Nocturnal

Another Day, Another Body

Pookie went through the motions. Part of his brain paid close attention to details. Another part directed the other cops, sending uniforms where they needed to go to collect information. And yet another part was lost in the bizarreness of his partner, of what this all meant.

Pookie was overweight, out of shape and slow, but he wasn’t that slow. He’d been maybe two blocks behind Bryan. Pookie had turned the corner just in time to see Jay Parlar’s flaming body sail into the night air. Bryan was down on the sidewalk when the kid’s body smashed into the van. No way Bryan could have thrown the kid off that roof.

Pookie had closed in, his chest burning, his stomach heaving — he really had to do something about getting back into shape — and then, Bryan’s crazy leap. To leap that high, maybe Bryan had jumped up, then pushed off the side of the van or the van’s door handle, like those parkour guys who could run up the side of a building. Bryan had been far away, it had been dark save for the streetlights, the boy had been on fire … plenty of variables to play tricks with what Pookie had seen.

Because a man couldn’t jump eight feet straight up.

Bryan’s feet had cleared the van roof. He had dropped down lightly, one black Nike on either side of the facedown, burning kid. Bryan had whipped off his jacket and used it to smother the flames. He’d been helping the boy.

But when Bryan had rolled the kid over, everything changed. Pookie knew — he knew — that if he hadn’t gotten there when he had, Bryan would have put a bullet through Jay Parlar’s brain.

The crime-scene investigations team was already finished with their work. According to them, Jay would have died even if he hadn’t been set on fire and tossed off a four-story building. The boy had been stabbed while still up on the roof, severing an artery — he never had a chance.

When the morgue van took the body away, Pookie had gone up to the roof to see things for himself. There, he’d found symbols written in Jay Parlar’s blood.

The same symbols they’d found written in Oscar Woody’s blood.

Back down on the street, Pookie found Bryan sitting in the back of an ambulance, a paramedic examining his head. He looked dazed. No one gave that a second thought, though — the other cops automatically wrote it off as a natural reaction to seeing a burning kid thrown off a building.

Pookie scratched the stubble on his cheek as he stared at his partner. He’d tried hard to rationalize all of this crap, tried to come up with a normal explanation, but it was time to accept what he’d witnessed with his own eyes.

The dreams were for real.

It was no trick, no gimmick. Was Bryan psychic? Pookie wasn’t ready to believe that just yet, but after tonight he couldn’t rule it out. He’d been in Bryan’s apartment when Bryan dreamed about Jay Parlar. No evildoer had slipped in and whispered in Bryan’s ear. There were no microphones in the wall, no electrodes in the pillow. Bryan had dreamed a kid was in danger. Then, he’d shot out of the apartment, tried to save that kid just as any cop would do. An abnormal method of discovery, but a normal reaction.

As fucked up as it was, Pookie felt infinitely better. Bryan had not killed Jay Parlar — if he hadn’t killed Jay, then he probably hadn’t killed Oscar Woody. Probably. Bryan had no alibi for Oscar. He could have killed Oscar and someone else could have killed Jay.

Which would mean, what? That Bryan had accomplices? That maybe he was working with other killers? Even if that was true, why would he murder those kids? Pookie spent at least fifty hours a week with Bryan. Before last night, Bryan clearly hadn’t know a thing about Oscar Woody or Jay Parlar or BoyCo. There was no motive.

Fuck. None of this made any sense.

Patrol officers were already in buildings on both sides of the street, knocking on apartment doors, looking for witnesses. Pookie didn’t have any hope of finding someone who had been up at three A.M. and had seen the deal go down.

There were no witnesses.

Wait … that wasn’t right — there was one person who had seen Jay Parlar up on that roof.

Bryan had. In his dreams.

Pookie walked to the ambulance. The paramedic was just finishing up, wiping down the cut on Bryan’s forehead. Bryan’s black clothes helped hide the fact that he’d bled like a stuck pig, even left a trail of droplets all the way from his apartment to here.

