Any Given Doomsday (The Phoenix Chronicles) Page 3

  “Run along,” she said to the girl. “Others are out back playin’ at somethin’.”

  As the woman-child turned away, Ruthie ran her weathered hand over the youngster’s head. “Sweet baby,” she murmured.

  The kid left skipping.

  Ruthie headed for the kitchen. “I figured you’d be by.”

  I followed, uncertain. My conscious mind knew Ruthie was dead, knew I was dreaming, yet this all seemed so real, and Ruthie very much alive.

  “Figured?” I echoed as I stepped into the sun-bright room.

  “I know I’m dead, honey.”

  I’d always wondered if Ruthie were a bit psychic herself. She’d been the first to talk to me about my “special gift.” And while most people as religious as Ruthie might have taken me for an exorcism, or at least laid on the hands to rid me of my whispering demon, she had introduced me to someone who understood. Someone who had helped me learn how to deal with what I was.

  I fingered the tiny piece of turquoise I’d worn around my neck since I was fifteen.

  Someone who had scared the living hell out of me, but that was another story.

  “Is this heaven?” I wondered.

  “Sure enough.”

  Why had I asked? Where else would Ruthie be?

  “Why are you still taking care of kids?”

  I heard a bunch of them through the open window, laughing, running, being kids.

  “How could I be happy without little ones to care for? These here had their lives ended too soon. They need somethin’ extra.”

  Trust Ruthie to find lost souls to mother even in the afterlife.

  “Ah, Ruthie,” I whispered. “What am I gonna do without you?”

  “Go on. That’s what everyone does.”

  “Not sure I can.”

  “You have to. Jimmy needs you.”

  My head, which had been sagging with grief, jerked up. “Jimmy’s never needed anyone but himself.” And a little sugar on the side.

  “That’s not true. He’s always needed more than any of the others. He just refuses to say so. Doesn’t think he deserves happiness. Anything that might be good in his life, he makes sure he ruins, because he hates himself more than anyone else ever could.”

  “I doubt that,” I muttered.

  Her eyes narrowed. “You will help him, Elizabeth.”

  She’d put the E in my name. I didn’t have much choice.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She nodded, satisfied. “I gave you all that I had.”

  I remembered what Hammond and Landsdown had said about Ruthie and Jimmy arguing. Had she really left me her house, her bank account, her everything?

  “What about the kids?” I blurted. “They should get something.”

  She smiled softly. “You probably won’t want this gift, but I’ve known it would be yours from the moment I met you.”

  Not want it? Whatever it was, if it came from Ruthie, I definitely wanted it.

  “You’ll hate me for this—” she began.

  “Never.”

  “You don’t know yet what I’ve done to you.”

  Tome?

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You will.” She looked up, and then past me, as if someone had called her name. Fear crossed her face and I spun around, but nothing was there.

  “They saw you,” she whispered. “They know who you are.”

  “Who’s they?” I asked, but suddenly I understood. “Who killed you, Ruthie?”

  She shook her head, still gazing past me. “Doesn’t work like that. I can guide you, but the truth is something you must discover for yourself.”

  “Great,” I muttered, although it would have been too much to hope for to have Ruthie’s ghost—or whatever she was—tell me her murderer’s name so I could tie this all up neatly by sundown.

  “You have to go,” Ruthie insisted. “They’re coming.”

  “The people who killed you?”

  Her gaze met mine, and what I saw there scared me.

  “They aren’t people,” she said.

  Chapter 5

  My eyes snapped open. I was in my room, my bed. The covers were still pulled over my head, and there was someone moving around in here besides me.

  My Glock resided in a small gun safe beneath the kitchen sink. I left the weapon there unless I had a damn good reason to take it out. In retrospect, not the best decision I’d ever made. Right now, I wished I kept the thing in my nightstand.

  If I chose to believe dream-Ruthie, the people who’d killed her had come after me. Except they weren’t people.

