Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

“I WASN’T EXPECTING you tonight,” Captain Mila Gil, the Night Shift version of O’Hara, said as she stopped in front of Marlow’s desk. She narrowed her eyes, a spray of wrinkles creased into the corners, as she looked down at him. “Have they cleared you for duty?”

A casual tap of the mouse hid the files that Marlow had pulled up. No one had told him he couldn’t look into the recent spate of post-shift deaths, and that wouldn’t change as long as no one knew what he was doing.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m fighting fit.”

“Good,” Gil said. “Because I don’t care if your liver just fell out your ass. It’s a blue moon tonight, and if you don’t have a death certificate and a note from your mother, I want all hands on deck.”

“I’m getting a head start,” Marlow said. He pointed to Victor Clemons’s file on his desk. “Captain O’Hara asked me to follow up on that complaint. Nothing actionable, but it’s worth keeping an eye on over the next few nights. Acrimonious breakup, and the wolf still sees the house as his territory. His ex disagrees. There’s been a few incidents.”

Gil looked sour. “Breakups like that?” she said. “They’re why I work on my marriage. Divorce isn’t worth that. Add it to the briefing folder and go get some coffee. I don’t want you dying on me halfway through the night.”

“Me neither,” Marlow said with a wry smile.

She snorted and walked away. Marlow stared after her while his mind tangled itself in erratic, suspicious knots. It could have been a chance choice of words, or it could have been a taunt at someone she thought was still oblivious to the plan to kill them. Who better to run a gang of corrupt Night Shift officers than the person who ran the rest of the Night Shift?

Except, Marlow reminded himself, Gil had transferred from Vegas nine months after Piper’s arrest. It didn’t mean she was clean, but it meant she wasn’t in charge. Whoever that was, they’d known Piper. Until recently, they’d worked for him. Or at least kept in contact.

So, he could eliminate Gil from the list of suspects. That just left the rest of the Night Shift. Not a comforting thought.

Marlow pulled the files back up and flicked through the tabs. They were the deaths he’d talked to Cade about, finally collected in one place after Sargeant Windsor in San Marcos unearthed the last one filed in the system with the wrong case number.

People died during the full moon. Not many, not like in the old days, but always a few. Even with the Night Shift on their A-game, they couldn’t stop that.

Mostly nulls. People misjudged their curfew or just wanted the thrill of outrunning a wolf and got caught out on the street. Or they rolled the dice on a wolf picking their home out of all the other houses on the street and didn’t put in proper security.

Wolves died too, though: a bad enough accident, a fight with another wolf that did more damage than their bodies could stitch back together, or a trap. Not often, though. Mostly, if wolves died, it was the morning after. They’d shift back and find themselves naked and somewhere they might not recognize. They didn’t often leave their territory—although there were always a few cases a year of someone who headed north and got as far as LA, or sometimes even San Francisco—but that still left plenty of opportunities to get lost. They woke up in the wilderness and didn’t have the wolf’s survival instincts or healing ability to get home.

So, other than the number of them, most of the deaths weren’t unusual.

Except for Clara Walker. She’d jumped off the Coronado Bridge, and that was weird. Wolves committed suicide during the new moon, not during the honeymoon period after the shift. The wolf was too close to the surface then, and it wanted to live.

In the photo, Clara was a pretty woman with clear brown eyes and curly black hair. Or she had been. The other photos were more brutal, but the autopsy hadn’t shown any sign of foul play.

She’d done it herself. But why?

Marlow read on down through the report. No history of depression, her job had been secure, and while there was a recent breakup, her family said she’d started to date again. Halfway through the transcript of the interview with Clara’s sister, the woman said that the breakup hadn’t been a surprise.

“…they never talked, he was always at work, but she said he’d at least given her a good idea for her podcast.”

Marlow flicked back up and then down to the bottom of the file. There was no other mention of the podcast. He pulled up Google and had just started a search when the door swung open and the rookie stumbled in, laden down with half the squad’s packs.

“I got it!” the rookie said gamely as he headed for the locker rooms. He didn’t look like he had. “It’s okay!”

Marlow closed down the files and pushed himself back from the desk. He intercepted the rookie just as the closed door broke the kid’s forward momentum and his carefully balanced burden started to shift. Marlow relieved him of four packs, one after the other, and stacked them on Bennett’s desk.

