Nevermore (3 page)

She wore a name badge that said monica.

“Hey,” Dean said, “we’re checking out.” Never

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Monica took a final puff on the cigarette, then stubbed it out in the ashtray. “You’re Winwood, right?” she asked with a scratchy voice.

Sam managed not to roll his eyes. Just once, Sam wished Dean would pick an inconspicuous alias.

“That’s right,” Dean said with a smile. “We’re ready to check out.”

“Yeah, there’s a problem. Your credit card was declined. I’m gonna need another one.” There was Dean’s wide-eyed look again, but this time Sam didn’t smile. “Declined. Really.” Dean looked at Sam helplessly, then turned back to Monica. “Could you try it again, please?” She gave Dean a withering look. “I tried it three times. That’s all they’ll allow.”

“Did they say why?”

“No, no reason. You wanna call the credit card company? You can use this phone.” She picked up the desk phone—which, Sam was appalled to see, was a rotary dial—and held it up for Dean to take.

“Uh, no, that, uh—that won’t really help.” Sam realized why Dean was stalling. He had other credit cards, but none of them said Dean Winwood on them.

Quickly, Sam stepped forward, reaching into his back pocket, and said, “I’ll get it.” He removed one of his own fake credit cards from his wallet and handed it to Monica.

She took it and stared at it, which Sam had been 18 SUPERNATURAL

hoping she wouldn’t do, since this one didn’t say Winwood either. “Thought you two was brothers.” Without missing a beat, Sam said, “We are, but I was adopted. By the time I tracked down my birth parents, they had both died, so I changed my name to McGillicuddy in tribute to them.” Monica’s face split into a rictus that Sam supposed could’ve been called a smile. “That’s so sweet of you. What a nice boy you are.” She ran the card through the machine, then entered the total for the three nights they stayed.

The wait for the machine to check was intermi-nable. Dean, to his credit, had recovered, and he had his best poker face on.

Finally, after several eternities, the machine beeped and the word approved appeared on the small screen.

“All right,” Monica said, still smiling, as the whirr of a printer could be heard under the desk.

“Here’s your card back, Mr. McGillicuddy.”

“Thank you,” Sam said, retrieving it and putting it back in his wallet.

“Such good manners. Mr. and Mrs. Winwood obviously raised you both right.” Dean smiled. “Yes, ma’am, they did a bang- up job.”

Monica then handed the printout, as well as the credit card machine’s receipt, to Sam. “Just sign here, and you can be on your way.” Never

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Once that was all done, they went back outside.

“Nice save there, Sammich,” Dean said with a grin. “Y’know, I’m finally starting to get it.” Sam frowned. This sounded suspiciously like the beginning of a lengthy diatribe, the end of which would be a joke at Sam’s expense. “Get what?”

“Well, Sammy, we grew up together, and that whole time, nothing about you ever screamed ‘lawyer’ at me. So when you told me that you were apply-ing to law school, it kinda threw me. But I’ve been watching you the last year, and I think I fi gured it out.”

Here it comes.
Sam tried not to groan.

“You can shovel manure as good as anyone I’ve ever met. That line you pulled on Monica there with the adoption? Beautiful. And with a straight face.” In fact, Sam’s skills at lying—both in terms of pretending to be someone else and also misleading people as to the true nature of his life and of the world itself—had been one of the things that attracted him to the law. His life as the child of a hunter of supernatural creatures, and of being trained to be a hunter himself, had given him these skills anyhow, and it only seemed natural to put them to good use.

That wasn’t what he told his brother, though.

“Yeah, I can pull the wool over people’s eyes. And I do most of the research and know most of the lore. And I’m good with the weapons and the hand- to-hand.” They arrived at the Impala, and 20 SUPERNATURAL

Sam gave his brother a grin as he stepped up to the passenger door. “So, uh, what do I need
you
for, exactly?”

Before Dean could construct a reply, his phone started playing Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.”

