Zombie Pulp

1

When the phone rang I was sleeping like a body in a freezer, cool, dead, and easy. When it finally jarred me awake, I bolted upright, my heart pounding, my head full of spun cobwebs. How long it had been ringing I didn’t know. I seemed to remember dreaming about phones. Maybe for hours.

My hand fumbled it off its cradle. “Steel here,” I said into the receiver, my voice full of sand. “Make it good.”

“Vince? Where the hell you been? I been calling you all goddamn day.”

I knew the voice. Knew it well. It was everyone’s favorite homicide detective, Tommy Albert. Tommy and me went way back. Years ago, before I picked up my private cop’s license, I’d been on the force with him. He didn’t call me unless it was important.

“I’ve been sleeping, I guess. I like to do that sometimes.”

I looked at the clock. Christ. I’d been out for almost fourteen hours straight. Not surprising, really, when you took into account that for the past three weeks I’d been chasing an errant husband and his twenty-year old mistress throughout the tri-state area. And for those three weeks I bet I hadn’t slept more than three or fours hours a night. The entire case was a comedy of errors, a comedy with me as the lead clown. Not exactly duck soup but I’d brought the duo in and it had paid off in heavy green. Good or bad, it was how guys like me made our meat.

I cleared my throat. “What the hell’s so important? You know I gotta get all the beauty rest I can.”

“And then some,” he said. “I was about to send a couple uniforms over there, have them kick in the door and drag you over here.”

“I don’t think I’d like that.”

Tommy went on to tell me he’d been calling me just about every half-hour all day long. “It happened this morning,” he went on. “Our boy… surely you remember the one that decided his wrists would look better laid open with a razor? Yeah, well, guess what? Guess what happened this morning?”

“You remembered you were engaged to him?”

“Ha. No, and let’s keep that between us, shall we? No, I’m afraid our boy disappeared from the morgue.”

I was awake now. “What do you mean disappeared?”

“Just what I said.”

It hit me hard. Like a hammer to the skull. “You telling me those county ghouls lost him?”

“Yup. Either misplaced him or someone took him. Unless you think he might’ve wandered off on his own,” Tommy said. “But you gotta remember how sweet he was on you, Vince. Probably out dragging his dead ass to a florist, buying something special for you.”

The man we were talking about was named Quigg. And he was sweet on me like I was sweet on razor blades in my shorts. He hated me and I hated him and wasn’t the world a beautiful place to live?

But let me tell you about this guy.

It was a homicide case. Strictly something for the precinct boys, definitely not the province of a private dick like me. I got pulled into it when the sister of one of the victims hired me to do what the police weren’t doing: tracking down the killer. And, somehow, killer, doesn’t seem to really cut it here. Maybe a better word would be maniac. Our boy here, you see, was a cannibal. Yeah, he was killing ’em with a knife—post mortem knife it turned out—just as sharp as you please, slitting open their throats like the bellies of hogs and having himself a spot of cold lunch when they were down and out. I saw a few of the bodies. Tommy Albert showed me the crime scene photos of the others. It was enough to put you off red meat for life. The bodies were all the same—young women, throats slit, meat from their bellies and thighs cut free with a knife, throats and faces and wrists chewed-up. The bodies were generally drained of blood. Thing that we never did understand is why he cut the hearts out. No other organs, just the hearts. Maybe he was eating them. That was the general presumption. But even then, I didn’t believe it.

I’d been on the case a month when the eighth and final body in as many weeks turned up. I had narrowed down my cast of revelers to three men by then—one was a former mental patient, another just a big mean bastard with a history of sadism, and the third, a mild mannered guy who just happened to be a professor of anthropology of all things. It turned out that our boy was Quigg, the professor. I caught him in the act. I got there too late to save the girl’s life, but at least I stopped him from carving her up like the Christmas ham at grandma’s house.

I’ll be the first to admit that I worked him over pretty good before I called in Tommy and his boys. When the black and whites finally rolled in, Quigg was in need of some prolonged dental care. But the fact that this twisted, sick piece of shit was even breathing when the bulls slapped the bracelets on him was testament to my self-restraint. Given what he’d done, I should’ve made him the suck the end of my .45 like a 10 cent lollypop before I urged his brains out the back of his skull.

Anyway, Tommy’s boys took him away. His lawyer—some hot shot greaseball garbage-eater with all the morals of a child molester—tried the insanity plea, but Quigg was convicted and sent upstate. His first night there, he opened his wrists and the angels sighed.

And that’s all she wrote.

Or was it?

“Who the hell would spring a stiff?” I said.

Tommy said, “Who knows? But I’m just bringing you up to speed here. All that happened twelve hours ago, chum. It’s what’s happened since that’s yanking my chain.”

He dropped the bait and I bit.

And it was worse than I thought.

2

An hour later, after a hot cup of Joe and a hotter shower, I pulled on my rags and went uptown to the townhouse residence of the district attorney, Bobby Tanner. He was a good egg for a prosecutor. He’d hired me numerous times to do background checks on cases he was working on. We were tight. Bobby’s family had money like geese have feathers: he could’ve stuffed mattresses with it. Bobby had attended some ivy league college, but had decided to go into public service much to the chagrin of his people who wanted him to join some upscale whiteshoe firm on Fifth.

But that was the kind of boy Bobby was: honest, decent, principles so high you would’ve needed a ladder to climb over them. Problem was, Bobby didn’t have anything anymore.

Bobby was dead.

His living room was crawling with cops and coroner’s people. They were thick as eels swimming upstream. Tommy and I were standing over in the corner next to a bookshelf, smoking, not saying a hell of a lot. Bobby wasn’t just another stiff, he was our friend.

The condition of the body was eating at us… much the way someone else had been eating at Bobby. He’d been partially devoured, you see. Most of the flesh had been stripped from his face and throat. His belly had been ripped apart. His head had been opened like a can of soup and sucked clean. His left arm was missing beneath the elbow. This time, the killer hadn’t used any tools, the coroner informed us, he’d used teeth and nails.

“I know what you’re gonna say,” Tommy said to me, “but there can’t possibly be a connection between Quigg and this.”

“And why not?”

“Because he’s dead.”

“He’s also missing,” I pointed out.

“That don’t buy beans,” Tommy said.

And maybe it didn’t. I started thinking about Quigg. It was something I dearly wanted to put out of my head forever. But now it all came back like a bad rash. The same old questions that I never could answer, but ones that I knew were important. Somehow. “I’m still wondering about Quigg,” I said. “What did we really know about him?”

Tommy just stared at me. His was a big fellow, went an easy three-hundred plus, was built like something that could’ve pulled a beer wagon for a living. He wasn’t pretty. He was balding, his face a roadmap of Death Valley, a cigar butt shoved in the corner of his mouth. Maybe not campaign poster material, but effective as hell. Only reason he hadn’t brought in Quigg himself was that Quigg, though under suspicion, was connected like the water works.

“He was a sick sonofabitch,” Tommy said. “He ate goddamn people and now he’s dead. And don’t start with any of that ‘cult’ bullshit with me again. I’m not in the mood.”

It had been my pet theory. You see, Quigg, although technically employed by City College as a professor of anthropology and folklore, had been on the last leg of a five-year leave of absence at the time of his arrest. According to the college, he had been gathering information for some paper he was writing. He spent two years in Haiti, another in Ecuador, and two more hopping around Asia and the Middle East. I’d never been able to connect up any of that unless he had learned how to be a cannibal from some jungle tribe. But I knew there was a connection. I could feel it like a fat man can feel cool air blowing up through a hole in the seat of his pants.

But the cult angle?

One of the few witnesses to the murders claimed he saw not just a lone man leaving the crime scene, but a group of people. And when I was following Quigg around he was always in the company of three or four others. And that night I found him doing his thing… well, I could’ve sworn I heard footsteps running off as I approached. Many of them. I hadn’t bothered following because I’d thought I had my man.

