Blood & Rust Read online

  I looked up at him. I wiped the blur out of my eyes and said, “I don’t know. I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything.”

  We sat in his idling car as I told him what had happened. He listened quietly, nodding occasionally. After I finished, Sam said, “This is just great. You know once we get you to the hospital, we’re both in the shit. You know that?”

  I shook my head and said, “No, I don’t.”

  He pulled the Saturn out into the street. The car slid a little. The snow was wet and heavy, the kind that was hell on driving. The wind whipped it into a white wall that erased everything more than half a block distant. Once he’d pulled away from Coventry, and the businesses clustered there, we were the only car on the street.

  Sam focused his concentration on the road ahead, “I’ve been covering your ass when they wanted you in for questioning. You could have been in protective custody by now.”

  He gritted his teeth, and I could feel his stress at driving in this mess. “Now you’ve made yourself look like a suspect, and that makes me look like an accessory—”

  “Can you please tell me what’s going on?”

  He looked at me. I felt the car slide, and he looked back at the road. “The way you keep things close to the vest, and you think I know something? God that’s what I hated about you when we were partners.” He sighed. “What I know? Two weeks ago a high-class hood hires you to find his missing kid. You find some connection between this kid and a guy, alias ‘Childe.’ You find something going on, and you refuse to tell me about it. They go after your ex-wife, and you insist on going off on your own after this Childe person—and somehow you convince me to let you.” Sam pumped the brakes to bring the car to a slow sliding stop at a red light. “That’s ‘what’s going on.’ ”

  “Am I a cop?”

  “Christ, you don’t remember anything? Do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Damn, I’m glad you asked to go to the hospital. I’d hate to try and convince you to do anything you didn’t want to. Look, your name is Kane Tyler, you’re forty-five years old. You’re the most stubborn man I know. You were a cop for nearly fifteen years. Since then you’ve been freelance, finding people’s missing kids.”

  “Tell me about my family.”

  The light turned green, and Sam spun the wheels for a while before the car started moving.

  “You have the daughter I should have had. Don’t worry about Gail, I did manage to swing some police protection for her. I have a detective sitting with her in Oberlin.”

  “Oberlin.”

  “She’s eighteen, goes to college there. Is any of this helping you remember?”

  I gritted my teeth and balled my hands into fists. All of this and no memories surfaced. All I had was one last lingering image of Kate’s corpse. I couldn’t even picture my daughter’s face. I felt a deep rage for the people who had left me in that sewer. They had taken my life from me, just as surely as if they had killed me.

  My gut ached, and I felt very cold. I stared down so all I saw were my pale fists shaking in my lap. “How could this happen? How could I forget everything?”

  “The doctors will help you.”

  I slammed a fist into my thigh. “But how?” I looked up at Sam. “There was nothing wrong. All that blood, and I didn’t find a wound—”

  “Calm down,” Sam said. “I don’t know what happened to you, but you’re frightening me. You could be bleeding inside. You should have gone to a hospital immediately.”

  “How long has that van been there?” I said, interrupting him. A black van, little more than a shadow, was behind us. It was gaining slowly through the snow. The windows were black, and I saw no sign of a license plate.

  “I don’t know, two or three blocks?”

  “Call for backup,” I said, staring at the van. Something else had joined the anger and frustration—fear. I knew that van, even without a memory of it, just as I’d known Sam as a friend the first moment I’d seen him.

  “What... ?”

  “Call! Now!” I could feel that it was nearly too late. The van was accelerating toward us. Something, either my tone of voice or the fact that I drew the Eagle, convinced Sam. He got on the radio and started calling, “Officer needs assistance.”

  As if in response, the van slid behind us, and thudded against our rear bumper. We blew through the next intersection without even slowing for the red light. Sam’s knuckles were whitening on the steering wheel.

  “Pull away from them.”