“For that matter,” Sam added, “I’m the one who showed you how to download ringtones.” Pulling the cell phone out of his pocket, Dean scowled. “I would’ve figured it out eventually.” He flipped it open and glanced at the number, which caused his eyes to go even wider than they had in the office. Putting the phone to his ear, he said,

“Ellen?”

That surprised Sam. Ellen Harvelle ran a roadhouse that catered to hunters. He and Dean had recently learned that Ellen’s late husband died when he was on a hunt with their dad, and it put a bit of a strain on their relationship—especially since they only found out because Ellen’s young daughter Jo snuck out and went on a hunt with him and Dean against Ellen’s very strenuous objections.

Years of listening to loud music and using fi rearms had played merry hell with Dean’s hearing, so he kept his cell’s volume up way too loud. That meant Sam could hear Ellen’s tinny voice over the phone’s speaker.

“Listen,” she said, “I may have a job for you boys.”

Never

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“Really? ’Cause—”

“It’s for Ash. He wouldn’t ask himself, but I fi gure he did you two a favor, so you might be willing to do him one back.” Ellen seemed to be barreling through the conversation, not letting Dean get a word in.

Or, at least trying not to. Keeping Dean quiet was usually a forlorn hope. “Sure, I guess.” He smirked. “Always had a soft spot for that mullet-head. What’s he need?”

Ellen gave the particulars of the case to Dean, and did it in a lower voice, so Sam couldn’t make it all out. Ash was a deadbeat drunk who nonetheless was a genius and able to track demons via computer, a trick Sam had never mastered despite many attempts. As Dean had once said, Ash’s geek- fu was strong. Sam didn’t entirely believe his claim to have gone to MIT—for starters, he said it was a college in Boston, and anyone who’d gone there would know it was in Cambridge—but he did believe that Ash had the

know-how, based on the times he’d helped him and his brother out.

“Okay. We’ll check it out.” With that, Dean flipped the phone shut and looked out the driveway. “That road’ll take us to 80, right?” Sam tried to remember the map. “I think so, yeah. Why, where’s the job?”

Dean grinned. “The town so nice, they named it twice: New York, New York.”

22 SUPERNATURAL

“Really?” Sam turned and went back to the trunk. “Open it up, I wanna show you something.”

“Something in New York?” Dean said, joining him at the back, since he had the keys.

After Dean opened the trunk, Sam took a folder out of his bag. “It may not be anything, but I noticed a couple of murders that took place there.”

“Sam—it’s
New York.
They get, like, fi fty murders a day.”

“Which is why these two probably fl ew under the radar.” He took the clippings, photocopied off newspapers he’d looked at in several different public libraries they’d visited recently. “First, we got a guy bricked up in a building’s basement.” Sam handed Dean an 8½ by 11 sheet of paper with a fi ller news story in a section of the
New York Daily News
dedicated to community news about a man named Marc Reyes, who was found bricked up in the basement of a house in the Bronx.

As Dean glanced over the photocopy, Sam went on: “And this past Sunday, two college kids were beaten to death by an orangutan.” Dean looked up at that. “Seriously?” Sam nodded. “That’s two murders that are right out of Edgar Allan Poe short stories.”

“That’s kind of a stretch,” Dean said as he handed back the story about the bricked-up man.

“Maybe—but they both took place in the Bronx, and Poe used to live in the Bronx. Plus, the fi rst Never

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murder was on the fi fth—they didn’t fi nd the body until two days later, but it happened on the fi fth, which was—”

“The last full moon,” Dean said with a nod.

“Yeah, okay, maybe, but—”

Tossing the folder back into the trunk, Sam said,

“And the orangutan was on the last quarter.” He didn’t need to add that lots of rituals were based on the phases of the moon. “It’s not that big a deal, but since we’re going to New York anyhow, I fi gured we could look into it while we—uh, do whatever it is we’re doing.”

Dean slammed the trunk shut. “Haunting. Some friend of Ash’s is having ghost issues. So who’s he gonna call?”

