Scott Sigler - Nocturnal - A Novel

“Bryan, get off the van,” Pookie said.

Red and blue lights cut the night as patrol cars turned onto Geary. Bryan looked down at the boy again — horribly burned, young body smashed from a four-story fall. If Bryan hadn’t dreamed about the kid, would this have happened? All that rage, all that hate … how could he feel that for someone he’d never even met?

“Bryan!”

Pookie’s yell yanked Bryan back into the moment.

“Get down ,” his partner said. “Let me handle this. You keep your mouth shut, let me do the talking, got it?”

Bryan nodded. He slid off the van. Next thing he knew, he was sitting with his ass on the concrete sidewalk, his back against the building from which a flaming Jay Parlar had fallen to his death.

Up on the van roof, Pookie kept pumping away on the boy’s chest. Pulse or no pulse, he would continue to do that until the paramedics arrived.

Bryan closed his eyes.

This was what it felt like to go insane.

Alex Panos Gets Gone

A half-block east of the ruined van, two teenage boys stood at the corner of Geary and Larkin, their heads peeking around just enough to watch the scene — four police cars, an ambulance and cops all over the place. One of the boys was much bigger than the other. The smaller one wore a black sweatshirt, hood pulled up over his head. His name was Issac Moses.

The other boy wore a crimson jacket with gold sleeves and a gold BC on the chest. His name was Alex Panos, and he wanted to know just what the hell was going on.

“Holy shit,” Issac said. “Alex, that cop, I thought he was gonna shoot Jay.”

Alex nodded. “I recognize those pigs. The one in black is Bryan Clauser. The fat one is Pookie something or other. They were at my house.”

“At your house ? Holy shit, man, holy shit . What are we gonna do?”

Alex didn’t know. He glanced at his friend’s plain black sweatshirt. Issac thought someone wanted to kill anyone wearing BoyCo colors, so he didn’t wear them. Alex had called Issac a pussy for that, but after seeing what happened to Jay, maybe it was a good idea to lose the Boston College gear after all.

“Alex, man, I’m scared,” Issac said. “Maybe we should go to the cops.”

“Dumb shit, those are cops.”

“Yeah, but you said they were in your house, and they didn’t try anything, right? And that cop in black, he didn’t actually shoot Jay. Besides, both cops were on the ground — they didn’t set Jay on fire and throw him off the fucking roof of his own building, right?”

Alex looked back down the street. One of the cops that had visited his apartment, the one that dressed all in black, was in the back of the ambulance. A paramedic was working on his face. The other one, the fat chink, he was also around somewhere but Alex didn’t see him.

Jay was still on the van roof. It didn’t look like he was moving. A second paramedic was up there with him, but he didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry.

“I think Jay’s dead,” Alex said.

Issac’s face wrinkled, his blue eyes narrowed and started to tear up. “Dead? Jay ? Holy shit , man!”

“Be quiet,” Alex said. “I gotta think.”

Issac was right about one thing: the cop hadn’t actually shot Jay. But maybe that was only because Jay was already dying from the fall. If Alex and Issac had been just a couple of minutes earlier, would they be dead as well? What really mattered was that those two cops had come to Jay’s place at three in the morning, and now Jay was dead.

Issac tugged at Alex’s sleeve.

“Alex, come on,” Issac said. “Let’s go to the cops. Other cops, I mean. We’re in a lot of fucking trouble.”

Alex shook his head. “No way. Whatever cop we talk with, those two are going to know, and then they’ll come for us. Cops stick with cops — they don’t give a shit about the law or justice or whatever. We have to find a place to hide for a while. That, and we have to find guns.”

Alex ducked back behind the building, out of sight of the cops swarming around Geary Street. He started walking north on Larkin, then stopped, reached back, grabbed Issac and dragged him away from the corner.

Another Day, Another Body

Pookie went through the motions. Part of his brain paid close attention to details. Another part directed the other cops, sending uniforms where they needed to go to collect information. And yet another part was lost in the bizarreness of his partner, of what this all meant.

Pookie was overweight, out of shape and slow, but he wasn’t that slow. He’d been maybe two blocks behind Bryan. Pookie had turned the corner just in time to see Jay Parlar’s flaming body sail into the night air. Bryan was down on the sidewalk when the kid’s body smashed into the van. No way Bryan could have thrown the kid off that roof.

Pookie had closed in, his chest burning, his stomach heaving — he really had to do something about getting back into shape — and then, Bryan’s crazy leap. To leap that high, maybe Bryan had jumped up, then pushed off the side of the van or the van’s door handle, like those parkour guys who could run up the side of a building. Bryan had been far away, it had been dark save for the streetlights, the boy had been on fire … plenty of variables to play tricks with what Pookie had seen.

Because a man couldn’t jump eight feet straight up.

Bryan’s feet had cleared the van roof. He had dropped down lightly, one black Nike on either side of the facedown, burning kid. Bryan had whipped off his jacket and used it to smother the flames. He’d been helping the boy.

But when Bryan had rolled the kid over, everything changed. Pookie knew — he knew — that if he hadn’t gotten there when he had, Bryan would have put a bullet through Jay Parlar’s brain.

The crime-scene investigations team was already finished with their work. According to them, Jay would have died even if he hadn’t been set on fire and tossed off a four-story building. The boy had been stabbed while still up on the roof, severing an artery — he never had a chance.

When the morgue van took the body away, Pookie had gone up to the roof to see things for himself. There, he’d found symbols written in Jay Parlar’s blood.

The same symbols they’d found written in Oscar Woody’s blood.

Back down on the street, Pookie found Bryan sitting in the back of an ambulance, a paramedic examining his head. He looked dazed. No one gave that a second thought, though — the other cops automatically wrote it off as a natural reaction to seeing a burning kid thrown off a building.

Pookie scratched the stubble on his cheek as he stared at his partner. He’d tried hard to rationalize all of this crap, tried to come up with a normal explanation, but it was time to accept what he’d witnessed with his own eyes.

The dreams were for real.

It was no trick, no gimmick. Was Bryan psychic? Pookie wasn’t ready to believe that just yet, but after tonight he couldn’t rule it out. He’d been in Bryan’s apartment when Bryan dreamed about Jay Parlar. No evildoer had slipped in and whispered in Bryan’s ear. There were no microphones in the wall, no electrodes in the pillow. Bryan had dreamed a kid was in danger. Then, he’d shot out of the apartment, tried to save that kid just as any cop would do. An abnormal method of discovery, but a normal reaction.

As fucked up as it was, Pookie felt infinitely better. Bryan had not killed Jay Parlar — if he hadn’t killed Jay, then he probably hadn’t killed Oscar Woody. Probably . Bryan had no alibi for Oscar. He could have killed Oscar and someone else could have killed Jay.