Текст книги "Known Devil"

Автор книги: Justin Gustainis

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

McGuire and I looked at each other but didn’t have to say anything. We knew what had just happened. There was a lot we had to talk about, once the crowd had cleared.

One of the detectives who had already stood up was Karl, who had taken a few steps that put him next to the media room’s only door. He wasn’t blocking the way, but anybody who wanted to leave was going to have to pass pretty close to him.

This move wasn’t part of the playbook that we’d worked out earlier, and I wondered what Karl had in mind. Maybe he hoped to get one more shot at Slattery with his Influence as the PP leader and his entourage left the room. But things didn’t quite work out that way.

I turned in my chair, and watched as the Patriot Party foursome made their rapid way toward the exit. Franks, the campaign manager, must have noticed Karl standing near the door, because he let go of Slattery’s arm and turned to say something to Brody, the bodyguard posing as an administrative assistant.

The instructions that Brody had received became clear a couple of seconds later. As the group reached the door, Brody put his wide body between Slattery and Karl – typical bodyguard behavior, even though Karl hadn’t made any kind of threatening move. But then Brody did something that wasn’t so typical of his profession: he reached inside his coat and came up with a crucifix, extending it out toward Karl they way all the vampire hunters do in the movies. I’ve done the same thing myself – for the simple reason that it works.

I was still in the front of the room and too far away to hear what Brody said, with all the other voices in the room competing with his. But from his posture and expression, I had no trouble guessing that it was something like “Get your ass back, bloodsucker!”

I sucked in a breath. We hadn’t planned for this, either. Franks must’ve figured out that Karl was a vampire, even though it was common knowledge that no member of the undead could possibly be up and about this long after sunrise. I guessed that I wasn’t the only Sherlock Holmes fan in the room, because Franks had clearly adopted one of the Great Detective’s core principles: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Quite a few of the cops were milling around in the aisle now, asking each other variations on the “What the fuck?” question. I shoved my way through them, in a hurry to get to Karl so I could do something about that cross Slattery’s bodyguard was using to threaten my partner. Brody was still standing in his Van Helsing pose, even though the tactic had already served its purpose: Slattery and the other three had slipped out behind him and were probably halfway to the front door by now. I didn’t know what Brody intended to do – maybe the big man wasn’t sure himself. I just knew I wanted to get that cross away from him before the situation went from bad to worse. But this seemed to be my day for surprises.

Karl had flinched from the crucifix at first, turning away and using his arm to shield his face, just like movie vampires have been doing since Bela Lugosi – the real ones have probably been doing it a lot longer. But then something strange happened.

Karl slowly turned back toward Brody and looked right at the cross that the bodyguard was pointing at him like a pistol. I couldn’t see his face then, but Karl’s body was tight with tension as he reached out his left hand and grabbed Brody’s wrist.

I’d made enough progress through the press of bodies in the aisle that I was close enough to hear my vampire partner say, “That’s a nice piece of religious art you’ve got there, Brody. Mind if I take a look?”

Karl must have tightened his grip as he spoke. Brody was big and tough, but his muscles and pain threshold were no match for vampire strength. After a couple of seconds, his hand opened involuntarily, letting the cross drop from his grasp. It was falling toward the floor when Karl reached out his other hand and caught it.

I stopped pushing my way through the crowd then and just stood still, watching. I don’t think my jaw dropped, but it might’ve. The conversations in the room, which had been fading as more people saw what was going on, went completely silent, as if the talk had been coming from a TV that somebody had just turned off

Karl let go of Brody’s wrist then, glanced down at the crucifix in his palm and said, “So, where’d you get it – Vlad-Mart?” Brody didn’t say anything. He was staring at Karl as if a three-headed alien from the Planet Mongo had just beamed down in front of him and asked directions to the White House.

Karl looked down at the cross again. “It’s nice work,” he said. “Not too elaborate. I always thought less is more, myself.” I think he was trying for a casual tone, but to me, at least, the strain in his voice was unmistakable. “I bet you had it blessed by a priest, too, didn’t you? Maybe even the bishop himself.”

Brody took a step back, stared at Karl a few seconds longer, then turned on his heel and walked rapidly out the door. In the silence, I could hear his footsteps in the hall outside, receding rapidly. He was not quite running.

The buzz of talk came back all at once, twice as loud as it had been before. I shook off the paralysis caused by amazement and made my way over to Karl. Now that I could see his face, the strain of what he’d just done was obvious.

