“I know you can handle it.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“I want to go with you.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ll know his scent from the crime scenes. It’s the only way I can tell if this is the guy.”
“Fine. You at work now?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll pick you up there.” The phone clicked off.
Matt was standing in the doorway between the booth and the studio. “Kitty. Are you serious?”
“Yeah. You heard the guy. He wasn’t talking like he was going to do something. He’s already done it. How much time do we have left?”
“I don’t know.” He had to look back at his board. “Ten minutes?”
I took a couple more calls and spent all my effort trying to sound normal. I couldn’t remember what they were about, or what I said. I hoped I sounded normal.
“This is Kitty Norville, Voice of the Night.” I signed off with a sigh and listened to my recorded howl.
“Be careful!” Matt called as I started out of the booth. I grimaced, the best kind of reassuring smile I could manage at the moment. He didn’t look reassured. He gripped the doorway, white-knuckled. Wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Cormac pulled up to the curb as I left the front door of the station. He drove a Jeep. Not an SUV, but a real Jeep with mud caking the wheel wells. I got in the passenger side and told him the address. Thank God for the online reverse directory.
We’d driven for about five blocks when he said, “You understand that we have to kill this guy. By not calling the police, by going outside the law, that’s the only thing we can do. Not arrest him, not talk reason into him, but kill him.”
“You were listening to the show.” I probably had double the number of listeners the ratings said I had, since no one seemed to want to admit they were listeners.
“You ever kill anyone?”
“No.”
“Just stay out of the way so I can get a clean shot.”
I leaned on the door, holding my forehead in my hand. Vigilantism, that was the word for what we were doing. But the niceties of legal technicalities were slipping away. Four women had been murdered. A werewolf had done it. Someone had to stop him.
Cormac’s cell phone beeped. It was jammed into the ashtray, near the stick shift. He grabbed the hands-free wire dangling from it and stuck the earpiece into his ear. It took about six rings. So that was why he always took so long to answer.
“Yeah.” He waited a minute, then said, “Just a minute.” He covered the mouthpiece part of the wire with his hand. “It’s Hardin. She wants to know if I know how to get hold of you. She wants to talk to you about tonight’s show. I guess she was listening.”
“Should I tell her?”
“What’s the saying? It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
He was right. She’d just get in the way. “I’ll call her back when it’s all over.”
Cormac uncovered the wire. “Detective? I’ll have to get back to you on that . . . What am I doing? Driving . . . Yeah, I’ll keep in touch.” He pulled the wire out of his ear, smirking. “She’s an optimist,” he said. “That’s her problem.”
The address was northeast, in a neighborhood of dilapidated houses on the edge of a region of industrial warehouses, oil refineries, and train tracks. It might have been a nice place once, maybe fifty years ago. A few big, old trees lurked in many of the yards. But they were dead, their branches broken, and the yards themselves were overgrown with weeds. The streetlights were all out, but the wash of the sodium floodlights from the warehouses reached here, sickly and orange.
As we pulled onto the street, Cormac turned off the Jeep’s headlights and crawled ahead.
“There it is,” he said, pointing to a bungalow set back from the road. A fifty-year-old house, maybe three or four rooms. It used to be white, but the paint was peeling, chipping, streaking; the wood of the siding was split and falling apart. Half the shingles were gone.