WOLF TALE
THE KILLER OF COMMUNITIES
“That fucking evil old bastard!” Robert Holmes snarled at the very thought of Randal O’Brien.
“Calm down, Bob,” said Thomas Sadowski on the other line, his lawyer and an old friend from his school days. He was also the protégé of the missing Reginald Stanley James and damn good at his job, which was why his “it’s not working” speech was really starting to make Bob angry. “There’s nothing you can do—”
“My father sold those properties to Randal O’Brien when they were dirt cheap! He did not know those property values would skyrocket two decades later!”
“That’s how the game works, Bob,” Sadowski replied awkwardly. It wasn’t a typical response that he made. “He sold them to the old man in the nineties when the value was at its highest and died years later thinking he had made a killing.” The mall had been finished in the 1980s, business was seemingly booming in the 1990s, at least in Bartlett Bay, and those properties in Lower Bartlett his father sold were the highest they would be for two decades. His father died thinking he got the best of Randal O’Brien.
Bob knew all that. He just didn’t care.
He stood in front of his glowing, blue pool in the backyard of his three-story house in Edwards Grove. He was a wiry man with almost no fat or muscle at all, built like an old tree root, or so an ex-wife once told him, clean-shaven and balding at the back of his head, with what hair he had was dark gray and combed forward toward his eyes. That night, he wore a light blue dress shirt with his black tie hanging untied around his neck and navy blue slacks.
“Why was that old man even buying property out here? He must have been in his eighties or something!”
“Stanley once told me that O’Brien had some idea about rejuvenating Bartlett Bay but he didn’t think it would ever happen. It was an example of things Julian Bartlett would never let happen. There was also the old man’s infamous off-and-on depression over his daughter’s coma that probably also influenced his plans.”
“Well, what I want to know is how to get them back. There has got to be some flaw in the sale or something.”
“No,” Sadowski told him. “It’s airtight.”
Bob wanted to scream. He couldn’t stop thinking about how valuable those properties were about to become.
Not only were people coming back, a new generation of people looking for work and finding it in the cannery and fisheries reopening, but the property value was also about to skyrocket everywhere and most especially south of Midtown. Bartlett had a few apartment complexes on Nathan Boulevard that his father had sold, not far from the high school, and moved out the few remaining tenants to the only decently working apartment complex he had so he could fix up the old ones. For some idiotic reason, he was letting the old tenants stay grandfathered in with earlier cheaper costs, but when he fixed those apartments, he would be making a fortune on rent from any number of new people coming into town for work.
And God only knows how much money he would be making from the boardwalk, which, after a lengthy debate on ownership, it seemed he was the complete owner.
“What about the other thing?” he asked. That one he felt more certain about.
“It’s terrible. The elite circle is an especially bad problem—”
“Those black bastards can barely fucking read!” Bob snarled. “You telling me they outwitted you?”
“They’re not all black and they’re all holding out. Some even took loans to do so. As far as the black ones are concerned, one of them went to the Fullers.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Bob cried. He knew exactly what Sadowski was about to say. “Is there any time in the history of this town when those fucking niggers aren’t also sticking their damn heads into everyone else’s business?”
“They think you’re taking advantage of the few black community members still living on Adams Street,” Sadowski told him.
Adams St. was the second richest area in Bartlett Bay, which wasn’t saying much before Ethan Bartlett, but it had once been a very expensive area along the Bay City Dagger, a section of water that stretched north from the Long Island Sound along the west side of the city past Interstate 95. In the nineteenth century back when most of the money of Bartlett Bay came from the Long Island Sound, it was like Edwards Grove, and those rich people whose wealth was typically connected to the ocean lived there. The street contained some of the most beautiful, old Victorian houses one could find in America and some of them even had private docks on them. Many were crumbling and most of the unoccupied ones were owned by Ethan Bartlett or various banks.
At the north end of Adams St., below the drop that separated Lower Bartlett Bay from Midtown and around the southwestern edge of what Ethan Bartlett called Sorcery and Stick Farm, the road made a loop back into itself which locals called Elite Circle. Once it had been called “Negro Circle” and later “Colored Circle” but people felt those terms were “outdated” so it landed on “Elite Circle” in modern times. It got the name because it once was a location for Bartlett Bay’s small population of highly educated African Americans known as the “black elite.”
Many of the old owners, their children and grandchildren, white and black alike, stuck to their properties like ticks and had refused all sales over the years. One of them was Argyle Coughlan, somehow managing to hold onto the house his ancestors had built.