But were there others?

Was Quigg operating alone?

Somehow, I started to see a connection here. Whatever Quigg was part of, maybe it was still in operation. But why Bobby? Why a high-profile victim like the district attorney? It made no real sense… or maybe it made all the sense in the world.

“I’ll be in touch,” I told Tommy, heading towards the door.

“Where the hell you going?”

“Following a hunch,” I said.

Tommy looked at me. “I don’t give a rat’s hairy ass how you spend your free time, Vince, but don’t get yourself in trouble. You know how you are. When you get going, things happen.”

“Things?”

“You know what I mean. Try and keep the body count low, will ya?”

But I was already out the door.

3

It was midnight and rain was pissing down from a slate sky and I had spent the past three hours parked in the darkness. I was watching the house of Marianne Portis. Why? Because she was really all I had. Marianne was a slight, pale woman who looked like central casting’s idea of a librarian. She didn’t look to me as the sort that could hurt a fly… but you never knew. She showed up every day at Quigg’s trial and, more than once, I saw the two of them pass secretive looks. So I’d had her checked out. When Bobby bought it, I thought of her right away.

But nothing was happening. I didn’t know what I was expecting or hoping for, only that when it happened I’d know it. It was getting on one in the morning and I was starting to nod off when a black sedan rolled up. Marianne came out and hopped in. They drove off and I followed them all the way over to the East Side where they pulled into a small parking lot behind a funeral home. That definitely raised my curiosity a notch. Traffic was light so I didn’t hang around. I drove up to the next block and parked my heap across from some second-rate clip joint and struck out on foot.

The funeral home was stuck in between a boarded-up factory and a row of old houses. It was a two-story brick job with withered ivy climbing all over it like hair on a monkey’s back. There was a gray and weathered sign out front which proudly proclaimed it was the Douglas-Barre Funeral Home and had been since 1907… in case I was counting.

I strolled casually past the front and then circled around back. I came through the alley, a chill wind blasting rain into my face. My overcoat flapped around me like a flag on a high pole and rain ran off the brim of my fedora in tiny rivers. It was so wet even the rats were staying home. I positioned myself beneath the overhang of a warehouse loading dock, hiding in a pocket of shadow like a spider in a crevice.

I waited over an hour before something happened, cigarette butts gathering at my feet. The delivery/receiving doors at the back of the funeral home were opened and secured. There were two cars parked back there and neither of them were hearses. Just that sedan and a wood-paneled delivery wagon.

Cigarette dangling from my lower lip like a steaming icicle, I watched. Two men carried out a body—and I could see by the way they carried it that it was just as dead as my mother’s virtue—and unceremoniously dumped it into the back of the wagon. Then the doors were closed and the wagon drove off, followed by the sedan and Marianne. I could’ve made a mad dash for my heap, but I decided I wanted to look around first.

I was curious.

I wanted very much to know where they were taking the stiff, but there was no real chance of catching up with them at night. Not in this city. Not without breaking a few traffic laws and having coppers crawling up my backside like mites. And I didn’t want to spend the night in the jug.

Those delivery doors were locked, but the lock wasn’t much. I took out my little case of picks and went through it in about a minute. Inside, the place was lousy with shadows. All the darkness in the world was gathered here. It stunk of sweet flowers and age. I made my way through winding corridors and past darkened viewing rooms. All I could hear was the rain on the windows and the beat of my own heart. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not afraid of dead people. Death and me go way back. I’ve sent plenty of business His way. But places like this always remind me of my mother buying it when I was eight… or of Helen. Helen was my wife. Three months after we were married we were still nuts about each other and then she got sick. Two months later, we planted her. The cancer. Got into her blood. She was two weeks shy of her twenty-fifth birthday. But that’s the way it works sometimes. Guys like me aren’t designed to be happy in life, we’re designed to stumble drunkenly from one scene to the next like a two-bit actor without the benefit of a script.

I looked around and didn’t see a thing worth noting. Then I went upstairs, found the offices, some storage rooms. In one of the offices, one that had been recently occupied judging by the clouds of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, I found an address book in the top drawer… after I jimmied it open, of course. There were notations and phone numbers scribbled down. Names of florists, mortuaries, a few business cards clipped to the back cover.

What intrigued me I found in the back.

It read:

H. Hill?

I jotted that down in my little notebook. It must’ve been a meeting with someone, somewhere. It was a vague clue, but something told me there was relevance simply because funeral directors, to my knowledge, didn’t conduct their business at that hour of the morning—

“What the hell you think you’re doing?”

I looked up and there was some guy standing in the doorway leaning on a broom. His mouth was hanging open wider than a hooker’s at a convention. He was as ugly as a platter of fried dogshit. Looked like someone had heated up his face and pressed it into a Mr. Ugly mold. Thing was, it cooled all wrong. Another thing was, I knew him.

“You,” he said when he saw my mug. “Steel. What the hell are you doing here? I better call the cops in.”

“Slow down, Junior,” I told him.

His name was Junior Styles and he was a wrong number from the soles of his flat feet to the top of his pointy head. He’d had a pretty good racket going at one time. He had a couple girls working for him, young stuff mostly he’d bullied into it. They’d pick up johns at bars and bus stops, you name it, and bring ’em back for a quick roll. Thing was, Junior’d be waiting there with a rod and he’d rob ’em blind. Threaten to tell their wives or families if they squealed to the cops. I hadn’t seen him in about five years; he’d been upstate doing a nickel. I knew. I helped to put him there. And I could see he remembered it, too.

He screwed up his mug and said, “I’ve been thinking about you a long time, Steel, you dirty sonofabitch. Breaking and entering. Ha! I like that.”

“Zip it, pimp,” I told him. “If anyone’s gonna call the bulls in it’ll be me.”

He paled some at that. He knew I’d been a cop and he knew a lot of my friends were cops. And he was a petty criminal and an ex-con. We both knew who they’d believe.

“Never figured you for a broom jockey, Junior. Good to see you found your place in society.”

“Fuck you, Steel. This is just something I’m doing for awhile.”

“Yeah? What’s your grift? How’d you get tangled up in this mess?” I said.

“What mess?”

I shook my head like I knew what I was talking about. “They’ll put you away for keeps this time.”

But like a skinflint, he wasn’t buying it. He swung the broom handle at me and it whistled past my cheek. I stepped in hammered him two quick shots to the chops. He took ’em, spit blood, and cracked me in the ear with the broom handle. I saw stars and clipped him under the jaw. Before he could answer that one, I took hold of his shirt and sank my knee into his stomach. I repeated that maybe three times until he was curled up harmless as a kitten in a box.

He gagged and spat and called my mother a few unsavory names. But all that got him was a couple more kisses from my left.

“Dirty… sonofabitch,” he growled.

“I’ll do the talking, Junior. I’ll ask the questions and you’ll do the answering. Savvy?”

He glared at me with eyes like runny egg yolks. “Go… screw… yourself.”

I laughed and pulled a switch out of my inner coat pocket. It was a special pocket I’d had sewn in the back, at the bottom, right where the seam was. Even if somebody took my gun, I was still armed. I thumbed the button and six inches of double-edge Sheffield steel was at my disposal. I took my pal by the shirt and hoisted his dead weight up. I slammed him up against the desk and pressed the blade against his crotch.

His eyes were wide, his face trembling. “What the hell you doing? Jesus, Steel.”

“What am I doing? I’m about to slice off Uncle Johnson and the twins unless you start singing a tune I wanna hear.”

“For chrissake! What do you wanna know?”

I sketched it in for him, real slow and simple-like. Didn’t want to tax that dishrag he called a brain.