Sam chuckled. They both got into the car, Dean in the driver’s seat. “That’s really weird.”

“What, that there’d be a haunting? We see them all the time.”

“No,” Sam said with a shake of his head, “that Ash would have a friend.”

With a chuckle of his own, Dean slid the key into the ignition. A grin spread on his face as the Impala hummed to life. “Hear that engine purr.” Squirming in the passenger seat, Sam thought,
I
swear to God, if he starts petting the dashboard
again, I’m
walking
to New York.

However, he was spared that. Dean shoved a Metallica tape into the player, twirled the volume 24 SUPERNATURAL

up, and the car was filled with the guitar opening to “Enter Sandman.”

Dean turned to him. “Atomic batteries to power.” Glowering at his older brother, Sam said, “I’m only gonna say, ‘Turbines to speed’ if you don’t make a comment about me in short green pants.” Dean pulled the gearshift down to R and said,

“Let’s move out.” He backed out of the parking spot, then brought it down to D and sent them out onto the open road.

THREE

On the road

Interstate 80, approaching the
George Washington Bridge

Thursday 16 November 2006

“How can there be so many people on one road?” Sam tried not to laugh out loud at Dean’s plain-tive cry, the fifth time he’d asked the question in the last ten minutes—a time span during which the Impala had moved forward maybe fi fty feet.

They’d been driving all night. Sam had suggested they stop at a motel overnight, but Dean wanted to get there quickly. They had stopped in a motel in Clarion, Pennsylvania, to shower and change clothes, paying for it with one of the fraudulent cards, but didn’t stay the night. Instead, they worked their way 26 SUPERNATURAL

across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, taking it in turns to sleep or drive.

Unfortunately, that meant they arrived at the approach to the George Washington Bridge smack dab in the middle of the morning rush hour, and traffi c was bumper-to-bumper.

Dean was about ready to jump out of his skin.

“There’s gotta be a faster way to get into the city.”

Sam didn’t bother looking at the map, since they’d had this conversation several times already.

“The Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel are farther away from the Bronx, and they’re tunnels—

they’ve probably got
more
traffic ’cause they have to squeeze more cars into fewer—”

“All
right.
” Dean pounded the steering wheel.

Ash’s friend lived in a neighborhood called Riverdale, which was also in the Bronx, which meant it would be easier for Sam to investigate the Poe murders. “That other thing you

were talkin’ about,”

Dean said. “You said they were all from Eddie Al-bert Poe stories, right?”

“Edgar Allan Poe, yeah.”

“Right, whatever. He’s the guy that did ‘The Raven,’ right?”

Giving his brother a sidelong glance, Sam said,

“You’ve read a poem?”

“They did it on
The Simpsons
once. Hey, c’mon, Never

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move
it, will you!” Dean suddenly screamed at the car in front of them. “Christ, you don’t have to leave fifty car lengths between you and the guy in front of you!” Again he pounded the steering wheel. “I swear, these people got their drivers’ li-censes from freakin’ Crackerjack boxes.”

“Anyhow,” Sam said, as much to take Dean’s mind off his frustration as anything, “the guy bricked up in the basement is from ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’ The orangutan is from ‘The Murders on the Rue Morgue’—which, by the way, was the first detective story.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, that story was an influence on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he created Sherlock Holmes.”

“Well, thank you, Marian the Librarian.” Sam was glad to hear Dean teasing him, as it meant he wasn’t letting the driving get to him—

“Hey! Use the freakin’ turn signal, will you?”

—much. “I took a lit class as an elective at Stanford—it was called ‘American Hauntings,’ all about the use of the supernatural in American fi ction, including a lot about Poe.” He shrugged. “I was curious, after all the weird stuff we’ve seen,

what the pop culture interpretations of what we do were like.”

“What,
X-Files
reruns didn’t do the trick?”

“Honestly, Dean, you should read Poe’s stories.