“Evidently, the Fullers feel the descendants of the old black elite are worth protecting,” Sadowski told him. “They sent their lawyer to help and he’s helping the white ones on Adam’s Street as well.”
Bob was so angry his face started to turn red. He spun around, paced over to the brick wall that separated his property, and badly wanted to punch a hole through it but he knew it would just break his hand. Adams St. was especially more valuable and was about to shoot up into the stratosphere without Bob getting any of it. “So—much—money!” Bob let out a snarl that was somewhere between a cry and a groan.
Of course, the Fullers would send that bastard just to keep those properties from him! It seemed every time Bob tried to do anything, somebody like Bill Pennington came along to make a problem for him. The Penningtons had been close associates of the Fullers for generations and Bill, in particular, had been battling Stanley for the last two decades but now that Stanley was gone, he was going to be virtually unstoppable.
Bob walked back to the pool and said, “You’re joking! Tell me you are fucking joking!”
“I’m not, Bob. You need to cut your losses and fight another day. They’re going to win this one.”
“Fuuuuuuck!” he snarled. It seemed that between his father, old man O’Brien, Ethan Bartlett and those goddamn Fullers, he was getting the financial equivalent of being raped. He paced back to the wall and added, “You’ve got to have something!”
“There’s nothing that can be done. They own those properties, lock stock and barrel and can hold out until the prices rise up and by then you won’t want to buy anymore.”
Bob felt certain this would never have happened if Stanley was still around. Sadowski had been Stanley’s protégé and was just as evil a lawyer as he was but nowhere near as connected or experienced. Pennington had to walk softly around old Stanley but not Sadowski.
Bob wanted everything his father sold returned back to him at a proper low price and the knowledge it wasn’t going to happen filled him with such rage at the injustice of the situation that he almost screamed. Even those restaurants, which were mediocre before, would be booming with the increased economy. Not the golf course, which was evidently cursed, but those other places…
He turned around and jumped up and down in the grass a few feet from the pool’s edge, his face distorting in rage, and then he went back to the wall and stared into the sky at the full moon with his lips pulled back over his teeth like a growling dog. His face was burning up and starting to turn red and if he squeezed his iPhone any harder, it would certainly break. “Damn!” he snarled in a guttural, low tone. “Damn, damn, damn! All that fucking, fucking, fucking, money!”
He took a deep breath and walked back toward the pool.
“My father died of dementia!” he told Sadowski when he called down. “That’s got to mean something!”
“In nineteen-ninety-two, your father’s Alzheimer's Disease didn’t even have preliminary effects on his mind. He was as sound as you or I. He knew exactly what he was doing and that is exactly what every judge in Connecticut will think.”
Bob looked down into the water, the front of his body lighting up in bright, light blue, and briefly fantasized about holding Bartlett down under the water until he drowned. “He’s eighteen, Tommy! Bartlett is a fucking child! How is a child beating us?”
“He’s nineteen and a legal adult.”
“You’re frightened,” Bob said suddenly. He spun back around and walked back to the wall. “You think something happened to Stanley, don’t you?” When he reached the wall, he added, “Admit it.”
There was a long pause.
“I’ve never liked that town, Bob,” said Sadowski in a strange, slow voice. “I’m not ‘frightened’ exactly but that place just isn’t right. Doing business there is different somehow and more dangerous in some way that I can’t explain. The rules are just different somehow. Stanley knew that but he forgot and I think he paid the price for it.”
Bob kicked the wall and grunted in pain, his teeth clenched tight. He felt stupid for not predicting that result. “What about Randal O’Brien?” he asked. “He was a doddering, sentimental weirdo when he signed those contracts! Surely, he made some mistake!”
“He was many things but ‘stupid’ wasn’t one of them. Randal O’Brien was a very good businessman when it came to contracts. He was, in fact, a contract lawyer himself and had been doing those kinds of sales for almost sixty years, which was how he made his personal money. It’s unbreakable.”
“Goddamn it!” Bob roared at the moon. Then, in a very soft voice, he added, “Do you think those fucking niggers are going to try and sue me over some race bullshit or something?” He left out the more incriminating part but Sadowski knew what he was asking.
“Maybe. With the Fullers’ help, maybe.” He seemed to shrug. “Nothing will stick, though. It’ll just be a pain in the ass.”
It was the fisheries and cannery’s double-edged sword, Bob decided. The same thing that should have made Bob richer was also enriching his enemies. Now that they had good-paying jobs on the boardwalk, they thought they could walk all over Robert Peterson Holmes as if he were nobody.