Junior nodded, started humming a few bars. “All I know is that I was told those people would be coming for a body… that they knew what they were doing and I was to stay out of their way. That’s what the man said.”

“And who’s the man?”

“The man? Barre… Franklin Barre. He owns the place. Christ, you gotta believe me.”

And I did. I let him go and he slid to the floor like lard down a hot pan. He just sat there, covering his friends with his big mitts, and hating, just hating me.

“We’ll finish this talk another time,” I promised him.

I picked up my lid off the floor, brushed off the brim and put it on my skull. Then I got the hell out of there.

4

Next morning I was sitting in my office pouring hot tar down my throat when the blower rang. I’d been sitting there thinking about H. Hill and what it might mean as I answered it.

“Yeah?” I said, setting my coffee down.

“Vince?” Tommy Albert said and I could hear it in his voice again, that sense of disgust like he’d just found out his mother had the clap. “Well. My friend, this ain’t getting any better. In fact, it’s getting a hell of a lot worse.”

“Lay it on me.”

I could hear him striking a match and I could almost smell that turd he was smoking. “You recall a guy named Buscotti? Tony Buscotti?”

I did. Tony “The Iceman” Buscotti, a.k.a. “Frankenstein”, a.k.a “The Headhunter”. Big Tony, as he was also known, was an enforcer and a torpedo for the Italians. He was one of the main cogs in their protection rackets. He was the guy who collected late payments from bookies, loanshark customers, and a variety of other businesses the wops decided needed “protecting”. He was also the guy the mob gave contracts to. A stone killer, Buscotti very often used a knife on his victims. His specialty was a few slugs in the knees to cripple his prey and then some fancy knifework to finish the job. He was a big fierce man, part human and part grizzly bear. Rumor had it he ate raw meat. And when you were nearly seven feet tall and weighed around four hundred pounds, you could do any goddamn thing you wanted to. He made the toughest cops on the force want to wring out their shorts.

Or had, that was.

A year ago he’d been convicted of some seven homicides and sent to the big house for the hot squat. Two weeks ago, he sat down in that chair and put the funny hat on and they fed him the juice. Worm meat now, but the memory persisted like a bean fart in a closet.

“He’s dead,” I said. “Nobody showed at the funeral. Hard to understand, he was such a sweet kid… when he wasn’t using a baseball bat on someone’s jewels.”

But Tommy wasn’t in the mood for that. “His body’s missing.”

I almost spilled coffee all over my lap. “Missing?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “I’m out here at the cemetery. You better get out here. I think we’re developing a pattern.”

I was already pulling my coat on. “Which boneyard are you at?”

And then he said it and I knew: “Harvest Hill,” he said.

5

By the time I got there they were pretty much finished with the grave.

They had opened it and found Buscotti’s casket empty as my wallet and now everyone was standing around looking grim as graverobbers. The day was the color of dirty laundry: dingy and gray. Last night’s rain had turned the boneyard into a mud sea. It was everywhere, clotted on the bull’s shoes like they’d just tiptoed through Mother O’Leary’s cow pasture.

Tommy Albert said, “They had this special coffin made for this ape.” He flicked his cigar butt down into the black, yawning grave. “Had to be twice as wide as usual and longer than your standard box. Like the service and the plot, it was paid for anonymously. You know what I’m saying, Vince?”

I did.

It was all paid for by the Outfit. They couldn’t come right out and put their names to it because that wasn’t how they did things, but everyone knew who sprang for it all the same.

Tommy and I turned away and walked through the sloppy earth, weaving our way amongst headstones, stands of leafless trees, cracked slabs. In the bleak shadow of an ornate burial vault we found more diggers at work. We got there just as they struck wood.

Tommy looked at me. “Eddie Wisk,” he said. “Numbers runner. He was gunned down three weeks ago.”

The workers brushed dirt from the lid of the casket and opened it. They didn’t have to bust open the catches because somebody beat them to it. Wisk was gone, too. You could see the grayed impression on the silken pillow where his head had been. A beetle ran across it. But that was all.

Tommy’s boys jumped down there and started dusting for prints.

“Gone,” Tommy said. He shook his head. “This is connected, ain’t it, Vince?”

“Has to be.”

“Still clinging to the ‘cult’ theory?”

I sighed, slapped a nail in my kisser and gave it some heat. “I’m not sure of anything just yet.” Quickly, I filled him in on my visit to the funeral home. “I’m thinking whoever wrote that is the one that was here last night.”

“And you think it’s this Franklin Barre character?”

I blew out smoke. “Just a guess. It was his office I was in.”

“I’ll have him brought in. See what we can sweat out of him,” Tommy said. “What about this Marianne Portis broad?”

“I think you should hold off on her for now. Give me a day or two.”

Tommy looked at me. “You know what kind of shit I could get into if I did that?” He shook his head. “Two days. That’s it. This stinks, Vince. Stinks bad. I got pressure on me now like you wouldn’t believe. I got uniforms out looking for Stokes too.”

Stokes was the night watchman at Harvest Hill. Nobody seemed to know where he was and maybe he wasn’t tied up in this, but neither Tommy or I believed that for a minute.

Conspiracy? You’re damned right. One that involved killing prosecutors and robbing graves and making off with dead bodies in the still of the night. But what was the thread? There was something, but I just couldn’t make the connection.

“See ya, Tommy,” I said walking off.

“Where you going?”

“I gotta see a guy about a grave.”

6

Thirty minutes later I was in Little Italy. Parked just up the street from a warehouse called Frenzetti & Sons. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a warehouse and was: inventory in the form of furniture came in and went out. But if you happened to know the right people, you could get invited down below into the basement where the Italians operated an illegal casino. Blackjack, roulette, craps, slot machines, high and low stakes card games—you name it. The mob ran it and took a lucrative cut of everything that went down. The mob, in this case, being Slick Jimmy Conterro. A guy I grew up with and who happened to be an underworld soldier. I never held that against him and he never held being a cop against me.

I knew that right now, Bernie Stokes, night watchman of Harvest Hill boneyard was down in the casino. And would be for fifteen or twenty minutes more.

I knew I could go down there and get him anytime, but I didn’t. I’ve gambled at Jimmy’s place plenty. Lots of cops do. He gives good odds. Better than you’ll get in Vegas. He runs clean games. But I also knew Jimmy wouldn’t like me barging down there and manhandling a customer. You didn’t make waves in this neighborhood; even the cops were on the payroll here.

So I sat there in the heap chewing a salami on Jewish rye and dipping my bill in a quart of beer. The minutes ticked by. I finished the sandwich, the beer, was halfway through my second butt when Stokes came out.

You should’ve seen him.

Looking over his shoulder, keeping his head low trying to blend into the crowd. But he blended in like a nun in full habit at a stroke parlor. Maybe it was how he acted—so jittery and afraid—but the guy was marked. You could see that.

I called him over and he almost left his skin lying on the walk.

“Jesus, Bernie,” I said. “What gives? You don’t look so good.”

“Don’t feel so good,” he said, sliding through the passenger side door.

He was a tight little guy with a beak on him like a doorstop. Good guy as far as that went, but you could trust him like you could trust a rattlesnake in your shorts. He stank of hair oil and cheap rum. His eyes were red as the setting sun and his face hadn’t seen a razor in a week or more.

“I got my problems, Vince. You know? I got my problems.” He kept his eye on the rearview. In fact, he kept an eye out everywhere. “You can’t be too careful these days.”

“Give you a ride somewhere?”

“Sure. Uptown. You know the place.”

I did. Bernie had a place over an Irish saloon. “Somebody after you, Bernie?”

He was trying desperately to light a cigarette, but his fingers were trembling too much. I lit it for him. His face was pale as a whitewashed fence. “Yeah, somebody’s following me. I know it.”