  What in hell did that mean?

  And what did they want? I hadn’t seen them. I had no idea who they were. Unless they thought Ruthie had told me something before dying.

  Shit.

  I was starting to get twitchy. They could shoot me, stab me, pretty much anything me, and I wouldn’t know about it until too late. I could feel the bull’s-eye on my back already.

  Slowly, trying not to rustle the covers, I crooked a finger in the sheet and drew it downward.

  A man knelt by my bed, or at least I thought he knelt. Either he was extremely short and standing, or freakishly tall and kneeling. From the breadth of his shoulders, which blotted out most of my room, I figured the latter was a better bet.

  He was also naked, at least from the waist up, and that piece of info disturbed me almost as much as his being here in the first place.

  Despite the shadows, his hair shone eerily white, a towhead at an age when most had darkened to muddy blond. His eyes were spooky too, seeming to reflect the silver light of the moon when the moon had already risen past the apex and started to descend on the win-dowless side of my building.

  In other words, no possibility of a reflection. His eyes appeared to glow from within.

  The cops were not going to believe any of this—if I lived long enough to tell them.

  The intruder grinned, and I saw something else the police wouldn’t believe. His teeth had been filed to spiky points. What a nut.

  I erupted from the covers, reaching for the lamp on the bedside table, a book, a paperweight, anything to bonk him over the head with.

  He grabbed my wrist, moving quicker than anyone I’d ever known. I froze as images tumbled through my mind—what he’d done to people, what he was.

  A monster.

  And not the Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer type of monster, not even Hannibal Lector; he was a…

  Berserker.

  The word whispered through the air in Ruthie’s voice. I was so surprised I almost didn’t duck when he swung a hamlike fist at my head.

  I’d been a state champion in high school gymnastics, and a few times a month I still practiced at the Y. I was nimble and quick. I did all sorts of cool things.

  Back flips, kips, round off after round off. I could swing on a parallel bar and walk across a very thin balance beam. Sadly, none of that was going to do me much good here, so I snatched up the lamp.

  Yanking the cord out of the wall, I smashed it into his face. He bled, but he didn’t go down. He did let me go, and the horrible images stopped.

  Then he rose. And rose, and rose. Yep, naked all the way from his head down to his toes—a particularly long distance since I put him in the vicinity of six seven. And that adage about big feet, big—well, you know the one—this guy appeared to have invented it.

  He started toward me. I backed away. He didn’t have a weapon, but then a guy his size had a pretty good weapon in his fists.

  I bumped against the nightstand, set my hand down, and felt something sharp and cool and foreign. A knife when I was a gun kind of girl.

  “Jimmy,” I whispered, and the mammoth tilted his head like a dog that had heard a word it recognized amid so many it did not.

  “Sanducci,” he snarled, then threw back his head and roared. The sound was so loud, so feral, it made me cringe. I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but then I’d have to drop the knife, and that wasn’t happening.


  But something else was. The man in front of me had begun to change.

  The first indication was the shift in the tenor of his voice, lowering from a man’s wordless anger to a beast’s primal growl.

  He dropped onto all fours, hunched, shook his huge head, and fur sprang out everywhere.

  I blinked, and when my eyes opened a man no longer stood in front of me but a bear.

  He opened his mouth and emitted a bellow that should have shattered my window, maybe my eardrums. Then he rose onto his hind legs and swiped at me with one massive paw.

  He wasn’t as quick in this form as he’d been as a human and I jerked out of the way of his sharp claws. Of course if he caught me with one of those blows I’d be dead, so I couldn’t take the time to pat myself on the back for my agile avoidance. Instead, I scurried away, clutching the knife. He lumbered after.

  As I watched him waddle, I got a sense of deja vu so strong I wavered with it. I’d seen this very thing in the dream I’d had at the hospital. This man-bear had been at Ruthie’s.

  Of course she had said they were coming.

  They? Hell. I hoped there weren’t more of these hanging around.