He tried for a smile but it barely displayed the points of his fangs. Handing the little crucifix to me, he said, “Just as well it’s not made of silver. That would’ve made things… difficult.”

“Difficult,” I said, and grinned at him. “Yeah, absolutely.”

Karl’s smile broadened into something more genuine. “Guess Doc Watson had it right, after all,” he said.

I was about to say something clever involving a pun on “elementary”, but I never got the chance – because suddenly Karl’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed in a heap on the floor. I knelt to check his pulse before realizing just what a futile exercise that would be.

“Rachel?”

“Ummpf.”

She’d gone home around 8.30, pleading exhaustion. I could hardly have blamed her. But this call was absolutely necessary.

“It’s Stan. Stan Markowski.”

“Whaa? Stan who?”

“Rachel, Karl’s dead.”

There was silence on the line for three or four seconds, and when Rachel’s voice came back there was no sleepiness in it at all.

“You don’t mean undead, but dead for real?” she asked.

“That’s the problem – I don’t fuckin’ know.”

“What happened?”

I ran it down for her, starting with the arrival of the Patriot Party crowd and ending with Karl’s swan dive to the floor of the media room.

“Karl handled a crucifix?” Her voice was as dubious as mine would have been, if I hadn’t seen it for myself.

“Bet your ass he did,” I said.

“Without any burns on his hand, or any other ill effects?”

“Nope, none at all – unless you count what happened there at the end.”

“Handling holy objects,” she said, as if to herself. Then, a little louder: “There’s nothing in the spell that should have given him that kind of power. Although, I grant you, it’s still experimental, so who knows?”

“I don’t think it was the spell that did it.” I briefly explained the sessions that Karl had been having with Doc Watson to see if his aversion to holy objects was only psychological.

“That’s fascinating,” Rachel said when I’d finished.

“Yeah, fascinating,” I said. “But it doesn’t do anything about the fact that right now, my partner’s doing a pretty good imitation of something that you’d pull out of a drawer at the county morgue.”

More silence from the other end. “Rachel? You still there?” I shouldn’t have raised my voice to her like that – but it had been kind of a stressful morning. I decided to start acting like a grown-up. Better late than never.

“Shut up – I’m thinking. Or trying to.”

After a few seconds, she said, “Where’s Karl now?”

“In the trunk of my car, zipped up in a plastic body bag.”

“What’re you going to do with him?”

“I was kinda hoping to get some advice from you on that question.”

I heard her breath go out in a long sigh. “My Goddess, Stan, we’re dealing with stuff here that nobody else has ever had to think about, as far as I know.”

“Well, then, I guess it’s time somebody started,” I said. “I nominate you for the honor.”

“My cup runneth under,” she said. “Alright, let’s try to think this through. There’s nothing unusual about a vampire appearing to be a corpse during daylight hours, because he is a corpse – until sunset.”

“When were you planning to tell me something that I don’t already know?”

“Stan,” she said tiredly, “stop. I know you’re worried about Karl, and so am I. But please, just… stop.”

I made myself take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yeah, alright. Sorry.”

“Forget it.”

“But what happened, Rachel? This was the day that Karl wasn’t supposed to be a corpse, remember? He was supposed to be alive and kicking, all day long. What went wrong?”

“Any answer I might give to that is pure speculation at this point. Maybe the spell doesn’t affect every vampire the same way. The one that Annabelle worked with was conscious and functioning the whole day, she said – but it’s always a mistake to generalize from a sample of one. That’s true in both science and magic.”

I’d been about to say, “If you didn’t know whether it was safe, then why did you do it?” when the truth stood up and hit me right in the mouth. She did it because you and Karl asked her to, smart guy. Asked her – shit, you both practically begged her.

So, instead of making a complete ass out of myself, I just said, “Uh-huh.”

“Or maybe having to deal with that jerk holding the cross caused more stress than Karl’s system could handle, considering the strain he was already under.”

“Yeah, the cross was something none of us had counted on,” I said. “But, Rachel, you should have seen him – taking hold of that goon’s wrist, then catching the cross when it fell. I was so proud of him…”

“Yes,” she said, “as well you should be.”

I had to swallow a couple of times before I went on. Keeping most of what I was feeling out of my voice, I said, “It’d be nice if I get the chance to tell him that sometime. You think I will?”

“The simplest answer to that is also the most difficult,” she said, “because it involves waiting. Make sure you’re with Karl at sunset. Not to be blunt about it, but either he’ll rise or he won’t. Then we’ll know.”