I wasn’t sure what that was about. Jimmy’s goons weren’t known for their subtlety; they wanted you, they kicked right through the front door like the First Marine Division hitting a beach. “Probably cops, Bernie.”

“You think so?” He was even paler now.

“I know it.” I explained to him how I was unofficially working with the precinct. “It’s this bit about Tanner. The papers didn’t have the particulars, Bernie, but he was partially eaten. Chewed up like a drumstick.”

“Jesus.”

He looked like he was going to be sick, so I turned the screw a bit.

“They want to talk to you about what happened out at Harvest Hill. Some ghouls hit it last night, snatched a couple stiffs. Caretaker found the graves all messed-up this morning.”

Bernie stared off into space. “You think they’d put the graves back in order when they were done.”

Some cabbie laid on his horn and I gave him the finger. “Who are they, Bernie? Listen, you might as well be square with me on this bit. Better me than the bulls, you understand? They put the pinch on you, you’ll be wearing a state suit.”

“I don’t know nothing about nothing,” he said.

But he knew. He knew, all right. “You know a cop name of Albert?” I asked him. “Big ugly flatfoot? Know the guy?”

“Never heard of him.”

I smiled… then frowned, shook my head before he saw me. “Well, this Albert, this big ugly shit-eating ape, he’s really something. He’s handling all this. You sure you never heard of him? No? Damn, guy gives me the creeps. They should’ve thrown him off the force years ago. Things he does to guys… boy. Anyway, he’s in charge. He’ll be coming to see you real soon. You can count on it.”

Bernie looked at me. “What… what kind of things this Albert-guy do? I mean, what? Knocks guys around? Rubber hose or what?”

I laughed and shook my head. “Only if they’re lucky. See this Albert… boy, he’s something. Some kind of pervert, I guess. Likes to get a guy alone. Strip search him and stuff. But that’s just the beginning with this freak… man, makes me sick, Bernie. I just hate the idea of him pawing you up and all. Forcing himself on you—”

“Christ!” Bernie said, desperate now. “I’ll just talk to you, okay, Vince? You can keep him off me, right?” He dragged off his cigarette and he could barely hold it still. “All I know is these people come to me. They say they’ll pay me a hundred just to look the other way. But when I found out what they want… I’m, no sir, no goddamn way…”

“Not unless they up the sugar?”

He shrugged. “Well, you know how things are these days. So five-hundred they give me. I tell ’em, okay, just put everything back the way you found it. First couple times they did too.”

I swallowed. “How many times this happen?”

“Three, four times. I don’t know what their thing is. Don’t wanna know. Last night, though, Vince, that was my night off. They must’ve just come in and did what they wanted.”

“Who watches it when you’re off?”

“No one. They were all by their lonesome last night.”

“Who are they, Bernie?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Didn’t get no names and didn’t give ’em mine. There’s two of ’em—a man and a woman. Creepy, I tell you. Both of ’em. But they just handle the business end. This truck pulls up and men get out, do the digging. It’s dark, I never see what they look like.”

“Why these hoods, Bernie? Why are they after these dead criminals?”

He just shook his head. “They know who they want and where to find ’em. I didn’t have nothing to do with that.”

He told me a few more things, but nothing of any value. I brought him back to his place even though I knew the cops would be waiting for him. But it had to be done. They had to put Bernie in custody… if somebody really was following him, he might not be around in a day or two.

Two uniforms jumped out from behind a parked car and put the elbow on him. He was like jelly in their hands, trembling, shaking, loose as a bag of poured rubber. Completely boneless. Tommy came walking up and nodded to me, then he turned to Bernie.

“You Bernie Stokes?” he said, flashing his tin. “Yeah? Well, I’m Detective-Inspector Albert. I need to have a word with you. Alone.”

You should’ve seen Bernie then. Christ, he came alive like a sack of cobras, twisting and writhing and fighting. The uniforms could barely hold him. Me? I had all I could do to keep a straight face.

“Put him in the car,” Tommy said. Then he turned to me. “What the hell’s wrong with that sonofabitch?”

“Search me.” I quickly filled him in on everything I’d gotten out of Bernie. “You better put him under protective custody, just in case.”

Tommy nodded. “He’ll be safe.”

“He’s not a bad guy, Tommy. Just a little sleazy is all. He’d make a good little rat. Let him skate on this and he’ll be more than happy to finger these people for you if we can bring ’em in.”

“Yeah, okay. Sure was acting funny… not a hophead, is he? No?” A look passed over Tommy’s face. Then: “You didn’t happen to tell him I was some kind of pervert, did you?”

“Me?”

“You bastard. You goddamn bastard, Steel.” But he thought it was funny as always. “Listen. Do the names Yablonski and Sumner mean anything to you?”

They did, but I couldn’t place them

“They were two of the jurors that put Quigg away,” he said. “They found their bodies this morning. Same as Bobby Tanner.”

I just stood there, the color running out of my face slow and steady. “It’s connected to him. It all is. But how?”

“That’s what we’re gonna find out tonight, sunshine.” Tommy put an arm around me and grinned at me salaciously with a face uglier than a boar’s backside. “You think I’m a pervert? Good. Because me and you got a date.”

“What should I wear?”

“Come as you are. We’re pulling the night shift out at Harvest Hill.”

7

Truth was, we weren’t alone.

Tommy and me were staked-out in a stand of dark bushes that bordered a family plot of leaning marble headstones. Roughly dead center of the graveyard. Two uniforms were hiding out by the north wall and two more near the gates. Tommy’s instructions were simple: nobody moved until the ghouls were in place and digging. It was a clear, cloudless night. Cool and breezy, but with a big old moon riding high in the sky and painting down the cemetery in a white, even glow. It was a good night to do what we were doing.

I lit a cigarette, cupping it in my hands to cut the light same way I was taught in the Navy. “This is a hell of a date, Tommy,” I whispered to him. “No wine. No steak. No music. Not even a goddamn movie. You think you’re getting into my pants, guess again.”

“Shut your yap, Steel,” he said.

I had an ugly feeling I wouldn’t be seeing my bed this night. I wasn’t sure if this was going to work or not. I just kept watching the headstones dotting the hills, jutting from the dark earth like teeth, angled and white. A sudden gust of wind blew leaves in our faces.

And then we heard gunfire.

Someone shouting.

A police whistle.

Screaming.

It was coming from the north end. Tommy and I were already running, ducking through the marble forest of tombstones. I leaped over slabs and leapfrogged markers. Guns were still shooting and men were still shouting. We came around a stand of gnarled elms and saw shapes in the darkness.

I pulled my .45 out of the speed rig under my left arm and almost started pumping metal into a pair of stone death angels flanking some rich guy’s grave. And then suddenly there was a third angel, only it was no angel. The guy advanced on me with an upraised shovel. I yelled at him to drop it, but he waded right in. I put three slugs in him and it dropped, but he didn’t. I tried a fourth and fifth but I might as well have been plugging a bag of wet cement for all the affect it had. Suddenly he was on me and I was bathed in a putrid stink like a morgue drawer full of spoiled beef. He took hold of my arm and nearly broke it he was so goddamned, unnaturally strong. He tossed me around like a scarecrow stuffed with straw. And at 6’3 and over 200 pounds, I’m no lightweight. I punched him and he didn’t even notice so I went for his eyes, clawing at his face… and it came apart under my fingers like dry, rotting plaster. My nails scraped the skull beneath and then he tossed me through the air and my head struck a stone and Goodnight, Irene.

A few minutes later, Tommy was pouring a flask of whiskey into my mouth. I came awake coughing and gagging and swinging, completely disoriented. I felt like I was sewn up in a bag of black velvet. The mists parted and Tommy helped me up.