  “I’m trying—”

  The van kept with us, as if it were tied to our bumper. I leveled my gun at the grille of the van, and fired. The sound tore at my ears, so much it seemed that it was the gun’s report and not the bullet that shattered the rear window. Gun smoke filled the cab for a moment before it was sucked out by the sharp winter wind.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  I didn’t answer. The van was like a wall behind Sam’s car. I fired into the grille again. The van didn’t slow or pull away. Snow bit my face.

  The world began wailing and pulsing red as Sam turned on the siren. With that and the tearing wind, I could bearly hear him yelling into the radio.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the sliding door on the side of the van open. I tried to shift my aim, but the van rammed the rear of the car, throwing me against my seat. It knocked what little breath I had out of me, and I suddenly had more panicked thoughts about forgetting to breathe.

  This is a bad time to start losing it.

  I forced those thoughts away and pumped another shot into the front of the van. The shot went wide of the mark and one of the headlights shattered. Without that glare in my eyes, I saw a shadow slip out of the side of the van, out and up.

  “What the... ”

  Something thudded on the roof of the Saturn. I raised the gun and was firing through the roof before I realized what I was doing. Sam jerked, swerving the car toward the left curb. “What are you doing?”

  I never had a chance to answer him.

  The driver’s window shattered. I barely had time to see an arm reaching down from the roof to grab the wheel, before the resulting skid threw me against the passenger door. My gun clattered into the foot well.

  The car jumped the median, sliding sidewise. Sam fought for control of the wheel and the arm let go just in time for the van to plow into the side of the car. The van stopped, and we kept going, spinning out to crunch into a parked pickup truck, slamming to a halt with a lurch that tried to ram my stomach through my throat.

  For a few moments, the world was cloaked in a ghostly quiet. The siren had died, leaving only the crimson strobe of the flasher. The engine had ground to a halt. For a few seconds all I heard was the ticking of cooling metal.

  Then I heard a step on the roof.

  How could anyone ... ?

  I scrambled to reach my gun. Someone jumped off the roof of the car before I had gotten to where my gun had slid under the passenger seat.

  “You?” I heard him say. His voice was harsh and rough, like the grinding of millstones.

  I turned to face him and saw a kid; he couldn’t be more than eighteen. He wore black, and the only highlights I saw on his clothes were the studs on his leather jacket. There was no sign of the fact he’d been riding on the roof during a near-fatal skid.

  He leaped up to squat in the shattered rear window. It was a leap of unnatural dexterity. I kept fumbling under my seat until my hand felt the butt of the Desert Eagle.

  The kid looked at me with a monochrome face intermittently tinted red by the oscillating police flasher. He smiled at me with lips that appeared alternately black and soaked with gore. “Aren’t you dead, my friend?”

  I got my hand around the gun. I pulled it out and leveled it at the kid’s chest. Even though I grabbed my wrist to brace it, the tip of the gun still shook.

  “Don’t. Move.” I said. My head throbbed, I felt weak. I felt as if I moved through molasses.

  The
kid laughed at me. “You really don’t want to shoot me, Mr. Tyler.” He leaned forward slowly, looking me in the eyes. The kid had black irises. I couldn’t see any pupils, just black, bottomless holes that tried to suck me in. Everything slowed as he reached for something in the back seat. I could feel his breath on my cheek.

  My finger felt like lead when I pulled the trigger.

  The sound was like a grenade going off in the back seat. The kid flew backward out the rear window, disappearing behind the rear of the car.

  The world went quiet again. “Sam?”

  I kept looking out the busted rear window, and I saw nothing but flying snow. “Sam?” A note of hysteria leaked into my voice. I turned to look beside me.

  “Shit.” It was little more than a whisper. The wind tore the words away. Sam was slumped in his seat, unconscious. Blood streamed from his nose and mouth. The sight of it froze me.

  So much blood that it steamed.

  I reached over and felt for a pulse. It was there. He was alive. My hand came away covered in livid crimson. The heat of it sank into my fingers. I held my hand in front of my face, the blood almost seemed to glow....