“You don’t have to do everyone’s scutwork, you know,” Marlow said as he pulled a rifle slipcover from under the rookie’s arm. “Just your job.”

“Speak for yourself, Marlow,” Franklin corrected him as he loped into the room, big, blond, and genial in a Raider’s hoodie. “Senior officers get to call the training shots.”

“I’m senior to you,” Marlow pointed out.

“Really?” the rookie asked.

“Six months,” Marlow said.

Franklin scowled at him and grabbed his bag off the table. He swung it up onto his back in one easy movement.

“Marlow was Night Shift’s backup choice after I got injured in the line of duty before my first shift,” he told the rookie. “He took my slot, and I had to wait until I was fit for duty again. Same thing that would have happened to you if you’d broken that arm a month ago. So you should count yourself lucky you’re even allowed in here to do scutwork.”

The rookie flushed and hitched his shoulder up to hold the kit bags in place as he scratched at the frayed edge of his cast.

“I do,” he said. “I know I fucked up. I should have been more careful. It’s my fault you’re going out there short-handed.”

Franklin looked conflicted. Marlow had seen the look before, as Franklin’s desire to be a dick butted up against his hatred of the city bureaucracy. The hatred won.

“I’ll tell you a little secret about how this town is run,” Franklin said as he clapped his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “And when I say run, I mean run into the ground. The—”

Marlow had heard this one before. He unearthed his kit—just the Kevlar and weapons, anything silver he had to sign out himself—and headed to get changed. Rude, maybe, but he might get killed tonight. He didn’t want Franklin’s opinion on where city funds should be spent to be one of the last memories he made.

“Fuck me. I got it in my mouth,” Bennett said. She took a swig of water, swilled it around her mouth, and then spat it out. The red-tinted liquid splattered over her boots and dribbled into the cracks in the pavement. “What the hell?”

Marlow holstered his gun and held his hand out for the bottle. She twisted the cap on and tossed it to him. It slapped, cold and heavy, against his palm, and he bent over to pour it over his head. Blood and a few furry chunks hit the pavement.

“Urban farm?” he suggested.

The bottle went to Franklin next. He rinsed off his hands and shook them to shed the water and mess. The flip of his fingers was oddly fastidious for the situation. “Hoarder?”

Bennett crouched down to wipe her boots off with a tissue. “Still think the Blue Moon is an old wives’ tale?” she asked.

“Yes,” Marlow said.

“After that?” Bennett jerked her thumb back over her shoulder toward the house. The windows and doors were broken to let out the stink of the aconite tear gas they’d used to clear out the feeding frenzy. “You ever seen a clusterfuck like that on a normal night?”

“Two hundred guinea pigs did not just manifest themselves overnight,” Marlow pointed out. “They were already there, and it’s just chance the wolves found them tonight, rather than last month or two months from now.”

“Bullshit,” Bennett said. “One wolf maybe, but six of them, just gorging themselves like that? They hadn’t even eaten all of them; they were like foxes in a henhouse. And it’s a coincidence it happened on the double bubble? I repeat, bullshit.”

She had a point. Marlow stuck a finger in his ear and wriggled it. That had been weird. It had been like… gory confetti, and the wolves drunk on the thrill of it. On the other hand, she might plan to kill him tonight, so he wasn’t in the mood to admit anything.

“We’ve had weird calls before,” Marlow said. “What about those guys that left out chicken carcasses stuffed with weed butter before they turned? Six stoned wolves with the munchies, and three on the worst trip of their lives. Nothing weird about the ‘lunar energy,’ just garden-variety stupid.”

Bennett pulled a face, but there wasn’t time to argue further. Their radios crackled with another call, and she caught it.

“Dispatch, throw us a good one,” she said. “We’ve a blue-moon skeptic on our hands here.”

A guinea pig, fat and fuzzy, with two asymmetrical rosettes on its backside, scurried out of the gates and along the pavement between their feet. Franklin grabbed it on instinct and then stood awkwardly, as if he didn’t know what to do with it.

“I’ve got just what you’re looking for, then,” Dispatch drawled. “Reports of a half-naked woman staked out on her lawn. Neighbors called it in. Apparently they tried to get her to come inside, but she won’t give them the keys. Elim and Church Street, white house, red door, lady on the lawn. Can’t miss it.”

“We’re on it,” Bennett said. She turned to Marlow. “See? Told you. Blue moon brings out the crazies.”

