart of the city. Their press credentials made it easy to park, so they stopped at the Biltmore for a drink.

“The place is quiet,” Sam muttered, “and there ain’t any other newshounds hangin’ around. I just want to get myself together again.”

Fields didn’t protest, just followed “So whaddaya think?” he asked as soon as they had slipped onto a couple of stools at the luxurious mahogany bar.

Sam didn’t answer. “Perfect Manhattan, up,” he said to the bartender. “They know how to make a Manhattan here,” he growled. “That’s my definition of a good bar.”

“What’s going on, Sam?” Fields was insistent now. He wanted to know. This was a good story and there were going to be great pictures. He certainly wasn’t going to tell Sam Garner, but he had gotten a good look at the thing that had been following the reporter. It had come out of the brush just as Sam reached the wall and had sat and watched him go. Then its ears had snapped toward Rich Fields and it had simply disappeared. There it was one second, then a flash of gray and it was gone.

There had been a perfect picture there for a second before the thing had taken off. But Rich Fields hadn’t taken a picture. For that second he had been frozen, staring at the most horrible living thing that he had ever seen. But it had all happened so fast. You couldn’t be sure about moments like that, maybe it was a trick of light on a dog’s face. He eyed Garner. “What was it?” he asked.

“How the hell do I know! Quit ridin’ me, you ain’t an editor. It was somethin’ weird. Out of the ordinary.”

“Well, that’s obvious. Did it kill Evans?”

Garner raised his eyebrows, looked at the photographer. “Sure. And it was responsible for the bloody bench the cops found this A.M. too. It’s a monster livin’ in the park.” He stared a moment at the drink before him. “Monster Stalks Park. It’s more a National Herald story, ain’t it? There’s no proof, except what we might have seen. That won’t work in the Post.”

Fields nodded his head slowly. He sipped his Martini. Garner was right about this place; you spent half your life around fifth-rate bars, you forgot how great a skillfully made Beefeater Martini could be. Right now it really hit the spot. “We gonna file?”

“Not yet. There’s too many loose ends. I think we might get lucky, wrap it up nice and pretty. Those two detectives, they’re scared shitless about this. You know what they did, they shot one of those things on the museum lawn. They were scared of being attacked. I’ll tell you what’s goin’ on. We got some kind of a holy terror loose in this town and the police are scared to make that fact public.”

Fields smiled. “That’s gonna be a very beautiful story, Sam. If we can get it together, that is. It’s gonna be very hard to get together. We sure ain’t gonna trap one of the beasts. And I can’t see us workin’ it out of those two cops. I think we got a toughie on our hands.”

“Brilliant insight, Dr. Freud. It’s a very tough story, but we’ll break it—if we live through it.”

Fields laughed but not very hard.

The human had come snooping along, following the blood trail of the dead child. As soon as he dropped down from the wall the old father was aware of the human interloper. He was a small man with quick, light movements. His face was tense with curiosity. His movements were halting and confused though, as if the trail was hard to follow. And evidently it was; the human was tracking by eye from blood droplet to blood droplet. Three times the old father thought that the man would lose the trail but each time he had regained it once again. And he kept hurrying along between the branches, oblivious of the fact that the old father was never more than six feet away.

The rest of the pack had moved off, getting away from the scene of this afternoon’s disaster. Only the old father had lingered behind, drawn by his sorrow to stay near the place where his son had died. He himself had been about to go, to fall into his new place at the bottom of the pack, when he had heard the scrape and thud of the human dropping over the wall. He had scented the man almost immediately; it was a fresh smell, mostly of the cloth in which the man was wrapped. But even so the flesh beneath the wrapping had a definite odor—a healthy man, one who smoked heavily but did not breathe poorly. He came along, crunching and clattering, his lungs loudly passing air in and out. As he got closer to the spot where the boy had died the old father stifled an intense urge to kill him. Here was another human meddling in the affairs of the pack, further evidence that knowledge of the clan was spreading.

The man clambered up the slope that led to the very spot that was still covered by the young male’s blood. And he entered the bush under which the death had taken place. A stifled sound came from the man. The old father rushed up to the bush, then stood very still as the man came out.

The human did not see him but seemed to sense his presence anyway. Fear had come into the man; here was something unknown, and it made the man want to return to his own kind. The man ran along with the old father just behind. He was in a fever to kill this human, so much so that his mouth hung open. It took every ounce of strength for him to let the creature escape. All his instincts screamed at him, kill it, kill it now! But he knew in his mind that this would be a mistake. They could not risk so much killing and after all the man had seen only blood. The snowmelt would wash most of it away before more humans could be brought to this place. Also, the pack was not here to help him dispose of a body. It would have to be left here until he could get them back. They were not likely to respond to his signal although his voice carried for miles. He was no longer pack leader, he would have to run and get them if he wanted them. And while he was gone, other humans might discover the carcass of this one, making the problem faced by the pack that much worse.

