Part 22 (1/2)

And blackness.

The Chrysler slowed to a stop, some two hundred yards down the road. Vic turned the volume down and hit the power-window b.u.t.ton. He listened for the sound of fire, or maybe a nice explosion.

But aside from the tortured rumble of the sedan's engine, all was quiet. He'd lost sight of the Mustang shortly after it hit the retaining wall. The curve obscured the rest. He put the car into reverse, began backing up. He'd gone maybe three or four hundred feet when he saw a wheel, upright and wobbling as it rolled all on its lonesome down the darkened road. Another fifty feet back, and the wreck came into view.

The Mustang had wrapped around a gnarled old oak. The front end was crushed from b.u.mper to winds.h.i.+eld, the rest of the car mashed like an old beer can.

Vic smiled. He could see steam wafting up, hear the groan of metal settling. He watched for a minute, didn't hear anything else. He'd kept his promise, all right. Just like he said he would.

Never laid a hand on 'im, he thought, and began to chuckle.

And the chuckle became a laugh, the laugh a full-scale belly-buster. He looked up, saw the waning moon, dolefully observant. She was the perfect lover, he mused. She kept her opinions to herself. This time when the urge to bay rose up inside, Vic gleefully gave in.

Then he turned the stereo way up high. Put the car into drive.

And together, they howled off into the night.

PART TWO.

Jane.

EIGHTEEN.

MONTHS LATER.

26.

Ah, how the mighty had fallen. The name on the sign hanging over the door was Big Dan's Deadbeat Bar & Grill; and whether that was simply truth in advertising or actual self-fulfilling prophecy, the end result was the same.

It didn't matter that it wasn't the actual name of the bar-which was Danny D.'s, for anybody who cared. Once upon a time, some whiz kid had scrawled the words on the flap off a case of Gennie Cream Ale, found a stray nail poking halfway out above the door. The rest was not so much history as irony, or entropy. Dan didn't much care for the sign, but he couldn't be bothered to climb up there and take it down. And neither could anyone else.

Which pretty much summed it up. The bar wasn't just a dump; it was a black hole. And moreover, a virtual loser magnet, ground zero for bottom feeders, with a rich redneck history of shootings and stabbings to go with its watered-down booze and lobotomized IQs. It had the kind of desperate dog kennel vibe you made cruel jokes about when your life was on track, but found yourself naturally gravitating toward when that same life horribly disa.s.sembled.

Syd had spent a good bit of the last eighteen months there. It somehow spoke to his condition.

Ever since the crash and burn.

The door opened without warning. Another loser, coming through. Syd winced against the light, the dark shape it framed. He couldn't see who it was, nor imagine that it mattered. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. Syd was on his seventh beer. On the outside, yet another Pennsylvania spring had sprung: a bright, s.h.i.+ny, sun-s.p.a.ckled chlorophyll explosion, draping the world in its first blush of green.

He knew it was beautiful, and that it should be inspiring; but, frankly, at this point, it just gave him a headache. The sun was too bright, and what it revealed was too damaged. The world didn't bear up to such close scrutiny. The shadows made a lot more sense.

Just as it was easier, in the long run, to bury the truth. . . .

The door shut. Syd blinked back the little floating dots, let his gaze flicker across the room. There was Doris the troll, on her perch by the corner, with her bottle of Pabst and all those hairs in her chin. There was Big Dan himself, a blubbery mountain of caked sweat and whiskey-soaked lard. A couple of big-mouthed Blutos-Syd had nicknamed them Bo Hunk and d.i.c.k Weed-slowly p.i.s.sed each other off as they argued last night's pre-season game. Maybe a half-dozen others, mostly regulars, were scattered around the bar. He didn't know their real names, didn't want to; it was easier to make up his own.

The guy who'd just come in was small and balding. It took Syd's eyes a moment to completely readjust, make the face come clear. In fact, it wasn't until the little guy stopped and said, ”Hey, man. How ya doin'?” that Syd realized who it was.

And by then, of course, it was far too late.

Oh, christ, he thought. Staring at the legendary figure before him. There was no time to do anything but react. His grimace and shrug were completely automatic.

