The Seal of Solomon (Alfred Kropp 2)

“You offered to come.”

“I did?”

He nodded. I thought about it. “I don’t remember offering that.”

I slid down the door until my butt hit the carpet, dropped my head into my hands, and closed my eyes. I could smell something foreign, a sickly sweet odor like rotting fruit. I sniffed my hand. It came from me. I smelled like a rotten banana. It wasn’t a stench like BO (though I couldn’t remember taking a shower since that day on the Pandora—not that my not being able to remember meant anything), so what was it? I’d heard gangrene can stink to high heaven as your flesh rots right off your bones. Did I have gangrene? Had one of my long toenails cut into my toe, causing an infection? Why was my flesh rotting off? Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe something was leaking from the splintered glass of my mind, and that leaking something smelled like rot.

I felt him touch my shoulder.

“There’s something wrong with me, isn’t there?” I whimpered. “There’s something very bad happening to me.”

“I think so, Alfred.”

“Because I looked into its eyes.” I remembered Carl writhing on the desert sand, screaming gibberish as he tore at his own face.

“It could be.”

“Well, is it or not? Aren’t you the demonologist?”

“Alfred,” he said softly, patting my shoulder. “Alfred, it will soon be over,” he said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

36

Op Nine changed his clothes before we left, putting on a rumpled jacket and a tie with a mustard-colored stain on it. He looked like your typical high school assistant principal or a salesman at a low-end used car lot.

We went downstairs and the valet pulled the Taurus around to the front of the hotel. I saw Op Nine slip him a fifty-dollar bill. That seemed excessive for somebody supposedly traveling incognito and didn’t match his getup or the vehicle we were driving. After getting a tip like that, the valet was sure to remember us.

Op Nine jumped back on the interstate and we headed north. A light, freezing rain was falling and we passed a couple of cars that had spun off the slick road, the flashing of their hazard lights sparkling red and yellow in the frozen condensation on the windshield.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Shaky.”

He just grunted back. His whole being seemed focused on the road or what lay at the end of it.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Evanston, just north of the city.”

“Mike lives in Evanston?”

“His mother does. Everyone, Alfred, without exception, has a . . . vulnerability. A pressure point, if you will. For the Hyena, that point is his mother.”

“What are you going to do to his mother, Op Nine?”

“I didn’t say I was going to do anything to her.”

“I read Section Nine. You’re allowed to do anything you want to her, aren’t you?”

He didn’t say anything.

“You could kill her if you wanted.”

“I would not want that. Alfred, simply because I have certain . . . latitude doesn’t mean I take pleasure in it. It is a great responsibility and burden.”

“Yeah. Playing God usually is.”