Chapter Forty-one
Detective Sherbet sat back and folded his hairy arms over his roundish stomach. I mostly wasn't attracted to roundish stomachs and hairy arms - or, for that matter, hairy anything. But on Sherbet, the longish arm hair and extra stomach padding seemed right. On him, oddly, both were attractive. If he had been single and I had been another twenty years older, there was a very good chance I would have had the hots for him.
He seemed to be noticing me looking at his stomach and unconsciously adjusted his shirt over, not realizing that his padded stomach was adding to his manliness. At least for me. I can't vouch for every woman.
I suspected I had daddy issues, whatever that meant.
"He also said something else," said Sherbet. As he spoke, he looked through the sliding glass door at Monica, who was sitting on the edge of the bed and wringing her hands and rocking slightly. I couldn't be sure, but I think she was mumbling something, or singing something. The woman was tormented beyond words, and my heart went out to her.
I looked back at Sherbet, "What else?"
"He told me that Ira Lang would never give up trying to kill her, that Lang had approached many, many people in prison, and that just because we caught him once, didn't mean we were going to catch the next killer that Ira hired, or the next, or the next."
"He's going to keep coming after her," I said. "Forever, until one or the other dies."
"Which, for him, is sooner rather than later, since he's on Death Row."
"Still a few years away, though."
"Or longer," said Sherbet. "Unless, of course, you visit him again, in which case he might not survive the meeting."
"He threatened the kids."
"You are a mama grizzly."
"I'm a mama something."
Sherbet looked at me, seemed about to say something, paused, then seemed to go a different direction. "Anyway, he's out of the hospital and back on Death Row."
"Where he belongs."
"I couldn't agree more."
We were silent. Sherbet's overtaxed digestive system moaned pitifully as it went to work on the greasy donuts.
"Which reminds me," said Sherbet, reaching down and opening his briefcase. He extracted a smallish electronic gizmo thingy. "I want to show you something."
"Your new DVD player?" I asked.
He grinned. "Sort of. It's a loaner from the department."
I watched with mild amusement as his sausage-like fingers tried to manipulate the small piece of electronic gadgetry. He picked it up and examined it from every angle.
"Everything's so damned small," he grumbled.
"Let me have a look, detective," I said. He gratefully handed it to me. I took it from him, and flipped a switch on the side and the player whirred to life.
"Should I press 'play'?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
I set the player on the table between us and pressed 'play', and a moment later I saw a sickening scene. It was footage from a security camera, looking down on two people conversing in a jail visiting room. Both were on the phone, speaking to each other through a thick, bulletproof glass window.
Sherbet was watching me closely as the video played on the little screen. I hate being watched closely. My first instinct was to turn the damn thing off and fling it over the balcony railing like I had with the donuts.
My next instinct was to make a joke or two about the video, perhaps something about the camera adding ten pounds. But there was no joking my way out of this.
I had been wrong: there was a camera in the jail's visiting room, perhaps hidden.
Besides, I felt too sick to joke, so instead I watched the tape with horror and curiosity. After all, it was a rare day that I actually got to see myself.
Of course, I had worn a lot of make-up that night, knowing there would security cameras everywhere, and wanting to make sure I didn't show up as partially invisible. In fact, anytime I was anywhere that had heightened video security, I made it a point to wear extra make-up.
Anyway, the video was grainy at best. No sound, either. On the tiny screen, I watched as I sat forward in the chair, speaking deliberately to Ira. Ira was leaning some of his weight on his elbows and didn't seem to blink. Ever. I hadn't noticed that before. Then again, that could have been a result of this grainy image. The camera had been filming from above, in the upper corner of the visitor's side of the room.
From this angle, I could see some of my profile, and I watched myself, fascinated, despite my mounting dread over what was about to come.
In the video, I looked leaner than I had ever looked in my life. A good thing, I guess. I also looked strong, vibrant. I didn't look like the stereotypical sickly vampire. But I knew that wasn't always the case. This was early evening. I always looked better in the early evening. Or so I was told.
And, if I do say so myself, I looked striking. Not beautiful. But striking.
As the video played out, I must have said something with some finality because I ducked my head slightly and reached for my purse. As I did so, Ira said something to me, and I immediately sat back down again. I leaned closer to the window. Ira did, too, grinning stupidly from behind the protective glass.
Now my face looked terrible. I suddenly didn't look like me. Truth be known, I didn't recognize the woman in the video clip at all. She seemed strange, otherworldly. Her mannerisms seemed a little off, too. She moved very little, if at all. Every movement controlled, planned, or rehearsed. In fact, the woman in the video seemed content sitting perfectly still.