  He swiped at me again, and I realized it didn’t matter how many there might be. This one was going to kill me if I didn’t do something.

  All I had was the knife, so I gripped it tightly, waited until he took another swing, and after I ducked, I came back up knife first.

  The instant the tip entered his body he erupted outward, covering me with a fine layer of ash, the rest floating in the gray-tinged darkness like dust motes in the sun, then cascading downward to coat the floor.

  I stood covered in fine gray powder, uncertain what to do. No reason to call the cops. There was nothing left to arrest, and I really didn’t want to talk about how the big, naked man had turned into a huge, snarling bear.

  Something weird was going on—something much weirder than anything that had ever gone on in my life before, and that was saying a lot.

  I threw on my clothes, grimacing at the feel of ash on my body. To be on the safe side, I removed my gun from the safe and then, keeping tight hold on both it and the knife, I crept downstairs and took a tour of the area surrounding my building. Neither man nor beast lurked about. Apparently “they” had only sent one assassin after me tonight.

  Back inside, I locked up and went directly to my laptop, connected to the Internet, typed in berserker.

  “Old Norse for bear shirt,” I read. Got that right. “Germanic warriors who, in the frenzy of battle, literally became an animal, usually a wolf or a bear.”

  I paused, trying to take this all in, but I was still having a hard time believing what my eyes had clearly seen. A man turning into a bear—then disintegrating into ash. I forced myself to read on.

  “Since the only way to kill a berserker was with pure silver, and silver was a rarity at that time, these warriors understandably gained the reputation of being indestructible.”

  I picked up the knife. Must be silver, which meant it was Jimmy’s.

  I needed to find him. He had a few questions to answer.

  For instance, why had the man-bear known his name and really seemed to hate it?

  Why had Jimmy thought I might need a solid silver knife?

  Why had that thing, and a whole lot of others if my bizarre post-coma vision were true, been after Ruthie, and why did they now appear to be after me?

  And, most importantly, just what in hell had happened to make me see monsters when all I’d seen before was the truth?

  Unfortunately, Jimmy was hiding. Conveniently, I was very good at finding the missing.

  I needed to talk to Laurel and Hardy—I mean Ham-mond and Landsdown—and find out what, if anything, they’d learned since our last encounter.

  I swept up the remains of my attacker, tossed him into a plastic garbage bag and deposited everything in the Dumpster. Then I washed that man right out of my hair. It took a lot of shampoo.

  By nine a.m. I was headed past the heart of the city.

  Like most ethnic towns, Milwaukee had sections— what had once been called boroughs or ghettos; hell, they still were. But along the river, the same one that divided Friedenberg from the rest of the world, the ultrarich occupied brand-new condos.

  The only thing more expensive than living in one of those was living in a high-rise on Lake Michigan. Water—even water that’s icy eight months out of twelve—does a number on the real estate values.

  I cruised by the courthouse, glanced at the Bradley Clock—the largest four-sided clock in the world—caught a glimpse of Miller Park to my right, and drove over the Hone Bridge. Ten minutes later I left my Jetta in the visitor parking lot and walked into the police station where I’d once worked.

  At the desk 1 asked for Landsdown and Hammond. Just my luck, they were in.

  “If it isn’t Sixth Sense,” Landsdown greeted, using the nickname I’d come to loathe.

  I ignored him. Sometimes it helped.

  “Have you been in contact with Sanducci?” Hammond asked.

  “Not lately,” I said, skirting the truth with a lie.

  His face fell. “Why are you here?”

  “Maybe she saw him,” Landsdown murmured, “with her X-ray vision.”

  “Why did you ask me to help if you think it’s all BS?” I demanded.

  “You’ve come up with some extremely convincing BS.”

  I had, at that.

  “Either way,” Landsdown continued, “if you’re the real thing, which I doubt, or you’re bogus, which gets my vote—you’ve got a history with Sanducci. Even if you can’t tell us where he is, maybe we’ll stumble over him coming out of your place after a long night of the horizontal bounce.”