Marlow snorted. “She’s a null,” he said as he loped back over to the van. “This is garden-variety stupid.”

They piled into the back. With the rookie on desk duty at the station, it was Franklin who brought up the rear. He gave them all a quick leer as he slammed the doors shut.

“At least the scenery is gonna be nice for once,” he said as he dropped the guinea pig in an empty ammo box.

“Don’t be gross,” Bennett said as she fastened her seat belt.

She slapped the metal next to her and yelled, “Go, go, go!” to the driver. Marlow was nearly thrown out of his seat as the van took off with a guttural roar of the engine. He hung on to the straps of his harness and managed to get himself wedged back into position and strapped in. Franklin swore at Bennett as he bounced off the sides before he managed to fall into a seat.

Marlow tilted his head back against the cold metal behind him, the thrum of the engine loud as it vibrated through the bone, and tuned out the familiar bickering. He focused on the staccato monotony of calls as they came through the driver’s radio.

Fire at a Target over in Mesa Verde.

Two robberies under cover of the moon. Three reports of pack activity. One call up at the Reserve to collect a handful of paparazzi who’d thought it was a good night to try and catch a photo of a naked celebrity mid-shift. That made Marlow think briefly of Cade, somewhere in the city—unless he’d made it out to the ranch he’d offered Marlow as a bolthole.

Marlow checked the gun in his holster, as if it might have fallen out since last time. It was an old habit, but the buzz of low-grade anxiety that made his heel bounce and his skull ache was not new. He remembered it from his first shift after he’d been put back on active duty after the shooting. The brass had been confident they’d cleaned out the department, but the back of Marlow’s neck had burned all night long with uneasy suspicion.

It had faded over the years, tamped down as he dealt with the very real, toothy, and easy to identify threats right in front of him. He’d actually thought it had gone away, but now it had been turned back up, he’d realized it had always been there as a low background hum.

Maybe he should have taken up Cade on his offer, pulled a hamstring, and sat this month out in the country. Except if he’d done that, Marlow wasn’t sure he’d have been able to come back.

One good thing about it, he supposed as he braced around a corner, at least Cade wouldn’t get to say “I told you so” if he was right.

According to the neighbors, the woman on the lawn was Vera Brannick, and she was usually very nice. Not tonight.

“She bit me!” Franklin said as he recoiled. He shook his hand, then examined the bite mark. “Damn it. She broke the skin. I’m gonna need a shot or something. Fuck sake.”

Vera screamed and, as Bennett finally managed to get her feet unshackled, kicked.

“Get away! I want this!” she yelled as blood soaked through the pink teddy from the gouges on her stomach. She’d done them herself. “I want to know wild, feral love. I want him to come for me! He can’t resist.”

Marlow threw a blanket over her like she was an angry canary. She fought them as they tried to get her on her feet, so they just picked her up and hauled her over to the ambulance.

“She’s on something,” Bennett said. She stopped and pulled a cautious face, then spat a tooth out into her hand. “Shit.”

The paramedic plucked it out of the froth of bloody spit with gloved fingers and held it up to check it in the light.

“Came out in one piece,” he said. “I can insert it back in if you want?”

Bennett gave an exasperated look. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I always thought I could rock a gap tooth.”

The paramedic looked at her. Behind him, his partner had Vera strapped down to the stretcher and had slid a needle into her arm. Her screams slid away to dozy mumbles.

“Put it back in,” Bennett said, the words enunciated. “You idiot.”

He absorbed the insult with a shrug and got her to perch on the back of the ambulance and tilt her head back.

“Her neighbor says she was out there nearly an hour,” Marlow said. “I can’t believe she lasted that long.”

Franklin snorted. “You ever see a wild animal eat something rabid? No way. They give that crazy, frothing squirrel a wide berth. I figure it was the same with her. Any wolf that came by could smell the bad idea on her.” He held his hand up and flapped it toward the paramedics. “I guess no one cares about my hand, huh? Just let it fall off, yeah?”

The paramedic glanced over his shoulder. “Put antiseptic on it.”

Bennett growled something at him around the fingers in her mouth, and he looked back down at her. He’d just wiggled the tooth back in when the radios crackled again.

“Dispatch to Charlie-forty, we have an incident at an address you flagged,” Dispatch said. “A Victor Clemons. Do you want to respond?”

Shit. That was all he needed. Marlow cracked his neck to loosen the muscles and glanced over at Bennett.