But now I wasn't sitting still. Now I was motioning with my finger for Ira to come ever closer. And he did.
One moment I was sitting there, and the next I was reaching through the destroyed glass, grabbing Ira, slamming his face over and over into the glass. What I saw didn't make sense, either. A smallish woman reaching through the glass, manhandling a grown man, a convict, a killer. Slamming him repeatedly against the glass as if he were a rag doll.
None of it made sense; it defied explanation.
It defied normal explanation.
A moment later the guards burst into the room. The final clip was an image I had not seen since I was struggling under a sea of guards. It was an image of Ira's face, partially pulled through the glass, his skin having been peeled away from his forehead like a sardine can. Also, the glass was cutting deeply into his throat, and he was jerking violently, gagging on his own blood, which flowed freely down the glass, spilling over both sides of the counter, dripping, dripping. He would have surely died within minutes if he had not been given emergency help.
Sherbet reached over and easily turned off the player and sat back, watching me some more. He said, "The guards reported that you were nearly impossible to tackle to the ground. That it took three of them to do so, and even then you wouldn't go down easily."
I said nothing. For some reason, I was remembering what I had looked like in the security video. My passive expression. My inert features.
Sherbet went on, "As you can see in the video, you punched through the glass so fast that there was little or no indication that you moved at all. One moment you're sitting there, and the next you are reaching through the glass. We were certain the digital video had skipped a few seconds ahead, but the timer on it never missed a beat. One second you are sitting there. Two-tenths of a second later you are reaching through the glass. Two-tenths of a second, faster than a blink of an eye. And during those two-tenths, you are seen flinching only slightly. The broken glass itself can be seen hurling through the air at the same time you are holding Ira by the neck." Sherbet shook his head. "It defies all explanation. It defies natural law."
Beyond my hotel balcony, the sky was alive with streaking particles of light, flashing faintly in every direction. Thank God I can mostly ignore these flashing lights, or I would go crazy. Vampirism and OCD do not mix.
Sherbet looked at me. "Do you have anything to say about this, Samantha?"
I continued looking up at the night sky, at the dancing lights. No jokes, no nothing. I needed this to go away. "Obviously there was something wrong with the video, Detective."
He nodded his head as if he had expected that answer. "And the fact that you broke through the security glass?"
"The glass was already broken."
"We can't see any breaks in the image."
"You yourself said the image is not the clearest."
He nodded again. Now he turned his head and looked in the same direction I was looking. I doubted he could see the zigzagging lights.
I asked, "Why were you shown the video?"
Sherbet chuckled lightly. "Are you kidding, Sam? The video has made its way through our entire department. Hell, half the police in the state have seen it by now. You're lucky it's not on BoobTube."
"YouTube," I said, and thought I was going to vomit. So much for keeping things on the down-low.
Sherbet went on, "You can imagine my surprise when I discovered the freak in the video was, in fact, you."
"Probably so surprised that you nearly dropped your donut," I said.
"I'm never that surprised."
"So why are you here?" I asked.
"Just chatting with an old friend."
"I'm not so old," I said.
He nodded as if that somehow answered a question he had. Now we were both silent. Inside the hotel, Monica had turned on the TV - a comedy show judging by the sudden bursts of laughter. Monica giggled innocently.
"I'm your friend, Sam."
"I know."
"Anything you tell me will remain between us."
"Anything?"
"Anything."
"That's good to know," I said.
"I worry about you, Sam."
The surprising tenderness in his gravelly voice touched me deeply, and I found words temporarily impossible to form. I nodded. My vision blurred into tears.
"If you ever want to talk," he said. "If you ever need a friend. If you ever need help of any kind, I'm always here for you. Always."
And now I was weeping.
He reached over and hugged me tight, pulling me into him, and I smelled his after shave and the donut grease and the smallest hint of body odor. The body odor went with the manliness. After all, this was the end of a long day of crime fighting. A man should have a hint of body odor at the end of a long day.
His hairy arms smothered me completely and for a few seconds, a few rare seconds, I felt safe and comfortable and cared for.
Then he pulled away and carefully packed up his mini-DVD player in his scuffed briefcase. He then gave me the softest jab you could ever imagine on my chin, smiled sadly at me, and left me on the balcony.
