“Vince…?” Ferro finally asked as they headed north through Abington. They’d be in Pine Deep in forty minutes. Dawn was coming late today as a dense cloud cover remained locked down over the region. “Vince…you okay?”
LaMastra turned slowly to face his partner and gave him a long stare that was filled with a bottomless sadness.
“We’re going to die, you know,” he said softly. “All of us. ” He turned back to the window. “We’re all going to die. ”
Ferro opened his mouth to say something reassuring, but ultimately held his tongue. He didn’t like to lie to his partner.
6
About five minutes after Crow pulled away from his store the back door to his apartment opened and a hunched figure shambled slowly inside. It was streaked with blood and dirt and it moved with slow, shuffling steps from the kitchen into the living room, then into Crow’s bedroom.
It stopped, head raised as if sniffing the air.
“Crow,” it said in a hoarse, dry voice.
The three cats cringed back from it, hissing.
The figure turned slowly toward them and stood there, swaying like a scarecrow in a breeze, then it leaned back against the wall and slumped wearily to the floor. The cats kept their distance for a while, eyeing the intruder warily. Then one of them—Muddy Whiskers, the oldest—took a tentative step forward, paused, took another step, and another, always ready to run. Finally the ginger cat was right there, sniffing the mud-caked shoes and torn jeans.
The figure raised one hand, offering scabbed and filthy fingers for the cat to smell. Muddy Whiskers looked past the fingers at the face, at the bloodred eyes, but he didn’t shy away. After another few seconds he came closer still and pushed his head against the proffered hand. He started to purr.
The figure bent forward and scooped the cat up, pulled him to his chest, buried its mouth and nose against the cat’s head, and began to cry.
The other cats watched for a while, and then they, too, came closer and took the strange-yet-familiar scent. Muddy Whiskers let himself be held, and he didn’t even struggle as Mike Sweeney began rocking back and forth as he wept.
Chapter 32
Crow peered into the oversized duffel bags the detectives laid out on a table in the lab Weinstock had ordered set aside for their use. “Gee, you think you brought enough guns?”
“If it has fangs we want it dead,” Ferro said, “not just pissed off. ”
“Works for me. ”
There were two short-barreled Remington 870s with pistol grips and folding stocks of the kind favored by some of the more hard-core narcotics units; a Mossberg Bullpup with a twenty-inch barrel and an eight-shot clip; a venerable old Winchester Defender with a standard stock and a Parkerized finish; an Ithaca Deerslayer; and one monster of a ten-gauge shotgun that LaMastra fondled with familiarity. This was an Ithaca Mag-10 Roadblocker with an augmented clip that allowed him to carry seven shells instead of the usual three. It was a bull of a gun useful only in the hands of a bullish man.
Ferro had somehow procured a thousand rounds of 12-gauge and two hundred for the Roadblocker, and over the last few hours they had worked in teams to doctor them up by injecting pure garlic oil into the casings, sealing the needle holes by melting the plastic with a lab burner. Ferro, LaMastra, and Val handled that job, marking each shell with a felt-tip pen to indicate the ones that were enhanced. Crow worked on the five hundred 9mm pistol bullets Ferro had brought. The concave mouths of the dum-dums needed only a small drop to fill, and Crow sealed in the oil with a drop of hot wax, blew on the wax, and smoothed the tips to make them round and even. When they had doctored six hundred shells and three hundred bullets, Ferro called a halt to it. They all gathered around the autopsy table, staring in fascination at the weapons and the ammunition that they hoped would help them survive the coming war.
“Okay,” Ferro said as if instructing a class, “the plain red shells are standard twelve-gauge double-ought buckshot. The ones marked with the black arrows are filled with deer slugs. If we have do concentrate on head shots, that’ll do’er. ”
“What about those?” Crow asked, touching a shell marked with thick black bands.
“Shok-Lock rounds,” Ferro said. “Inside is a kind of ceramic minishell that explodes on impact and discharges bits of metal. ”
LaMastra nodded. During the hours of work he’d shaken off some of his funk and had started talking again, though his eyes were still spooked. “Fire one at a lock and poof!— no lock. Fire one at a head, and all you have is a lingering cloud of pink mist. ”
Crow winced. “Thanks, that image is going to stay with me. ”
“The rest are for Vince’s Roadblocker. ”
“Standard double-ought,” said LaMastra with a grin, “but at ten-gauge it’s a real crowd-pleaser. ”
They loaded all six of the shotguns. Crow selected the Bullpup, liking its weight; Ferro took a Remington. They stowed their shotguns in one of the duffel bags, along with Crow’s Japanese sword and a collection of knives. LaMastra opened one of the bags of garlic bulbs and poured several dozen into a plastic bag and stowed this in the duffel.
Ferro finished the last of his cold coffee, “Does anyone know when sunset is today?”
“6:47,” said Val. “I checked the paper. ”
“Then let’s go,” said Ferro.