“Give me good news, Tommy! Tell me something helpful!”
“There is nothing you can do, brother,” he told him simply. At least Sadowski would tell him straight because he needed that. “Nothing conventional, anyway.” That last comment was phone talk for “nothing legal.”
That bastard from California did seem to have the Midas touch with business but what he had gained there he lacked in the respect department. Bartlett needed to learn how to placate his superiors better. It was necessary in order to function in Bob’s town or any place that had politics for that matter.
When Holmes faced the boy on the docks last week and tried to explain the situation to him, gentleman to gentleman, the boy looked at him with a half-surprised, a half-are-you-for-real look on his face and said, “Are you retarded or something?”
“What did you say to me?” Bob had replied in shock.
“I’m sorry, was I being politically incorrect?” Bartlett asked. “Are you mentally disabled or something?”
“Boy, those properties are mine!”
“Not according to the contract your father signed with Randal O’Brien.” He looked at the black hawk on his shoulder who shrugged and looked back. “What do you even care? You’re a Wellington and thus already rich. Probably richer than me.”
That was true on both. His mother was born a Wellington heiress which would give him a huge fortune when she finally died and his father had been almost as rich himself, but what did that have to do with what was right? That boy had stupid ideas about business and frankly, Bob considered correcting the way that boy was mismanaging his business his civic duty.
And it was not as though he was a real Bartlett so who cared if he was destroyed in the process?
“My father was taken advantage of by Randal O’Brien,” he had told Bartlett coldly. “He died of Alzheimer’s Disease.”
“One, he didn’t have it then, and two, he sold it at the height of the market when everyone thought that mall was going to fix the town and made quite a killing and, three, you’re only mysteriously caring now when the properties are about to skyrocket in value.”
Bartlett gave him a wide smile.
“I think you lost this investigation, Detective Holmes.”
“All that fucking money, man!” Bob snarled into the phone, angry all over again. He hated being called “detective” too. It was an insult that children gave him back in school when bringing up his so-called “stupidity.” “All that money is wasted on a bunch of fucking nobodies and some punk from Cala-for-ni-ay is taking it all! He’s like that asshole who runs Costco! I mean, for real, Tommy, do you have any idea how much money I could have made if I still had those properties? He’s going to flip those houses on Adam’s Street for millions!”
He turned back around and then walked back over to the pool again. He looked down at it, watching its glow light up the darkness for a second before he started to speak.
“I’m not going to stand here and let some California bi-blow Jew of some has been family take away all that I deserve!” he said bitterly.
“Don’t do anything reckless,” said Sadowski. “The boy has got a good lawyer and the town loves him.”
“What the fuck does the town have to do with anything?”
“I’m just saying that he is very popular. These people could make your life a living hell if you were to cross him.” He sounded like he was implying something else, something darker, but Bob wasn’t getting it. It felt rather odd for Sadowski to be warning Bob about his own town.
In Bob’s experience, Bartlett Bay people knew well how to behave.
“Well, Tommy, I’m not worried,” he told Sadowski. “I’m going to ruin him the way your Stanley would have if he hadn’t disappeared and then I’m going to laugh. That fucking boy is fucking dead.”
He turned around, walked right into something, and then blinked.
A moment of silence followed and though Sadowski spoke in his ear, Bob found he couldn’t make out what it was. He looked down, saw a pile of something red, gooey, wet and hose-like in a sloppy pile, and felt confusion come over him. Then the bloody hands with its human-like fingers covered in black fur with claws focused in front of him. He saw them opening and closing and then felt warm breath on his face.
Thoroughly confused, Bob slowly raised his eyes upward.
The werewolf looked down at him, its black eyes wide with barely controlled rage and its ears folded back the way dogs do when angered. He saw its lips curl back over its black-furred maw, slowly revealing sharp, pointed white teeth and then a slow, growing, canine growl began to form from its throat.
Bob’s eyes grew wide with understanding, the cellphone falling from his hand. It landed on the cement with a loud clack but the casing prevented it from breaking or even turning off. The voice of Sadowski was somehow still audible and then, as everything suddenly seemed to clear up and move in slow motion, he heard Sadowski clearly speak.
“Bob?” he called. “Are you there? Bob?”
Bob felt himself grow dizzy, lost his balance, and fell backward.
He hit the pool with a splash and seemed to sink very slowly under the surface. He was suddenly too tired and weak to swim and as he drifted down into the glowing blue depths, he saw the werewolf move up to the edge of the pool, a man-like thing well over six feet tall, its front glowing blue and distorted by the water’s quivering surface.