Nevertheless his mind was not his whole being. Underneath it were the powerful emotional currents of his race, currents that now tore at him and demanded that he kill the intruder, tear the creature apart, end the threat.

Then the man was at the wall, screaming for help. A pale face appeared above the wall. For an instant the old father met the eyes of this human; looking into human eyes was a little like looking into the eyes of an old enemy, or even a beloved sister.

He should not be here—run! And he ran, moving back into the brush in the wink of an eye. Then he sniffed the air, located the pack and started off after them. His mind was spinning with the terrible knowledge that another intruder had come, and he was alternately relieved and guilty that he had not killed the thing. This conflict made him feel angry, and his anger fed his desperation. Wild, mad thoughts began to roll in his brain. He wanted the danger to be over. The pack had to prosper. Soon they must win this battle against humanity. With the appearance of this new factor—the stranger who sought the lair of the pack—came proof that the forbidden knowledge was spreading. It had to be stifled at the source, and soon. “Tonight,” he thought as he trotted, “or it will be too late.”

Chapter 11

« ^ »

With the coming of night the wind rose. It swept down out of the north, freezing and wild, transforming the afternoon melt into a cutting mantle of ice. The warmer air that had lingered over the city became clouds and blew away to the south, and remaining in the sky were the few stars that defied the electric flood below, and a crescent moon rising over the towers. The bitter wind flooded along the avenues of Manhattan, carrying with it an ancient wildness that seldom reached the inner sanctum of the city; it was as if the very soul of the frowning north had swept from its moorings and now ran free in the streets.

Buses crunched along the ice-slick pavements, their tire-chains clattering and their engines wheezing. From steaming grates came the rumble of subways. Here and there a taxicab prowled in search of the few people willing to venture into the cold. Doormen huddled close to the glittering entryways of luxurious apartment buildings or stood in lobbies staring out at the wind. Inside these buildings normally docile radiators hissed and popped as overstrained heating systems fought to maintain comfort against the freeze.

The last light had disappeared from the sky when Becky opened her eyes. Beyond the bedroom door she heard the drone of the evening news. Dick, Wilson, and Ferguson were there watching. She rolled over onto her back and stared out the window at the sky. In her field of vision there were no stars, only the bottom point of the moon slicing the darkness, cut off by the top of the window. She sighed and went into the bathroom. Seven-thirty P.M. She had slept for two hours. Disconnected images from her dreams seemed to rush at her from the air; she splashed water on her face, ran a brush through her hair. She shook her head. Had they been nightmares, or mere dreams? She couldn’t quite remember. Her face looked waxy in the mirror; she took out her lipstick and applied a little. She washed her hands. Then she returned to the bedroom and pulled on her thermal underwear, then threw on jeans, a flannel shirt, and added a heavy sweater. The wind moaned around the corner of the building, making the window bulge and strain. Long fingers of frost were appearing on the glass, twinkling softly as they grew.

Becky walked into the living room. “Welcome to the real world,” her husband said. “You missed the show.”

“Show?”

“The Commissioner announced that Evans was killed by a gang of nuts. Cult murder.”

Wordlessly Wilson waved a copy of the News.

Becky shook her head, didn’t bother to comment, “Werewolf Killers Stalk Park—Two Dead.” So ridiculously confused, so mindless. The Commissioner just couldn’t grasp the truth, none of them could. She found her cigarettes and lit one, then flopped down on the couch between her husband and Wilson. Ferguson, slumped in their reclining chair, had not spoken. His face was drawn, the skin seeming to have stretched back over the bones, giving him a cadaverous appearance. His mouth was set, his eyes staring blindly in the general direction of the television set. The only movement he made was to rub his hands slowly along the arms of the chair.

Becky wanted to draw him out of it. “Doctor Ferguson,” she said, “what’s your opinion of all this?”

He smiled a little and shook his head. “I think we’d better get our proof.” He felt his pocket for the rustle of paper. His notes on Beauvoy’s hand signals were there, ready for reference in case his memory slipped.

“He means we’ve run out of time,” Wilson said.

“So what else is new. Any of you guys hungry?”

Everybody was very hungry. They wound up ordering two pizzas from a place down the street Beer and Cokes they had in the refrigerator. Becky was just as glad, she didn’t particularly care to cook for four people. She leaned back on the couch crossing her legs, feeling the weight of the two men beside her. “We got everything?” she asked.

“Two radios and the camera. What else is there to get?”

“Nothing I guess. Anybody been upstairs?”

