Limbus, Inc.

Strip Search By Jonathan Maberry

The card was on the floor. I kicked it when I opened the door.

Not the first time somebody slipped something under my office door. At least this time it wasn’t a threat, a fuck-you letter from a girl, a summons, or an eviction notice. Been getting way too many of each of those lately. Economically speaking, this year sucks moose dick.

This was just a business card. It looked crisp and expensive. The kind lawyers sometimes use.

I have three ex-wives, so I left it there. I do not want to hear from another lawyer. Sure, maybe if there was an estate attorney trying to find me to tell me I’d just inherited a mansion and a vault filled with gold bars. But, since the odds on that were on a par with me getting laid this week, I didn’t bother picking up the card.

Instead I went through the ritual. I closed my office door, flopped into the piece o’ crap faux leather chair, sorted through the mail for job offers or checks from satisfied clients, found none of that shit, listened to my answering machine, didn’t hear a thing worth listening to, opened my laptop and checked my agency email, didn’t find anything except a Nigerian prince who wanted to transfer thirty million into my account and an ad for the latest dick pills. Same shit, different day.

I had a mildly masochistic urge to log into my bank account to see how much I had left, but I drank beers until I came to my senses.

Outside it was the kind of spring day that Philadelphia gets a lot of but doesn’t deserve. Maxfield Parrish blue skies, a few sculpted white clouds, temperature in the mid-seventies, and low humidity. The city was pretending to be San Diego, and it fooled a lot of tourists, but only those who weren’t here in the summer, when the humidity and the temperature jump into the low nineties and refuse to fucking budge. For months. I sometimes think the real reason the Founding Fathers started the Revolution was because they were hot and cranky. When Philly summers really start to cook even a Buddhist monk would lock and load and go looking for someone to shoot.

But it was May tenth.

The day was beautiful. I had windows open and the breeze was perfect.

I sat there, sipping a Yuengling and looking at the door, trying to will it to open at the touch of a client with an expensive job.

Nothing.

I was four beers in and the door still remained closed.

I sighed.

I looked around. I run a one-man investigation office. Industrial, domestic, whatever. I’ll look for Hoffa if there’s a paycheck in it. I have a secretary who works on a per diem. Right now there was nothing to type or file, so she was at home with a dozen cats and her skewed perception of reality.

I saw the card on the floor. Yup, still there.

Another beer came and went.

The card was still there.

I would have knocked back a sixth but I didn’t have one. The only thing left in my little cube fridge was a three week old yogurt that was evolving into a new life form.

That was the only reason I got up to get the card. Boredom and no beer.

Funny how things start.

I bent and picked it up.

Frowned at it.

On the front, printed in black on cream stock, raised lettering.

“Balls,” I said. I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Sometimes it’s an ad for low-end commission work-at-home crap. Cold calls to sell products people wouldn’t want even if it was free. Follow-up calls for people dumb enough to put their email addresses down at a restaurant, hotel or resort. Or time-share pitches. Stuff like that.

If that was what it was.

I turned it over. There was a hand-written note on the back. That was different. Most of these kinds of cards are just the basics. A hook, no real information, and a contact number.

With the ‘How lucky do you feel’ thing I wondered if this was a new marketing scheme for second-string call girls.

I’m horny, but I haven’t ever been so horny I wanted to pay for ass.

The note on the back said:

2:45, your office.

I looked at the wall clock.

2:43.

Shit.

There was still time to pull the shade, lock the door and turn off the office lights. I wanted a client, not some yuppie entrepreneur trying to see some college-girl tail.

But then I caught a whiff of something.

Literally a whiff. I put the card to my nose and sniffed it.

The odor was very faint, but it was there. Just a hint of it. Like freshly-sheared copper.

The smell of blood.

Human blood, too. And, yes, I can tell the difference. Some people can do that with wine or truffles or chocolate. Me, I can tell you anything you want to know about blood. Other things, too, but in my trade it really matters that I can tell a lot from a little noseful of blood-smell.

Thing is, there was no stain anywhere on the card. Not a drop, not a smudge. Nothing.

Smell was definitely there, though.

I put the card against my nose and took a longer, slower sniff.

There’s so much you can tell if you have the knack. My whole family has the knack. My grandmother, Minnie, is best at it. She can tell blood type. I may not be in her league — and really, no one is, old broad or not — but I could tell a lot. If I ever sniffed that blood again I’d know who owned it. Better than fingerprints for me. Back when I was a cop in the Twin Cities, I closed a shitload of cases that way. Finding the right perp was the easy part for me. Finding evidence that tied him to the case was harder. Sometimes it was impossible, which frustrated the living shit out of me. Nothing worse than knowing someone did something bad and then having to watch him skate through the courts back onto the street with a free pass to hurt someone else.

Most of the time.

A few of those guys tripped and hurt themselves. Or, um, so I heard.

I tapped the card against my chin, thinking about it. What kind of marketing stunt was this? What kind of—?

Out in the hall I heard the elevator open.

The wall clock told me it was 2:44.

“Early,” I said.

But as soon as the visitor knocked on the door the clock ticked over to 2:45. The exact second.

I went around and sat behind my desk before I said anything. I let the seconds tick all the way to 2:46. Just to be pissy.

The person outside didn’t knock again. But I saw a figure through the frosted glass. Tall, dressed in some kind of suit, and definitely female. Her silhouette was rocking.

With my luck, though, she’d have the right curves but a face like Voldemort.

“Come in,” I yelled.

The door opened.

She came in.

I actually said, “Holy shit.”

She had the kind of face that you read about. The kind of face that if it looked down at you from a movie screen you’d absolutely believe you were on your knees in the Temple of Athena. The kind of face Hollywood women pay a lot of money for and never quite get. You’re either born with that face or you spend your life in therapy because it’s just not going to happen.

That kind of face.

Pale skin with pores so small it looked like she was carved out of marble. Not white marble, though. She had some natural color that I’m pretty sure wasn’t a tan. Couldn’t peg her race or nationality. Maybe she was from the same island Wonder Woman came from. I don’t know. I never visited that island. I knew right there that I couldn’t have afforded the boat fare.

She was maybe thirty, about five-eight. Tall, with good bones and great posture, and enough curves to make my hair sweat, but not so many that it walked over the line into cartoonish. That’s a very delicate line. Her hair was a foamy spill of black with some faint red highlights. Her lips were full and painted a discreet dark red. Make-up applied with skill and restraint. Pearl earrings, a drop-pearl necklace that rested half inch above the point where her cleavage stopped. Yes, I looked.

The only flaw — if you could call it that — was a small crescent-shaped scar on her cheek near the left corner of her mouth. If she was a different kind of woman I’d think that it was the kind of scar you can get when someone wearing a ring pops you one. But I couldn’t sell that story to myself. This was a class act. But, I like scars. They’re evidence that a person’s lived.

She said, “Mr. Hunter?”

“Sam Hunter,” I said, rising and offering my hand.

Her grip was cool and dry, but she withdrew her hand a half-second too quickly. Maybe she was afraid I hadn’t washed. Not an unrealistic thought. I suddenly felt grubby.

I gave her an expectant smile, waiting for her name, but she didn’t give it. Some clients are like that. Either they like being mysterious or they have to be careful. A lot of them hedge because they seem to think that if they withhold their names it somehow distances them from whatever problem brought them here. Nobody comes looking for a guy like me unless they’ve stepped in something. A bear trap, a pile of shit. Something.

“Have a seat,” I said, gesturing to the better of my crappy visitor chairs. She sat and smoothed her skirt over her knees. She wore a charcoal jacket that had a pale blue chalk stripe that precisely matched the color of her silk blouse. Her skirt matched her jacket. Her shoes looked more expensive than my car, and probably were.

She sat there and studied me for a long time without speaking.

So, apparently the ball was in my court. Fine. I tossed the card onto the desk between us.

“Yours?”

“Ours,” she corrected.

She waited for me to ask, but I didn’t. I couldn’t tell from the mouth she made if that was a good move on my part or not. She was clearly evaluating me, but I didn’t know what kind of yardstick she was using. So I leaned back in my chair and waited.

After a while she gave a single, short nod and said, “We want to hire you.”

She leaned on the ‘we’, so I guess I was supposed to ask.

“We being…?”

“The Limbus Corporation.”

“Who are they?”

“That’s not really—.”

“No,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“You’re going to tell me that it’s not really important. It’s a cheap answer to a question that actually is important. You left a card with the company name. You’re here as a representative of that company. That puts the company into play. So… who or what is Limbus Inc?”

She gave me a few millimeters of a smile, but she didn’t answer the question. Instead she opened her purse — an actual Louis Vuitton that would have paid off my mortgage — and removed two items. One was a standard-sized envelope with a thick bulge in it that was exactly the right size and shape to make me want to wag my tail. She placed that on the desk and held up the second item. A plain black flash drive.

“Will you agree to help us in this matter?” she asked.

I blinked a couple of times before I said, “Is that a serious question?”

“It is.”

“You haven’t told me anything yet.”

“I know.”

“And yet you want to know if I’ll ‘help’?”

“Yes.”

“This isn’t how it works.”

“This is how it works with us.”

“With Limbus?”

“Yes,” she agreed.

I drummed my fingers on the desk top. “You have your own car or should I call you a cab?”

The smile widened. Just a little tiny bit. But she didn’t answer. She wiggled the flash drive back and forth between her fingers.

I sucked my teeth. “What’s on it?”

Instead of answering she handed it over.

I hesitated for a moment before accepting it, but figured what the hell. This would be the world’s most absurd set-up for someone trying to infect my computer with a virus. Maybe the flash drive had photos of girls and this broad was a very charming pimp. Or maybe the Jehovah’s Witnesses were going high-tech and this was the latest issue of the Watchtower in eBook format.

I took the drive.

Something really weird happened when I did, though. Flash drives are small so it’s not unusual for fingers to touch when giving and receiving. When my fingertips brushed the edges of her painted nails, there was a shock as sharp and unexpected as an electric shock. Like the little snap of electricity you get on cold days when you touch a doorknob. I could even hear the crack in the air as the energy arced from her to me.

I snatched my hand back.

She didn’t.

She withdrew it slowly, smiling that cat smile of hers. There was an opportunity to make some kind of joke about how shocking it all was, yada yada, but it would have been lame. She wasn’t a chatty, laugh-a-minute kind of gal. She also wasn’t the kind to waste a lot of her time in idle chitchat.

So, I plugged the flash drive into my laptop, located the device, accessed the menu and saw that there was one Word document and sixteen image files. Jpegs.

“Open the pictures,” she suggested.

I selected all of them and hit the preview function.

My computer’s preview function acts like a slideshow unless I hit a key to give me static images. By the time the first image popped up I forgot about the keys. I forgot about pretty much everything.

The picture was high-definition and tightly focused. No blur to soften any of the edges. No grain to reduce the impact.

It was a girl.

Or, at least it was girl-shaped.

She lay in the open mouth of a grungy alley, her body partially covered by dirty newspapers. Her mouth was wide open, the lips stretched as far as they could go, tongue lolling, teeth biting into the scream that must have been her last. The scream that was stamped now onto the muscles of her face.

Muscles, I said. Not skin.

She had no skin.

Not on her face.

Not on her body.

Not anywhere.

Not an inch of it.

The image vanished to be replaced by another girl.

Different girl, and I could tell that only by location — this one had been spilled out of a black plastic industrial trash bag — and by size. She was bigger, taller and bigger in the breasts and hips.

But that was the only way to tell the difference. All other individuality — skin tone and color, scars and tattoos, marks and moles — had been sliced away. All I saw was veined meat.

Another image. Another girl.

Another.

Another.

Another.

Sixteen.

The slideshow ground on mercilessly and I was absolutely unable to move a finger to stop it. The images flicked across my laptop screen. Sixteen young women. At least, I think they were young. Somehow I knew they were young.

All dead.

All stripped of more than flesh. Someone had torn away their lives, their individuality and their dignity along with their flesh.

When I raised my head to look over the laptop at her, there must have been something in my eyes because her smile vanished and she physically shrank back from me. Not a lot, but a bit.

“What the fuck is this?” I asked, and I barely recognized my own voice.

The woman cleared her throat, licked her lips, smoothed her skirt again. Rebuilding her calm façade.

“Beyond the obvious — the murder and mutilation of young women — we don’t know what it is.”

“A serial killer?”

“So it would appear. Sixteen dead girls over a period of roughly sixteen months.”

“This isn’t happening here in Philly,” I said. “I’d have heard something.”

“The first girl was found in Seattle. Felicia Skye, seventeen,” she said. “Other bodies have been found in nine cities in five states. All girls ranging in age from sixteen to eighteen. They’re all runaways, and all of them have worked as prostitutes. Eight have also worked as exotic dancers.”

“Strip clubs don’t hire kids.”

“Anyone can get a false I.D., Mr. Hunter,” she said coldly. “You know that.”

I pointed at the screen. “Where’s this shit happening?”

“The most recent — the sixteenth — was found in a storm drain in New York.”

“When?”

“Twenty-six days ago.”

“It wasn’t in the papers.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She took a moment on that. “We don’t know. None of these have been in the media. Not one.”

“That’s impossible. Murders like this are front page.”

She nodded. “They should be. This should be all over social media and Internet news, but it’s not.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. If you know about it and you want something done, then why don’t you take this to the press?”

Another pause. “We have.”

“And—?”