He tried to breathe, couldn’t, and then the realization of the situation suddenly made him panic. He tried to fight, tried to pull himself up, but even with the panic pushing him, he was too weak to do more than merely move his arms. He knew then that he was drowning and all the while he did so, that monster stared down at him, its eyes focused on him, waiting for him to rise up out of the water.
Bob knew then he was dead no matter what he did. If he ever rose from that pool, somehow managed to climb out and breathe precious air for even a mere moment, the werewolf would simply walk over to him and finish what it started.
He couldn’t anyway and as the agony overwhelmed him, he knew he was going to die.
Bartlett… he blamed before panic overtook his reason. Bartlett did this…
* * *
“In fucking Edwards Grove,” said Mary Merrick as she and Caitlin Christopherson stepped away from the crime scene. “It’s going to get crazy from now on.”
“Yeah,” Christopherson agreed. When rich, connected people died, situations of that sort always had a way of becoming much more aggressive.
It was still dark, less than an hour since Holmes was found dead, and they were already at a dead end. Unsurprisingly, neighbors neither heard nor saw anything, there were no tracks anywhere beyond the yard, and so far as anyone could tell and just like before, no other kinds of evidence at all. The werewolf had seemed to simply appear, tossed Robert Holmes’ intestines on the ground, possibly stayed to watch him drown and then vanished into the night.
How the fuck did a werewolf get all the way in here and then leave without getting noticed? Caitlin wondered and then added, Just another goddamn question I can’t fucking answer.
The two were outside under a street lamp in front of the house illuminating the two of them. Mary slipped out a pack of Camel cigarettes, pulled out one with her teeth, and then looked at Christopherson for a moment. Then she held out the pack and Caitlin took one and put it to her lips.
“I fucking quit this shit,” she told her as Mary lit it with her Zippo. “Trying to be a good role model.” Now that the two of them were alone and no one could hear, she added, “What do you know about this guy?”
“He was a fucking asshole,” Mary told her. “He was messing with Bartlett over the properties he owns after that Grace O’Brien deal because that deal contained properties Holmes’s father sold old Randal O’Brien, Grace’s father, all over Lower Bartlett Bay. He was also trying to use his connections with debt companies to push a bunch of struggling families into selling their homes to him on Adams Street, including the Elite Circle, before they became valuable. The mayor was so upset, she sent her personal lawyer to help them.”
That’s different, Christopherson thought and took a drag of her cigarette. She looked at Mary for a moment and Mary looked back at her. “It ends after twelve, right?” said Christopherson softly.
Mary looked at her strangely. She then moved close and, in a gentler, surprisingly sisterly voice, said softly, “Just let it go, Caitlin. Please.”
Christopherson nodded and took a deep drag.
The notion that the murders were random was gloriously seductive but that irritating, unshakable feeling that there was a pattern she wasn’t seeing was stabbing her in the back of the mind like a mosquito. All those people connected to somebody and that somebody was the werewolf.
But who? she wondered. The person who sabotaged Darnell Morris’s car might be the werewolf but that road had led to nowhere. No one in Applewood was talking and somehow, she couldn’t say how exactly, she sensed that wasn’t the correct path. It might even be a coincidence since the man was so despised by the community there that just creating and then hoping for an opportunity on a full moon was a likelihood. Maybe.
Mary looked into her face and there was genuine worry there. Worry for Caitlin Christopherson personally. Let it go, her face seemed to say.
Christopherson blinked at her and opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. Doug Gurney and Darnell Morris were one thing, they were scumbags, but Janet Dupree was just a normal, good woman, if a bit wild. Now they took out Bob Holmes, who was scum but no criminal, right in the most expensive neighborhood in the city.
It was sheer luck that most of the victims were bad but that luck couldn’t last forever.
It wouldn’t always just be scumbags or crooked businessmen who died but more of Janet Dupree’s sort and quite possibly someone even more innocent. Maybe even a child, like her daughter, flying a kite like in that old Stephen King movie, who just lost track of time and was caught after dark.
She could never have saved Janet Dupree, she was the first and Christopherson could not have known what was to happen, but what about the others? That little girl or boy who might be next? She wasn’t sure if she could live with a dead child on her hands. Not if she knew in her heart that she was capable of preventing it.
Let it go, Mary’s expression said again.
I don’t know if I can, Christopherson’s face replied.
Try, Mary’s face seemed to tell her. For your own good, try. Then, to her surprise, Mary hugged her tightly. “Try,” she whispered. “Just try.”
