“Ayuh.”
“So, why do you think he needs all that garlic?”
Oscar squinted up into the moonlit sky for a moment and then back at the road. “Probably something to do with the damn vampires, if y’ask me.”
“You think so?”
“Ayuh.”
4
Crow got home well before dawn, parked outside of his shop and hurried inside, door key in one hand, pistol in the other. Once inside he locked up again and went straight through the store into his apartment, locking that door behind him, too. His three cats crowded around him, scolding him for being away so long. Their cat box needed changing, their water bowl was dry, and they were hungry.
As he took care of their needs he wondered for the thousandth time where Mike was. “C’mon, kiddo…be okay,” he murmured, but he had nowhere to go with his concerns, and no time to spend on them. He showered—first hot and then very cold—and dressed for a hard day in heavy-duty cargo pants with lots of pockets, North Face hiking shoes, thermal undershirt, his shoulder holster, and a Temple Owls hoody that zippered up the front and was baggy enough to hide his shoulder rig. Appraising himself in the mirror he thought he looked like a street kid getting ready to rob a liquor store.
He stuffed his pockets with a lighter, Swiss Army knife, gum, two PowerBars, a small first-aid kit, and extra magazines for the Beretta, and clipped on a Buck 888 Combat Knife in a black Cordura sheath. It was a real killer, with a 43/4-inch blade, but it weighed only eleven ounces. Crow was as much an artist with a knife as he was with his sword. He took the sword, too, a Paul Chen katana, one of the Orchid series, that had cost well over a thousand dollars and with which Crow had practiced tens of thousands of cuts. He knew that sword better than any other and though he’d never actually fought with it, he believed that with that sword in his hand he could stand up to just about anyone. Or anything. On impulse he packed his two cheaper but still sturdy training swords, putting all of them into an oversized tournament duffel. Then he locked up his shop and went to war.
5
Ferro drove; Vince sat, arms folded, head turned away to look out of the passenger window at the darkness rushing by. He’s been like that most of the way back to Philly, had barely said a word while they were gathering their weapons and equipment—a process that would be creating a lot of questions they would have to answer at some point—and hadn’t said a single word since they’d headed back north.
“Vince…?” Ferro finally asked as they headed north through Abington. They’d be in Pine Deep in forty minutes. Dawn was coming late today as a dense cloud cover remained locked down over the region. “Vince…you okay?”
LaMastra turned slowly to face his partner and gave him a long stare that was filled with a bottomless sadness.
“We’re going to die, you know,” he said softly. “All of us.” He turned back to the window. “We’re all going to die.”
Ferro opened his mouth to say something reassuring, but ultimately held his tongue. He didn’t like to lie to his partner.
6
About five minutes after Crow pulled away from his store the back door to his apartment opened and a hunched figure shambled slowly inside. It was streaked with blood and dirt and it moved with slow, shuffling steps from the kitchen into the living room, then into Crow’s bedroom.
It stopped, head raised as if sniffing the air.
“Crow,” it said in a hoarse, dry voice.
The three cats cringed back from it, hissing.
The figure turned slowly toward them and stood there, swaying like a scarecrow in a breeze, then it leaned back against the wall and slumped wearily to the floor. The cats kept their distance for a while, eyeing the intruder warily. Then one of them—Muddy Whiskers, the oldest—took a tentative step forward, paused, took another step, and another, always ready to run. Finally the ginger cat was right there, sniffing the mud-caked shoes and torn jeans.
The figure raised one hand, offering scabbed and filthy fingers for the cat to smell. Muddy Whiskers looked past the fingers at the face, at the bloodred eyes, but he didn’t shy away. After another few seconds he came closer still and pushed his head against the proffered hand. He started to purr.
The figure bent forward and scooped the cat up, pulled him to his chest, buried its mouth and nose against the cat’s head, and began to cry.
The other cats watched for a while, and then they, too, came closer and took the strange-yet-familiar scent. Muddy Whiskers let himself be held, and he didn’t even struggle as Mike Sweeney began rocking back and forth as he wept.
Chapter 32
Crow peered into the oversized duffel bags the detectives laid out on a table in the lab Weinstock had ordered set aside for their use. “Gee, you think you brought enough guns?”
“If it has fangs we want it dead,” Ferro said, “not just pissed off.”
“Works for me.”