“That’s it?” I said. “That’s the best you’ve got?” The promise I’d made myself to remain calm hadn’t lasted very long.

“Well, there is one other method,” she said, sounding like someone whose patience had just been used up. “The advantage of this one is you can do it right now, as soon as you get out to your car. But it does have something of a downside, as well.”

“What?” I practically yelled. “What is it?”

“If Karl is still among the undead, then he still possesses all of a vampire’s vulnerabilities. The sun’s shining nice and strong today – from my window, I can hardly see a cloud in the sky.”

I thought I could see where this was going, and I didn’t like it.

“So what you do,” Rachel said, “is open the trunk, unzip that body bag, and take hold of Karl’s arm. Pull it out of the bag until the sun is shining on it. If it bursts into flame, you’ll know that Karl’s OK – apart from his arm, of course. I imagine it’ll heal, eventually. Are you willing to do that to your partner, Stan? To your friend?”

“The fuck I am,” I said.

“No, I didn’t think so.” We were both quiet for a bit, being pissed off at each other, but when Rachel finally spoke, the anger had drained out of her voice. “I knew you couldn’t,” she said. “I couldn’t do it, either. So, I guess that means we wait, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said dully. “Shit.”

“And if you think the hours between now and sunset are going to be one tiny bit easier on me than they’ll be for you, Stan…”

“I know, Rachel. I know.”

“You’ll be with Karl then. Come sundown.”

“Fuckin’ A right I will be.”

“Then when you, uh, know for sure, call me, OK? No matter… no matter what.”

“Count on it.”

I sat in McGuire’s office, sipping from a cup of his excellent coffee and telling him what Rachel’d said about Karl. The coffee’s rich taste aside, I was just grateful for the caffeine. I felt more tired than I had in a long time, and only part of it came from being short on sleep.

“Fine,” he said when I was done, slapping a palm on his desk. “Just great. One of my detectives may or may not be deceased, and I won’t even know until” – he glanced at his watch – “something like five fucking hours from now.”

“We won’t know,” I said. I might’ve said that with a little more emphasis than I usually use with the boss, but like I said, I was tired.

McGuire stared at me for a second, as if he was wondering how I’d look with a shiny new asshole, but then blew out a breath between his lips and slowly sat back in his chair. “Yeah, alright. I know. It’s not all about me.”

“No, I’d say it was mostly about Karl.”

He nodded tiredly. “Well, while we’re waiting for the sunset to resolve that particular issue, there’s no shortage of other ones to think about.”

“Like what Karl got out of Slattery, there at the end.”

“That’d be pretty high on my list, yeah,” he said. “Helter fucking-skelter. Jesus. Never thought I’d hear that again, except maybe on some TV documentary about the Sixties or something.”

“Patton Wilson,” I said. “He’s back. Has to be.”

“I heard that bastard was hiding out in Australia someplace.”

“Maybe he was,” I said. “Or that could’ve been a rumor he started himself, to throw the feds off his trail. Anyway, I’m betting he’s in Scranton now. Or someplace close by.”

“Close by,” McGuire said with a slow nod. “That’s right – he never was much for delegating, was he?”

“No, he wasn’t,” I said. “He’s a very hands-on terrorist, is Mister Wilson.”

“Terrorist?”

“I don’t know what else to call the bastard. He wants to wipe out all the supes by starting a ‘race war’ between them and humans. If that’s not terrorism, I guess it’ll do until the real thing comes along.”

“Yeah you got a point there. Last time, he just used that bunch of religious whackos he controlled–”

“The Church of the True Cross,” I said.

“Yeah, them. But this time, he’s doing what the military calls ‘fighting on multiple fronts’.”

“Multiple is right,” I said as I rubbed my forehead. “It makes my brain hurt just trying to get a handle on it all.”

“The Patriot Party’s the easy one,” McGuire said. “We got that straight from the horse’s mouth not an hour ago.”

“Wilson’s gotta be behind the Delatassos, too,” I said. “Delatasso Junior, anyway.”

“The bombings, you mean?”

“That’s one part,” I said. “Those bombs have got the people scared shitless, and I don’t blame them. And since the bombing’s all part of the gang war, supes get the blame, with the fucking Patriot Party right there to fan the flames. Just like the Nazis and the Reichstag fire.”

McGuire’s a World War Two buff, so I didn’t have to explain to him what I meant. “For them, it was the Jews,” he said slowly. “And for the PP, it’s supes.”

“With a similar result in mind,” I said.