Christopherson didn’t answer and hugged her back.
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“That fucking evil old bastard!” Robert Holmes snarled at the very thought of Randal O’Brien.
“Calm down, Bob,” said Thomas Sadowski on the other line, his lawyer and an old friend from his school days. He was also the protégé of the missing Reginald Stanley James and damn good at his job, which was why his “it’s not working” speech was really starting to make Bob angry. “There’s nothing you can do—”
“My father sold those properties to Randal O’Brien when they were dirt cheap! He did not know those property values would skyrocket two decades later!”
“That’s how the game works, Bob,” Sadowski replied awkwardly. It wasn’t a typical response that he made. “He sold them to the old man in the nineties when the value was at its highest and died years later thinking he had made a killing.” The mall had been finished in the 1980s, business was seemingly booming in the 1990s, at least in Bartlett Bay, and those properties in Lower Bartlett his father sold were the highest they would be for two decades. His father died thinking he got the best of Randal O’Brien.
Bob knew all that. He just didn’t care.
He stood in front of his glowing, blue pool in the backyard of his three-story house in Edwards Grove. He was a wiry man with almost no fat or muscle at all, built like an old tree root, or so an ex-wife once told him, clean-shaven and balding at the back of his head, with what hair he had was dark gray and combed forward toward his eyes. That night, he wore a light blue dress shirt with his black tie hanging untied around his neck and navy blue slacks.
“Why was that old man even buying property out here? He must have been in his eighties or something!”
“Stanley once told me that O’Brien had some idea about rejuvenating Bartlett Bay but he didn’t think it would ever happen. It was an example of things Julian Bartlett would never let happen. There was also the old man’s infamous off-and-on depression over his daughter’s coma that probably also influenced his plans.”
“Well, what I want to know is how to get them back. There has got to be some flaw in the sale or something.”
“No,” Sadowski told him. “It’s airtight.”
Bob wanted to scream. He couldn’t stop thinking about how valuable those properties were about to become.
Not only were people coming back, a new generation of people looking for work and finding it in the cannery and fisheries reopening, but the property value was also about to skyrocket everywhere and most especially south of Midtown. Bartlett had a few apartment complexes on Nathan Boulevard that his father had sold, not far from the high school, and moved out the few remaining tenants to the only decently working apartment complex he had so he could fix up the old ones. For some idiotic reason, he was letting the old tenants stay grandfathered in with earlier cheaper costs, but when he fixed those apartments, he would be making a fortune on rent from any number of new people coming into town for work.
And God only knows how much money he would be making from the boardwalk, which, after a lengthy debate on ownership, it seemed he was the complete owner.
“What about the other thing?” he asked. That one he felt more certain about.
“It’s terrible. The elite circle is an especially bad problem—”
“Those black bastards can barely fucking read!” Bob snarled. “You telling me they outwitted you?”
“They’re not all black and they’re all holding out. Some even took loans to do so. As far as the black ones are concerned, one of them went to the Fullers.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Bob cried. He knew exactly what Sadowski was about to say. “Is there any time in the history of this town when those fucking niggers aren’t also sticking their damn heads into everyone else’s business?”
“They think you’re taking advantage of the few black community members still living on Adams Street,” Sadowski told him.
Adams St. was the second richest area in Bartlett Bay, which wasn’t saying much before Ethan Bartlett, but it had once been a very expensive area along the Bay City Dagger, a section of water that stretched north from the Long Island Sound along the west side of the city past Interstate 95. In the nineteenth century back when most of the money of Bartlett Bay came from the Long Island Sound, it was like Edwards Grove, and those rich people whose wealth was typically connected to the ocean lived there. The street contained some of the most beautiful, old Victorian houses one could find in America and some of them even had private docks on them. Many were crumbling and most of the unoccupied ones were owned by Ethan Bartlett or various banks.
At the north end of Adams St., below the drop that separated Lower Bartlett Bay from Midtown and around the southwestern edge of what Ethan Bartlett called Sorcery and Stick Farm, the road made a loop back into itself which locals called Elite Circle. Once it had been called “Negro Circle” and later “Colored Circle” but people felt those terms were “outdated” so it landed on “Elite Circle” in modern times. It got the name because it once was a location for Bartlett Bay’s small population of highly educated African Americans known as the “black elite.”
Many of the old owners, their children and grandchildren, white and black alike, stuck to their properties like ticks and had refused all sales over the years. One of them was Argyle Coughlan, somehow managing to hold onto the house his ancestors had built.