  The sound of sirens broke me out of whatever trance I was in. I got loose from the seat belt and pushed open the door. Leading with the gun, I inched my way around the wreck. When I rounded the rear fender, I leveled my gun at the pavement—

  The kid wasn’t there.

  I started looking around maniacally until I saw him dimly, through the snow, jumping into the van. He was carrying something. By the time I had the gun steadied in his direction, there wasn’t anything to shoot at.

  “Missed,” I whispered. “Must have missed.”

  I stumbled around to the driver’s side, which was a crumpled mess. Sam was still breathing, but the blood looked even worse on this side. The blood pulsed crimson in time to the light on the dash, like something alive, like a beating heart.

  I slid to my knees next to the door, my head level with Sam’s. My knees hit the slush, but it felt as if I’d never stopped falling. The world kept spinning and spinning, and I lost all sense of time or space. For a few minutes all I knew was that red pulsing light....

  Sam’s coughing brought me back to reality. He was on the ground, next to the car, and I was crouched next to him. I had no memory of prying open the wrecked driver’s side door, or of pulling him out of the car. My face was barely inches from his.

  His eyes fluttered open for a minute and he looked into mine. “Where the fuck did you learn mouth-to-mouth?”

  I didn’t respond because I was trying too hard to keep the world from spinning out of control. Sam’s face was covered with blood. I could taste it on my own lips. I had a horrifying suspicion that I hadn’t been trying to resuscitate him.

  Sam coughed again, turned away from me, and spat up a mouthful of blood. The sight tightened something inside me. I began nervously wiping the blood from my own face, and sucking it off my hands. I knew it was Sam’s blood, but I did it anyway.

  I became afraid of what I might do. This man was a friend of mine, and all I could do was watch his life leak out of his body and feel a sick hunger, picture my lips on his, taste the blood again....

  I needed to see a doctor. I was having some sort of psychotic episode. What I was feeling was not sane.

  Sam had called for backup. Where the fuck were they?

  I pushed myself upright, consciously trying to wipe the blood off my hands in the snow. Sam would be fine, fine as long as I didn’t do anything more. But all I could think of, all I smelled and saw, was that damn blood.

  “Don’t think of it,” I was almost pleading with myself now. I needed to concentrate on something else, anything else. For once my memory provided something on command.

  “Gaily bedight, / A gallant knight, / In sunshine and in shadow, / Had journeyed long, / Singing a song, / In search of Eldorado.” I chanted the stanzas like a mantra. With each word I was trying to force the blood away from my sight. “But he grew old—/ This knight so bold—/ And o‘er his heart a shadow / Fell as he found / No spot of ground / That looked like Eldorado.”

  Minutes it had been, only minutes since the van had forced us off the road. It already felt as if I had spent most of my life here. The taste of blood was still in my mouth as I spoke.

  Something about my distorted state of mind made my senses unnaturally sharp. I was aware of everything—the bite of individual snowflakes on my cheek, the crunch of salt under my feet, the rattle of the power lines in the wind, the sound of a car’s distant engine, and the noise of its tires crunching the snow.

  I looked up and saw headlights in the distance, through a swirling wall of white. The headlights and the emerging silhouette were familiar. It was my tail from the hotel.

  I kept chanting, trying to calm myself. “And, as his strength / failed him at length, / He met a pilgrim shadow—”

  It was an Olds, and it pulled up next to the wreck. Three people got out of the car. One bent over Sam, the other two walked toward me. My first thought upon seeing them was: They’re dressed like lawyers, not cops. But lawyers don’t drive seven-year-old Oldsmobiles.

  A pair of them stopped in front of me. They were dressed to match, dark suits, wine-red ties, and charcoal-gray trench coats. The one in the lead was tall, black, and completely bald down to his brows. His friend was a weaselish man with a razor mustache and slick hair, who would have looked more at home in a brown shirt and jackboots.

  Their hands were empty, but I got the impression that the white guy at least had a shoulder holster under his trench coat.