“You said the bombings were only one part of it,” McGuire said. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I am, if you’re thinking about Slide,” I said. “Drug-addicted supes are gonna commit crimes to get money. And every time they do, the PP gets something else to be outraged about.”

“And if the Patriot Party wins the election…”

“Wilson gets a city government that’s gonna do whatever he tells it to. Same thing if the Delatassos wipe out the Calabrese family and take over local organized crime. Then Wilson controls both the cops and the crooks.”

“But the Delatassos are supes, too,” McGuire said. “They’re vamps, for God’s sake.”

“I figure Wilson’s willing to overlook that – for a while,” I told him. “Shit, the Nazis had an alliance with Japan, remember? And the Japanese weren’t exactly what Hitler and his crew considered members of the fucking master race.”

“Alright, fine,” he said. “But let’s put the history lesson aside. The important thing–”

“Wait! Wait a second – something just occurred to me.”

He raised an eyebrow in my direction. “I don’t suppose it’s a miraculous solution to all our problems.”

“Sorry, no. In fact, it’s another problem – or it is if I’ve got things figured right.”

“Then let’s hope you’re wrong,” McGuire said. “But you better tell me anyway.”

“I just remembered something Christine was telling me the other night. Now that Victor Castle’s dead, that leaves a power vacuum in the supe community.”

“You needed your daughter to tell you that? You must be slipping, Markowski.”

“No, I figured that part out for myself. But what I didn’t know is that there’s a guy – a vamp – who’s angling for the job. And it sounds like he’s pushing pretty hard.”

“Pushing how?”

“The usual combination of carrot and stick. The stick is what you might expect – he’s known as a bad guy to cross, you should pardon the expression. Any supe who’s against him runs into a world of hurt.”

McGuire leaned back in his chair. “If that’s the way he does business, I’m surprised we haven’t encountered him before now. Or maybe we have – what’s his name?”

“Dimitri Kaspar.”

He shook his head slowly. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“The guy doesn’t have a sheet, at least not locally. I asked the Staties to check their database, see if he’s been busted anyplace else in Pennsylvania. But you know how that works.”

He nodded. “They’re going to get back to you – any day now.”

“Yeah, that’s about it,” I said.

“Still, this Kaspar just sounds like a run-of-the mill punk, whether he’s got fangs on him or not.”

“I’d agree with you,” I said, “except for the size of the carrot he’s offering to those who go along with him.”

“What kind of carrot are we talking about?”

“The usual kind – money. Apparently he’s been spreading a lot of it around. But here’s the thing, boss – this guy works at the Post Office, sorting mail. He should barely be able to make the rent every month, let alone throw cash around like he’s been doing. Unless he’s hit the lottery, there’s only one explanation I can think of.”

McGuire stared at me for three or four seconds. “You know, under other circumstances, I’d be inclined to say you were batshit paranoid.”

“Yeah, but just cause we’re paranoid doesn’t mean that Patton Wilson isn’t really out to get us.”

McGuire let out his breath in a long sigh. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”

“The bastard’s thorough,” I said. “You gotta give him that.”

“Alright,” McGuire said. “Whether you’re right about this vamp Kaspar or not, it’s pretty damn clear that Wilson is back, and he’s up to the same shit as last time – but on a much bigger scale. Question is: what the fuck are we gonna do about it?”

“Oh,” I said. “You don’t know, either?”

I got through the rest of the day somehow. I wouldn’t have minded going out on some calls, even though I felt beat to shit, but McGuire said he couldn’t authorize the overtime for half a detective team. He didn’t mind if I hung around the squad room, though, so I spent a lot of time at my desk.

Lieutenant Crestwell, the squad’s day-shift commander, came on duty at some point. McGuire must’ve asked him to leave me alone, because Crestwell didn’t acknowledge my existence all day, beyond a nod when he first entered the squad room. That was fine with me – I was busy thinking about the return of Patton Wilson. I wish I could say that some brilliant idea occurred to me as I sat there, but brilliant ideas seemed to be in short supply for me lately.

That bastard Wilson was angling to be the power behind three thrones – the local Mafia family, the city government, and the Scranton supe community – assuming you want to dignify any of those positions with a word like “throne”. Well, you couldn’t fault Wilson for nerve – the guy had the balls of a brass ape. Unfortunately, he also had both brains and bucks in abundance – maybe enough to make his twisted ambition a reality. Unless somebody stopped him. Somehow.