”I know,” said Marc Pankowski, ”exactly what you mean.”

For a moment, they exchanged what Syd knew was meant to be meaningful eye contact. It was hard not to laugh, but the dread in his stomach went a long way toward counterbalancing his reaction. Syd wasn't sure if Marc could read him, because Marc looked away and then kept going down the bar.

But the horrible thing was that, under the circ.u.mstances, maybe Marc had a point.

I know exactly what you mean. It suggested a commonality of experience, a new link forged of understanding in the brotherhood of man. I know exactly what you mean. Was it true? G.o.d help him: in some ways, yes. They had both flamed out and lived to smell the ashes. They had both been drunk when they did it, and had pretty much stayed that way ever since. They had both become monsters, then turned to s.h.i.+t. So, yeah, there were a couple of similarities.

Only I never took anyone out with me, Syd thought. But that wasn't exactly true.

Suddenly, Syd was staring at his hands and the fifty-cent draft on the bar before him. The TV behind the bar was tuned to ”The Love Connection.” Chuck Hillary-or Willary, or whatever-was smugly leering. He tried to make himself watch, couldn't. It was just too f.u.c.king grim. There was nothing here to feed his soul, nothing here to give him solace.

When the first tear welled up, he was almost surprised. It had been so long since he'd even cared.

Syd picked up the beer and drained it, wiped his cheek as an afterthought. Then he motioned wordlessly to Dan for another. It was still very difficult to think about Jules, even after all this time. What was worse: once he'd started, it was impossible to stop. The fact that he'd never told a living soul just compounded the matter, upped the ante on his shame.

When the cops had shown up at the scene, he was f.u.c.ked up and far from home, with a concussion, six cracked ribs, and his left arm and leg broken in seven places. Syd was pinned beneath the steering column. It took two hours, an extra EMS team and the Jaws of Life to finally free him from the wreckage, and the whole time he was fading in and out of resolution: from teeth-chattering shock to utter black and back again. He was babbling, too, about chases and bodies and mysterious monsters trying to run him off the road.

The police listened to every word he said, and didn't believe a bit of it. Chief Hoser, in particular, shook his head dismissively, his stern, gaunt features conveying the essential message: I always knew you'd turn to s.h.i.+t.

In any event, all of their most pressing questions were answered by his Breathalyzer test. Never mind the crash, they said: his blood-alcohol level alone was enough to have killed him.

It wasn't until Jules turned up missing, and the blood in the parking lot was found, that they seriously started asking questions. But by then, Syd had sobered up and had time to think. Think about the thing that had chased and destroyed him. Integrate and a.s.sess the astonis.h.i.+ng facts of his condition, the essential unbelievability of his experience.

Compounding his predicament was the fact that the car that Nora left parked outside his apartment turned out to be registered to a thirty-two-year-old white male by the name of James Whalen, late of Shreveport, La. James had been missing some seven months now. The police were real curious about that little development. Well, you see, officer, my friend Jules got killed by a werewolf, the same one that ran me off the road. It all happened because I f.u.c.ked its girlfriend, who just happened to be another werewolf, probably the one who did your boy down in L'weeziana. Oh, yeah, and in the process I got turned into one, too. Swear to Christ.

So much for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

In the end the only way to deal with it was to swear complete ignorance: of what had happened to Jules, of what had happened to Nora, of absolutely everything. Nora's things were confiscated, but like the car, they yielded no clues, not even a fingerprint. Chief Hoser dragged Syd in for questioning yet again, this time with detectives and State Police in the room, and asked him why he thought that might be.

Syd could only shrug.

In the end he got a lot of hard looks and intimidating questioning that went nowhere; Jules's case was left open, but past a certain point they just stopped looking.

Of course, the rumor mill took it through every conceivable mutation, mostly centering on Jules's pent-up wanderl.u.s.t and the mysterious redhead. Syd kept his mouth shut and his head down; he had other problems to worry about.

Eventually he went to court for reckless driving, driving under the influence, and reckless endangerment; he pled guilty and got socked with a two-thousand-dollar fine, eight weeks on the D.W.I. program plus four months of A.A. and personal counseling, and a year's suspension of his driver's license.