“Evidently, the Fullers feel the descendants of the old black elite are worth protecting,” Sadowski told him. “They sent their lawyer to help and he’s helping the white ones on Adam’s Street as well.”
Bob was so angry his face started to turn red. He spun around, paced over to the brick wall that separated his property, and badly wanted to punch a hole through it but he knew it would just break his hand. Adams St. was especially more valuable and was about to shoot up into the stratosphere without Bob getting any of it. “So—much—money!” Bob let out a snarl that was somewhere between a cry and a groan.
Of course, the Fullers would send that bastard just to keep those properties from him! It seemed every time Bob tried to do anything, somebody like Bill Pennington came along to make a problem for him. The Penningtons had been close associates of the Fullers for generations and Bill, in particular, had been battling Stanley for the last two decades but now that Stanley was gone, he was going to be virtually unstoppable.
Bob walked back to the pool and said, “You’re joking! Tell me you are fucking joking!”
“I’m not, Bob. You need to cut your losses and fight another day. They’re going to win this one.”
“Fuuuuuuck!” he snarled. It seemed that between his father, old man O’Brien, Ethan Bartlett and those goddamn Fullers, he was getting the financial equivalent of being raped. He paced back to the wall and added, “You’ve got to have something!”
“There’s nothing that can be done. They own those properties, lock stock and barrel and can hold out until the prices rise up and by then you won’t want to buy anymore.”
Bob felt certain this would never have happened if Stanley was still around. Sadowski had been Stanley’s protégé and was just as evil a lawyer as he was but nowhere near as connected or experienced. Pennington had to walk softly around old Stanley but not Sadowski.
Bob wanted everything his father sold returned back to him at a proper low price and the knowledge it wasn’t going to happen filled him with such rage at the injustice of the situation that he almost screamed. Even those restaurants, which were mediocre before, would be booming with the increased economy. Not the golf course, which was evidently cursed, but those other places…
He turned around and jumped up and down in the grass a few feet from the pool’s edge, his face distorting in rage, and then he went back to the wall and stared into the sky at the full moon with his lips pulled back over his teeth like a growling dog. His face was burning up and starting to turn red and if he squeezed his iPhone any harder, it would certainly break. “Damn!” he snarled in a guttural, low tone. “Damn, damn, damn! All that fucking, fucking, fucking, money!”
He took a deep breath and walked back toward the pool.
“My father died of dementia!” he told Sadowski when he called down. “That’s got to mean something!”
“In nineteen-ninety-two, your father’s Alzheimer's Disease didn’t even have preliminary effects on his mind. He was as sound as you or I. He knew exactly what he was doing and that is exactly what every judge in Connecticut will think.”
Bob looked down into the water, the front of his body lighting up in bright, light blue, and briefly fantasized about holding Bartlett down under the water until he drowned. “He’s eighteen, Tommy! Bartlett is a fucking child! How is a child beating us?”
“He’s nineteen and a legal adult.”
“You’re frightened,” Bob said suddenly. He spun back around and walked back to the wall. “You think something happened to Stanley, don’t you?” When he reached the wall, he added, “Admit it.”
There was a long pause.
“I’ve never liked that town, Bob,” said Sadowski in a strange, slow voice. “I’m not ‘frightened’ exactly but that place just isn’t right. Doing business there is different somehow and more dangerous in some way that I can’t explain. The rules are just different somehow. Stanley knew that but he forgot and I think he paid the price for it.”
Bob kicked the wall and grunted in pain, his teeth clenched tight. He felt stupid for not predicting that result. “What about Randal O’Brien?” he asked. “He was a doddering, sentimental weirdo when he signed those contracts! Surely, he made some mistake!”
“He was many things but ‘stupid’ wasn’t one of them. Randal O’Brien was a very good businessman when it came to contracts. He was, in fact, a contract lawyer himself and had been doing those kinds of sales for almost sixty years, which was how he made his personal money. It’s unbreakable.”
“Goddamn it!” Bob roared at the moon. Then, in a very soft voice, he added, “Do you think those fucking niggers are going to try and sue me over some race bullshit or something?” He left out the more incriminating part but Sadowski knew what he was asking.
“Maybe. With the Fullers’ help, maybe.” He seemed to shrug. “Nothing will stick, though. It’ll just be a pain in the ass.”
It was the fisheries and cannery’s double-edged sword, Bob decided. The same thing that should have made Bob richer was also enriching his enemies. Now that they had good-paying jobs on the boardwalk, they thought they could walk all over Robert Peterson Holmes as if he were nobody.
“Give me good news, Tommy! Tell me something helpful!”