“They got away,” he said in a hopeless voice. “Never seen nothing like it. I gave one of them four rounds, point-blank, and that meateater went through me like nobody’s business.”

He brought me on a quick tour of the carnage. One cop was dead. His head was nearly twisted from his shoulders. He was laying on his back, a broken arm tucked under him. But to see his face, you had to flip him over. Two other cops were beaten and busted-up.

Tommy scanned the area with a flashlight. In the distance I could hear sirens. We came up to a body sprawled in the grass, arms outstretched to either side. There were so many bullet holes in it you could have used it as a watering can. Tommy put the light on the face. It was decayed, gray, and flaking, eaten away in places as if by insects. There were tiny worm holes in the nose. One glazed eye stared up at us.

Tommy looked at me. “You know this guy?”

I nodded dumbly. “Yeah… I think… I think it’s Johnny Luna.”

“Yeah, it’s him, all right,” Tommy said in a dry voice. “And Johnny Luna died six months ago.”

8

The next night, I stuck to Marianne Portis like a birthmark.

I sat there in the darkness, my brain spinning like a top in an oil drum. This was all connected to Quigg somehow. The D.A. who’d convicted him was dead. Now two of the jurors. Tommy had placed cops at the houses of the others. But there were other people involved in putting that headcase away—the judge, Tommy, me, plenty of others. And how did all that tie in with glomming corpses and, worse yet, with walking dead men? Two days ago, you asked me if I believed the dead could walk I’d have laughed in your face. Now I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t know what to think.

But I did know a few things.

One of which was that Franklin Barre was missing, presumed dead by Tommy and his people. The links to this business were being cut like apron strings and I had a feeling it wouldn’t be long before I got snipped. And Marianne Portis? We now knew she was a colleague of Quigg’s. At one time she had been chairwoman of the City Folklore Society. We also knew she was somewhat respected in the field, publishing assorted papers on folklore and the occult in various trade magazines.

But what did it all add up to? Anyone’s guess. That’s what.

Just before midnight the black sedan rolled up again. Marianne came out and got in it. I followed at a discreet distance. They drove slowly through the city traffic, but like a hooker paid by the hour, they were in no hurry. I followed them down the main stem over the bridge and right out of town. They hit the highway and then cut down a few deserted country lanes. My lights off, I followed at a safe distance.

I started to get that feeling in my gut. The one that tells me I’m onto something, that things are about to become… relevant. Either that or the salami roll I had for supper was starting its march to the sea.

Out in the middle of nowhere, the sedan whipped through a set of black iron gates and into yet another cemetery. I waited a few minutes before following. Just another boneyard—lots of monuments and scraggly trees. I piloted my heap down the lonesome dirt drive, shadows reaching out and clawing over the ruts. Above there was no moon, just gray clouds and skeletal boughs scratching against them. I got lost. I’ll admit that. I’ll also admit I was starting to get the creeps just driving around and around, maybe half wondering if I’d ever find my way out. Wouldn’t that be a goddamn set-up? Stuck in some spookworld where I drove endlessly through a cemetery?

But, eventually, I found the sedan.

It was way out back. There was a big mausoleum crowning a barren hill. Two stories of rectangular gray stone set with huge black windows. A real inviting place… if you were a corpse. I killed the engine on the heap and coasted into a stand of trees, just off the drive. The sedan was parked up there pretty as you please. There was a delivery wagon and a truck up there, too. I sat there, smoking in the dark, wishing I had Tommy and his boys backing me up. But I was alone, so I did the first fool thing that popped into my head: I walked on up there.

The front door was a massive affair you could’ve driven a tank through. I went around back and cased the joint. I could see lights in a few windows, but there were drapes covering them so I couldn’t see what my pals were doing. I started checking doors and windows, but they were all locked. Then I found a cellar window that tilted up. I slid through like a greased eel and landed in the darkness. I sat there waiting for a reception committee, but none came.

So far, so good.

It took my eyes awhile to adjust to the darkness. I had a flashlight with me, but I didn’t dare use it. I could see that I was in a storage room of sorts—crates and boxes stacked up, a few metal barrels against the wall. It was all pretty pedestrian, except for that funny smell which I knew was formaldehyde. There were other odors, too. A sweet, sickly stink of decay and death hung in the air. And something like a spice cupboard that had been shut up for too long.

I kept moving around down there, feeling up the walls like a teenager under Mary Jane’s sweater until I found my way into a cement block corridor studded with doors. Way it was stinking down there, I just didn’t feel really curious about what was behind those doors. Finally, I found a set of steps and went up. I was in a marble hall, the walls of which were studded with brass nameplates bearing the tags of the deceased. It was cold in there. I kept going, wandering down more and more corridors until I saw lights and heard voices.

I cracked open a heavy oak door just a bit and the gang was all there.

I could see Marianne and another thin, cadaverous-looking guy with a face only Frankenstein could love. Next to them were three or four other people, their backs to me. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I sure as hell could see what they were doing. The room was set up like an embalming chamber… or so I thought at first. It was dimly lit, but there was no mistaking the metal drums of chemicals or the hoses and suction devices, floor pumps, trays of instruments. Just as there was no mistaking the stiff spread out on a metal table like Sunday’s wash. He was rancid. About as fresh as a wormy hamburger on a hard roll.

Marianne and the others all had aprons on and little surgical masks. I was ready to ask if I could borrow one before I heaved up my dinner. To this day, I still can’t be sure what it was they were doing exactly. I saw them douse the body with chemicals. I saw Marianne take a syringe and shoot something in the cadaver’s neck. I saw another sprinkle powders and rub the graying flesh down like a Christmas goose. And then I saw them dump what looked like bloody meat the entire length of the body. The stink of whatever they were using overpowered the death smell. Reminded me of biology class in high school.

Maybe I can’t really be sure about any of what they did. My heart was hammering like Gene Krupa and my belly was full of jumping frogs.

So, I can’t be sure.

But I am sure of what happened next… the body, that goddamn stiff they’d dragged out of some moldering grave, it began to move. It began to shudder and writhe like there was a high voltage cable shoved up its ass. About the time it sat up and let out a mournful, agonized shriek, I was on my way out. Back down the stairs I went, drenched now in cold sweat, scared like a kiddie at a monster show. At the bottom of the steps I walked right into something (I don’t know what) and it tipped over and shattered. Glass sprayed everywhere. I froze up like a Roman statue, just my heart thumping away.

But everything was still quiet.

I tried to negotiate my way in the darkness. It was no easy trick. Maybe if I’d had half a brain I would’ve broke out the flashlight. But I didn’t. Not yet. I found a door and I was sure it was the one. I slipped into the mulling darkness and the room was colder than a meat locker. That awful stink of putrescence and formaldehyde was stronger. In fact, it was gagging. It was like being trapped in a body bag. I bumped into something again, but nothing fell. And, dammit, I’d had quite enough. I pulled the flashlight out of the pocket of my overcoat and clicked it on.

And then instantly wished I hadn’t.

I was in another cellar room, but not the one I’d landed in earlier. No, this one had tables arranged in rows from end to end with little walkways in-between. They were like mortician’s slabs, each draped in a white sheet. And there was no doubt what was under those sheets: I could see the forms easily enough. Now and again, a hand had slipped from beneath its covering, dead fingers dangling in midair. I could see the toes of some of the taller ones. Quickly, I went from slab to slab, looking down on those ruined faces. I recognized quite a few.

It was about that time, my skin all clammy and my fingers stiff as pencils from the cold, that I first sensed it. I don’t know how to adequately describe it. It was like the air around me had changed, was charged with something. I could feel the hairs along the back of my neck stand up. Gooseflesh spread down my spine like ripples in a pond. The air was suddenly full of static electricity, thrumming with it, some noxious stored potential was beginning to vent itself. I caught a sharp aroma of ozone like lightening was about to strike.