I realized that Christine would be rising at sunset, and she’d expect to find me at home. If I wasn’t there, she might assume the worst, so I called and left a message on her voice mail.

Hi, honey, it’s your old man. Listen, I won’t be there when you get up tonight, and I’m not sure if I’m gonna get home at all. Some crazy stuff’s going on at work – I’ll tell you about it when I see you, which may not be until tomorrow night. But there’s nothing to worry about.

I hoped that last sentence didn’t turn out to be a lie. I didn’t know what, if anything, Christine had going on with my partner, but I still didn’t relish the idea of telling her Karl wouldn’t be coming around anymore – ever.

Apart from a shower and quick change of clothes in the locker room, I spent most of the day at the station house. But as the sun finally lowered over the city, I was in another part of town, standing behind my parked Toyota Lycan, with the trunk key in my hand – waiting.

Today’s Times-Tribune and Weatherwitch.com both agreed – sunset was scheduled for 6.07. I checked my watch – it was coming up on 6.00. Of course, the jury was still out on whether vampires rise and sleep at meteorological dawn and dusk, or whether they’re obeying some other, more fundamental, impulse.

6.04: No sounds or stirring from inside my trunk, where Karl Renfer slept. Whether his current state was going to last a couple more minutes or go on forever was the question that had my guts feeling like a tightly clenched fist.

6.06: I found myself wondering what kind of funeral Karl would have wanted, and pulled my mind away from that thought as quick as I’d yank my hand from a hot stove. I’m not one of those nitwits who think the “power of positive thinking” ever changed one goddamn thing, but I was not going to stand here and think about Karl being dead forever. I was not going to do that.

6. 07: Full dark now – at least, it seemed that way to me. The interior of the trunk remained as quiet as the grave, a metaphor I banished from my mind the instant it showed up. I thought about Rachel and wondered what she was doing right now – as if I didn’t know. Wherever she was, she had the face of a clock or watch in view. She’d probably be trying not to stare at it, to distract her mind with other stuff – and failing, just as I was.

6.08: I was going to have to tell Rachel, eventually. After all, I’d promised. “Call me, either way,” she’d said. McGuire would want to know, too. I wondered how long I should wait before deciding to make the call that both of them were dreading. It seemed that I should–

“Hey – what the fuck is going on here?”

That pissed-off voice came from inside my trunk, and it was the voice of Karl Renfer – loud, and clear, and alive. Well, undead, anyway.

“Just a second, Karl!” I yelled. I nearly pounded my fists on the trunk lid in relief, but had enough sense to realize that Karl might misinterpret the sound, not knowing where he was. “Everything’s fine – just give me a second!” I started patting my pockets for the car keys, then realized that they’d been in my left hand the whole time.

I finally got the Lycan’s trunk open, and the light came on to reveal the body bag, bent at a sharp right angle. We’d had to bend Karl at the waist in order to get him into my trunk, which isn’t exactly roomy. Most Toyotas are compact cars, unless you want to spring for the Hexus, which is the luxury model, and I’ve never had that kind of money.

I could see slight movement from inside the body bag. Karl could have torn his way out of that thing in about a second, but I’d asked him to wait, and that’s what he was doing.

I grabbed the tab of the big zipper and yanked it down all the way to reveal my partner, who was looking a whole lot better than when I’d zipped him in there six hours earlier. For one thing, his eyes were open.

He blinked at me a couple of times. “What the fuck, Stan?”

“I’ll explain in a second,” I said. “But first, let’s get you out of there.”

It took a little while to get him straightened out and completely free of the bag, but finally Karl was standing on the sidewalk next to my car, making a futile effort at brushing out the wrinkles his suit had developed during the day. He gave up after a few seconds and raised his head to look around.

“Hey, we’re in front of my building,” he said.

“I figured once you were out of there, you might want a change of clothes, maybe a shower and something to eat.” Like any self-respecting vampire, Karl had a supply of blood in his fridge.

“You figured right,” he said. “But what the hell was I doing in… oh.”

“Remember what happened now?”

He slowly ran a hand through his hair, which was pretty mussed up from getting in and out of the body bag. “I’d just used some Influence to slip what’s-his-name, Slattery, a question, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I remember he answered, something about helter-skelter. Then all the PP guys walked out in a huff. I went over near the door, hoping for another shot at Slattery when he passed, but then his pet gorilla started waving a cross at me.”

“How’d you feel, when he did that?”