Pookie leaned in and looked at the sutured wound. “Hey, is that just three stitches?”

The paramedic nodded. “Yeah. Not too bad.”

“Three stitches for all that blood? Bryan, what are you, a hemophiliac?”

Bryan shrugged.

“I asked him the same thing,” the paramedic said. “Seemed like a lot of blood, but it appears to be clotting normally. No problems. Maybe it was from his sprinting here, I’m not sure. Scalp wounds always bleed like hell, though. He’s fine.”

“Thanks,” Pookie said. “Can you give us a minute?”

The paramedic nodded and walked off.

Pookie sat next to his partner in the back of the ambulance.

“Bri-Bri, you good?”

Bryan shook his head. “Far from it. Panos and Moses are next if they’re not dead already. You put out a call to have them picked up?”

Pookie nodded. “Ball-Puller Boyd already tried the Panos place, but Alex wasn’t home. Susie doesn’t know where he is.”

“Shocker,” Bryan said.

“I know, right? A patrol car is at Issac Moses’s place, but he’s also nowhere to be seen. I called a BOLO for both of them.”

Bryan nodded and seemed to relax. The call to Be On the Look-Out went out not only department-wide, but across the Bay Area. Someone would find those kids and bring them in.

Pookie took in a slow breath. He had to ask the hard question. Asking it somehow made all of this real, and he wished to God it wasn’t real, but he couldn’t beat around the bush any longer.

“Okay, Bryan, spill it — tell me what you saw.”

Bryan pointed out the ambulance’s open back doors toward the ruined white van. “I turned the corner, started running down Geary, and—”

“No, not that what you saw. In the dream. Tell me what you saw in the dream.”

Bryan looked down — not at Pookie, not at the floor, just down. When he spoke, it was in little more than a whisper. “I saw Parlar. He was walking. It was like I was looking down from above. Like I was tracking him … stalking him.”

“From above,” Pookie said. “Maybe, four stories above?”

Bryan looked at Pookie, then up to the apartment building’s roof. He nodded, understanding. “Yeah. Maybe four stories above. Only, it wasn’t me that saw him. It was and it wasn’t. I was on the roof, with this … other guy.”

“What did the other guy look like?”

Bryan paused. “I don’t remember.”

“Bri-Bri, you lie about as well as I do when I tell a woman I’ll call her in the morning. Start talking.”

Bryan reached up, his fingertips lightly touching the three tiny black stitches. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

“Dude, I’m already positive you’re crazy. So tell me what the guy looked like.”

Bryan looked down again. “He had a blanket over his shoulders, his head. From what I could make out, he … he looked like a snake.”

“What, you mean shifty? Like those fucking Italians?”

He shook his head. “No, I mean like a snake. Green skin and a pointy nose.”

Pookie stared at Bryan. Bryan continued to stare at the ground.

“Green skin,” Pookie said. “Pointy nose.”

Bryan nodded.

Pookie didn’t want to laugh, but he couldn’t stop a small one from slipping out. “Man, I’d love to see the lineup if we catch this guy. Will number three step forward? No, not the werewolf, the snake-man.”

“It was just a dream, okay? It’s not like I saw a snake-man in real life.”

“Okay, okay,” Pookie said. Bryan was taking this hard. Who wouldn’t? But Pookie still had to treat him like any other witness — walk him through the situation, rephrase questions and ask again, and so on. “So what do you think is going on, Terminator? Did you know these boys?”

“No.”

“Before we found Oscar Woody, had you ever heard of the Boys Company?”

“No.”

“Then how did you know someone was trying to kill Jay Parlar?”

Bryan sighed. He probably wanted to believe all of this even less than Pookie did. “I already told you, Pooks. In my dream I was stalking him. I wanted to kill him, just like I wanted to kill Oscar in that first dream, although I didn’t know who Oscar Woody was at the time.”

Pookie closed his eyes and rubbed his face. He had to start making the smart decisions. Bryan hadn’t killed Jay Parlar, fine, but there was no longer any question that — somehow — he was involved in these murders. Partner or no partner, he belonged in interrogation, getting grilled like any other suspect in a murder case. But Pookie just couldn’t do that to his friend. There had to be another angle here.