“Dispatch,” he said. “We’re taking five to get Bennett patched up—”

“Take it,” Bennett said as she pushed the paramedic’s hand away from her mouth. “I’ll catch a ride with another squad once they’ve splinted this.”

The spot between Marlow’s shoulder blades itched as he tried to work out why Bennett would give him a chance to look good in front of their superiors. She wanted the promotion—either for the usual reasons people wanted to be promoted, or because it would make it easier to run a corrupt protection racket with less oversight—and she’d never played fair before. Maybe this had been planned?

He hesitated. Dispatch crackled an impatient request for an answer.

“Do it,” Bennett said. She wiped blood off her lower lip and gave him an annoyed look. “Since when do I need babysitting. Go. Make sure no one is getting killed.”

That was his job.

“On our way,” he said as he depressed the button on the radio. “Two-man team, Bennett’s trailing.”

Victor Clemons was a prudent man where full moon safety was concerned. Surveillance cameras, heavy-duty shutters, reinforcements to the walls and ceiling. His door was open.

Marlow signaled to Franklin to go around the back while he edged up onto the porch and checked the hall around the corner of the door. Thick gouges were ripped out of the plaster on the wall, dug down into the drywall beneath, and the wooden flooring was splintered and torn up. The flat, metallic scent of blood hung on the air.

“Victor?” Marlow said, voice pitched to carry but not too far. He unclipped the flashlight from his belt and flicked it on to illuminate the dimly lit space. “Are you still in there?”

He edged around the door and down the hall, one hand on the butt of his gun. The stairs were clear. Living room too. The TV was smashed and the couch torn to shreds, but no sign of blood or bodies.

The house felt empty. All Marlow could hear as he made his way steadily down the hall was his own footsteps and the faint controlled sound of his breathing.

He stepped in something that slid under his boot. Marlow hopped back and tilted the light down. A splatter of blood on the floor, bright red as the light hit it, with his boot print in the middle.

The wolf had come through the front door. He had probably hit the living room first, maybe while Victor hid. Then, when Victor thought Barney was occupied, he’d… What? Marlow turned the beam of the torch onto the stairs and tracked the route of escape straight down and out the front door. If he’d been in the kitchen instead, why not go straight out the back door?

Marlow filed that question away to answer later and pulled his gun. He held it low and ready by his side as he edged into the kitchen, weight balanced on the balls of his feet in case he had to move fast.

Most of the blood was in here. It splattered the floor and over the kitchen surfaces, a single long spray of it up the wall. Marlow was careful not to step in it this time as he circled around the island.

Barney lay on the ground in front of the kitchen sink. He was dead. It was the only time a wolf was human under a full moon. He was also naked, which made cause of death easy to pinpoint—a bullet hole in his chest, the skin singed around the edges. Marlow crouched down to check his pulse anyhow, fingers pressed against the slack, still-warm skin.

Nothing.

“Charlie-fifty, you there?” he said into the radio. “We’ve a dead wolf in here and no sign of a null. Where are you?”

“Door’s locked,” Franklin said, his voice sullen. “If a wolf can’t kick it in, I can’t either. Open up.”

Marlow stood up and headed over to the back door to let Franklin in. It wasn’t locked. The handle turned easily when he grabbed it.

So what the hell had taken him so long to make entry?

The pieces came together just as Franklin rammed his shoulder into the door from the other side. It smashed into Marlow. He’d already started to back up, but it was reinforced metal, and it hit his chest hard enough that he was knocked backward.

He hit the floor and skidded until he smacked into the base of the fridge. He felt the curved metal dent under the impact, and the gun slipped from his hand.

“I’d hoped the wolf would do you in,” Franklin said as he walked into the kitchen. He rubbed his shoulder with one hand as he talked, his thumb dug down into the joint. “Give you a bit of dignity; let you go out the way you want to go.”

Marlow snorted. Or tried to. His lungs hadn’t quite recovered from the door yet. He got his elbow under him and tried to push himself up.

“I don’t want to die by wolf,” he said.

Franklin kicked his arm out from under him. The ground came up fast, and Marlow saw stars as his head bounced off the floor. His voice stayed conversational as he put his boot on Marlow’s wrist and pressed down.“Then why are you fucking one? I mean, seriously? You know better. If I didn’t kill you tonight, he would have sooner or later. At least you know I’ll remember your face.”