“We’ve contacted six separate reporters in six cities. All six have died.”

“Died?”

“Three heart attacks, one stroke, one fatal epileptic seizure, one burned to death after smoking in bed.”

I stared at her. “You’re shitting me.”

“I’m not.”

“What about the Feds? If this is happening across the country, then the FBI should—”

“They are investigating it. But they’ve had some problems of their own with the case. The lead agent fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. Freak accident. His replacement was killed in a car accident when an ambulance ran a red light. That sort of thing. The investigation is ongoing but agents have been shying away from it. They think it’s jinxed.”

That didn’t surprise me. Even this deep into the 21^st century there was a lot of superstition. Everyone has it — from people who knock wood to baseball players who have to wear their lucky socks. Cops have it in spades, just like soldiers, just like anyone whose day job involves real life and death stuff. When I was on the cops back in Minnesota I heard about several jinxed cases. No one wants to say it out loud because of how it sounds, but people still fear the boogeyman.

I got up and crossed to my file cabinet, opened the bottom drawer, and took out the only bottle of really good booze I owned — an unopened bottle of Pappy Van Winkle's 23-Year-Old bourbon. At two-hundred and fifty dollars a bottle it was way out of my price range, but a satisfied client had given it to me last Christmas. I brought it and two clean glasses back to my desk, and the woman watched while I opened the bottle and poured two fingers for each of us. I didn’t ask if she drank. She didn’t tell me to stop pouring.

I sat down and we each had some. We didn’t toast. You don’t toast for stuff like this.

The bourbon was legendary. I’d read all about it. It’s aged in charred white oak barrels. Sweet, smooth, with a complex mix of honey and toffee flavors.

It might as well have been Gatorade for all I could tell. I drank it because my laptop was still fanning through the images. And because that, even if I didn’t take this case, those dead women were going to live inside my head for the rest of my life. You can forget some things. Other things take up residence, building themselves into the stone and wood and plaster of the structure of your mind.

I suppose if I was capable of dismissing this, or forgetting it, then I wouldn’t be who I am. Maybe I’d be happier, I don’t know.

I closed the laptop, finished the bourbon and set my cup down.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

The woman opened her purse again and removed another envelope. She placed it on the desk and slid it across to me. When I opened it I could see the glossy border of a photograph. I hesitated, not wanting to see another mutilated girl. But I was already in motion in this, so I sucked it up and slid the photo out of the envelope.

It was another girl.

This one had her skin.

She was a beautiful teenager, with bright blue eyes and a lot of curves that were evident in the skimpy costume she wore. A blue glitter g-string and high heels.

“Her name is Denise Sturbridge,” said the woman. “She’s only fifteen, which makes her the youngest of the women in question, but as you can see she looks quite a bit older. She’s a runaway from Easton here in Pennsylvania. Abusive father, indifferent mother. Pretty common story, and very much in keeping with the backstories of the other girls. She took off four months ago, got picked up by the kind of predator who trolls bus stops and train stations. He got her high and turned her out to work conventions. She was scouted out of there to work in a gentleman’s club near the Philadelphia airport. Fake I.D. that says she’s nineteen. She dances under the name of Bambi.”

I set the photo down.

“Tell me the rest,” I said.

“She went missing two days ago. We believe that she will be number seventeen.”

“That’s a big leap. A lot of girls go missing.”

She nodded. “She fits a type.”

I glanced at the closed laptop and the black flash drive. “So the killer is targeting exotic dancers.”

“Yes.”

“And he’s been on the move from Seattle, across the country. Now you think he’s here.”

“Yes. And there’s not much time.”

I cocked my head. “Now how the hell would you know that?”

“Because it’s been four-hundred and seventy-five days since the first girl died. The coroner in Seattle was able to determine the day she died. We think Denise will be murdered in the next twenty-four hours.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Do the math, Mr. Hunter.”

I did.

Didn’t need a calculator, either. It was simple arithmetic. Add a day to the span of the killings and divide by seventeen.

I could feel my blood turn to ice.

“Oh shit,” I said.

She studied me with her dark eyes and I could see the moment when she knew that I knew that she knew. Chain of logic, none of it said aloud.

Seventeen murders. One every twenty-eight days.

A cycle.

Sure.

But a very specific kind of cycle. She gave me a small nod.

I didn’t need to look at the calendar. Not for the next kill and not for any of the kills before that. The pattern screamed at me.

She slid the first envelope across the desk. “Fee and expenses,” she said.

I didn’t touch it, didn’t look at it. I stared down into the smiling eyes of a girl pretending to be a woman who was a couple of days away from becoming a red horror someone would dump in an alley.

Maybe tomorrow.

“We want you to find this girl,” she said.

I said nothing.

“There’s a Word document on the drive that has a complete copy of the case file. Police and FBI reports. Coroner’s report, lab reports. Everything.”

I didn’t ask her how she’d obtained all of that.

“What if I can’t find her in time?”

The woman shook her head. “Then find who’s doing this before there’s a victim eighteen. This isn’t going to stop, Mr. Hunter. Not unless someone stops it.”

“The last kill was in New York. This is Philly. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

She reached across and picked up the business card I’d found on the floor and held it out to me. “This should help.”

I didn’t touch it. Didn’t have to. I could still smell it. I could still smell the blood.

But now I understood.

The woman stood up.

This was the point where I should have asked ‘Why me?’ With all of the other cops and private investigators out there, why me?

We both knew that I wasn’t going to ask that question. We both knew why me.

Twenty-eight days.

I didn’t stand up, didn’t shake her hand, didn’t walk her to the door. Didn’t tell her whether I was going to take the case.

We both knew the answer to that, too.

“I haven’t said that I’m taking the case,” I said.

She flicked a glance at the envelope, then shrugged. “You will if you want to, and you won’t if you don’t. Our policy is to encourage, not to compel.”

“Your policy. You still haven’t told me who you are. I mean, what’s your interest? What’s this Limbus thing and why do you people care?”

No answer to that.

“Okay,” I said, “tell me this. The reporters who died. The heart attacks and strokes and stuff. You think any of that was legit?”

“Do you?”

“Was there any investigation?”

“Routine, in all cases. No one connected the cases because there was no evidence of foul play.”

“Anyone do autopsies on the reporters who croaked?”

“On heart attacks? No. None of the victims were autopsied except for the man who burned to death, and that was ruled death by misadventure.”

“And the stuff that happened to the feds looking into it?”

“As I said, this has become known as a bad luck case.”

“Do you believe in bad luck?” I asked.

She gave me a smile that lifted the crescent scar beside her mouth. “We believe in quite a lot of things, Mr. Hunter.”

With that she turned, walked out and pulled the door shut behind her.

I sat there and stared at the closed door for maybe ten minutes. I don’t think I did anything except blink and breathe the whole time.

Twenty-eight days.

Bodies torn apart.

I picked up the card and sniffed the blood again. Deeply. Eyes closed. Letting the scent go all the way into my lungs, all the way into my senses. I took another breath, and another. Then I put the card down. I wouldn’t need it anymore. That scent was locked into me now. I’d know it anywhere.

Interesting that this broad knew that about me.

We believe in quite a lot of things, Mr. Hunter.

“Shit,” I told the empty room.

I glanced at the envelope. Even if it was filled with small bills, fives and tens, it had to be a couple of hundred. I guessed, though, that the denominations were higher. If it was twenties and fifties, then there were thousands in there. It was a fat envelope.

It sat there and I didn’t pick it up. Didn’t really want to touch it.

Not yet.

I had this thing. If I took the money then I was definitely going to take the case.

Then I opened my laptop, accessed the Word document, and began reading. While I did that I tried not to look at the big calendar pinned to the wall by the filing cabinet. It was this year’s Minnesota Vikings calendar. I liked the Vikings but I didn’t give much of a warm shit as to who was featured on this month’s page. Or any month. The calendar’s only important feature was a set of small icons that showed the phases of the moon.

Twenty eight days.

One day to go.

One day for little Bambi.

A single day until the killer took her skin and her life and emptied her of her dreams and hopes and breath and smiles and life.

A day.

One day until the next full moon.

In my blood and under my skin I could already feel the moon pulling at me. Tearing, clawing.

Screaming at me.

Howling at me.

When you don’t have a clue you start at the beginning and see if you can pick up the scent. For most guys in my line of work that’s a metaphor. Guess I’m a little different.

The case file for Bambi — Denise Sturbridge — said that she worked four shifts a week at a strip club called ViXXXens in Northeast Philly. A quick Google search told me that the place was owned by Dante Entertainment and managed by one George Palakas.

I live in Old City near Front and South, so it was an easy trip up I-95. I got off at Grant Avenue, cut across to Bustleton Avenue and followed that to within half a block of the northeastern-most city limits. Couldn’t miss the club. The sign was massive, with a neon silhouette of an improbably endowed woman winking on and off in blue and pink. Beneath the sign squatted an ugly three-story building that looked like it might have been built in Colonial times. Who knows, maybe Washington even slept there. But that was then. Now it crouched in embarrassment. Whitewashed plank siding, smoked windows blocked by beer signs, twenty or thirty cars in the parking lot, and bass notes shuddering along the ground from speakers that were way too powerful for the size of the building.

I parked near a pair of Harleys and got out.

I’ve been in a hundred places like this. As a cop, as a P.I. Once, when I was in high school, as a patron. Sure, I’m a healthy straight guy, but I’m not the demographic for joints like this. It’s not an economic thing or a class thing or even an education thing. I think it comes down to personal awareness. It’s hard to sit on a stool, drinking beer after beer, watching a woman you don’t know and can’t touch gyrate and take off her clothes to bad dance pop, when everyone else is doing the same thing. None of it’s really for you. It’s for your beer money and tip money. It’s about you bringing your friends so they can spend their money. It’s about you becoming a regular so you contribute to the profit of both dancer and club. But it lacks anything of true human connection. You aren’t friends with the friendly bartenders and you won’t have sex with the sexy dancers. You’re an open wallet.

So who goes to places like these? Like I said, it’s not a class of men. Even before I entered I knew that there would be guys in construction worker boots and denims, and guys in good business suits. There would be married guys and single guys. There would be college grads and high school dropouts. There would be white, black, Asian and Latino guys. What there wouldn’t be would be very many guys who were genuinely happy in their lives. The ones who were, probably only came here with buddies. More for their friends than for the silicone tits and painted mouths up on stage. Or guys coming here for their first legal drinks, surrounded by fathers, uncles, friends; a big shit-eating grin stapled onto their faces to hide their actual embarrassment.

The rest?

You couldn’t even call them lost and lonely. A lot of them aren’t. But they’re missing something. Some connection, or maybe some optimism. Whatever it is, they either came here looking for a thread of it, or because they gave up looking and the music here was too loud for introspection and self-evaluation.

I drew in a breath through my nostrils, held it, let it out, and went inside.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon and the place was already three-quarters full. Too early for a bouncer, so there was no cover and no hassle. The bar was a big oblong with seats all the way around it and two small square stages inside, intercut by a bank of cash registers and liquor shelves. A dozen beer taps, but none of them were for good beers. The two brands were Heineken, which was a short step up from dog piss, and Budweiser, which was a full step down. No Yuengling, no good local microbrews. You didn’t come here to sample a good beer. You came here to drink a lot of beers quickly and cheaply so that you didn’t feel weird tucking part of your paycheck into a girl’s g-string for no god damn good reason at all.

There were two dancers working the afternoon shift. The one closest to the door was probably pushing forty but she’d had a lot of work done and kept her muscles toned. My guess was that she was a single mother with no college and shaking her ass earned her more cash — particularly unreportable cash — than asking drive-through customers if they wanted their Happy Meal giant-sized. Her eyes flicked around, looking for the kind of guy who would pony up a buck just to have her come closer, or the kind of guy who would toss her a buck to make her go away. There were plenty of both. When her eyes briefly met mine she got no signal that she could use and her gaze swept on. A rotating spot swept across her face and I could see some old acne scars that were nearly buried under lots of pancake. Not a pretty woman, but probably not a junkie or a hooker. Someone willing to do this to put food in her kids’ mouths and make as good a life for them as she could.

I moved on and took a seat between the two stages.

The second dancer was half the age of the first. She’d be skinny if it wasn’t for plastic boobs and a decent ass. Sticks for arms and legs that had shape only because of high heels and patterned stockings. She wore a red thong and flesh-colored pasties over her nipples. And although she had a pretty face, she was about as sexy as a root canal. At least to me, but like I said, I’m not the demographic.

The bartender drifted up and used a single uptic of his chin to ask what I wanted.

I ordered a vodka martini with three olives just to see what kind of expression it put on his face. His face turned to wood.

“Bud,” I said, and he curled just enough of his lip to let me know that he appreciated the joke. He drew a Budweiser and slid a mug in front of me. I put a twenty on the bar and tapped it to let him know I was starting a tab on it. He nodded and moved away.

The song that was playing was so gratingly loud that it could sterilize an elk. The lyrics were meaningless pap. Something about ‘high school charms’, which gave it all a pedophile vibe.

The other patrons were staring at the dancers. The music was too loud for conversation. One guy was playing video poker and eating fistfuls of beer nuts without looking at them. Two guys in dark suits sat at the far end drinking dark mixed drinks that I’m pretty sure were actually Coke in highball glasses. I marked them in my mind. Strip clubs don’t let you sit there and drink soda, which means that these guys were either part of the staff — off-shift bouncers, maybe; or they were friends of the house. I saw them watching me as I watched them. One of them gave me a nod and I nodded back. That’s not a friendly exchange, not in places like this. It’s one player letting the other player know that they’re all in the game.