Their plan was to stake out the roof and man it in relays. One would stay there with the camera while the other three waited below. The reason that they didn’t go up in pairs was that they hoped it would help to keep the chance of being scented to a minimum. The three in the apartment would keep in touch with the one on the roof via the handheld radios they had bought. Dick had purchased them at an electronics store, two CB walkie-talkies. They could have checked out a couple of police-issue models but they didn’t want their traffic overheard on the police band. No sense in attracting attention. By tomorrow morning it wouldn’t matter; they would have the pictures they needed. Becky’s eyes went to the camera, its black bulk resting on the dining room table. It looked more like a flat-ended football than a camera. Only the shielded lens, reposing like a great animal eye deep in its hood, revealed the thing’s function. They had all handled it earlier, getting used to the awkward shape and the overly sensitive controls. You could take pictures almost without realizing you had started the camera, and the focusing mechanism could be very frustrating to work if your depth of field was changing rapidly. How soldiers had ever used it in battle was beyond understanding. And it was terribly delicate, threatening to break at the least jostle or to lose its onboard computer if the batteries weakened too much.

But it worked miraculously well when it worked. “Anybody tried it out yet?” Becky asked. “You’re going to be the first.” She nodded. By mutual agreement she would stand the first watch on the roof, eight to ten-thirty. They had divided the hours of darkness into four two-and-a-half-hour segments and allocated the watches. Becky took the first, Ferguson the second. He had argued that he wanted to take his watch in the alley where he could confront the Wolfen, as he called them, personally. But he had been overruled. The third watch, from one until three-thirty, was to be Dick’s. This was the most likely time for the night’s attempt. Always when they had come before, it had been during this period. Dick had insisted on this watch, saying that he was the best choice, the strongest and the most fit. Becky couldn’t deny it. She and Wilson were exhausted, God knew, and Ferguson was showing signs of cracking. Dick was the strongest, it was right that he go at the most dangerous time.

Still, she did not want him to go. She found herself drawn to him in a strange, dispassionate way that she did not associate with their married love. There was something about his vulnerability that made her want to protect him. Physically there was no real attraction, but there was a quality of spirit that attracted her strongly—he had been willing, after all, to put his whole career on the line to keep his father out of a welfare nursing home. He had always been good and kind to her—but there was something inside him that was growing, a kind of wall that shut her out of his heart, kept her away from his secret thoughts. She wanted to be there but he refused her entry, and maybe not only her but himself as well. He brought tenderness and physical intimacy to the relationship but he did not bring himself. The real Dick Neff was as alien to her now as he had been when they first met. And her spirit, after hungering and trying for his love these many years, had simply given up. She knew now what was missing in their relationship and she had begun to try to do what she could to repair the damage. Mostly, it was going to be up to Dick. She longed for him to open himself to her, to give her more than a thin veneer of himself to go with his urgent sexuality, but she felt that in the end he would fail. Exactly why she felt this way she could not say, but she did feel it. Perhaps it came from the coldness she saw in his eyes, and the lust that filled them when she so desperately wanted to see love. Dick had been scarred in a way that many cops are scarred. He had seen too much of life’s miseries to open himself to any other human being, even his wife. When they were first married Dick would come home hollow-eyed with sorrow, unable to articulate his feelings about the horrors he had seen. He would describe them woodenly, all emotion absent from his voice.

There had been a child suicide, a little girl of twelve who had died in his arms of self-inflicted burns. She had pressed herself against a gas stove, then lurched, in flames, through a window into the street.

There had been a mother, pregnant, beheaded by a gang of teenage junkies. He had been first on the scene, witness to the spontaneous abortion and miscarriage delivery of the seven-month fetus.

There had been many others in his years on the street, most of them connected one way or another with drugs. These experiences plus his time in Narcotics had made of him an obsessive, consumed man with only one goal, to destroy the dealers who destroyed the people.

The obsession had to be compromised in so many ways that his hatred of crime had turned into self-loathing, a mockery of his personal worth. Problems, to a man like Dick, caused a slow closing of his heart, a shutting out of life, until there was nothing left but anger and animal lust and a vague, overshadowing sorrow that he could not voice.

Becky knew these things about her husband, and longed to tell him about them. But it was hopeless, and this hopelessness was now driving her away from him. She was rapidly reaching the point where if she could not help him, she would have to leave him.

And there was Wilson. George Wilson, a grumpy, unappealing creature with an open soul. He might grumble and threaten, but you could open Wilson up and get inside. And he loved her with boyish desperation. When his overtures were accepted he was amazed and gratified. He wanted her in a raw, urgent manner that possessed him right down to his core. She knew that he dreamed about her at night, that he held an image of her in his mind’s eye during his waking hours. And they fit one another in strange and satisfying ways.

Such thoughts were dangerous. How could anyone in her right mind want to trade the young, vital Dick Neff for a busted-up old man like Wilson? Well, she was thinking about it more and more lately.

The doorbell rang, and in a few moments they were eating pizza. “You still sulky, Doc?” Becky asked Ferguson. He was brooding more than he should; she was trying to draw him out.

“I’m not sulky. Just contemplative.”

“Like a soldier before a big battle,” Wilson said. “Like me this afternoon.”

“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been in a battle. But let’s just say that sitting up there on that roof half the night isn’t my idea of my proper role.”