“There is nothing you can do, brother,” he told him simply. At least Sadowski would tell him straight because he needed that. “Nothing conventional, anyway.” That last comment was phone talk for “nothing legal.”
That bastard from California did seem to have the Midas touch with business but what he had gained there he lacked in the respect department. Bartlett needed to learn how to placate his superiors better. It was necessary in order to function in Bob’s town or any place that had politics for that matter.
When Holmes faced the boy on the docks last week and tried to explain the situation to him, gentleman to gentleman, the boy looked at him with a half-surprised, a half-are-you-for-real look on his face and said, “Are you retarded or something?”
“What did you say to me?” Bob had replied in shock.
“I’m sorry, was I being politically incorrect?” Bartlett asked. “Are you mentally disabled or something?”
“Boy, those properties are mine!”
“Not according to the contract your father signed with Randal O’Brien.” He looked at the black hawk on his shoulder who shrugged and looked back. “What do you even care? You’re a Wellington and thus already rich. Probably richer than me.”
That was true on both. His mother was born a Wellington heiress which would give him a huge fortune when she finally died and his father had been almost as rich himself, but what did that have to do with what was right? That boy had stupid ideas about business and frankly, Bob considered correcting the way that boy was mismanaging his business his civic duty.
And it was not as though he was a real Bartlett so who cared if he was destroyed in the process?
“My father was taken advantage of by Randal O’Brien,” he had told Bartlett coldly. “He died of Alzheimer’s Disease.”
“One, he didn’t have it then, and two, he sold it at the height of the market when everyone thought that mall was going to fix the town and made quite a killing and, three, you’re only mysteriously caring now when the properties are about to skyrocket in value.”
Bartlett gave him a wide smile.
“I think you lost this investigation, Detective Holmes.”
“All that fucking money, man!” Bob snarled into the phone, angry all over again. He hated being called “detective” too. It was an insult that children gave him back in school when bringing up his so-called “stupidity.” “All that money is wasted on a bunch of fucking nobodies and some punk from Cala-for-ni-ay is taking it all! He’s like that asshole who runs Costco! I mean, for real, Tommy, do you have any idea how much money I could have made if I still had those properties? He’s going to flip those houses on Adam’s Street for millions!”
He turned back around and then walked back over to the pool again. He looked down at it, watching its glow light up the darkness for a second before he started to speak.
“I’m not going to stand here and let some California bi-blow Jew of some has been family take away all that I deserve!” he said bitterly.
“Don’t do anything reckless,” said Sadowski. “The boy has got a good lawyer and the town loves him.”
“What the fuck does the town have to do with anything?”
“I’m just saying that he is very popular. These people could make your life a living hell if you were to cross him.” He sounded like he was implying something else, something darker, but Bob wasn’t getting it. It felt rather odd for Sadowski to be warning Bob about his own town.
In Bob’s experience, Bartlett Bay people knew well how to behave.
“Well, Tommy, I’m not worried,” he told Sadowski. “I’m going to ruin him the way your Stanley would have if he hadn’t disappeared and then I’m going to laugh. That fucking boy is fucking dead.”
He turned around, walked right into something, and then blinked.
A moment of silence followed and though Sadowski spoke in his ear, Bob found he couldn’t make out what it was. He looked down, saw a pile of something red, gooey, wet and hose-like in a sloppy pile, and felt confusion come over him. Then the bloody hands with its human-like fingers covered in black fur with claws focused in front of him. He saw them opening and closing and then felt warm breath on his face.
Thoroughly confused, Bob slowly raised his eyes upward.
The werewolf looked down at him, its black eyes wide with barely controlled rage and its ears folded back the way dogs do when angered. He saw its lips curl back over its black-furred maw, slowly revealing sharp, pointed white teeth and then a slow, growing, canine growl began to form from its throat.
Bob’s eyes grew wide with understanding, the cellphone falling from his hand. It landed on the cement with a loud clack but the casing prevented it from breaking or even turning off. The voice of Sadowski was somehow still audible and then, as everything suddenly seemed to clear up and move in slow motion, he heard Sadowski clearly speak.
“Bob?” he called. “Are you there? Bob?”
Bob felt himself grow dizzy, lost his balance, and fell backward.
He hit the pool with a splash and seemed to sink very slowly under the surface. He was suddenly too tired and weak to swim and as he drifted down into the glowing blue depths, he saw the werewolf move up to the edge of the pool, a man-like thing well over six feet tall, its front glowing blue and distorted by the water’s quivering surface.