When the record changed, I left the beer and the twenty as placeholders, turned slowly on my stool until I spotted the entrance to the back rooms. I headed that way, and a short hall took me past employee restrooms, a store room, a fire door, all the way to a door marked OFFICE.

I knocked.

The man who opened the door was a burly forty-something, probably Greek face with a bald head, Popeye forearms, a thick mustache and wary eyes. He gave me a quick up and down and apparently decided I wasn’t a cop or someone from L and I. I was dressed in jeans and a Vikings windbreaker over an Everlast tank top. Cops and license inspectors all dress better than me.

“George Palakas?” I asked.

“What if I am?” he demanded, unimpressed.

“Need to talk to you.”

Palakas narrowed his eyes. “About what?”

“I’m looking for Denise Sturbridge.”

The manager gave me a slow three-count of silent appraisal, then he said, “No.” He turned away and started to close his door.

I got a foot out and blocked it. The edge of the door hit the outside sole of my Payless running shoes and rebounded.

Palakas wheeled on me. “Yo, asshole,” he growled. “The fuck you think you’re doing?”

“I told you,” I said mildly, smiling.

“Get your ass out of here before I have you—”

I shoved him. Quick and light, but it caught him off guard and sent him running backward into his office. His ass hit the edge of the desk, the impact spun him and he fell onto the floor, dragging a desk-light and a coffee cup full of pencils with him. He landed on his knees hard enough to make me wince. The lamp and coffee cup shattered.

I closed the door and leaned my back against it.

Palakas looked up at me. His knees had to hurt and his face was turning from a fake tan to brick red.

“You stupid motherfucker,” he whispered through teeth that ground together between curled lips. “I’m going to—”

“No,” I said, “you’re not. Stop trying to scare me to death.”

He cursed some more.

I kept smiling.

When Palakas paused for a breath I said, “You hired a fifteen-year-old girl to strip in your club. We could start there and see how fast I could get you shut down.”

“Bullshit,” he said, but suddenly his voice lacked emphasis.

“Right now that’s all that I know she did here. It’s enough for me not to want to take any shit from you.”

“Who’s she to you?” he asked as he got heavily to his feet.

I shrugged. “Maybe I’m her father.”

He actually laughed. “Her old man’s a methed-out schizo up in Easton.”

“Then maybe I’m her brother.”

“She doesn’t have a brother.”

There was a pack of gum in my pocket. I took it out and popped a couple of pieces out of the aluminum blister pack, put them into my mouth, crunched through the candy coating and chewed the gum. Palakas watched me do all this.

I said, “Does it really matter who I am?”

“It’s going to matter when I—”

“I already told you, stop trying to scare me. I want to have a conversation with you and I really don’t want to have to wade through a bunch of lines cribbed from old Sopranos reruns. I’m going to ask you some questions. You’re going to answer my questions. If I’m satisfied with the answers then I’m done and you can forget I was ever here.”

“Why should I tell you a god damn thing?”

“Ah,” I said, “this is the part where I threaten you. You see, if you don’t tell me what I want, or if I don’t like what you tell me, then I will kick a two-by-four so far up your ass you’ll be spitting toothpicks.”

“Think you could?”

“We can find out,” I said mildly. “And afterward we can have this conversation while we’re waiting for the paramedics.”

Palakas tried a sneer on me. It was supposed to look fearless and defiant, but this wasn’t a movie and he knew that if I was telling him I could hurt him then that’s how it would play out. Even if he had my legs broken later on, it wouldn’t stop him from taking the full weight now and very few people want to play it that way. Besides, the door was closed and I think he was actually curious.

“The fuck you want to know?” he said, playing it out, though. That was okay. He could posture all he wanted as long as he talked. What he didn’t know was that I could smell his fear. Beneath the deodorant, the residual smell of his soap — Ivory, I think — and his cologne — Axe — I could smell the fear stink.

“Denise Sturbridge,” I reminded him.

“Bambi. Yeah, so what? What about her.” He stepped over the debris on the floor and sat down behind his desk. I came and stood close to him and we both knew that it was because I wanted to make sure he didn’t get cute and pull anything unfortunate from a desk drawer. Small office. Even with a loaded gun I could get to him before he could take a shot. We both knew that.

“I’m looking for her.”

“She’s not here.”

“I know that, numb-nuts. That’s what ‘looking for her’ means. If she was here I’d have already found her.” I tapped him on the forehead with my index finger. “I want you to tell me where she is.”

Palakas gave a half-hearted swipe at my hand. “How should I know?”

“She works for you?” I suggested.

“No, she don’t. She missed three shifts in a row. That’s her ass as far as I’m concerned.”

“You’re saying she’s missing?”

“I’m saying she ain’t here. I don’t know where she is and I couldn’t give a hairy rat’s ass. She stiffs me on three shifts, am I supposed to give a wet shit about her? Am I supposed to keep her on the schedule? Fuck no.”

“I need to find her.”

“Then go to her damn apartment. What are you bothering me for?”

I shrugged. “Last known whereabouts.”

“Look,” he said, taking a breath, “who are you? I mean really.”

“I’m nobody,” I said.

“You’re not a cop?”

“No.”

“You’re not with Vice?”

“I said I wasn’t a cop.”

“You look like a cop,” Palakas said. From the sour shape his mouth made you’d think the word ‘cop’ was smeared with dog shit.

“Used to be a cop.”

“What are you now?”

“Private.”

He stared at me. “You serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“Bambi a bail skip or something?”

“No. She’s a kid who should be in school, not showing her boobs to a bunch of degenerate jerkoffs.”

Half a laugh burst from him before he could clamp it down. I edged closer.

“You want to tell me what’s so funny? Maybe we can both get a good laugh out of it.”

Fear flickered in Palakas’s eyes. I am not a big guy — pretty ordinary, really. Five nine, one-seventy; but I’ve been told I have a quality. Even people who don’t know what I have under the skin say that. A quality. When I wore the badge, it must have been there in my eyes. It made some pretty serious thugs back off and back down.

Palakas licked his lips for a moment.

“I don’t know where she is,” he said. “You want her home address? I can give you that.”

“I have that. Give me some names. She have a boyfriend?”

“She has a—.”

He almost said something smartass. Probably something like ‘she has a million boyfriends’. He stopped himself in time. Two or three more syllables and I’d have belted him, we both knew it.

“Do I need to repeat the question?” I asked quietly.

“She don’t have a boyfriend,” he said. “Actually I don’t think I ever heard of her going on a…um…on a real date.”

He didn’t have to explain what he meant.

“But…?” I prompted.

“But there was this kid she hung out with.”

“A girl?”

“No. A boy. Works in the kitchens. Black kid. Queer.”

“They hung out together?”

“Pretty much all the time. Name’s Donny Falk.”

“Is he working today?”

“No.”

“Know where I can find him?”

“Same place as Bambi. Windsor Apartments on Red Lion Road. Same building and floor. His apartment’s two doors down from hers.”

“You have a phone number for him?”

Palakas licked his lips again. “Yeah,” he said, and he very carefully opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a sheet of paper. I leaned over to look at it and saw that it was a list of employees — bar staff, bouncers, kitchen staff, cleaners, dancers — along with contact numbers and email addresses.

“You have a copy of that?” I asked.

“Yeah, but—.”

I plucked it out of his hand.

“Hey!”

I turned to him.

“Hey… what?”

Palakas gave me a long, disgusted look. “Hey, I guess help your fucking self to whatever you want. You got a P.I. license, which isn’t worth the toilet paper it’s printed on, but sure, go ahead, knock around a guy who’s got a heart condition. You kick dogs, too?”

I folded the paper and slipped it into my pocket.

“Gosh,” I said, “I’m really embarrassed that you think I’m a bully. You think I’m being mean? I certainly don’t want to convey that impression.”

He glared at me, not falling for it.

So I put a button on it for him. “It’s just that I’m pretty sure you knew that girl was underage. I’m actually showing a great degree of restraint here, ‘cause my real instinct is to wail on you until I feel better. The only reason I’m not is because you’re cooperating — after a fashion. And,” I added before he could say anything, “because I don’t know for a fact that you’re her pimp. If I knew for sure that you were making a fifteen-year-old girl sell herself, then I think we’d have to explore how really mean I can get. Believe me… neither of us wants to let that dog off the leash. You reading me here?”

“Yeah,” he said. He meant to say it tersely, but it came out like a wheeze.

I patted his cheek. “Good.”

I could feel George Palakas’s glare of hatred as I turned and left.

As I passed through into the bar toward the exit I saw the two men in dark suits watching me, and I saw their eyes flick from me to the hallway that led to the office. They stood up. The guy on the left was about six foot but had to go two-fifty, most of it in his chest and shoulders. The guy on the right was slimmer but also four inches taller. Big and Tall were not giving me friendly looks. Then Big crossed to the hall and disappeared in the direction of the office while Tall stood there and kept his eyes on me.

Not good.

There were too many people around in the bar, so I began walking toward the exit. Tall saw me and started heading in the same direction. My choices were these — I could wait for them to do something here in the bar, which meant risking injury to civilians. Nope. Or I could let them chase me outside, which opened this up to witnesses with cell phone cameras. Also not good.

Or…

The door to the men’s room was closer than the exit door. I gave Tall a smile and ducked through the door.

It took Tall about four seconds to come bursting through. He had an old fashioned black-jack in his right hand. You don’t see them much anymore. It’s a big slug of lead sitting on a spring and wrapped with thick leather. You use it with a snap of the wrist. In skillful hands it can brush the skull and send a person into dreamy land and when they wake up they’re sick, disoriented and tractable.

Used wrong it’s a skull crusher.

Tall was already starting to raise his for a heavy overhand swing before he was all the way into the bathroom. He was going for the full impact.

I stood with my back to him and saw all this in a mirror.

The blackjack whipped up and was just starting the accelerating drop that would end me when I turned.

I don’t just mean that I turned around. Sure, I did that, too. But when I say I ‘turned’, what I really mean is that I changed.

He swung the blackjack at a man.

It wasn’t a man he hit.

His eyes flared wide and his mouth opened to scream in total, sudden horror when I crashed into him and dragged him down to the floor.

The music outside was so loud, nobody heard him scream.

Nobody heard me snarl.

I was thirteen the first time I changed.

The first time took almost half an hour. I thought I was being torn apart. Guess I kind of was. Torn apart and put back together beneath the skin. Muscles melting into jelly and reassembling; bones reshaping, hair jabbing like needles through my flesh, mouth reshaping, new teeth bursting through the gums. And all of it in a paroxysm of screaming, inarticulate agony. Maybe it feels like dying. Maybe it feels like being tortured. While it was happening I begged God or whoever else is at the help desk to kill me right there and then.

My grandmother was with me through it.

She’d been making that change for nearly seventy years, since she was eleven. Almost everyone on her side of the family had been through it. And, yeah, it actually killed some of them. Depends on your blood line, or maybe if you have the right genes. There are several families like ours and whenever possible we’ve interbred. Not enough to go all Arkansas back-country, we’re not looking to turn out a bunch of moon-faced, slack-jawed brother-cousins. Just enough to strengthen the DNA.

What are we?

There’s a lot of folklore out there. A lot of legends. Lots of stories about things like me.

Lot of names.

Lycanthrope.

Berserker.

Vargulf.

Loup-garou.

Werewolf.

We call ourselves the Benandanti. That’s an old Italian name that means ‘good-walker’. It can also be translated as ‘those who go well’. Or even those who ‘do good’.

Yeah. Werewolf. Good guy. Same package.

They don’t make movies about my kind. You don’t see them in too many books or comics. We’re not like the Hollywood werewolves, but we’ve left claw marks all through history. One of us, an eighty-year-old guy named Thiess from Jurgenburg, Livonia, was even arrested by the Holy Inquisition in 1692 and put on trial. Not my direct bloodline, but we all know about him. He’s kind of a hero to us. The Inquisitors used every kind of torture, every manner of ‘enhanced interrogation’ to try and force Thiess to say that he was a servant and agent of the Devil. Lot of people would have cracked and said anything to stop the pain. Lot of people did, which probably accounts for every single signed confession of Satan worship those fruitcakes ever obtained.

Not Thiess, though. That one was one tough, stubborn fucker. And he was eighty!

He admitted that he was a werewolf. But he also told them that the Benandanti fought evil on the side of heaven. It was what we always did. It was who we were.

That story didn’t go over too well, so they really went to town on Thiess. Thumbscrews, hot irons, the rack. All of it, the works. He should have broken. He should have died.

He didn’t.

And he never once wavered in his assertion that the Benandanti have been fighting the true ‘good fight’. Against monsters.

Actual monsters.

The Inquisitors tried and tried and tried.

And failed.

Eventually they got to a point where they simply ran out of shit they could do to him. It was down to kill him or let him go.

And… they let him go.

The church court issued a letter saying, in effect, that no servant of the Devil could endure the ‘tests’ imposed on it by the Inquisition. Thiess, having survived, must have done so with the grace and protection of God Almighty.

Not only did they let him go, but they even gave him a nickname. A label of honor.

The Hound of God.

