Scott Sigler - Nocturnal - A Novel

Rex looked down and started to zip up when he heard a crack sound and felt the sting across his left cheek. He sucked in a half-breath of surprise. His hand touched his face. The skin hurt.

“That’s right,” Roberta said, the belt dangling from her right hand. “I’ll teach you to be a dirty, sinning boy in my house.”

The belt snapped out again. Rex ducked away but tripped on his desk stool. He and the stool fell — the back of his head thonked against the floor.

“Don’t you duck, you sinner ! You take what’s coming to you!”

He tried to get up. His arms and legs seemed to move in slow motion.

Crack across his forehead, then on his nose; he brought his arms up in front of his face.

“Dirty!”

Crack on his shoulder, a deep stinging.

“Nasty!”

Rex grabbed the overturned stool, tried to use it to help him scramble to his feet.

Crack across his back, the flash of pain so bad he cried out.

“I’ll teach you, you worthless little—”

Rex stood and swung, did both things so fast he didn’t even know what he was doing. There was a sound like a bat hitting a softball, then he heard something crash on the floor.

Rex blinked away tears. He opened his eyes.

He was holding his stool by the base of one leg. The edge of the rounded seat … it had blood on it.

And on the floor, Roberta. Moving slow, like she was drunk. Bleeding bad from her right cheek, her eyes glazed and unfocused.

The belt was still in her hand.

“Nas … tee,” she said. “Getting my … paddle …”

This pathetic thing was the woman who had beaten him so many times? Why had he let her do that? For the same reason he had allowed BoyCo to ruin his life — because he’d been a coward, because he’d been afraid .

But Rex wasn’t weak anymore.

“You’re a bully,” he said quietly. “I hate you.”

She puckered her lips and then puffed out, like someone trying to blow away a long strand of stray hair. Flecks of blood sprayed from her lips. She tried to sit up.

She didn’t get far before Rex put a foot on her chest and pushed her to her back. He reached down and tore the belt from her hands.

Roberta blinked; the glazed look vanished. She looked up at him with enraged eyes, grabbed his leg and tried to push it away.

His leg didn’t move. How had he once thought of her as strong? Her hands and arms, so weak , they couldn’t even budge him.

“Let me go!” She dug her fingernails into his calf.

This time, Rex saw the pain coming. He let it happen and found it wasn’t that bad. He pressed his foot down harder.

Her eyes widened. She dug deeper with her nails, so he pressed harder still. Now her eyes scrunched tight, her mouth opened in an airless scream. Her hands slapped at his foot and leg.

Rex smiled. How exciting . All the things he’d felt when he made the drawings, they were nothing compared to the thunderstorm in his chest, the hurricane in his head.

He dangled the belt so that the end slid across her face.

“You like this belt, Roberta ? You like it so much? Let’s see how much you really like it.”

He took his foot off her chest, then swung the belt as hard as he could. The leather cracked across her face, leaving an instant red mark.

Roberta screamed. She flipped onto her belly and scrambled for the door, crawling even as she started to rise.

She’s running!

His excitement spiked up to an impossible level. Rex ran after her. She stumbled into the hall and almost reached the front door before he kicked her feet out from under her. She fell hard, her face hitting the hardwood. He moved in front of her and blocked the door.

“Where are you going, Roberta ? Aren’t you going to teach me a lesson?”

She lurched to her right, crawled into the TV room.

He followed her. He caught her next to her TV chair. She started to beg, but only got out a few words before Rex wrapped the belt around her neck. Her eyes bulged, her hands shot to the cracked black leather.

Yeah, yeah that’s it, come on, comeoncomeoncomeon …

Rex pulled the belt tighter.

The Golden Gate Slasher

The department’s electronic records of the Golden Gate Slasher case had been spotty, at best. That didn’t surprise John Smith. The case was old enough that all initial reports had been done on typewriters or word processors, before the SFPD implemented a database.

Reports that old had to be scanned or hand-coded into the system. With hundreds of thousands of pre-database cases, even high-profile records didn’t always get transferred. Vast amounts of the SFPD’s records still existed only on paper: slowly fading, degenerating, slipping away into the untouchable realms of lost history.

The Internet didn’t give up much, either. The Golden Gate Slasher wasn’t even on Wikipedia. In a culture fascinated by murderers, a culture that celebrated crime, this serial killer had gone surprisingly unheralded.

So John had come down to the archives to see the real McCoy. A white cardboard box in a climate-controlled room was all that remained of one of San Francisco’s ugliest summers. Crime-scene reports, medical examiner notes, evidence tags … a ton of information, although it seemed very scattered and disorganized.

Maybe John was too damn scared of his own shadow to provide any real help, but he could make himself useful digging through these files.

He hated who he had become. Once upon a time in fairy-tale land, he’d been a real cop. He’d been a man . Now he was a glorified secretary. Every night he woke up in a cold sweat. Not with nightmares, exactly, but rather with playback memories so real they made that moment come to life all over again.

Pookie had been obsessed with exposing a dirty cop named Blake Johansson, who was taking payoffs from gangs to ignore certain cases. Chief Zou had told them to leave Johnansson alone, but Pookie wouldn’t let up. He kept digging for dirt, kept banging away for that bit of evidence that would put the guy away. John had also wanted to let it go, let Internal Affairs handle it, but Pookie refused to stop — and like a good partner, John had been there every step of the way.

A tip led them to the Tenderloin, where they hit gold — Johnansson taking a payoff from Johnny Yee, boss of the Suey Singsa Tong. Pookie had rushed things. Instead of calling for backup, he went in. There had been a moment when Pookie had Johnansson dead to rights, but that moment passed. Johnansson drew. Pookie should have put him down, but he didn’t. John would never understand why Pookie hadn’t pulled the trigger at that moment. If he had, things would have turned out different.

It got crazy from there. Johannson fired, Pookie fired, John fired, then Johnansson ran out the back door. When John followed, he took a bullet in the belly. He never saw the shooter, didn’t know where the shooter was, didn’t even know if it was Johnansson.

John crawled fifteen feet to a big plastic garbage can for cover. During the crawl, he took a second round, this time in the left calf. Pookie called out — he’d been hit in the thigh. He was pinned down, unable to come to John’s aid.

For fifteen minutes John Smith cowered behind that garbage can, shoving his fist into the agonizing wound in his belly to try and stop the bleeding. That whole time, bullets kept on coming. John tried to find the shooter, looked at the buildings surrounding him, at the windows, at corners, at trees, but couldn’t see anything. He learned that plastic isn’t exactly the best bullet-stopping material in the world.

Bryan Clauser had been the first to respond to shots fired and officer down . Bryan, somehow, found the shooter and found him fast — that exchange lasted all of a few seconds and ended with three new holes in Blake Johansson: two to the chest, one to the forehead.