  I whispered, “‘Shadow,’ said he, / ‘Where can it be—/ This land of Eldorado?’ ”

  “Mr. Tyler?” The tall one spoke with a Jamaican accent that was at odds with the snow-whipped landscape.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. My senses sharpened with the tension, my eyes carved razor edges on everything. But my heartbeat, if anything, slowed.

  “We represent Mr. Sebastian, your employer.”

  When I didn’t respond, the Jamaican continued, “Mr. Sebastian wants you to come with us. He is very emphatic about police involvement in his daughter’s disappearance.”

  I could feel myself being backed in a corner. “But, Sam, he’s—”

  “We understand your relationship with him, and granted you some latitude. But Mr. Sebastian does not want you questioned by the police. He does not want official investigations. Especially after what you’ve unearthed already.”

  What have I unearthed? “You bastards stole my tapes.” The Jamaican’s partner, the one I’d been thinking of as Mr. Gestapo, smiled. His teeth were gray. The Jamaican nodded slightly, acknowledging my statement but not granting it any importance. “You disappeared,” he said.

  “You mean I managed to shake your tail and you panicked.” It wasn’t time to be lobbing verbal grenades, but anger was welling up and it was hard to contain.

  Mr. Gestapo stopped smiling.

  “Perhaps,” said the Jamaican, “but if you’d been killed, Mr. Sebastian needed to know what you knew.”

  “So now you know what I know—”

  “If you would come with us, please.” The Jamaican held a long arm up to the Olds. “Do not worry about your friend. We’ll leave a man here to tend to him until an ambulance arrives.”

  I didn’t move. “What if I wish to stay and wait for the ambulance?”

  The Jamaican lowered his arm. “Mr. Tyler, we will not force you into the car. But I should remind you that Mr. Sebastian has many friends in the police department. Friends who are quite aware how emphatically he does not want you questioned. If you were to fall into police custody, the consequences would be unpleasant for all concerned.” He motioned at the Oldsmobile. “Now, may we please offer you a lift away from here? You do have Mr. Sebastian’s daughter to find.”

  I smiled, shook my head, and got in the car. I felt more and more like the knight in the Poe poem—

  “Over the Mou
ntains

  Of the Moon

  Down the Valley of the Shadow,

  Ride, boldly ride,”

  The shade replied,

  “If you seek for Eldorado!”

  5

  They put me in the back seat of the Olds, which was good. It gave me some chance to hide how strung out I was. My hands shook, my head throbbed, and my thoughts were racing around in circles, trying to deny that anything odd had happened with Sam.

  I needed a doctor more than ever. But some sense of caution kept me from telling my escort.

  The Olds pulled away just as the police flashers began emerging from the snow behind us. When the flashers stopped by the wreck, it was a few moments before the snow reclaimed them, turning blank and gray behind us.

  “You’ve caught up with me,” I said, forcing my voice to sound more stable than I felt. “Now what?”

  “We stay with you, Mr. Tyler. It’s because of you that Mr. Sebastian knows what we’re dealing with, and he feels very strongly that you should continue—”

  “And continue under Mr. Sebastian’s leash. I see.”

  Mr. Gestapo chuckled at that one. “I see you understand. Mr. Sebastian does not wish you to disappear again.”

  You bastards, my life is falling apart. How the hell can I collect the pieces with you guys riding my tail?

  Worse, I was beginning to think I might need a psychiatrist, and not just for my amnesia. There was a less than subtle threat that if I went to the police, I would find it unhealthy. I doubted that Mr. Sebastian would be any more sanguine about me talking to a doctor.

  I racked my stumbling brain for questions I could ask that didn’t reveal my ignorance. “What exactly does Mr. Sebastian think we’re dealing with?” I asked. “What does he know about what’s going on here?”

  “An old evil, Mr. Tyler. An evil that goes far beyond idolatry and false gods. An evil that threatens his daughter’s immortal soul.”

  I shook my head. That kind of language prompted thoughts I didn’t need to be having.