Not to say that the church was all kissy-face with us after that. The official result of the trial was exoneration for Thiess. The actual result is that they were embarrassed and probably scared of us. So, in secret and way off the record, they began hunting us down. Not for trial but for quick, quiet execution. There were never many of us, and there were a lot of killers working for the Inquisition. We were very nearly wiped out, and for a while the gene pool was so shallow that whole centuries passed before the wolf once more began screaming in the blood.

My grandmother is the strongest of all of us. Sweetest little old broad you ever wanted to meet. Most of the time. Frail-looking dame with blue hair and a bit of a dowager’s hump. But… she can make the change faster than you can snap your fingers, and when the werewolf emerges from beneath the wrinkles of the human, anyone giving her problems — or bothering someone to whom she’s offered her protection — is literally in a world of hurt.

For me, I can get pretty cranky, too. On both sides of the skin change, but I do everything I can to keep that change from happening. I don’t trust my level of control when I’m a wolf. Bad things have happened, things have spun out of control more than once. It’s why I’m not a cop anymore.

But there are times…

I’m telling you all of this so you’ll understand what happened in the bathroom at ViXXXens. Tall expected to beat the shit out of some schmuck asking the wrong questions of the wrong person. He had every reason to expect to win that fight. He even scored his hit with the blackjack.

It just didn’t do him any damn good.

The blackjack hit my shoulder as I turned. It hurt. I’m a monster but I still had nerve endings, I’m still meat and bone, and I could still feel pain.

It’s just that as a werewolf it takes a lot of damage to slow me down. A whole hell of a lot. Decapitation will do it. Fire will do it. Maybe a machine gun, I don’t know. It hasn’t ever come to that.

A blackjack?

Oh, please.

And pain is like gasoline on a fire. It dials everything up.

I slashed at his arm and the tough double-stitched leather of the blackjack ripped apart. The lead slug bounced off the ceiling and dropped into a sink. The tips of my nails stroked his hand and wrist and blood splatted the metal toilet stall.

I could have taken the guy’s head off.

Easily.

But here’s the thing about werewolves. In the movies we’re ravening, blood-mad, mindless monsters.

In real life, not so much.

Sure, there’s rage.

Sure, there’s a lot of animal urges. Lots of subliminal kill-kill-kill impulses.

And, sure, there’s a big temptation to chow down because we’re predators and humans are tasty prey. Yeah, that’s gross, I’m well aware of that. And I’ve had a lot of next-day puke sessions after I’ve done some chomping. Less so these days because I have more control. At first, though, I went after the bad guys like they were blue plate specials. Live and learn.

It was Tall’s good fortune that I had that control now. And that I’d eaten a couple of quarter pounders on the way here. Otherwise he might have been missing some juicy parts.

Instead, all I did was slam him against the wall over the sink. Kind of hard.

He crashed down onto a row of three filthy sinks, ripping two of them off the wall. He crashed to the floor in a quivering heap, covered with porcelain debris, bleeding from a lot of little cuts. Alive, but not enjoying it.

That’s when Big pushed through the door.

The first thing he saw was his friend. I was off to one side. He didn’t see me until I got up in his face and made him see me.

He started to scream.

I threw him into a toilet stall. He hit the back wall hard enough to turn his eyes blank and knock him all the way to the edge of la-la land. I got to him and caught him before he fell.

Even as I grabbed him I shifted back. I jerked the chain on the wolf and made him go away before he did something we’d all regret. Takes a lot of effort to do that, though. The wolf does not like to go back into the kennel. Not one bit.

It was with human hands that I shoved him onto his knees and stuck his face in the unflushed toilet.

I held him there until my personal disgust told me to stop. Maybe three, four seconds. Then I pulled his dripping head out, spun him around and stuffed him down into the corner between the toilet and the wall.

I squatted in front of him, watching a piece of toilet paper slide down his cheek. He coughed and sputtered and stared at me in total confusion. This wasn’t the face he’d seen a second ago. His eyes shifted to find the big bad wolf, but he couldn’t know that the monster had already left the building.

Oh, yeah… that whole cycle of the moon thing? That’s mostly fiction. During the three days of the full moon we’re a little more aggressive, our rages are harder to control, but that’s all. We can make the change anytime we want. Into the wolf and back to our own skin. Just like that. On a dime.

A few seconds ago there was a snarling monster with black hair and lots of fangs. Now there was a skinny guy in a baggy Viking’s windbreaker. If you don’t come from a home life like mine, that’s pretty hard to process, and Big was blowing a lot of mental circuits trying to make sense of it.

I crossed to the door and locked it, then squatted down again in front of Big. He was borderline catatonic with fear.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He started shaking his head. Either refusing to answer or in denial of what was happening.

“Your name.” I said it slower, but got nothing.

A slap across the chops would probably have helped unscramble his grits, but, y’know, he was just bobbing for turds, so… no thanks.

For his part, he started flapping his arms around. At first I thought he was trying to fight me or fend me off. But that wasn’t it.

He made a half-fist, extending his index and little finger so he could fork the sign of the evil eye at me.

Fair enough. Even though he looked more German than Italian, I figured what the hell. He had just seen a monster. Besides, I’ve met wiseguys and wiseguy wannabes who did that sort of thing. They were every bit as superstitious as cops and ball players.

Then he began mumbling something. It first I thought it was Italian, but it wasn’t.

It was Latin.

“… defende nos in proelio; contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperat illi Deus; supplices deprecamur: tuque, Princeps militiae coelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude…”

Unfortunately I don’t speak Latin. I mean, who needs to? Even priests don’t use it much anymore. But you can tell when something is Latin. It doesn’t really sound like anything else. Sounded like church stuff. Sounded like stuff you hear in movies.

“Hey,” I snapped. “Hey, asshole.”

He kept rattling on with the Latin. I yelled at him again. No change.

If I hadn’t destroyed the sinks I might have belted some sense into him and then washed my hand. Instead I reached around and under him and took his wallet. He didn’t try to stop me. He was totally freaked out, kept pointing the horns of his fingers at me, kept muttering church stuff at me.

The driver’s license in the wallet told me that Big’s real name was Kurt Gunther. German, like I thought. Or German heritage. All his I.D. was American. There was about four hundred in mixed bills in the wallet, a bunch of credit cards, membership cards from everything from Sam’s Club to the library in Doylestown. I smiled. Am I prejudiced because I don’t expect thugs to have library cards? Not sure.

There was a glassine flap that had something that really caught my eye. There were two items in it. One was a card the size of a credit card, but it was blood red and had no markings on it except a magnetic strip on the back. But as I turned it over I caught a flash of something. I held it close to my eye and turned it over more slowly, and this time I could see a symbol hidden on the front. It was very subtle, a hologram, like they put on driver's licenses. Only this one was red upon red, with but the slightest 3D effect. It was too small to see clearly, but I could tell that it was circular, with a symbol in the center and lots of radiating spokes. There were other symbols between the spokes, but I couldn't make them out. It reminded me of one of those astrological wheels, but there were more than twelve spokes. Although it was difficult to count, I think there were eighteen symbols around the edge.

The other item was a business card. It had the name, business address, email and contact phone number of a broker at one of the big-ticket national chains. Dunwoody-Kraus-Vitalli. The broker’s name was Daniel Meyers.

That’s not the thing that made me go ‘hmmmm’; it was what was written in blue ballpoint on the back.

A single word.

A name.

Bambi.

I leaned toward Mr. Gunther and showed him the card.

“Bambi,” I said. “Where?”

“… hostium nostrorum, quaesumus, Domine, elide superbiam: et eorum contumaciam dexterae tuae virtute prosterne…”

“Stop that,” I said, “or you’ll get to meet your lord and savior sooner than later, capiche?”

He stopped the chanting.

I wiggled the card and repeated, “Where?”

He looked from the card to me and back again. His eyes, which were already pretty well bugged out, bulged nearly out of their sockets. The steady stream of Latin dribbled to a stop.

He said, “N — no…”

Behind me Tall was starting to groan and move sluggishly among the rubble.

Outside the music was still pounding, but who knew what Palakas was doing. Calling the cops. Calling more thugs. Loading a gun. I could hear a big clock ticking in my brain.

“Talk,” I said. “Or should I let the dog out to play?”

Turns out, he didn’t want to see the dog again.

Didn’t really want to talk, either, but we crossed that speed bump without anyone losing a wheel.

Kurt Gunther and his partner, Salvatore Tucci — Mr. Tall — were bouncers. Not a major surprise there. But they didn’t work here at ViXXXens. They worked at a place called Club Dante. I’d heard of it but had never been there. It was one of those so-called ‘gentlemen’s clubs’. Lots of girls with almost nothing on and lots of booze, but they don’t consider themselves a titty bar. The girls are prettier — or have more expensive cosmetic surgery — the booze is all top shelf and over-priced, and lap dances cost more than most of the customers here at ViXXXens make in a week. Places like that are usually fronts for the sex trade, but proving it is a bitch. You have to be a member, and anything hinky happens behind closed doors. The clientele are the local rich and powerful, which means the place has a lot of money and a lot of juice. Places like that don’t get raided, or if they do, word has already come down and when Vice breaks in everything is a-jay squared away.

“Is Bambi out there?” I asked him.

Gunther started to tell me that she wasn’t, that he didn’t know who she was, but I reminded him that if I had to show him the wolf again, then the beast was going to take home a trophy. Gunther clearly didn’t want to sing in a high squeaky voice for the rest of his life.

He told me that Bambi was hired to work a special party out at Dante’s. They had lots of small rooms for parties.

“Who hired her?” I asked.

“Meyers,” he told me. “Daniel Meyers.”

The stockbroker.

“Where is she now? Where’s Bambi?”

Gunther said he didn’t know. He and his partner picked her up at ViXXXens and dropped her at Dante’s two nights ago, but the manager over there said that she split. They’d come back here looking for her but had so far come up dry. They were hanging around the place hoping she walked in.

I can usually tell when people are lying to me — it’s a smell thing — but Gunther was telling the truth. Or, at least as much of the truth as he knew.

I left him there and got out of the bar pretty quick. I caught a quick glimpse of Palakas across the bar talking on the phone. Didn’t wait to find out what kind of heat he was calling.

Bambi’s apartment building was close, so I headed over there and parked outside of the Windsor South Apartments. It was a six-story block built like a slab, with balconied apartments front and back. Cheap but not squalid. Lawn out front needed mowing but it wasn’t full of crab grass or weeds.

There was no doorman. The lobby had an intercom, but no one answered at either Bambi’s apartment or that of her friend, Donny Falk. So I loitered around until someone came in. When they used their key to open the inner security door, I went through with them. I gave a grunt and a nod like I knew them, and busied myself by pretending to look at something interesting on my BlackBerry. We got in the elevator. He got off at four; I went up to six, then found the fire stairs and went down to three. The apartments on the right-hand side were odd numbers, left side were even. Bambi’s apartment was 309. Falk’s was 307.

I knocked on 309 and heard nothing but echoes.

The hall was empty, the door was locked. I sniffed the door and smelled only those things I expected to smell. Wood, old cooking smells, a little mildew, and dust.

The place even felt empty. It had that kind of vibe. Like a dead battery.

The other doors along the hall stayed shut, so I bent to study the lock. Every P.I. worth his license can bypass a lock without much trouble. The really good ones require a set of lock-picks and maybe three minutes work. This one was a cheap-ass lock, and I opened it with a flexible six-inch plastic ruler I carry for exactly this kind of thing. It pushed the tapered bolt back on its spring and the lock clicked open. I glanced up and down the hall and then stepped inside.

Denise Sturbridge’s apartment was neat and small and clean. And empty. I ghosted my way through it. There were dishes in the dishwasher, leftovers in the fridge, some trash in the cans that told me nothing, the usual stuff in the bathroom, and exactly what you’d expect in the bedroom. Drawers filled with cheap but attractive clothes. Dance stuff. Shoes, but not too many and most of them inexpensive. A hamper with soiled items in it. Twin bed, pink sheets, a stuffed turtle.

I touched very little, but I sniffed it all. And, although that sounds intensely creepy, think of it more like a dog and less like a thirty-something adult man.

I catalogued the scents of Denise Sturbridge as a living person. I added that to the already-logged scent of her blood.

There was nothing of note anywhere. A work schedule was posted on the side of the fridge, held in place by a magnet from a pizza shop. There was a TV and DVD player, and most of the disks she had were romantic comedies or Disney stuff.

Girl stuff.

Kid stuff. Like the stuffed turtle.

My heart hurt looking at it.

“Where are you, kid?” I asked the empty apartment. “Give me a little help here.”

But there wasn’t even a whisper of anything useful.

I wiped off everything I touched and left her apartment. I drifted down to Donny Falk’s door and froze in my tracks.

There were splinters on the carpet and when I peered at the frame around the lock I could see where the wood had been cracked. Someone had forced the door and then pushed the splinters and twisted metal back into place as far as it would go. You had to look close to see it. I was looking close.

Which is when I caught the smell.

Faint.

But there.

Sickly sweet and gassy.

Only one thing smells like that.

I put my ear against the wood and listened for any sound of movement. Anything at all.

Nothing.

Shit.

I leaned my shoulder against the door and pushed it open. There wasn’t much resistance beyond the friction of the broken lock and torn frame. I stepped inside and immediately pushed the door shut.

Donny Falk was kitchen help in a strip club, and he clearly lived small. Mismatched Salvation Army furniture, plastic milk crates and boards for shelving, posters thumbtacked to the walls, a threadbare rug over worn linoleum.