“Bri-Bri, you said there were others with you in the Jay Parlar dream. You said the same thing about the Oscar Woody dream, right?”

Bryan nodded.

“So do you think you could describe them to a sketch artist?”

Bryan thought for a second, then shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I can’t really visualize them, you know? It was just a hodgepodge of messed-up features.”

A young uniformed officer approached. Pookie slid out of the ambulance to meet him. “Officer Stuart Hood, good to see you. Your mom win that cook-off last month?”

“Took second,” Hood said. “I’ll tell her you asked.”

“Aw, she got robbed. You tell Rebecca she should have won the blue ribbon. And tell her to make me some more of those hazelnut cookies you brought in. Like little slices of heaven, those things.”

Hood smiled. “I’ll tell her. Turns out we have a woman who saw something suspicious, Inspector. Tiffany Hine, sixty-seven years old.”

“A witness at three A.M. in this part of town? Nice work, Officer Hood. I’m surprised you didn’t find a ring-tailed lemur first.”

Hood smiled, laughed a little. “I wouldn’t get too excited, Inspector.”

“Oh, you think this is a funny situation?” Pookie said. “This is high comedy to you?”

“If I’m sad and melancholy, is he going to suddenly spring back to life?”

“Melancholy? That’s a big word for you, isn’t it? Just tell me what Hine said.”

Hood bit his lip, trying to hide a smile. “She said she saw a werewolf take the boy.”

The last thing Pookie needed right now was a standup comic moonlighting as a cop. “Officer Hood, I’m really not in the mood for jokes, you get me?”

Hood shrugged. “I’m not joking. That’s what she said.”

“She said, a werewolf?”

“Well, she said the guy had a dog-face, anyway. That sounds like a werewolf to me. But Wolfie wasn’t alone, he had … a partner.” Hood’s chest jiggled from a suppressed laugh. “She said … she said it was a guy with … with … a snake-face.”

Pookie looked at Bryan, then back to Hood. “A snake-face? You’re sure?”

Hood nodded. He coughed, still trying to cover up his laughter. “Uh, Inspector Verde is en route. He said the case is his because of the symbols on the roof. He’s coming to take over the scene. Should I give him this crazy … excuse me, I mean this valuable witness?”

Polyester Rich. As soon as he arrived, Pookie and Bryan would be locked out of the case. If Pookie wanted answers, he had to get them now. “What’s Verde’s ETA?”

“He said fifteen minutes.”

“We’ll take the witness,” Pookie said. “Where is she?”

Hood pointed to the green apartment building across the street from the white van where Jay had died. “Apartment 215,” he said, then walked away.

Bryan stepped out of the ambulance. “We have a witness that saw a snake-face?”

Pookie nodded. “So it seems.”

That old excitement flashed in Bryan’s eyes, but only for a second. He looked down again. “Look, man, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m putting you in a really shitty spot. So here’s your out — if you say the word, I’ll go downtown and turn myself in. I’ll tell the chief all about my dreams and let her figure out what to do next. You want me to do that?”

It shocked Pookie how badly he wanted to say yes. Shocked him, and filled him with guilt. Bryan Clauser had saved his life. They were partners. They were friends. And, God help him, Pookie just flat-out believed that Bryan Clauser was innocent.

He looked to the green building across the street. Could the witness in there somehow validate what Bryan had seen in his dreams?

“Come on,” Pookie said. “I have to talk to this woman. You’re my partner, so you get to tag along.”

Bryan looked up, looked Pookie in the eyes. He nodded. They both knew that Pookie was putting his career on the line.

“Thanks,” Bryan said. “I mean it. Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me yet, Terminator. Maybe you and this Tiffany Hine both wind up in a straitjacket before sunrise. Polyester Rich will be here soon, so let’s make this quick. Who knows? You might actually get your monstery lineup after all.”