The pain in his wrist actually helped. It was immediate, occurring, and Marlow had abused his body enough over the years that it knew what to focus on. The ache from being clotheslined by the door faded into the background, and the hot, fresh pain that radiated up his arm cleared the fog from Marlow’s head.

“You’re Piper’s second?” he said. “And I thought it was Bennett. I owe her an apology.”

“You owe me an apology,” Franklin said. “You thought I was an idiot, right?”

Marlow shook his head. “You don’t get to Night Shift by being stupid,” he said. “I just thought you were unlikeable.”

Anger thinned Franklin’s lips over his teeth for a moment, and he put his weight on Marlow’s wrist. Then he got himself under control again.

“Always a smartass,” he said. “I do what needs to be done, and I know what needs to be done. It’s a wolf’s world, Marlow, and if you want to live in it, you have to live by their rules. It doesn’t count if it happens under the full moon.”

“You tried to kidnap Lance Rilkes under a new moon,” Marlow pointed out. “How does that fit?”

Franklin looked at him for a second and then grinned. It was wide and seemed entirely genuine.

“That’s your problem, Kit,” he said. “Too smart for your own good. The others buy that shit, but you see right through it. Too clever to be conned, and too moral to corrupt.”

“You could try,” Marlow said. “Who knows. I went along with Piper for way too long.”

Franklin shook his head. “The penny-ante stuff,” he said. “Piper always said you’d balk if you got too deep. That’s why he was so easy to convince that it was you who’d squealed.”

He winked.

Marlow drove the heel of his hand into the side of Franklin’s braced knee. It wasn’t exactly how he’d wrecked his, but the torn-gristle pop of it sounded very similar. Franklin made a wet retch of sound in the back of his throat as his knee bent the wrong way. He lurched backward, and Marlow scrambled to his feet.

He tackled Franklin, shoulder aimed at the vulnerable slice of flesh where the Kevlar vest rode up, and took them both to the ground. Franklin grunted and hammered punches into Marlow’s ribs and back as they scuffled in the blood. He managed to flip them over and pinned Marlow down, his forearm jammed into Marlow’s throat.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Why let you go out clean. I’ll tell them you got scared. That your famous nerve finally broke. There was no need to kill that wolf, no lives in danger, but you did it anyhow. Then you attacked me to cover your tracks, and I had to kill you. With my bare hands. Think they’ll buy it?”

Red smeared at the edge of Marlow’s vision. He peeled his lips back from his teeth in a snarl at Franklin.

“My nerve, maybe,” he rasped out. “That you could beat me?”

He sucked air through his teeth to express his doubts about that lie. Franklin snarled and leaned harder on his throat. That brought him in close enough for Marlow to reach up, grab an ear, and dig his thumb into Franklin’s eye.

Franklin screamed and recoiled. Blood dripped down his face from his torn eyelid as he scrambled away on his hands and knee. He blotted at his eye with the back of his sleeve as he cursed Marlow.

“You really think you’ve got nine lives, huh?” he rasped as he grabbed Marlow’s gun and scrambled to his feet. “Well, trust me. Three’s the charm.”

Franklin squinted through the veil of blood as he aimed at Marlow, finger curled around the trigger. He licked his lips.

“Probably for the best,” he panted. “If you were corrupt, you’d be competition, and I learned from Piper where that leads.”

His finger tightened on the trigger, and then Bennett’s voice echoed down the hall.

“Marlow? Franklin?” she said. “What’s going on?”

Habit twitched Franklin’s head in her direction. The gun wavered for a second, and Marlow lunged for the back door. He scrambled out over the threshold on all fours and then staggered to his feet in the garden. The cool night air stung his raw throat as he sucked in lungfuls of it. He scrambled up the wire fence at the bottom of the garden and dropped down the other side.

A window twitched in the house opposite and quickly closed again as the neighbor took in the scene. They were probably on the phone to 911 now, which would just help Franklin’s story.

Marlow grimaced and put that aside to deal with later. He pushed himself into a dead run down the long concrete rat run of the alley. At the end of it, he paused for a second to orient himself.

Behind him, he heard the distinct double-tap report of shots fired.

Bennett?

There was nothing he could do now. Marlow stripped his radio off and tossed it, then folded one arm over his ribs as he jogged away into the darkness. The wolves were waiting out in the city for him, but tonight they weren’t who he was worried about.