And then it did.

My head reeling with that savage smell, that dark and rising sweetness, the bodies on the slabs all began to sit up. I saw sheets shudder and slide from sunless, graveyard faces. A lot of them were little more than skulls knitted with tight dry flesh like tanned leather.

I didn’t wait to see what came next.

There was a window on the other side and I went for it, smashing through it with my flashlight and diving into the cool grass. And then I was running and stumbling and sliding down the hill on my ass. I could see my heap waiting for me and then I saw the two heavies next to it.

Unarmed, smelling like a litter pile in a death camp, they came at me. My .45 slid out from the speed rig and I started drilling those bastards, knowing that you can’t kill something already dead, but sometimes you can sure give ’em a bad day.

I emptied the clip and drove them back and then I was in the heap. I had barely started rolling when she was hit hard. I thought a truck had rammed into us. I was practically knocked against the passenger side door. Another thud and that old Chrysler went up in the air a few feet, balancing on two tires and then hammering back down, the shocks squeaking like honeymooner’s bedsprings.

Then I saw.

It was no truck that hit me. It was worse.

Out of my window I saw him standing there, his huge and moonish face grinning like a skull in the desert: Tony “The Iceman” Buscotti. Remember him? He was the human ogre and former syndicate hitman that was supposed to be feeding the worms out at Harvest Hill in that grave big enough to drop a Steinway into. Yes, sir, old “Frankenstein” himself. Big Tony could have given Karloff the cold sweats.

His hand smashed through my window and I covered my face against the implosion of glass shards. His hand—big enough to palm a football—came snaking in, fingers clawing for purchase. And those fingers… I could see the bones popping through the knuckles, the skin hanging in ropy loops. I slammed down on the accelerator and almost went right into a tree. I threw her in reverse and mowed down the other two goons that I’d given the gift of my bullets to. I rolled right over one of them. Then Big Tony was there again, the yellow of his skull showing through the holes in his face which looked like a wormy shroud hanging from a clothesline. Those gargantuan hands took hold of the door and at the exact second I gave the old heap the gas, there was a sudden lurching and screeching metallic groan as Big Tony ripped the door clean off the driver’s side.

Then I was peeling away in a spray of dirt and that big, dead hulk was standing there with the door in his paws like a cue card. I don’t remember very much of my escape. Only that I sideswiped tombstones and bushes as I thundered down that winding maze of dirt road. Drenched with fear-sweat, I exited those black gates like a train rocketing from a midnight tunnel. Then the road. The highway. The city lights.

And me, shivering like a sick kitty in a high wind.

9

Ninety minutes later, after half a pint of rye, I was back out there.

This time Tommy Albert was with me. Him and about twenty cops, local johns—sheriff’s deputies—and assorted whitecoats from the coroner’s office. The place was wriggling with badges. You know what we found? Squat. Yes, that’s right. The bodies were gone. As were Marianne and the ghoul glee club. But they hadn’t completely sanitized the place. There just wasn’t time.

Downstairs we found the slabs. We also found the room where they did their thing with the stiffs. All the equipment was pretty much in place. We found blood everywhere. Sticky fluids. Scraps of raw animal meat. A linen bag of human bones so fresh they still had red-brown stains on them. But that was pretty much it.

“It happened,” I was telling Tommy. “Don’t look at me like some kind of freak. I saw it.”

He stopped looking at me. “I believe you. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do.”

I dragged off my cigarette. “These guys never will.”

“They don’t have to, Vince. What we got out here is more than enough justification for me to call in all these boys.” He stuffed a cigar in his mouth. “I gotta pick up that Portis broad. You know that. She’s behind all this and only she can fill in all the holes.”

Holes? Sure, we could’ve dropped most of the Midwest through the holes there were in this one. Graverobbing. Cannibalism. Murder. Walking dead hoods. Any minute now, I expected Chaney and Lugosi to be brought in for routine questioning. That’s how bad this mess was. It stunk worse than a trucker’s underwear.

A uniform came running in from the outside. “Inspector, we gotta a dead cop,” he said to Tommy. “In the city.”

Then we were back in Tommy’s Ford sedan screaming towards the concrete jungle, lights blaring and siren shrilling. There was no more to do out at the mausoleum. Those already there could handle it. Once we had the streets beneath us and the concrete and brick wrapping us up like mama’s arms, I started to feel better. On the West Side, down near the docks, was where the cop was. He was sprawled in a pool of his own blood.

There was a sheet over his body, reporters barely held at bay by a defensive perimeter of uniforms. Another detective—a thin, asthmatic guy named Skipp—was breathing through a handkerchief. You could smell the wharfs, the docks. That stagnant fishy smell of the bay blowing in with fingers of mist.

Skipp pulled the sheet back. “This your boy?” he said.

Tommy nodded. “That’s Mikey Ryan. He worked vice.”

I knew Ryan. We’d gone to the academy together. We’d pounded a beat together, drank out of the same bottle, raised hell. I was at his wedding. Now he was dead. Another good cop gone in a city that can’t afford to lose too many.

He hadn’t been mutilated. He’d been stabbed, though. Skipp said he’d been stuck at least fifteen or twenty times. “Took the last jab right in the pump,” he told us. “Then as an afterthought, his killer did this.”

Ryan’s neck had been snapped. The side of his throat bulging with a shank of protruding bone. “Wasn’t an easy way to go,” Skipp said and resumed breathing through his hanky. It sounded like there was a whistle lodged in his throat every time he sucked in a breath. “Goddamn night air… it’s not good for me.”

“It’s even worse for him,” I said.

“He didn’t die right away, though,” Skipp said.

He held up Ryan’s hand, it was wet with blood. That didn’t mean a lot until you saw what was scratched in blood a few inches away:

“He lived long enough to leave us a message.”

Tommy just kept staring at it, shaking his head. “L-U-N… what in Christ you suppose that means? Could be a plate number… could be just about any goddamn thing.”

But I knew. There was no doubt in my mind. “He was telling us who did this to him,” I pointed out. “LUNA. As in Johnny Luna.”

Tommy looked at me. “He’s in the morgue.”

But I just stared at him, boring holes in his face.

10

It didn’t take too many phone calls to find out Luna was missing from the deep freeze. The attendant on duty covered his ass by saying maybe he was picked up by a private mortuary. And it sounded good. But Tommy and I knew different: Johnny Luna had walked out of there. Only good thing was nobody saw him do it.

11

The next day, after a sleepless night in which gaunt shadows reached out for me in the darkness, I did some checking. I went about it real casually. I had a photograph of Marianne Portis and I started showing it around very selectively.

About three, four hours later I struck gold.

I struck it with Louie Penachek, a degenerate gambler who was always into the loansharks for three or four figures. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for a buck. He was obsessed with the ponies. Sports betting. Card games. Any possible way he could wager on the outcome of something, he was into.

Barely five feet, slick as an oiled weasel, I found him out at the track, betting on the Danes. He was jumping up and down and screaming at the top of his lungs. By the time I’d reached him, he was leaning up against the railing, defeated.

He saw me, said by way of greeting, “Sonofabitch should’ve been a winner, Vince. It had all the markings. I had an inside tip on this one. Damn! Twenty clams down the old pisser.”

I flashed the cabbage at him: a couple fifties. “I need some info,” I told him. “You tell me what I want to hear, you got em.”

He licked his lips, looked like a sailor finally coming into port, catching his first glimpse of a cathouse. “Sure, sure, sure, Vince,” he said. “Ain’t much I don’t know about.”

I showed him the picture of Marianne.

His face dropped like mercury on a cold day. “No, no, no.” He held his hands up. “I can’t get involved in that. How would it look?” Then he looked at the bills again. “That’s some rich gravy.” He licked his lips again. “All right, goddammit, you bastard, Vince, you asked for it.”