Inside the hotel room, through the sliding glass door, I watched as he quietly spoke to Monica. As he did so, he held both of her hands in one of his. He said something else, jerked his head in my direction, and she nodded. He was reassuring her, I knew. Letting her know she was in good hands.
When the door shut behind him, Monica came out and sat beside me. She reached over and took my hand, and we sat like that for a few minutes.
Finally, I said, "They caught a guy hanging around downstairs."
"The guy Ira hired to hurt me." Her voice sounded so tiny and lost and confused. Her simple, sweet, innocent brain was trying to wrap itself around why a man she had loved at one time would actually hire another man to hurt her. To kill her.
And as we sat out there together, as we held hands and watched the quarter moon climb slowly into the hazy night sky, I suddenly knew what I had to do.
Chapter Forty-two
I was flying. I was free. Life was good.
The moon, still about a week from being full, shone high and bright. Any thoughts of the moon automatically conjured images of Kingsley. And any thoughts of Kingsley automatically conjured images of the beast he was, or claimed to be. Admittedly, I had never actually seen Kingsley transform into a werewolf, and a part of me still wanted to believe that, in fact, he wasn't a werewolf, that this was all one crazy hoax. Or that he was delusional.
I mean, come on, an honest-to-God werewolf? Really?
This, of course, coming from a creature flying slowly over Orange County.
Actually, a part of me - a big part - still hoped that I was in the middle of one long, horrific nightmare, and that I would wake up at any moment, in bed, gasping, relieved beyond words that this had all been one bad dream.
I'm ready to wake up, I thought. Please.
I banked to port and caught a high-altitude wind. I flapped my wings easily, smoothly, comfortably, sailing along in the heavens like an escaped Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float from Hell.
Still, just because one monster (me) existed, that didn't necessarily mean all other monsters existed.
Or did it? Maybe there was some truth to everything that goes bump-in-the-night. If so, where did it end? Were there fairies? Angels? Aliens? Demons? Keebler elves? And weren't elves, in fact, fairies? Or was it the other way around?
I didn't know.
More than likely Kingsley was exactly what he claimed to be: a werewolf. I had seen the excessive hair on his forearms a few times now. I had also seen him survive five bullet shots to the head. Not to mention, he didn't even bat an eye when he found out that I was, in fact, a vampire.
Still, that didn't a werewolf make.
The moon burned silver above me. I wondered if I could fly all the way to the moon. I wondered if I could fly to other worlds, too.
Maybe someday I will fly to the moon.
Dance on the Moon.
I hadn't spoken to Kingsley in a few nights now, not since I had discovered that he was, in fact, responsible for getting Ira out of jail. Jesus, how do you respect a man who does that for a living?
An icy wind blasted me, but I held my course. I flapped steadily, powerfully into the night.
Granted, not all of Kinglsey's clients were killers. Some were innocent. Some he legitimately helped. Others, not so much. Others were evil and wretched and should stay in jail. Kingsley knew damn well that he was releasing animals back into society, that he was putting killers back onto the streets.
But I had known this about Kingsley already, hadn't I? It hadn't really bothered me until now. Until it hit close to home. So why should I hold it against him now? Kingsley had done nothing wrong. Hell, he was just doing his job. Like he said, if it hadn't been him, it would have been another defense attorney getting Ira out of jail.
So perhaps I should be angry at the system, not Kingsley.
Perhaps.
Below me was my destination. It was a massive multi-storied structure in Chino, California. It lay sprawled before me in a hodgepodge of auxiliary wings and isolated buildings. My target was one of those isolated buildings, located on the north side of the prison.
The Death Row Compound.
It was a large, grim, three-story structure that housed hundreds of condemned inmates. A lethal, electrified fence encircled the compound. Guard towers were everywhere.
I circled the bleak structure once, twice, getting a feel for the place. I circled again a third time, and as I did so, I felt a pull for a particular area. I focused on that area as I circled the structure again.
The pull grew stronger.
I rarely used my new-found psychic ability in this way. In the past, I just sifted through various hits as they came, rarely directing my heightened senses.
Now I directed them.
I was searching for one inmate in particular. One inmate currently housed in Death Row. One inmate who's time had come.
As I circled the structure a fifth time, I felt a very strong pull toward a corner wall on the second floor.
There he is, I thought.
I knew it. I felt it. I believed it.
But what if I was wrong?
I let the question die in me unanswered; I didn't have the luxury of being wrong.
As I circled back from my fifth fly-by, I tucked in my leathery wings and dove down, fast, the wind howling over my flattened ears.