Maybe that had been enough for him. Maybe he kept the place clean and filled it with music and friends and his own hopes and dreams. Some people cruise along that way. If they don’t have much then at least they have some measure of freedom. They make genuine friendships, and they’re loving and loyal to anyone who shows them respect and kindness.

Now, though, the place was a wreck.

It looked like a storm had blown through it.

The couch and chair were overturned, cushions slashed, stuffing pulled out, posters torn down, CD players smashed, CD’s crushed underfoot, baseball bat rammed through the TV screen, flowers torn out of pots, cereal boxes torn open and spilled, toaster-oven crashed onto the floor, refrigerator door open and everything pulled out and smeared onto the cheap linoleum and carpet. I moved carefully through the debris, careful not to leave footprints in anything sticky or powdery. There was a short hallway leading off from the living room, with a bathroom door on one side and a bedroom at the end. I peered into the bathroom to see the same kind of destruction. Everything that could be smashed had been, everything that could be cracked or spilled or torn was in ruins. I caught a glimpse of fifty different angry versions of my face in the fragments of the shattered mirror. None of those faces looked happy. This wasn’t wolf face, but it was every bit as dangerous.

The bedroom door was closed, but the smell was coming from there.

For a moment I felt so old and depressed that I wondered if I should leave the door closed, turn around and go home. I wasn’t a homicide cop anymore — not since they asked me to turn in my badge back in the Cities. I was a P.I. with no legal reason to be here, and I couldn’t prove that I hadn’t been the one to kick in the door and trash the place.

If I walked into that room then I would be tampering with a crime scene.

They could and probably would put me in jail for something like this.

Best thing in the world for me to do was get the hell out of there. I had other leads to follow — the stockbroker and Club Dante. It was a better, smarter choice to walk away.

But then if I was a better or smarter guy I wouldn’t be working this job.

I opened the door.

And stood there.

I didn’t enter.

Everything I needed to see I could see from where I was.

Donny Falk was about twenty, maybe five-six, one-thirty. I could tell that much.

George Palakas had said that Donny was black and gay. The posters on the wall were all of good looking men in skimpy outfits, so I could make the case for him being gay. As for black?

You’d need to look at his skin to make that call.

And he didn’t have any.

The whole room was painted in his blood. Not artistically, but from arterial sprays. He seemed to float in the midst of it, but that was an illusion. His arms and legs were spread wide. Someone had driven big iron nails through his wrists and shins. I would like to think they’d done that after the kid was dead, but I don’t think mercy was really any part of this scenario.

I could see why his screams didn’t alert the neighbors. You need a tongue for that. His was nailed to his forehead.

And…the killer had torn open Donny’s chest and removed his heart.

I forced myself to look around the room, but there was no sign of the stolen organ. The killer had taken it with him.

But the killer had left something behind. Something I recognized.

On the wall, drawn with care in Donny’s blood, was a large circle. There was a small symbol in the center, and eighteen spokes radiating out to connect with the big outer circle. Between each circle was another symbol. Each symbol was unique. Each was entirely unknown to me. I removed the Club Dante card from my jacket and held it up at an angle where I could see the hologram.

Same symbol.

If it was astrological, then it was from some philosophy other than the normal one I knew about. Eighteen symbols.

The pattern was strange, alien to me.

Looking at it made my heart hammer and my skin crawl.

Was this killer hunting according to some crazy religious thing? Was this part of some ritual he was acting out? While on the cops I ran into religious maniacs before. Some of them had this view in their heads that they were on the verge of becoming something greater than what they were; that they were about to ascend, and that it only required blood sacrifices and an adherence to specific rituals to open that door.

Is that what I had here? Was Bambi waiting to become a victim to the grand designs of someone who wanted to become God?

“Bambi,’ I murmured. “Denise…Donny…”

I stood there for a long time as a series of weird emotions crawled through my shocked brain.

Donny Falk was not my client. I hadn’t known him, and differences in age and location and profession would probably have prevented us from ever crossing paths, or if we had, we probably wouldn’t have anything to say to one another.

And yet…

He was the friend, perhaps the only friend of Denise Sturbridge. Bambi. She was a lost little girl pretending to be a jaded woman of the stage and streets. Donny was probably the only ‘safe’ man in her world. The only one who didn’t want to plunder her silky loins or sexualize her beyond her years. And maybe she was an equally safe zone for him. Nonjudgmental, a kindred innocent in a corrupt world.

Bambi wasn’t my client any more than Donny was. The unnamed woman from Limbus had hired me to find her. Donny was a side-effect of that search.

And yet…

My brain is wired in a certain way. I know that some of it has to do with my Benandanti heritage — we’re pack animals, and you always protect the pack. But I’d like to think that I would have some approximation of that sensibility even if I was a normal man. The desire to protect the pack, to protect anyone who can’t protect themselves. When I take on a client it’s like they become part of my family, part of my pack. I will do absolutely anything, go to extreme lengths to protect what’s mine.

But Bambi and Donny weren’t mine. They weren’t part of my pack.

Were they? Did the protection I afforded clients extend to people like them? Or was what I was feeling merely the normal outrage a moral person feels in the face of a demonstration of so clearly an immoral act?

Inside my head the wolf howled.

Aloud I said, “No.”

I removed my cell phone and used it to take several photos of the symbol, and immediately forwarded them to a woman I knew at the University of Pennsylvania. An anthropologist who’d helped me on another case involving ritual symbols.

Then I backed out of the room, turned in the hall and leaned my forehead against the wall.

Shit.

Who was this maniac?

I looked down at the Club Dante card in my hand. I removed the business card for the stockbroker, Daniel Meyers.

That place and that man were tied to Bambi.

Somebody was going to give me some answers.

I only hoped those answers led me to the monster who tore the skin from these young people. sixteen girls, one boy. I knew that the girls were all prostitutes, but in my heart they were all children. Innocents. The damaged and discarded ones. A lot of them were victims of abuse at home, or from shattered homes. Drugs was one way out, a way to blunt the jagged edges of the pain and self-loathing. Hooking bought more drugs and it completed the cycle of destruction that often began at home and ended on the streets. When I thought of them as ‘innocent’ I didn’t mean pure. Some of them were willing participants in their own destruction, but I’ve found that few people are truly self-destructive. Usually self-immolation of the moral kind is an end result, a skill learned from others.

For seventeen of those lost souls there was absolutely nothing I could do. Even revenge or managing to get the killer arrested wouldn’t cloth them in their lost skin or breathe life into their empty lungs. Nothing I did would make their hearts beat again or coax a smile onto their dead mouths.

However, Bambi might still be alive.

Out there.

Somewhere.

At Club Dante?

I was going to have to find out.

Donny Falk hung on the wall and I couldn’t take him down. Maybe the cops could find some evidence in all that gore. I couldn’t risk disturbing that process. But there was something I could do.

I closed my eyes and drew in all of the scents of this place. Identifying Donny’s, filing it away. Separating out Bambi’s. Discarding all of the neutral smells — food, clothing, all of that. Then picking through the commingled animal smells.

Donny didn’t have any pets.

The only animal smells had been left by people.

There were two smells that were stronger than the others. Fresh and pungent. Male smells. Not Big and Tall. Other male scents.

I catalogued them the way my grandmother taught me. If I smelled them again, even months from now, I’d know them.

Not one scent, but two.

Two killers?

Those smells were both in the killing room.

Two killers.

There was nothing else to learn here, so I wiped off the wall where I’d leaned my head, smudged any footprints I’d left on the floor, pulled the door shut as I left, and wiped the doorknob.

I walked down the fire stairs with every outward appearance of calm.

Appearances are so incredibly deceptive.

The offices of Dunwoody-Kraus-Vitalli were in Center City, but by the time I got down there it was after five. I stood at the receptionist’s desk and tried to look affable, upscale and charming. In the parking garage I’d changed out of my oversized Vikings jacket and put on a three-button Polo shirt. Like most working P.I.’s, I have all sorts of clothes in my trunk. I combed my hair and tucked a pair of Wayfarers into the vee of the shirt.

The receptionist was a snooty brunette with too much eye-makeup and too little warmth.

“Mr. Meyers has left for the day,” she said.

“Ah, damn,” I said mildly and started to turn away, then paused, snapping my fingers. “Hey, did Mike say he was going to the club tonight?”

The receptionist lifted one eyebrow about a quarter of an inch. My attitude and apparent familiarity with Meyers, along with the reference to a club, was at war with the fact that she didn’t know me from a can of paint.

“I…think he said something,” she said evasively.

It was enough.

“Cool,” I said. “I’ll catch him there.”

“He may call in. I’ll tell him you stopped by, Mister…?”

I grinned. “Wolf,” I said.

“Very well, Mr. Wolf.”

I gave her a smile and a wink and headed for the elevators.

Wolf.

Sometimes I crack myself up.

Two calls came in while I was on my way south to Club Dante.

The first was Jonatha Corbiel-Newton, the anthropologist at University of Pennsylvania.

“Hey, doc,” I said. “Thanks for getting back to me so fast.”

“No problem. You caught me in my office grading papers.”

“You get the images?”

“I did. Where did you take them?”

“They’re attached to a case. Something I’m working on right now.”

“Are these from a crime scene?”

I was careful to make sure that Donny wasn’t in the shots I’d forwarded. “What makes you ask?”

“Well…it rather looks like the medium used to paint the symbol is blood.”

“Pretty sure it’s paint,” I lied.

“It’s very dark and viscous-looking.”

“Red poster paint. That tempura stuff.”

“Uh huh.” She clearly didn’t believe me, but then again I hadn’t contacted her because she was an idiot.

Even so, I sidestepped the topic. “Is that an astrological symbol?”

She took a moment before answering. “Not precisely. It has cosmological connections, but it isn’t a chart for any of the common astrologies. It’s not the zodiac or the Chinese astrological grouping. It doesn’t represent planets, animals or aspects of the natural world.”

“Okay, but—.”

“However I do recognize it.”

“Ah.”

“It’s a symbol used by a group who call themselves the Order of Melchom.”

“The who of who?”

“Order of Melchom. There are several versions of the group, some new and some very old. The new groups vary between covens of modern neo-pagans and RPG-ers.”

“Who?’

“Role playing gamers. Like Dungeons and Dragons. Those groups have adopted thousands of names and symbols from various arcane sources and used them as backstory for their games. It’s all over the Net.”

“I’m pretty sure this wasn’t posted by geeks playing games,” I said. “You said the others were neo-pagans? Do you mean witches?”

“Well, wiccan, of one kind or another. Not the white-energy wiccans, though. This symbol is tied to dark energy.”

“You mean evil?”

“Evil is relative. Most modern pagans view the universal forces as white and black, light and dark, or positive and negative.”

It wasn’t quite the way I saw things, but I kept that to myself.

“You said there was another reference,” I said. “Something older? What’s that?”

“In Biblical terms, Melchom is often cited as a variation of a god worshipped by the Ammonites, Phoenicians and Canaanites. The more common name is Moloch, which is itself another name for ‘king’, The worship of Moloch was brutal.”

“In what way?”

“In sacrificial ways,” said Jonatha. “Devotees practiced a particular kind of propitiatory child sacrifice in which parents gave up their children.”

I had to clear my throat before I asked, “What kind of sacrifice?”

“The biblical and historical records vary. Most likely the children were burned alive. There’s a reference to that in the Book of Leviticus, but other texts include plenty of references to various kinds of mutilation that include a ‘sacrifice of the flesh’.”

“Which is what?” I asked, though I thought I already knew.

“The sacrificed children were very carefully skinned so that they would be ‘unclothed to the soul’ and still alive when given up to Moloch.”

The day outside was bright and there were puffy white clouds in the gorgeous blue sky. All of that didn’t belong in a world, in any world, in which this conversation was a part. I told myself that, but the bright clouds and the flawless sky mocked me for my naiveté. Lovely skies have looked down upon every despicable thing we humans have done. What’s truly naïve is to think that horrors are always hidden away in shadows.

“This Moloch sounds like a charmer,” I said.

“He is. He’s nasty and he’s fierce. The ancients considered him one of the greatest warriors of the fallen angels.” I heard her rustling book pages. “John Milton wrote this about him in Paradise Lost…

“…MOLOCH, horrid King besmear’d with blood

Of human sacrifice, and parents tears,

Though, for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud,

Their children's cries unheard that passed through fire

To his grim Idol.”

“Nice.”

“There’s more,” she said. “Milton listed him among the chief of Satan’s angels, and he gives a speech at the Parliament of Hell to argue for war against God.”

“He’s an angel?”

“Depending on which source you read,” she said, “he’s either a fallen angel, a god, or a demon. In his aspect as Melchom, he’s the accountant for hell. He holds the purse strings to all of the Devil’s gold, and he inspires men to strive for wealth, often by any means necessary. He’s a monster in all of his aspects, really.”

And that fast something went skittering across my brain. A demon worshipped by men striving for money.

“Sam—?” asked Jonatha Corbiel-Newton. “You still there?”

“Yeah.”

“Is any of this useful to you?”

“Christ,” I said, “I hope not.”

Seventeen skinned teenagers. ‘Hope’ was a pretty vain luxury.

“What have you gotten yourself into?”

“I’m not sure, doc. I’m still blundering my way through it.” I paused. “Tell me something, though…are there any modern cults of Moloch? Does anyone still believe this sort of thing?”