There were two short-barreled Remington 870s with pistol grips and folding stocks of the kind favored by some of the more hard-core narcotics units; a Mossberg Bullpup with a twenty-inch barrel and an eight-shot clip; a venerable old Winchester Defender with a standard stock and a Parkerized finish; an Ithaca Deerslayer; and one monster of a ten-gauge shotgun that LaMastra fondled with familiarity. This was an Ithaca Mag-10 Roadblocker with an augmented clip that allowed him to carry seven shells instead of the usual three. It was a bull of a gun useful only in the hands of a bullish man.
Ferro had somehow procured a thousand rounds of 12-gauge and two hundred for the Roadblocker, and over the last few hours they had worked in teams to doctor them up by injecting pure garlic oil into the casings, sealing the needle holes by melting the plastic with a lab burner. Ferro, LaMastra, and Val handled that job, marking each shell with a felt-tip pen to indicate the ones that were enhanced. Crow worked on the five hundred 9mm pistol bullets Ferro had brought. The concave mouths of the dum-dums needed only a small drop to fill, and Crow sealed in the oil with a drop of hot wax, blew on the wax, and smoothed the tips to make them round and even. When they had doctored six hundred shells and three hundred bullets, Ferro called a halt to it. They all gathered around the autopsy table, staring in fascination at the weapons and the ammunition that they hoped would help them survive the coming war.
“Okay,” Ferro said as if instructing a class, “the plain red shells are standard twelve-gauge double-ought buckshot. The ones marked with the black arrows are filled with deer slugs. If we have do concentrate on head shots, that’ll do’er.”
“What about those?” Crow asked, touching a shell marked with thick black bands.
“Shok-Lock rounds,” Ferro said. “Inside is a kind of ceramic minishell that explodes on impact and discharges bits of metal.”
LaMastra nodded. During the hours of work he’d shaken off some of his funk and had started talking again, though his eyes were still spooked. “Fire one at a lock and poof!— no lock. Fire one at a head, and all you have is a lingering cloud of pink mist.”
Crow winced. “Thanks, that image is going to stay with me.”
“The rest are for Vince’s Roadblocker.”
“Standard double-ought,” said LaMastra with a grin, “but at ten-gauge it’s a real crowd-pleaser.”
They loaded all six of the shotguns. Crow selected the Bullpup, liking its weight; Ferro took a Remington. They stowed their shotguns in one of the duffel bags, along with Crow’s Japanese sword and a collection of knives. LaMastra opened one of the bags of garlic bulbs and poured several dozen into a plastic bag and stowed this in the duffel.
Ferro finished the last of his cold coffee, “Does anyone know when sunset is today?”
“6:47,” said Val. “I checked the paper.”
“Then let’s go,” said Ferro.
Val told them to wait and quickly searched the cabinets until she found some small plastic specimen vials with pop-off lids. She filled a half dozen of them with garlic oil and gave two to each of them. “You never know,” she said, and they nodded their thanks.
Ferro and LaMastra stepped out into the hallway, leaving Crow and Val alone in the morgue. Crow wrapped her in his arms and kissed her.
“I know this will tarnish my Captain Avenger image,” he said, “but I’ve never been this scared before.”
“Me, too.”
“We could leave, you know. Pack up my car…just go. You, me, and the baby.”
“Sounds great. I hear Jamaica’s great this time of year.”
They smiled at each other, letting the lie make the moment bearable. They kissed very tenderly. Val leaned back and searched his face for a long time. “Crow, I’m not going to make any more speeches, okay? Just promise me that you’ll come back. Give me your word and I’ll be able to let you go. Otherwise—I think I’ll just go crazy.”
Very seriously he said, “Val, you know that poem I like, “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes? The one Loreena McKennitt did a song about? Remember what the hero says to his love? ‘I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.’ That’s me, baby. Mr. Hero Guy. Nothing’s going to stop me.”
She pulled his face close to hers. “Swear to me, swear you’ll come back.”
“I swear,” he whispered.
“Swear on our baby.”
“I swear.”
“Swear,” she said again and again, and each time he swore, and each time he kissed her face, tasting tears. “I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too.” Then she pushed him back and turned away and walked across the room where she leaned with both hands on the edge of a counter. He understood and didn’t say anything else. As he pulled the door closed behind him he heard the first of her deep, terrible sobs.
The cops saw his face and didn’t comment.
Crow nodded and he and the cops headed out to assault Dark Hollow.
Chapter 33
1
The three ATVs stood in a row in the clearing at the top of Dark Hollow, the gray light of dawn brightened by the intense yellow paint jobs. “Nice,” LaMastra said, nodding approval as he ran his hands over the controls; Ferro eyed the machines dubiously.