And he told me.

12

What I had to do had to be done at night.

So I waited.

And waited.

When the sun was down an hour, two, I was still waiting. Still thinking. I’d talked to Tommy, but I hadn’t told him what Louie told me. I was saving that until I was sure. I had to be sure this time. Tommy told me that Mikey Ryan had been undercover, following around bagmen who ran money for the Italians. The money was from gambling, prostitution, extortion. He was mapping out their haunts, their routes, how often they came and went. All in advance of a big raid by vice.

But now he was dead.

How did that factor in? I wasn’t sure just yet. I laid there in my rack, listening to the clock tick, traffic on the street below. I smoked and watched the neon from the bar downstairs light up my room, latticing me with sharp shadows.

That’s when I heard my door open.

Feet went pounding away. Very casually, I went for my .45 on the nightstand. I didn’t know what to expect. The lights were off. Carefully, I turned the gooseneck lamp on the stand so when I clicked it on it would illuminate the intruder, temporarily blinding him. It would give me the edge.

Breath locked up tight in my lungs, I waited. A trickle of sweat ran down one temple like ants to a picnic. My finger was hot and damp against the trigger of my Browning. I caught a whiff of something sharp and pungent like spices, like age. I could hear the intruder moving through my living room, approaching my bedroom door.

The door swung in.

I saw a shadow… filmy, almost transparent.

I clicked on the light. And it could’ve been a lot of people standing there, arms outstretched. I could’ve given you a grocery list of sorry bastards who wanted me dead. But I never would have guessed this.

Helen was standing there.

Dead these two years, but shuffling forward all the same. She was a mummy. Nothing more. I still recognized the diamond choker around her withered throat. She was naked and her flesh was papery, shriveled, it clung to the skeleton beneath like wet decoupage. Except it wasn’t wet, but dry and rubbed with spices to keep it from crumbling away entirely. As she drifted towards me, stick arms extended and twig fingers clutching, she seemed to be disintegrating, flaking away. Motes of her danced in the shaft of light from the lamp.

Her skull-face attempted a grin but it was the grin of mortuaries and death houses, the grin of something long-buried beneath shifting Egyptian sands. Eyeless, her fine nose collapsed into the nasal channel of her skull, her teeth gone black, she attempted speech… but her vocal cords had long ago succumbed to worm and dust. What came out was a dry and hideous croaking.

My insides gone to sauce, funeral bells gonging in the drum of my skull, I sat forward and, letting out a piercing shriek, I put two slugs in her head. She folded up like a house of cards, shattering into dust and pitted bone and rags as she struck the floor.

My brain full of her stink, my mind full of an insane screeching, I fell next to her, sobbing.

This was their latest game.

But it hadn’t scared me off; it only made things personal.

13

It was a huge and rambling Tudor a mile outside the city lights. In a neighborhood where the yards sprawled half a city block and the driveways were circular and flanked by weeping willows. This is where I came. This is where it would end. The place was surrounded by a low stone wall.

I slid over it and dropped into the grass.

I waited for dogs, for guards, for worse things. But nothing or no one came. Surprised? I wasn’t. The egos of the people behind this ghastly little game couldn’t or wouldn’t accept defiance of any sort. The drive was choked with Rolls-Royces and Mercedes… but there were a few low-class sedans and wagons. I saw the car that had spirited away Marianne Portis and smiled. I also saw a delivery truck. I knew without a doubt that the dead ones arrived in that like troops.

I was glad she was there.

I wanted her to be part of this.

As I was casing the joint, some guy—an Outfit soldier—stumbled through the hedges probably in search of a place to relieve himself. He saw me and went for his gun, but never made it. I popped him three, four times in the face, dropping him. Then I punted him in the head and turned his lights out. I gagged him with his own hanky and tied him up in the hedges with his own belt.

I wasn’t careful going through that cellar window.

I kicked it in and dropped through with my bag of goodies. Using my flashlight, I made a quick inspection of the place. Kept looking and looking until I found the furnace room, taking special interest in the fuel oil tank against one wall. It held over 2oo gallons and it was nearly full. And then I knew how it would end for them. Not with a whimper, but like the Fourth of July finale. I’d found what I was looking for.

I opened my bag and got to work.

During the war, I served in the Navy. In the UDT to be specific. Underwater Demolition Teams. You probably read about us, they called us frogmen. We swam around and planted bombs on boats, docks, beachheads. Sometimes we came out of the water for quick commando raids. Like any good UDT man, I knew explosives better than I knew my own mug. I taped together ten sticks of TNT with electrical tape and attached a blasting cap to it. Then I ran a positive and negative wire from a battery-operated alarm clock to the blasting cap. Then I set the timer. I gave it ninety minutes. I was in no hurry and according to Louie Penachek, these little gatherings went on all night.

When I had attached my bomb to the fuel tank, I went right up the stairs.

It was a big house by any stretch of the imagination. But it only took me a few minutes to locate the people. There were a couple hatchetmen outside the door and I shot both of them down and kicked my way through the double oak doors and there they all were. Marianne and her crew. An assortment of high-ranking hoods from the Italian mob. Because you see, that was my plan: I wanted them all in the same place.

A couple tough guys went for their rods and I killed them where they stood. Then I aimed at the leader of the rat pack: Carmine Varga, the boss of the syndicates. He was an obese, swarthy guy with a face like congealed grease. He seemed to glisten with oil and evil. He was so fat they should’ve hung an orange triangle on his ass. I had seen pictures of him in the daily rags, but none of those did this guy justice. All my life I’d wondered when I’d meet the guy with the patent on ugly and here he was. I kept my rod on him while his hoods bristled like the pigs they were. They all wanted to make a try for me, but he stopped them with a slight shake of his head.

“Vince Steel,” he said like we were old pals. “I wondered when you’d show.”

I glommed a nail and burned the end, blew out a cloud of smoke. “Where are they?” I said to him, looking around, taking it all in—the long tables of culinary delights, the imported champagne, the works of art that hung on the wall. All things stolen or bought with blood money. “Where are the dead guys, fatso?”

He sneered at me, quickly gathered himself. “Dead guys?” He laughed. “Whatever are you talking about?”

I looked at him flat and mean and hungry, the way a rattlesnake might look at you right before it sunk its teeth into your throat. “You know what I’m talking about, you fat piece of shit. Are they here? Are they downstairs? Upstairs? Answer me and don’t even think of lying, because if you do I spray that morgue photo you call a face all over the fucking room.”

Marianne Portis stepped forward, her eyes were iron balls—cold and rusty. “Mr. Steel, you have no idea what you’re involved in here… put that gun away while you still can.”

I smiled at her. She had a cute way about her… like a hungry leopard coming at you in the dark jungle. “Shut that pisshole you call a mouth, sweetheart, and tell me where that festering collection of roadkill is. You know the ones I mean, I think.”

The gaunt man with her took a step forward in some vain attempt to protect his lady love. Maybe. I had to admit that Marianne—with her hair down, dark and lustrous, some make-up on, and a tight-fitting evening gown that left little to the imagination—was a pretty swell dish. I bet she’d been in more beds than a hot water bottle.

“Easy, Dracula,” I told him. “I don’t think it’ll take a wooden stake in your heart to put you down.”

“Drop that gun, Mr. Steel,” Marianne said.

I stared at her. “That was a nice trick you had, sending my dead wife over. Sickest piece of work I’ve ever seen.”

She smiled like a cat disemboweling a mouse. “My gift to you.”

“That’s sweet. And here’s one for you,” I said and put a slug in that fine expanse of belly.