He tried to breathe, couldn’t, and then the realization of the situation suddenly made him panic. He tried to fight, tried to pull himself up, but even with the panic pushing him, he was too weak to do more than merely move his arms. He knew then that he was drowning and all the while he did so, that monster stared down at him, its eyes focused on him, waiting for him to rise up out of the water.
Bob knew then he was dead no matter what he did. If he ever rose from that pool, somehow managed to climb out and breathe precious air for even a mere moment, the werewolf would simply walk over to him and finish what it started.
He couldn’t anyway and as the agony overwhelmed him, he knew he was going to die.
Bartlett… he blamed before panic overtook his reason. Bartlett did this…
* * *
“In fucking Edwards Grove,” said Mary Merrick as she and Caitlin Christopherson stepped away from the crime scene. “It’s going to get crazy from now on.”
“Yeah,” Christopherson agreed. When rich, connected people died, situations of that sort always had a way of becoming much more aggressive.
It was still dark, less than an hour since Holmes was found dead, and they were already at a dead end. Unsurprisingly, neighbors neither heard nor saw anything, there were no tracks anywhere beyond the yard, and so far as anyone could tell and just like before, no other kinds of evidence at all. The werewolf had seemed to simply appear, tossed Robert Holmes’ intestines on the ground, possibly stayed to watch him drown and then vanished into the night.
How the fuck did a werewolf get all the way in here and then leave without getting noticed? Caitlin wondered and then added, Just another goddamn question I can’t fucking answer.
The two were outside under a street lamp in front of the house illuminating the two of them. Mary slipped out a pack of Camel cigarettes, pulled out one with her teeth, and then looked at Christopherson for a moment. Then she held out the pack and Caitlin took one and put it to her lips.
“I fucking quit this shit,” she told her as Mary lit it with her Zippo. “Trying to be a good role model.” Now that the two of them were alone and no one could hear, she added, “What do you know about this guy?”
“He was a fucking asshole,” Mary told her. “He was messing with Bartlett over the properties he owns after that Grace O’Brien deal because that deal contained properties Holmes’s father sold old Randal O’Brien, Grace’s father, all over Lower Bartlett Bay. He was also trying to use his connections with debt companies to push a bunch of struggling families into selling their homes to him on Adams Street, including the Elite Circle, before they became valuable. The mayor was so upset, she sent her personal lawyer to help them.”
That’s different, Christopherson thought and took a drag of her cigarette. She looked at Mary for a moment and Mary looked back at her. “It ends after twelve, right?” said Christopherson softly.
Mary looked at her strangely. She then moved close and, in a gentler, surprisingly sisterly voice, said softly, “Just let it go, Caitlin. Please.”
Christopherson nodded and took a deep drag.
The notion that the murders were random was gloriously seductive but that irritating, unshakable feeling that there was a pattern she wasn’t seeing was stabbing her in the back of the mind like a mosquito. All those people connected to somebody and that somebody was the werewolf.
But who? she wondered. The person who sabotaged Darnell Morris’s car might be the werewolf but that road had led to nowhere. No one in Applewood was talking and somehow, she couldn’t say how exactly, she sensed that wasn’t the correct path. It might even be a coincidence since the man was so despised by the community there that just creating and then hoping for an opportunity on a full moon was a likelihood. Maybe.
Mary looked into her face and there was genuine worry there. Worry for Caitlin Christopherson personally. Let it go, her face seemed to say.
Christopherson blinked at her and opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. Doug Gurney and Darnell Morris were one thing, they were scumbags, but Janet Dupree was just a normal, good woman, if a bit wild. Now they took out Bob Holmes, who was scum but no criminal, right in the most expensive neighborhood in the city.
It was sheer luck that most of the victims were bad but that luck couldn’t last forever.
It wouldn’t always just be scumbags or crooked businessmen who died but more of Janet Dupree’s sort and quite possibly someone even more innocent. Maybe even a child, like her daughter, flying a kite like in that old Stephen King movie, who just lost track of time and was caught after dark.
She could never have saved Janet Dupree, she was the first and Christopherson could not have known what was to happen, but what about the others? That little girl or boy who might be next? She wasn’t sure if she could live with a dead child on her hands. Not if she knew in her heart that she was capable of preventing it.
Let it go, Mary’s expression said again.
I don’t know if I can, Christopherson’s face replied.
Try, Mary’s face seemed to tell her. For your own good, try. Then, to her surprise, Mary hugged her tightly. “Try,” she whispered. “Just try.”
Christopherson didn’t answer and hugged her back.