Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

Maybe he’d cook Vera’s breakfast.

Barefooted, Vin padded into the kitchen.

He almost slipped in the blood.

Beef blood puddled on yellow linoleum. That’s all it was. Vin breathed a sigh of relief. The blood must have overflowed the little plate as the steaks thawed, then dribbled off the counter and puddled on the floor. But then Vin saw that it wasn’t a puddle of blood; it was a scrawl.

Three words: LET HIM GO.

Vin shivered. He glanced at the sideboard. The steaks were gone, but the T-bones were still there. Picked clean. Gnawed.

“Jesus Christ.” Vin turned toward the phone, and that was when he saw the open bird cage, the dusting of green and yellow feathers on the kitchen table.

Vera Marlowe’s parrot had moaned its last.

Beyond the table, the back door stood open. Vin moved toward it, afraid of what he might find outside.

He expected that he might see any number of frightening things… but Sheriff Dwight Cole wasn’t one of them.

They were on the kitchen floor, rolling around in the beef blood, when Vera fired Vin Miller’s revolver over their heads.

“You can stop it, right now!” she said.

Vera’s bedside manner still fresh in his mind, Vin did exactly as ordered. Dwight couldn’t help himself. He sucker-punched Vin Miller behind the ear, and the deputy went down like something big and dead.

Vera tossed Vin’s gun onto the kitchen table. “You okay, Dwight?” she asked.

He nodded. “How about you?”

“Well… I’ve been better.” She looked down at Vin Miller and almost laughed, because the musclebound deputy had split his tight pants in the wrestling match. “It’s a shame,” she said wistfully. “Sometimes the best lookin’ broncos are the easiest to break.”

Dwight left that one alone, and Vera went for a robe. The sheriff took the opportunity to phone the jail. There was, of course, good news and bad news.

Deputy Hastings had won three of four checker games, and the prisoner was quiet as could be. That was the good news. The bad news could be shoehorned into two words… more trouble.

Dwight instructed Hastings to collect Vin Miller and lock him up. He cradled the receiver before the elderly deputy could give him an argument, and started for the door just as Vera returned to the kitchen.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked, cinching a black silk robe around her middle.

“To the cemetery,” Dwight said. “A call just came in.”

Vera’s full lips twisted into a formidable frown.

“I’m not kidding, Vera. There’s trouble.”

The big blonde toed the concussed deputy. She pointed at the smeared beef blood on the linoleum floor, and the gnawed steak bones on the counter, and the parrot feathers, which had blown every which way in all the excitement.

“Trouble? What the hell do you call this?”

FOUR

Lily Pine took one look at the sheriff and said, “You look like you’ve gone fifteen rounds with Sonny Liston.”

For the first time Dwight noticed his blood-stained uniform — a casualty of the wrestling match in Vera’s kitchen — and shrugged. “It’s a long story, Lily.”

“I’m sure it’s one of many.” The undertaker’s daughter left no room for a reply before adding, “And I’m equally certain that neither of us has time for it today.”

She started across the cemetery, a thin little thing with pale skin, delicate features, and a bouffant hairdo stiff with Hi-Style hair-spray. Her hair was jet-black, as was her loose turtleneck sweater, her tight toreador pants, her gleaming leather boots… and the barrel of the shotgun locked in her thin-fingered grasp.

“Do you really think we’re gonna need that thing, Lily?”

She stopped short. “The word is that you’ve got a werewolf locked up in your jail, Sheriff.”

“Well… that’s the guy’s story. But, Jesus, Lily, you’re just a tiny little thing. Firing a shotgun would launch you from here to tomorrow. And if you’re worried about werewolves, a scattergun isn’t going to do you any good, anyway. Unless you’ve got silver pellets in those shells, of course.”

The sheriff tried a smile, but Lily Pine cut it short with a grin both knowing and confident. “Okay,” she said, ‘‘now I see what this is about.”

“Huh?”

The undertaker’s daughter thrust the shotgun into the sheriff’s hands, pulled the revolver from his holster, and once again started across the lawn, the handgun cocked and ready.

“Men.” She shook her head. “It’s almost a biological need. They’ve always got to have the biggest gun.”

They stood near the open graves. Five ragged holes in sacred earth. Broken coffins, torn shrouds, shredded clothing. Desecration was too clean a word for it.

And the bones… Dwight was sure that Lily could have identified each one of them. She’d taken her degree in mortuary science, after all. But Dwight didn’t need to know their scientific names, because he could read what they said.

LET HIM GO. There it was, a message spelled out on the green grass, defiling hallowed ground. Letters made of leg bones, and arm bones, spines and fingers and broken ribs still caked with bits of dry flesh…

Lily’s pale lips were a tight line of anger. “Horrible, isn’t it?” She motioned toward the big house where she lived with her father, just fifty yards distant. “Father says that he didn’t hear a thing last night. But to think that they were so close, that they might have broken into the house… I don’t care if they’re not werewolves. Even if they’re only men — ”

“Don’t torture yourself.”

“I can’t help it.” She looked at him, her eyes dark wells of pain. “Guilt is a terrible thing. My mother died while I was away at college. If anything were to happen to my father… well, I just couldn’t deal with it.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“I guess I’m not so tough after all.”

“Shhh.” Dwight waved her off. “Listen.”

In the distance, they heard a low rumble.

Engines.

Motorcycles.

“I told you to let me drive,” Lily said. “You drive too fast.”

Dwight tossed her the keys. “Get the jack out of the trunk for me, will you?”

“It’s faster to walk back to the house. We could take the hearse.”

“Damn potholes.” Dwight kicked the patrol car’s flat tire. “Damn ditch.”

Lily said, “I’m driving, of course.”

“Of course.”

The undertaker’s daughter didn’t crack a smile. “If it’ll make you feel better, you can hold the shotgun.”

FIVE

The banker, Milt Rosewell, daubed his forehead with a rumpled handkerchief. “As I said before, Sheriff, they didn’t really do anything… but if you’d seen them.”

Dwight patted the little man on the shoulder. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight, Milt,” he said. “About twenty minutes ago, twelve guys on motorcycles pulled up in front of the bank — ”

“Right.” The banker pointed at the entranceway. “They came right through those doors. Every one of them with a star tattooed on the back of one hand. And they didn’t actually do anything. Well… that’s not quite right. They asked several questions.”

“Like what?” Lily Pine wanted to know.