She was a long time answering. “Back when I first began studying anthropology I would have said no unreservedly.”

“But now?”

“Now I’m not so sure. The more I get out of the office and into the field so I can see what people are actually out there doing, and practicing…I’m not so sure. Especially lately.”

“Why lately?”

“It’s the world, Sam. There’s no peace anywhere. Wars everywhere, the economy falling apart, such extreme political divisiveness, even the return of class wars. People are scared, they’re angry and they’re desperate.” She paused again. “These days people are looking for something to change the way things are going. They’re looking for an edge to help them get through all of this upheaval and carnage.”

“Geez,” I said with a small laugh, “so much for the detached scientist.”

She laughed, too, but it was thin and false. “Objectivity is taking as serious a beating as idealism these days.”

I saw my exit coming up and drifted off of I-95.

“Sam…what are you into?”

“As of right now, Jonatha,” I said, “it beats the shit out of me. I’ve got too much of the wrong information and not nearly enough of the right kind.”

“Sam…,” she said hesitantly, “that wasn’t tempura paint in that picture, was it?”

I drummed my fingers on the knobbed arc of the steering wheel as I waited for the light at the end of the exit ramp to turn from red to green.

“Thanks for the info, doc,” I said. “I owe you a steak dinner.”

Before she could reply to that I hung up.

The light turned green and I drove on.

Moloch. Melchom.

An ancient cult that involves sacrifices of flesh to an ancient god. Or demon. Or fallen angel. Or whatever the fuck he was.

A sacrifice of the flesh.

How in the big yellow fuck did that make any kind of sense? This wasn’t ancient Israel. This wasn’t medieval Europe. This was Phila-damn-delphia.

Then I thought about the stockbroker. Daniel Meyers. He was almost certainly a college graduate. I wondered how old he was, and if he used to belong to a fraternity. I worked some frat hazing cases before. Some of those clowns went way over the line. Branding each other, lots of ritual behavior, beatings. Even rape.

Could a group of frat brothers have crossed a harder line? Was this some kind of brotherhood thing? A Skull and Bones thing, or something worse?

That felt both wrong and right at the same time.

Either way, I was still shooting in the dark.

Club Dante was a big block nothing of a building from the outside. Tall, stuccoed walls, a pitched roof covered in faux terra cotta tiles, and massive wooden doors that would have looked better on the front of a medieval castle. Twelve feet high, wrapped in bands of black wrought-iron, and lined with chunky studded bolt-heads. The parking lot was behind a fence and a pair of armed guards worked the entrance. I parked across the street and studied them through the telephoto lens of a digital camera. The guards had that thin-lipped, lantern-jawed, unsmiling look of ex-military and possibly ex-special forces. Tough men, and from the way they moved and worked it was pretty clear that they were too good for the job they were doing. You don’t hire guys like that to check cars into a strip club parking lot, not even a very expensive strip club parking lot.

Hmm.

The cars were interesting, though. Nothing that looked more than two years old, and nothing that had a sticker price under fifty g’s. Some of them were way above that mark, too. Lots of sports cars. That made a certain kind of statement. The kind of guys who over-paid to come to a place like this were the kind who wanted everyone to know — or think — they had a big dick. Expensive clothes, ten-thousand-dollar wristwatches, hand-sewn shoes, nothing that was ever off the rack, and cars that cost more than my education were all ways of saying look at me and bow to my dick. It was the equivalent of attaching a fire hose to a tank of testosterone and hosing down everyone around them.

And because they made so damn much money, and money really is power in almost every way that matters in this world, everyone with less money dropped down and kissed their privileged asses.

For a whole lot of reasons I am less inclined to kowtow to assholes like that.

Maybe that’s why I’m always broke. I won’t play those kinds of games and I’ve never felt any urge to stand in a crowd of moneyed jackasses and pass around a golden ruler while we all measured our johnsons.

I drove slowly around the building, studying the fence from all sides. It was a tall chain-link affair with coils of stainless-steel razor wire along the top. Very inviting. There was no back gate and, as far as I could tell, only a single locked and alarmed red fire door. Odd for a building that size. Couldn’t possibly have passed code, which suggested that the owners were greasing the right palms.

There was movement among the parked cars and I saw another armed guard on foot patrol, walking a brute of a Doberman on a leash. Ninety pounds of sinew, muscle and attitude. Black and brown, with a bobbed tail and devil ears. As my car drifted past, the Doberman came suddenly to point and focused all of its senses on me. He couldn’t see me through the smoked windows of my car, but he knew that I was there, just as he knew that I wasn’t right.

Dogs always react to me. The ones who aren’t alphas tuck their tails between their legs and want to lick my hand. People always smile and tell me that I’m a real dog person.

Yeah, in a way.

The alphas are always instantly wary of me. The ones who are alphas but haven’t been trained for combat or patrol will keep their distance and watch me with wary eyes. If I push it I can get them to roll to me, but I seldom want to do that because some of them don’t reclaim their mojo afterward. I like dogs, so breaking their will isn’t high on my to-do list.

Alphas with guard dog training are a different matter. We’ve had some issues in the past. Their training is sometimes so intense that they will make choices they wouldn’t make in the wild. I’m one-seventy, which means that when I do the change, the wolf is one-seventy, too. That’s a lot of wolf. Even the biggest gray wolf is only about a hundred pounds. I’m closer to a dire wolf, the old prehistoric species. Their top range was one seventy. My grandmother thinks that we have dire wolf genes. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get that checked one day, if I can figure out how to get a DNA lab to do it without freaking them too much, or outing myself.

When I’m face to face with a trained attack dog, there’s usually trouble. I hate to kill a dog. I’ll play slice and dice with a person before I’ll open up a dog. Yeah, I know, a psychologist could really have fun with that, but there it is.

That Doberman had the kind of focused, barely suppressed aggression that let me know that it wouldn’t turn belly-up for me. If I wolfed out, then he’d make a run at me. And I’d have to kill him for it.

Club Dante wasn’t filling me with feelings of joy and puppies. Way too much security, the presence of a certain kind of money, and a definite connection to the missing girl. None of that added up to comforting math.

On the other hand it didn’t necessarily add up to involvement in seventeen brutal murders. It was, however, the only lead I had.

And in a way that was only semi-rational it smelled right.

When I stopped at the light I fished in my pocket for the red membership card. I sniffed it, but all I smelled was that guy Gunther. It was possible that by now he’d called to say that I’d taken the card from him. Was that the reason for the heavy security?

No, I decided. The patrols here had a lived in look. I was pretty sure this was their regular security.

Hoping that things wouldn’t play out that way, I drove four blocks away, parked, hailed a cab and had the taxi drop me at the club. I couldn’t risk that the guards would have a list of all of the tag numbers of regular members.

With my Wayfarers on and just enough indolent slouch in my walk, I strolled past the gate and entered through the massive front doors. They had a doorman in a tuxedo right inside. He was roughly the size of Godzilla and I had to lean back to look up at him. He gave me a quick up-and-down appraisal and shifted to stand between me and the door.

“May I help you, sir?”

I pulled the card out and held it up between two fingers. “Been a long day,” I said casually, “and I hear a martini calling to me.”

He was well-trained. His scowl became an agreeable smile and he stepped aside to allow me access to a key-swipe station mounted to one side of a second set of doors. I kept a bland smile on my face but held my breath as I fitted the card into the slot and swiped it.

The little red light on the station blinked from red to green. There was a faint click behind the door, and the doorman’s smile became less artificial and more genuine. He pushed the door open for me.

“Have a glorious evening, sir,” he said.

“Count on it,” I assured him as I stepped through the doors and entered the belly of the beast.

The club was pretty much as you’d expect. It was shadowy as a closet, an effect insured by low-wattage indirect lights and lots of dark wood. The motif was, apparently, early dungeon. Wrought iron fixtures, low couches, rough stone walls, rich draperies hung from brass rods. As I passed one of these I glanced at it and then gave it a double-take. What I first thought was a hunting scene of mounted riders, a dog pack and a bunch of frightened deer was actually something a lot less enchanting. The riders all wore burgundy-colored robes, the dogs looked half-starved and ravenous, and the ‘prey’ were men and women scurrying on all fours. Naked, some with antlers tied to their heads. The tapestry was old and woven from thick, rich threads, so it was hard to tell much about the people on all fours…except that the more I stared at them the younger they all looked.

I said, very softly, “Uh oh.”

I made myself turn away from the tapestry to study the room.

There were probably forty men in there. Most of them were dressed in expensive suits. A few had loosened their ties; a few others wore Polo shirts like mine. None of the customers were women. This was clearly a men’s club. Not sure I’d go as far as ‘gentlemen’, though.

The wait-staff were women of a type. Busty, leggy, barely dressed and very young. If any of them was older than nineteen then I was the Tsar of Russia.

I wondered how many of them were even eighteen.

For a few seconds I debated short-cutting this whole thing by making a call to the cops and Child Protection Services. Maybe the press, too. Blow it open. Pedophilia is not a popular crime, not for the common guy on the street. People will sometimes look the other way if politicians or white collar criminals run money scams, or take kick-backs, but when it comes to sex with kids, my fellow citizens have a very admirable tendency toward pitchforks and torches. Look what happened with Penn State. Look what’s happening with all those priests.

But what could I prove?

I mean, right here, right now, what could I prove? That there are possibly underage girls showing their breasts and serving drinks? The news might like that, but I doubted I could get a warrant happening.

And if Bambi was here, then it might encourage the bad guys to dispose of any evidence. That girl was evidence.

So I drifted through the place and pretended to be a part of the debauch. I obtained a drink as protective coloration. I exchanged a few words with other ‘members’. We talked sports, we talked politics. We talked stocks and investments.

Nobody mentioned Moloch. Nobody mentioned dead girls.

I noticed that nobody used names. They didn’t offer or ask names.

There was a small stage at the far end of the cavernous main room. When I’d come in, a redhead was beginning a veil dance. She discarded about a dozen of them until she was stark naked. There was some mild applause and she gathered up the gossamer scraps and trotted lightly off. Then the lights changed and I saw a lot of the men shift their attention more seriously to the stage. Two women came out. Twins with masses of blond hair. They wore stylized bullfighter costumes. Then a pair of very large Latinos came out, both of them wearing bull horns. A small band began playing dramatic bullfight music, and the foursome launched into a variation of the paso doble. But instead of the man acting as bullfighter and the woman, with her swirling skirts, acting as his cape, the men were the bulls and the women the toreadors. They were all pretty good dancers and for a moment I thought that this was a surprising bit of real art in this place. But then the horns of the bulls caught on pieces of the women’s costumes. With each lunge and twist the clothing was torn away, gradually revealing a lot of flesh and turning the women from bullfighters to helpless victims. The bullish men began stripping away sections of their costumes, particularly their pants. I saw where this was going and turned away. I like sex as much as the next four guys, but the theme of this had rolled down hill into a presentation of female defeat and use. I wanted no part of that.

There was a wooden apron that ran around the outside of the main room, with several hallways and doors leading off from there. As the action onstage grew more heated and the club’s members became more focused upon it, I faded to the back and began looking for a door I could open.

Movement to my left made me pause and I saw one of the men get up and walk toward the back of the big room. He threw a few glances over his shoulder at the increasingly X-rated action on stage, but I got the impression he was leaving. He didn’t head for the door, though. Instead he made for a hallway that cut off out of sight on the far corner. A few seconds later another man followed. And another.

It wasn’t an exodus. Only a small percentage of the customers vanished down that hallway. The rest were staring with total attention at the sweaty spectacle on the stage. The timing of it all seemed odd to me. That many guys couldn’t need to use the bathroom at the same time; an assumption supported by the fact that the men didn’t return. As I moseyed nonchalantly in that direction I could see that there was another guard just inside the mouth of the hallway, and beyond him was a door with the same key-swipe station as outside.

If I had spider sense it would have been tingling.

I watched a couple of guys to see what the routine was. They approached the hall, flashed something to the guard, then swiped their keycard and passed through the locked door. It took me three or four times before I realized that all they were showing was their red cards. Nice.

I waited for a moment when no one else was heading that way and I stepped into the hallway, flashed my red card, got a terse nod from the guard, swiped my card, and stepped through the doorway.

That easy.

As soon as I was inside I met a second security guard. He was even bigger than the Godzilla at the front door. Where do they get these guys? Thugs’R’Us?

He smiled at me. “Good evening, brother.”

Since I didn’t know what else to say, I returned his smile as I walked over to him. “Am I late? Have they started yet?”

He frowned and looked at his watch. “Uh… no, brother, it doesn’t start for another—.”

He stopped talking when I screwed the barrel of my Glock into his ear.

People tend to do that.

“Be smart,” I told him.

He froze into a statue, eyes wide, sweat bursting from the pores on his face.

“Where’s the girl?” I asked. I kept my voice low and level, letting the gun do all of my shouting for me.

I had no idea if he knew anything about anything, but sometimes you go on balls and instinct and a flip of a coin. Most of the times you waste your time. Once in a while though…

“She’s still upstairs,” he said.

I pressed the barrel harder against him. “Is she alive?”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Her fairy godfather. Answer the fucking question.”

He hedged. “Yes,” he said. But there was too much uncertainty in his voice. “They’re getting her ready.”

It was a simple statement that in any other circumstances might have meant something relatively innocent. But it filled my mind with terrible images and awful potential.

