The Laughing Corpse - Laurell K. Hamilton [51]
Irving was a big boy. He wanted the interview. Who was I to play nursemaid on a grown werewolf? Would Jean-Claude find out Irving’s secret? If he did, would it make a difference? Not my problem. My problem was Harold Gaynor, Dominga Salvador, and a monster that was eating the good citizens of St. Louis, Missouri. Let Irving take care of his own problems. I had enough of my own.
14
THE NIGHT SKY was a curving bowl of liquid black. Stars like pinprick diamonds gave a cold, hard light. The moon was a glowing patchwork of greys and goldish-silver. The city makes you forget how dark the night, how bright the moon, how very many stars.
Burrell Cemetery didn’t have any streetlights. There was nothing but the distant yellow gleam of a house’s windows. I stood at the top of the hill in my coveralls and Nikes, sweating.
The boy’s body was gone. It was in the morgue waiting for the coroner’s attentions. I was finished with it. Never had to look at it again. Except in my dreams.
Dolph stood beside me. He didn’t say a word, just looked out over the grass and broken tombstones, waiting. Waiting for me to do my magic. To pull the rabbit out of the hat. The best that could happen was the rabbit to be in and to destroy it. Next best thing was finding the hole it had come from. That could tell us something. And something was better than what we had right now.
The exterminators followed a few paces behind. The man was short, beefy, grey hair cut in a butch. He looked like a retired football coach, but he handled the flamethrower strapped to his back like it was something alive. Thick hands caressing it.
The woman was young, no more than twenty. Thin blond hair tied back in a ponytail. She was a little taller than me, small. Wisps of hair trailed across her face. Her eyes were wide and searched the tall grass, side to side. Like a gunner on point.
I hoped she didn’t have an itchy trigger finger. I didn’t want to be eaten by a killer zombie, but I didn’t want to be plastered with napalm either. Burned alive or eaten alive? Is there anything else on the menu?
The grass rustled and whispered like dry autumn leaves. If we did use the flamethrowers in here, it’d be a grass fire. We’d be lucky to outrun it. But fire was the only thing that could stop a zombie. If it was a zombie and not something else altogether.
I shook my head and started walking. Doubts would get us nowhere. Act like you know what you’re doing; it was a rule I lived by.
I am sure that Señora Salvador would have had a specific rite or sacrifice to find a zombie’s grave. Her way of doing all this had more rules than my way. Of course her way enabled her to trap souls in rotting corpses. I had never hated anyone enough to do that to them. Kill them, yes, but entrap their soul and make it sit and wait and feel its body rotting. No, that was worse than wicked. It was evil. She needed to be stopped, and only death would do that. I sighed. Another problem for another night.
It bothered me to hear Dolph’s footsteps echoing mine. I glanced back at the two exterminators. They killed everything from termites to ghouls, but ghouls are cowards, scavengers mostly. Whatever we were after wasn’t a scavenger.
I could feel the three of them at my back. Their footsteps seemed louder than mine. I tried to clear my mind and start the search, but all I could hear was their footsteps. All I could sense was the woman’s fear. They were messing up my concentration.
I stopped. “Dolph, I need more room.”
“What does that mean?”
“Hang back a little. You’re ruining my concentration.”
“We might be too far away to help.”
“If the zombie rises out of the ground and leeches on me . . .” I shrugged. “What are you going to do, shoot it with napalm and crispy-critter me, too?”
“You said fire was the only weapon,” he said.