She made a gagging, coughing sound and dropped to the floor, a blossom of blood spreading over her dress like a red flower. She glared at me through the pain, blood running from her lips. The gaunt man came at me and I gave him a pill in the face, point blank, spraying the others with the contents of his skull. I was throwing lead like a maiden aunt tossing rice at a wedding, but I didn’t care.

“It’s a hell of a way to die, sweetheart,” I told Marianne. “Gutshot. Could take hours and hours before you cash in.”

I sensed motion at my back and the welcome wagon rolled in with a maggoty stench. Johnny Luna. Tony the Iceman. I emptied my heater into them and Tony, his face hanging like confetti, gave me a shove and I went to the ground. And then, of course, they were all over me.

First things first. Varga’s hoods gave me a good beating, made me spit some blood and make obscene comments about their mothers. But then they had me subdued, tied to a chair. But despite all they did to me, I kept smiling.

“You won’t be smiling long, you sonofabitch,” Varga told me. Guy smelled like fish oil and grease. “Not when we’re through with you. But let me explain.”

I spat some blood. “No point. I already know what your mother does for a living.”

That got me a couple more knocks. When the fog parted, I was still smiling. How much longer before the place went up? An hour? Maybe a little less? Hee, hee, hee. Boy, were they in for a surprise.

Varga swept his hand around the room indicating the living ones. “I won’t bother with introductions. These are my people.” Then he looked at Marianne on the floor, bleeding like a slit pig. Her friend with that hole in his face. A few others including some broad who looked like Peter Lorre in drag. “These people here. They’re the ones that put this little thing together. You might remember a guy named Quigg. You do? Of course, you do. See, our good Mr. Quigg, he spent years bopping around to all them weird places putting together all this…”

He gave me the rumble and I listened.

Quigg had lived amongst sorcerors, witch doctors, shaman, you name it, all around the world, studying and learning. What he was interested in was nothing less than resurrection. After devoting most of his life to it, he succeeded. Or almost had. I kind of messed that up when I tracked him down and helped put him away. But Marianne, apt pupil that she was, carried on and put on the finishing touches. But she needed money. That’s where Varga came in. He bankrolled it all and was pleased with the results. See, through Quigg’s neo-science, he had an army of dead hoods at his disposal—killers, bagmen, enforcers, thieves, racketeers. Guys who could pull jobs and never be prosecuted because they were already dead. Even if they left fingerprints, what possible difference did it make? Eye witnesses? Who’d believe ’em?

It was perfect.

“…and it was out of respect to our Mr. Quigg that I had some of my boys take out the D.A., a couple of the jurors. That cannibalism bit was just a cosmetic touch. Yeah, but those three are only the beginning. Before we’re done, they’ll all be doing the deep six: the judge, your friend Tommy Albert, even yourself. We do that out of respect for the man that made this all possible.”

The walking dead goons parted and I almost shit a pearl.

Old Quigg came shambling forward, a bag of graying bones. His eyes were like yellow moons setting in that shrunken face. “Yes. Mr. Steel,” he managed, his voice dry as sandstorms. “And soon you’ll be joining us. First you’ll need to die, then we’ll need your heart—”

“Kiss my ass,” I said and then something hit me and I fell into darkness.

14

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

That’s what I woke to. My head was throbbing, but I came awake sharp and ready. I came awake in panic. In the darkness. In a box. It wasn’t a fancy casket they were burying me alive in, just a plain wooden packing crate. I tried to move, to thrash, to fight, but it was no good. This was Quigg’s revenge—let me die like this and bring me back like one of them. Trying to think, I pushed up at the lid with everything I had. It moved up two, three inches, but that was all.

The dirt kept raining down.

The sound of it was muffled and I knew my coffin was covered now. If I was going to do anything, I’d have to do it before too much dirt piled up on top. I flicked my lighter and saw that the lid was roped shut. At least it wasn’t chained or nailed. After some squirming and banging my knees and head, I got my switch out and began sawing through the ropes. It took less than a minute, but a minute was a lot when you were running out of air.

When the ropes were free, I began putting everything I had into getting that lid up. The dirt was still loose above, but it was still heavy as all hell. I got it up enough to start forcing myself through and then I was free, trapped in that cocoon of shifting black earth. I was able to draw air from pockets. I began clawing my way up real slowly, making progress, but not wanting to come bursting out of there before the gravediggers were done. But soon enough, the air was getting harder to breathe and I had to strain it through my teeth, drawing in ranks clods of dirt. That soil was rich and black and wormy. With everything I had, I clawed my way up. About the time black dots were dancing before my eyes, my fingers broke free. Then my head and shoulders.

The gravediggers were gone.

My throat and chest aching, I gulped in lungfuls of fresh air. When I could think again, I looked around. I was in a stand of trees out back of Varga’s Tudor. In the distance I saw retreating shadows and figured they were my gravediggers. From the way they walked I could see that they were zombies.

Pulling myself to my feet, I checked my watch.

Less than fifteen minutes until showtime.

15

When I’d brushed myself free of dirt, I made my way around front.

Varga was just climbing into his Mercedes and the others were getting into their respective vehicles. I dashed from shadow to shadow and came right up to Varga’s door. Before his driver even knew that the shit had hit or what it smelled like, I had his boss’s door open and I dragged that fat gob out onto the grass. A couple kicks to the ribs and the fight drained out of him like piss through a leaky drainpipe.

I threw him up against the car just as the troops moved in.

But I already had my knife against his soft, white throat. “Tell them to fade or I’ll slit your throat,” I ordered him.

He made a few pathetic wheezing sounds. I pressed the knife home until a trickle of blood ran over my fingers. “Do it,” I said. “Tell ’em all to get back in the house. The dead ones, too. Everyone.”

“You stupid—”

I kneed him in the kidneys and he yelped. “INTO THE FUCKING HOUSE!” he cried out. “ALL OF YOU!”

I watched them file in. Marianne’s little club… what was left of it. Then all of Varga’s hoods, at least twenty of them. Finally Quigg and the zombies carrying the bodies of Marianne and her boyfriend. In they went. The door closed.

“Any of ’em come out of there,” I hissed, “and you die, understand?”

He shook his head carefully. “They won’t. Not until I come for ’em.”

“You sure?” I said, pushing that cutter against his pipes.

“Yeah, I’m sure, tough guy.”

I dragged him up the drive and over to the wall.

Maybe my timing was a little off, because we’d barely made the wall when the fireworks began. There was a huge, rending explosion that pitched us to the grass. And the Tudor came apart like a house built of Popsicle sticks. Great sections of it vaporized as gouts of fire and rolling clouds of flame blasted through the windows and engulfed the roof. The air was raining charred wood and missiles of glass and burning fragments. They showered down all around us.

Varga sat up and just stared at his house, slowly shaking his head. “You sonofabitch,” he said, sounding like he needed to cry. “You dirty sonofabitch.”

I started laughing and couldn’t stop. “It’s all over, asshole. All of it.”

But then I wasn’t so sure. A huge figure stumbled out of the burning wreckage, lit up like Roman candle. He made it a few feet and fell into a blazing heap. You could’ve roasted wieners off him.

I figured it was Big Tony.

A few minutes later the fire department arrived along with dozens of nosy neighbors. There wasn’t much to do but watch it burn to ashes. They asked me and Varga questions, but we had no answers.

Finally, Tommy arrived. “Jesus H. Christ, Vince,” he said. “What in hell’s name did you do this time?”

He dragged me away to his car after warning the mob boss not to move. He gave me a belt of bourbon from his pocket flask, stuck a cigarette in my mouth, and waited. Just waited. It was going to be good and he knew it.

“Well?” he said. “You wanna tell me about it?”

“Depends,” I said, blowing smoke.

“On what?”

“On whether you like horror stories or not.” I took another drag. “Because if you do, Tommy, boy, have I got a beaut for you.”