  I hadn’t horizontal-bounced in so long I got distracted a minute just thinking about it. Sanducci had been a damn good bouncer.

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that,” I said. “I’ve got a few questions.”

  The two men glanced at each other and together they shrugged, which I took as a green light.

  “Any word on the autopsy?”

  “Not yet.”

  Rats.

  “Do you know why Sanducci was in town?” Maybe knowing that would help me find him.

  “According to his manager,” Landsdown said, “Sanducci was here to do a shoot with Springboard Jones.”

  “The basketball player?”

  “You know a lot of guys called Springboard?”

  Excellent point.

  Springboard—given name Leroy—was Milwaukee’s own Michael Jordan. He’d taken City High to the state championship at the Kohl Center, dragged the Badgers along with him to the Final Four, then been picked number three in the draft and would soon begin playing for our very own Milwaukee Bucks. Springboard had made good, and everyone loved it. However—

  “Jimmy’s not a sports photographer.”

  “Assignment was a portrait for the cover of Sports Illustrated.” Hammond explained. “Man of the year or some such shit. They wanted the best.”

  Jimmy was that—in more ways than one.

  “Did he take the picture?”

  “No. It was scheduled for tonight at eight.”

  “Where?”

  “City High.”

  I frowned. Only a few miles north of the bright lights and little city, the neighborhood changed—a lot. Tenements. Burned-out houses. Scrabbly grass, broken sidewalks. Boarded windows if they didn’t have steel bars. I had a hard time believing Jimmy would cart his precious cameras past Third and North after dark, even for Sports Illustrated.

  “I thought they tore that school down.”

  Asbestos in the ceiling and floor tile—a common occurrence in buildings constructed in the fifties and sixties—was making a lot of contractors a lot of money.

  “Next week. I guess Sanducci wanted to work his magic in the gymnasium where it all began.”

  I could see it—dusty faded court, broken wooden bleachers,
old school uniform, the photo in black-and-white. Stark, beautiful, as only Jimmy Sanducci could make it.

  Hammond studied me. “You don’t think he’ll actually show up there, do you?”

  I shook my head. Jimmy wasn’t that dumb. But if not there, then where?

  “Anything else I should know?” I asked.

  Hammond tensed. Landsdown scowled.

  “What?”

  “There’ve been odd disappearances in some of the cities he’s frequented,” Hammond said.

  “There are always odd disappearances in cities. You know that as well as I do.”

  Joe Citizen had no clue how many people disappeared each year and were never seen again.

  “You know why there might be ash residue at Ruthie’s?”

  I kept my face carefully blank. “She didn’t even have a fireplace.”

  “Right. Looked like someone tried to clean up in a hurry, but they didn’t do a decent job.”

  I knew exactly where the ashes had come from. The bizarre shape-shifting monsters I’d seen in my coma. But who had killed them?

  I had a pretty good idea.

  Chapter 6

  “Thanks for your time, Detectives.” I rose. “Could you let me know when you get the autopsy report?”

  “Anything special you’re interested in?” Hammond asked.

  “Cause of death would be nice.”

  “Considering the state of the body and the presence of the knife, we’re going with knife wound.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t believe it. Not anymore.

  “This is an ongoing homicide investigation, Phoenix. We aren’t going to give you any autopsy results, and you know it.”

  I had, but it never hurt to try. I had my own sources anyway.

  As I headed out of the police station I caught sight of the Yankees cap, encased in plastic as all evidence should be and perched on a filing cabinet.

  I knocked it to the ground, then knelt to tie my shoe. Shielding my movements with my shoulders, I slipped a finger into the bag and brushed the bill. Then I rose and continued on my way, leaving the cap on the floor. Better for someone to find it there later and think the evidence had fallen than for them to see me picking it up, wonder if I’d touched the thing, decide I had and start to follow me.