“How many are up there?”

His eyes shifted away and I knew he was about to lie to me. Before he could push us both out onto a ledge, I leaned close and whispered. “I don’t mind blowing your head off, slick. You have one chance to walk out of this, but you’re on a short fuse here.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “God’s honest truth. I only came on shift twenty minutes ago and some of them were already up there. Only about a dozen members have checked in.”

A dozen was the number of men I’d seen leaving the action outside.

I moved in front of him and put the barrel under his chin. I wanted to see his eyes better when I asked the next question.

“Do you know what they’re going to do to her?”

His mouth opened but it made a lot of shapes before he finally spoke, trying on different answers, seeing if any of them fit well enough.

“I’m just a grunt, man,” he said at last. “I just work the door.”

I leaned close to him and took his scent, sniffing at his face and chest the way a dog would. The gun stayed in place as I sniffed and I could see the total confusion on his face. He must have thought I was some nutcase. Sniffing like a dog.

I smelled fear on him. I smelled booze and tobacco and hashish. I smelled sweat and sex and blood.

And I smelled Bambi.

Not her blood scent.

Her living scent. The subtle perfume of hormones and skin oils and glands. The scent I’d picked up at her apartment.

He’d been close enough to her to get that scent on his clothes.

No blood, though.

No blood.

It was the only reason I didn’t kill him right there and then.

But it was a damn close decision.

Instead I kneed him in the nuts as hard as I could. His eyes bulged, his mouth puckered into a tiny Oh and he caved forward, cupping his balls. As he bent down over the pain, I clubbed him on the back of the neck, right where the spine enters the skull. It jerks the brain stem and short-circuits the nerve conduction. In the movies James Bond chops a guy there and the man goes out and wakes up ten minutes later with a headache. I’m not James Bond and this wasn’t the movies. He dropped like he’d been pole-axed, and when he woke up — maybe half an hour from now — he’d puke, he’d be dizzy and dazed, and he’d probably have neck problems for years.

Fuck it.

Behind me the door clicked as someone else used their keycard. I lunged toward a set of light switches and slapped them down just as the door opened. A man-shape filled the doorway, pausing in confusion at the unexpected darkness. I grabbed a fistful of his tie and jerked him into the hall, then kicked the door shut. The guy was a businessman in a nice wool suit. About my age, a little bigger, a whole lot richer.

I punched him in the throat.

He dropped, gagging and coughing, clawing at his neck.

The security guard said, “Hey!”

That was all I allowed him to say. I grabbed him by the tie and jerked that as tight as a noose while putting my foot as far through his nutsack as I could manage.

He said, “Oooooof,” in a high, squeaky voice. I used the necktie to pull him into the hallway. I took a one-second look to see if anyone in the main hall noticed any of this, but both couples onstage were going at it loud and weird, and the band’s speakers were cranked all the way up to eleven. No one saw shit.

I slammed the door, pivoted and kicked the key-swipe station off the wall.

The businessman was thrashing around on the floor trying to breathe. The security guy was on his knees, eyes popped nearly out of his head, face purple. I gave him a little bit of a shuffle side-thrust and he flopped back into bad dreams. Then I turned and kicked the businessman in the jewels and in the face. He groaned, rolled over and passed out.

It was suddenly very quiet in the hallway.

I was doing some real damage here and a small splinter of my mind was watching, aghast. The rest of me was remembering the faceless faces of the sixteen dead women, and the boy who’d been stripped of his life and nailed to a wall. And remembering the smell of Bambi, still alive, on the one guard’s clothes.

So, yeah, sure, compassion and all that. But not now and not for these guys. They were lucky I hadn’t wolfed out and really gone to town on them, and believe me that was a very strong temptation.

I paused to listen. If anyone upstairs heard the commotion they weren’t reacting. There was music drifting down the stairs. Drums and some kind of pipes. Very tribal. Voices, too. Some kind of chanting.

Ever since I spoke with Jonatha Corbiel-Newton my overactive brain had been conjuring a series of ugly pictures of what was going on here at Club Dante. I suppose the most dominant one was of frat boys going through some bullshit pseudo-ancient ritual before gang-banging Bambi and carving her skin off, all in some crazy belief that Moloch — fallen angel, demon or half-ass ancient god — was going to make them rich.

I shoved the businessman against the door and then dragged the unconscious guards over. That was more than a quarter ton of dead weight. If anyone tried to get the door open they could manage it, but not in the next five minutes.

Better for them if they didn’t.

Then I spun around and ran up the stairs.

I took the stairs two at a time, fast but quiet, thinking to myself, Hold on, kid. Hold on.

There was one more door at the top and one more key-swipe. I chopped the card down through it and then made myself slow down. I eased the door open and slipped quietly inside. The chamber was big, as wide as downstairs though with fifteen-foot high ceilings. Lights in recessed alcoves provided minimal illumination, but overall the room was dark. Shadows lay draped across everything. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment to goose along my night vision.

When I opened them I saw that there were at least twenty men in the room. Most of them were clustered around an open cabinet as one of the staff handed out robes of dark red silk. The men were stripping out of their expensive suits and then pulling the robes on over their naked skin. The expectation of what was about to happen must have been electric because some of the guys had hard-ons. I didn’t need to see that.

Music blared from at least a dozen speakers mounted high on the walls. It was the tribal stuff I’d heard downstairs, and the chanting was actually part of it. The guys here weren’t chanting. No idea what language the chant was in. Not Latin. Not anything I’d ever heard.

I faded into deep shadows thrown by a tall wooden carving. When I glanced up at it I was surprised to see that it was a bull. Kind of. The body was human, but the shoulders were massively overdeveloped and the head was that of a massive bull with long horns. I glanced around to see that there were other statues like this one. Not exactly like it, and some made out of stone or metal, but all of a gigantic bull-headed man. A minotaur? I wasn’t sure. My knowledge of mythology was pretty thin.

Another of the bull statures dominated the center of the chamber. At first I thought it was made of polished brass, but the more I stared at it the more I realized that it was gold. Maybe it was gold paint or gold plate, but somehow I got the impression that there was a serious amount of actual gold there.

And in a strange way it fit with the whole Moloch vibe. A demon who was the treasurer of hell. A creature who the ancient Ammonites and Phoenicians believed would guide certain men toward wealth. Would men like these — the financial kings of this city — have a false idol, one painted with sham gold?

No, I didn’t think so.

Somehow that made me a little more afraid.

This was looking a lot less like a frat stunt that got too serious and more like an actual cult. Or, I guess… a religion.

Did people really believe in something like this? Could they?

I mean… a cult that required human sacrifices wasn’t something you simply joined. Every man here risked life imprisonment or death row. At the very least this was felony murder, kidnapping, conspiracy, and a laundry list of capital crimes. I don’t care what kind of big-ticket lawyer they trotted out, everyone even remotely attached to this would go down for the hardest of hard falls.

And yet here they were, putting on robes, waving their chubbys around as they got ready to commit another murder.

What was the payoff that made this kind of risk worth it?

I mean… how could one member of the club ever sell this kind of thing to a friend?

Shit.

The thing that really chilled my blood, though, was the art on the walls. Spaced at regular intervals around the room were two-by-three foot posters in wooden frames. Women’s faces. All very young, all very pretty. Each of them looked absolutely terrified, some looked like they were in terrible agony when the photos were taken.

I counted them.

There were sixteen pictures. And empty frames for another ten.

I could only see a couple of the faces — and they were strangers, but I’m pretty sure I’d seen them before, but in pictures I’d seen none of them had their skin. Were these trophy shots, taken during rape or torture? Or at the moment of their deaths?

The wolf began to growl, low and with dark intent, deep inside my brain.

One man, a very tall, thin guy with prematurely white hair, kept glancing toward the door through which I’d entered and then down at his watch. He was probably wondering where the rest of his fellow worshippers were.

My time was running out. Bambi’s, too.

So where was…?

Suddenly a curtain in the back of the chamber opened and two burly guards came out, supporting Bambi between them. She was dressed in a little tunic that was made from the sheerest of fabrics and belted by a gold sash. The girl was able to walk, but even from across the room I could see that she was totally whacked out. Drugged on something. She seemed to float along with the men, her mouth slack, eyes glazed.

The gathered men all turned and began applauding. Some of them were still naked. They beamed smiles at her and gave her a thunderous great ovation, pounding their hands together with enthusiasm that was clearly genuine. One of them started a chant and within seconds the others joined in. Someone cut the tribal music and chants to allow this new mantra to dominate the room.

No real surprise what they chanted.

“Moloch… Moloch… Moloch…”

Balls.

But they were chanting like frat boys. “Moe-lock… Moe-lock…”

Made it sound a little silly, but for all that it was still scary as shit.

The man with the white hair nodded to the guards and they half-led, half-pushed Bambi up a short flight of steps in front of the golden statue. Then they used red silk scarves to tie her wrists and ankles to small rings set into the statue.

The gathered men applauded this, too. They were a happy bunch. They laughed and elbowed each other and hurried to pull on their robes.

White-hair looked at his watch again and spoke to one of the guards, nodding toward the door as he did so. The guard immediately began heading toward the door.

My time was up. If the guard went downstairs he’d see the three guys I’d trashed.

What choice did I have?

I stepped out of the shadows and pointed the gun at the center of the crowd. As I did so I yelled to the whole crowd, very loud and very clearly.

“Shut the fuck up.”

They did.

They actually froze in place, their chant snapped off like someone had hit a switch, leaving their mouths hanging open. White-hair pointed a finger at me.

“Who the fuck are you?”

It was a reasonable question.

Wasn’t one I wanted to answer, though.

“Cut the girl down,” I said.

They didn’t. They also didn’t move or speak. The whole bunch of them simply stood there and stared at me. So I swung my gun toward White-hair, aiming it at his face.

“Cut her down,” I repeated. “Right now.”

He didn’t even bother looking at the gun. Instead he looked at me and a slow smile formed on his face.

Smiles are not what you want to see when you have someone in your sights. You want to see fear and a cooperation born from a desire for self-preservation.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“The fuck does that matter to you?”

“You come in here, waving a gun, disrupting our religious services — we should at least know who you are and why you’re here.”

“I’m just here for the girl,” I told him. “I’m taking her out of here and I’ll blow a hole in anyone who so much as blinks.”

The rude son of a bitch actually blinked. Deliberately and repeatedly. Smiling all the time.

“You’re not a policeman,” he said.

“I could be.”

He shook his head. “We own the police.”

Ah.

“And you’re not FBI.”

“You own them, too?”

Another shake. “No…but they’re too smart to show up alone.”

“Now that’s just mean,” I said.

He chuckled. So did I. The other guys didn’t laugh, though there were a few tentative smiles. Most of them were still trying to figure out what was going on. Me, too. Only White-hair seemed to be comfortable with the way things were falling out. I didn’t find that comforting.

I cut a look at Bambi. She was still on her feet, but the glazed look in her eyes was intensifying. I wondered if they shot her up with something just before bringing her out. It looked like the drug was still hitting her system. She tugged at her bonds but instead of being alarmed at being restrained she seemed only mildly surprised.

“Look, chief,” I said to White-hair, “let’s cut the shit. Cut the girl down now.”

“Or—?”

“I thought we covered that. I shoot you and take her anyway.”

He nodded at my gun. “That’s a Glock 17 with an optional floor plate, which gives you nineteen rounds instead of the standard seventeen. That’s nineteen shots max and there are more than twenty of us, not counting the guards. Even if you dropped one man with each bullet — and I think we can both agree that’s unlikely — the rest of us will drag you down.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely,” he said.

“You won’t live to see it happen.”

“I don’t care.”

He looked like he genuinely didn’t.

“Bet you’ll feel different when your brains are on the wall.”

He shook his head. “If I die then I ascend to the golden halls of Lord Moloch where I will sit on a jeweled throne and have a thousand slaves bowing at my feet.”

“Or, you’d be worm meat in a box.”

One of the security guards chose that moment to go for his gun. He was to my right and probably thought he had a reach chance.

I pivoted and shot him in the chest. I don’t care how big your pecs are or how much Dianabol you take, a nine millimeter slug is going to punch your ticket. The round went in beside his sternum and punched its way out through a shoulder bone, taking pieces of his heart with it. Blood sprayed some of the gathered men.

The guard dropped right there and then.

The crowd looked down at the blood on their clothes and skin, and immediately began rubbing at it. I thought they were freaking out and trying to rub it off. But that wasn’t it. They were smearing it into their skin, smiling as they did so, laughing as if they were in ecstasy.

The rest of the crowd…cheered.

The second guard was also cheering as he pulled his gun. He was standing five feet from Bambi, and I swung around and put one into his chest and a second through the bridge of his nose. The back of his head exploded, splattering the girl and the golden statue with brain tissue and blood.

The crowd began yelling, laughing, applauding.

I turned back to White-hair, who was clapping his hands together with slow irony.

Around us the cheers were turning into a new chant of Moloch…Moloch.

White-hair said, “Do you have any idea what’s happening here? Do you have any idea what you’ve stepped into? What you’ve interrupted?”

“Some,” I said. “Bunch of dickheads making human sacrifices to an ancient god in the hopes of getting some divine assistance with your stock portfolios.”

He beamed at me. “That’s wonderful. Oversimplified and a little naïve, but wonderful.”

“So, fill in the blanks,” I suggested.

“Why? Are you hoping to join us?”