Karl made a face. “At first, it was the same as always – I saw the cross and had the urge to be someplace else – fast. But then the stuff I’ve been working on with Doc Watson came back to me. I used one of the relaxation techniques he’d had me practicing, and, shit – it worked. I was able to look at the cross, and then…” Karl shook his head in wonderment.

“And then you took it away from him, remember? You grabbed his wrist, made him let go of the cross, and then you caught it. You held it in your hand, Karl.”

He lifted his right hand and stared at it, turning it back and forth as if checking for damage. “Shit,” he said again. “No burns, nothing.”

“Guess Doc Watson was right, after all,” I said, and we just stood there for a minute, grinning at each other like a couple of idiots.

Karl’s grin slowly faded, then he said, “That’s the last thing I remember – holding the cross.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “You kind of flaked out on us after that.”

I told him what had happened, and explained how he’d ended up in a body bag inside my trunk for the last five hours or so.

“And you drove here just before sunset,” he said.

“Yep.”

“You must’ve been pretty confident that I was OK.”

“Of course I was,” I said. “Never doubted it for a minute.” He looked at me for a second or two, not speaking, then gave me half a smile. Vampires are good at detecting lies, but the one I’d just told didn’t seem to bother him very much.

Karl made a head gesture toward his apartment building. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “You can bring me up to speed while I clean up a little and get into some fresh clothes.”

“Good idea,” I said. As we headed up the sidewalk toward his building’s front door, I pulled out my phone. “But I’ve got a couple of calls I need to make first.”

What with one thing and another, we were over an hour late reporting for our shift. But McGuire didn’t seem inclined to dock us for the time.

“Good to see you, Detective,” he said to Karl as we walked in. “I was pleased to learn that I won’t have to dig my dress uniform out of the closet again just yet. It was a little tight, the last police funeral I attended, and I haven’t lost any weight since then.”

Fucking McGuire – sentimental, as always.

“Sorry I flaked out on you, boss,” Karl said as we sat down. “But at least we got something good out of Slattery. It wasn’t a wasted effort.”

McGuire twitched one side of his mouth. “Depends on what you mean by ‘good’. It was interesting – I’ll say that much. The only problem we’ve got now is what the hell to do about it.”

“I don’t guess it would do Slattery’s campaign much good if word got out about his thoughts on helter-skelter,” I said.

“I dunno,” Karl said. “There’s folks in this town who’d think that was a reason to vote for the son of a bitch.”

“But there’s plenty who wouldn’t,” I said. “Supes, especially.”

“I think you can assume that Slattery’s already lost the supe vote, Stan,” Karl told me. “He wrote us off a long time ago.”

“Anyway, there’s no video of him saying it,” McGuire said. “Nothing for the media to run with.”

“There’s about thirty cops who heard him say it,” I said. “Including the three of us.”

“Doesn’t matter much,” McGuire said. “Slattery would say we’d all been ordered to lie by the mayor, who wants to keep his job come election day. And there’s something else.”

We both looked at him.

“Maybe Slattery admits he said all that stuff about helter-skelter, OK? But then he says there was a vampire in the room who used Influence to make him say it – further proof that vampires have no place on the police force.”

“Influence doesn’t work that way,” Karl said.

“You and I know that,” McGuire said. “But do you think the average human living in Scranton knows it – or even gives a shit? People believe what they want to believe.”

People believe what they want to believe. McGuire wasn’t saying anything that I didn’t already know, but there was something… Shit.

“You’re right, boss,” I said. “We haven’t got any ironclad proof that Slattery said it. But, shit, who needs proof when you’ve got innuendo?”

McGuire shook his head. “I’m not following.”

“It’s simple,” I said. “We just follow the advice of Lyndon Baines Johnson, a guy who knew a few things about politics.”

Karl looked at me and said, “If you’re waiting for somebody to feed you the next line, I’ll do it – what’d Johnson say?”

“When all else fails, call your opponent a pig fucker – and let him deny it.”

After a few seconds, McGuire said, “I think the light is beginning to dawn.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say stuff like that, boss,” Karl said with a slight smile. “Especially after yesterday.” Then he looked at me and said, “I still don’t get it.”

“Print media may be on its way out,” I said, “but it isn’t dead yet. Plenty of people still read the Times-Tribune every day. It’s online, too – so even the geeks see it.”

“Yeah, they do,” McGuire said. “And if somebody were to leak the story to the T-T–”

“On deep background, of course,” I said.

“Of course. I bet they’d run with it,” McGuire said, “especially if they had the names of a few cops who were there, so they could confirm the story.”