“I don’t know. Let me hear the recruitment speech.”

He spread his arms and turned toward the golden statue. “You said it, friend. We’re praying to the god Moloch. We sacrifice to him as man was instructed to do — a sacrifice of the children, made in blood and flesh and flame. In return he guides us and protects us and fills our pockets with gold.”

“Uh huh. Tell me, sport,” I said, “how many of those sacrifices are your own kids?”

He snorted. “Our own? Do we look crazy?”

“Pretty much.”

He glanced around. “Okay, sure, in the moment, but you came in at the wrong part of the show. If you’d been a little patient you’d have seen the main attraction.”

“Which is what, you going all Hannibal Lecter on a teenager girl who can’t defend herself? Excuse me but that’s hardly a—”

“No,” he said. “The life or death of that worthless slut is nothing. You’re a man, you should understand that. She’s a cow, a piece of meat. If you’re here looking for her then you must know her history. A whore and a junkie whose life would never have mattered. If we hadn’t given her the chance to matter, then she’d have wound up in a crack house giving two dollar blow jobs while marking time until disease and a cirrhotic liver took her down to the hell that is surely waiting for her.”

“Oh, right, and you guys are the Salvation Army. Skinning her alive is the best way to save her soul.”

“Her soul doesn’t matter,” he said, his smile flickering a bit. “She is a means to an end. Our god is appeased only through the offering of living flesh, and the only flesh that matters is that of the young. That is the pathway to glory. It is through such offerings that every man here — every devout believer in the majesty of Moloch — has become wealthy beyond his dreams.” He scowled at me for a moment and shook his head. “You probably can’t grasp this. You put on an expensive shirt and think that’s going to make you look rich? You stink of poverty, of cheapness, of weakness, so this might all be beyond you.”

“Maybe not.”

He gave another shrug. “But we were all born to money. We deserve the good things we have. It’s in our blood, in our breeding. We are the elite of this world.”

The men all applauded this. Some of them gave each other high-fives.

“It is our right to take what we want,” White-hair continued.

“Even if it means killing the innocent?”

He spat on the floor between us. “Innocent? That’s a bullshit word and it doesn’t mean a fucking thing. That girl and everyone like her is a parasite. It’s because of people like her that our whole country is on the edge of economic collapse. She’s a leech on the system, and who pays for her free food and medical care? Us! The very ones who actually make the money and whose skill and genius made America great in the first place. It’s people like her — and you — who want to take it from us.”

“Seriously,” I said, “you want to turn this into a political rant? Now? With a gun in your face and your guards’ brains on your shoes? That’s where you’re going with this?”

He stopped and cocked his head as if listening to a replay of his own words. Then he sighed.

“Sorry,” he said. “I got caught up in the moment.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Where were we?”

“The girl. You were about to come to your fucking senses and let her go.”

“Ah,” he said, gesturing to a small table near the golden statue on which were various knives and scalpels. “No. I think I was going to invite you to watch our god accept the sacrifice of flesh and blood.”

“I’m pretty sure we weren’t going there.”

Behind me fists began pounding on the door. They must have broken through into the hall downstairs. My time was up. His eyes flicked to the door and back to me, and his smile returned, brighter and broader than ever.

“Playtime’s over,” he said.

I shifted around to stand between Bambi and the crowd. White-hair turned with me, so I edged closer to him so he could get a better look at the barrel of my gun.

“You’re right,” I said. “We’re done fucking around. I want you and all of your asshole buddies down on the floor, hands behind your heads, fingers laced. Last man done gets a bullet in the head.”

Nobody moved. All the chanting died away and the room fell into silence except for the fists pounding on the door.

Bambi stirred and moaned.

White-hair smiled.

Behind me, Bambi suddenly screamed.

I whirled, bringing the gun up, expecting to see a guard or one of the men trying something fancy, maybe sneaking up behind me.

I wish that’s what it was.

But it wasn’t.

When I’d shot the second guard his blood had splattered all over the statue. As I turned I saw that almost all of it was gone.

It hadn’t dripped or rolled off.

As I watched in absolutely stunned horror I saw the blood vanish as if it were being absorbed, pulled into the skin of the golden statue. Bambi screamed and screamed. Not because the blood was vanishing…but because the statue was moving.

Moving.

Moloch, the bull-headed god.

Moving.

Flexing its massive limbs, muscles rippling beneath a skin that glistened like polished gold but which was becoming real, tangible flesh. Still golden, but pulsing with life. Wherever the blood had touched it, the statue’s surface became alive.

Behind me I heard White-hair say, “Behold the glory of Moloch. Behold the demon-god made flesh through a sacrifice of blood. Behold your death.”

Bambi screamed and screamed.

And I screamed, too.

My mind reeled just as my feet staggered backward. This was impossible. This wasn’t some fucked up frat stunt…these men had actually conjured a monster, a demon, from the darkness of the ancient world. It was real.

It was real.

The giant bull head was still immobile, but the blood-spattered chest expanded and the muscles of its abdomen rippled. Then from the open mouth of the statue an impossibly long tongue lolled out, uncoiling like a pale serpent until the tip of it touched Bambi’s shoulder. Her whole body was speckled with blood, and the obscene tongue licked it up, drop by drop, hooking gobbets of meat and curling them back into that golden mouth.

The face — the solid metal mask of its face—moved. Jaws opened and eyes blinked once and again, losing the blank stare of a statue and flashing with hideous life. Its lips curled into a sneer that was part sensual delight in the taste of human blood and part in cruel expectation of a greater feast to come.

The gathered men once more began their chant.

“Moloch…Moloch…Moloch…”

White-hair laughed like a madman as the demon-god drew in a massive lungful of air and then let loose with a roar that was unlike anything I could ever imagine. It was so loud that it knocked me backward. I lost the gun and clapped my hands to my ears. Blood burst from my nose. I landed hard on the floor as the sound smashed me like a fist.

Then it stopped.

I gagged and rolled over onto hands and knees, vomiting onto the hardwood.

“Moloch…Moloch…Moloch…”

My ears were so badly damaged that the chant sounded like it came from the bottom of a deep well.

“Moloch…Moloch…Moloch…”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw White-face bend down to pick up my pistol. Beyond him the men in robes were crowding the table on which the knives were displayed. Bright steel seemed to sprout from every hand. There was a weird sound like bending metal as the demon-god Moloch began to move its massive limbs.

Bambi’s screams were rising to the ultrasonic as the full horror of what was happening pushed through the protective haze of the drugs. Somewhere deep within that scream I could hear the lost sea-gull cry of a little girl. The desperate and utterly hopeless shriek of a child who is being used and used and who knows that no one will ever, could ever come to save her. It was the most horrible sound I’d ever heard. It was the sound of innocence being destroyed.

I think that’s what did it.

Not the threat of the gun.

Not the men with their knives or the pounding of guards’ fists on the door.

Not even the first earth-shaking footfall of the demon-god.

It was the sound of the lost child within the woman’s scream.

It was primal.

Feral.

And in my mind, the wolf heard the scream and he — it — howled back in unbridled fury. The young of the pack were in danger, and the strongest of the pack had to answer. Had to respond.

Had to fight.

I transformed without knowing I was going to do it.

No…that’s wrong. I transformed without resistance. All of me — man and wolf—wanted this. All of me needed this.

On one side of a broken second I was a man, smashed to the ground, broken and lost; and on the other side of that second I was the werewolf.

I rose from the floor just as White-hair raised the gun.

I saw the surprise in his eyes. The shock.

The fear.

The doubt.

Even with all of that he pulled the trigger.

Again and again. Each bullet found its target. In my chest. In my heart.

And it did him no damn good at all.

I leaped into the air, closing the fifteen foot distance between us in the space between his third and fourth shot. I took him with my front paws, claws extended. He exploded around me. Arms and legs and head.

His blood was a cloud of red mist that I flew through as I rushed toward the other men.

They had their knives.

They tried.

They tried.

But they might as well have turned their knives on themselves.

I filled the room with screams. Theirs. Bambi’s. Mine.

They died around me. Beneath me. In me.

The room shook and I wheeled amid red carnage as the demon-god came toward me. Bambi was still tethered to him, tied wrist and ankle with red scarves. As he reached for me with one massive hand he reached for her with the other.

Most of him was flesh.

Some of him was still metal.

Whatever process of transformation was necessary for him to come from whatever hell he lived into the world of flesh and blood, it was not completed. Maybe there hadn’t been enough of the guards’ blood. Or maybe adult male blood was not enough. Maybe Moloch really needed the blood of a child sacrifice to gain his full power. Maybe that’s why he reached for her, to feed his need, to create the bridge between his world and ours.

Maybe.

Maybe.

But who gives a fuck?

Bambi was still alive. And I was never more alive than I was in that moment. Fully the wolf. Without hesitation or resistance on my part. A monster, and reveling in that.

On the walls all around me were framed posters of women who had died. I could feel their eyes watching me. I looked at their faces. Recorded every image with the clarity of mind that is a gift of the wolf. Every face, every line, every curve, every scar and blemish. Sixteen beautiful girls, each of whom had been torn apart and had their blood and flesh fed to a monster.

An actual monster.

My ancestors, the Benandanti, fought evil. They fought monsters and demons. Until now I thought evil was a human thing. Entirely human. I thought the whole ‘fighting monsters’ thing was some kind of metaphor, a grandiose way of describing struggles with human corruption.

Moloch, by his fact, by his presence, by his reality, changed all of that. It made the unreal real.

It also made the stuff of nightmares real.

Demon-gods.

Fallen angels.

Blood sacrifices to conjure something impossible.

Gold made flesh.

Maybe being flesh was the only way Moloch could exist in this world. I don’t know, I’m not a mystic, I don’t do metaphysical questions. All I know is that if Moloch was flesh — or even partly flesh — then it meant that he belonged to this world. And this world has rules.

One of which is that all flesh is vulnerable.

With a howl as loud as the roar of the demon-god, I threw myself at Moloch, slashing at him with my claws.

The golden flesh was tough.

Damn tough.

But flesh is flesh.

I had claws as sharp as razors. I had all of the muscle given to me by whatever power or gene or curse created my family’s bloodline.

I had the rage of a werewolf. A Benandanti.

A hound of God.

And I laid into that evil son of a bitch with everything I had.

Golden flesh opened as I raked him back and forth.

Red-gold blood splashed out, striking Bambi, who screamed and screamed. Hitting me in the face, in the mouth. I snarled and drank the blood down as I slashed.

Moloch roared in sudden pain and his surprise was awesome to see.

Maybe in all of his thousands of years of existence he’d never felt pain. Maybe he thought that pain was beyond him, that he was immune to it.

But he chose to be flesh. That’s what he wanted from his worshippers. They killed so many girls to give him that gift.

And I used it against him.

I tore at him. I bit into his stomach and pulled out organs and meat. I covered the floor and the walls with the blood of a fallen angel.

It burned my mouth and throat.

I drank it anyway.

When the guards knocked down the door they found shattered pieces of a statue standing in a lake of molten gold. Bambi crouched on a table that had once been covered with knives. She hunkered down, arms wrapped around her head, unwilling and unable to witness this.

I stood in the center, in the hollow of what had been the chest of the bull-god, a golden lump of heart-shaped meat in my hands, muzzle buried in it, feasting.

The guards saw this. They pointed guns at me.

I raised my head and growled at them.

They dropped their guns and fled.

Later…

I’m not sure how much later.

I dropped Bambi at the E.R. of the closest hospital. I walked her in. She was catatonic. She had some minor burns from drops of molten gold. She couldn’t speak, and the drugs were still in her system. I left her with nurses who tried to get me to tell them who she was, who I was, what had happened.

I walked away and found my car and drove back to my office.

That was six hours ago.

I showered in the tiny bathroom, then took the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle's 23-Year-Old bourbon back to my desk, poured a big glass, and drank it slowly. When it was gone I refilled it. And refilled it again.

Around midnight I fished for the card I’d found on my floor and laid it on my desk blotter.

How lucky did I feel?

Hard to say.

Hard to really know what to think.

I’d fought something that shouldn’t exist. On the other hand, to most people I was something that shouldn’t exist. Hang both of those on the wall and look at them.

Moloch.

Jesus.

But with all of that, there was something that hung burning in my mind.

After I’d let the wolf out, I’d looked at the faces of the sixteen murdered women. Those images were indelibly recorded in my mind. Every single detail. They were all strangers, women I’d only ever seen as skinned meat.

Except.

There was one face, one woman. A little more beautiful than all the others.

It was the kind of face that you read about. The kind of face that might have looked down at you from a movie screen if she’d been allowed to live, to grow up, to become what she’d wanted to be. Pale skin with pores so small it looked like she was carved out of marble; with good bones and full lips and only a single visible flaw. If you could call it a flaw. A small crescent-shaped scar on her cheek near the left corner of her mouth.

I thought about that face. It had been on a poster, screaming down at me, dying.

Maybe the cops would be able to match it against one of the sixteen bodies in morgues across the country. That scar, though, wouldn’t be there. It had been stolen with her skin.

But I’d seen it.

Yeah, I’d seen that scar.

I reached out and touched the Limbus card. I traced each digit of the phone number.

If I called it, I wondered who would answer.

I wondered if anyone would answer.

I sipped some more of my bourbon and wondered about a lot of things.

My cell phone lay on the blotter next to the card. I looked at it.

I poured myself another drink.

And another.