Nevermore (4 page)

28 SUPERNATURAL

‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ‘The Masque of the Red Death’—some of this stuff sounds like it could’ve been right out of one of our jobs. You gotta wonder what he saw to make him write that. I mean, he practically created the horror genre.”

“So, Professor, whaddaya think the deal is with these murders? Phases of the moon, re-creating old short stories—sound like any ritual you know?”

“Not offhand, but there’s something else. Before, when I had the maps out? I was checking something, and both these murders were exactly one mile from the Poe Cottage.”

“First of all, what’s the Poe Cottage?”

“Poe lived in the Bronx for a few years in a little cottage.”

“Dude, I’ve seen
Fort Apache
—the Bronx doesn’t
have
cottages. Hey, jackass, pick a freakin’

lane!”

Sam suddenly felt the urge to get a fi rm grip on the dashboard with his good hand. “It did in the nineteenth century. The Bronx didn’t even become part of New York City until the 1890s or so. Anyhow, because Poe lived there, they preserved the cottage—and his wife died there.” Dean nodded. “Okay, so the place has some emotional significance. Still not connecting the dots.”

Shrugging, Sam said, “Me, either.” Never

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“Second of all, why didn’t you tell me this when you were playing with the maps? I thought you were trying to find alternate routes.” Amazed Dean even had to ask, Sam said, “You had
Led Zeppelin II
in the tape deck. I know better than to try to hold an intelligent conversation with you when ‘Whole Lotta Love’ is playing.” Dean opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “Yeah, okay, fair enough.” They crawled ever more slowly toward the bridge, and Sam realized that they were approaching a toll booth. Dean saw that some lanes were moving faster, and he inched into them.

“Uh, dude, those are the E-Z Pass lanes.”

“Aw, crap.” The bane of the Winchesters’ existence had been the proliferation of things like E-Z Pass, Fast Lane, I-Pass, and assorted other services that involved sticking a piece of plastic on the wind-shield that a scanner would read, deducting the toll from a credit card or from payments made with a check. The former required a consistency of use with a card that Dean and Sam couldn’t afford, since their credit cards were all phony. Sam had considered setting something up with the checking account he’d had when he was at Stanford, and through which he maintained his cell phone and Internet, but now, with he and Dean wanted by the law, it wasn’t prudent for them to attach something 30 SUPERNATURAL

to the car that could be used to trace their movements.

However, the cash lanes were considerably slower, which, Sam knew, would only increase Dean’s dark mood.

Sure enough, the realization that he’d be stuck in slow traffic while dozens of other cars zipped through the E-Z Pass lane undid all of Sam’s distraction work, and Dean was now holding the steering wheel with an iron grip in his right hand while punching the inner driver’s side door with his left and muttering curses to himself.

Recognizing a futile endeavor when he saw one, Sam pulled out his Treo and made use of its web browser. It was slow—basically as fast as dial-up—

but he was eventually able to find and call up the website of Ash’s friend’s band, Scottso.

By the time he was done reading up on it, they were next in the toll line. “Dude,” Dean asked suddenly, “you got any cash?”

Sam whirled around. “Excuse me? I thought you were the keeper of the lucre, Mr. Pool Hustlin’

Poker Player Man.”

“Remember that girl in South Bend, the Notre Dame student who—”

Under no circumstances did Sam ever want to hear the end of any sentence of Dean’s that began with the words “Remember that girl.” “Fine, whatever.” Sam tried to straighten his lanky form as best Never

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he could in the front seat and dug his left hand into his pants pocket. He pulled out a ball of fl uff, three quarters, several business cards that read sam win-chester, reporter that he’d made up in a print shop back in Indiana, and his monogrammed money clip, which had four bills in it, one of which stood out as being a ten dollar bill, since they were all a different color now. He gingerly yanked it out and handed it to Dean.

Dean paid the toll with the ten, waited for the change, responded to the toll taker’s request to have a nice day with an incoherent grunt, and then stuffed the four singles into his own shirt pocket.

Sam considered objecting, then decided that life was just too damn short, instead saying, “We wanna take the Henry Hudson Parkway, so stay in the right lane.”

Dean nodded as they started over the bridge.

For a moment Sam just took the time to admire the view. The George Washington Bridge was one of the most famous bridges in the country, and while it didn’t look quite as distinctive as, say, the Golden Gate—which he’d visited on a trip he and Jess had taken to San Francisco—or the Brooklyn Bridge right here in New York, it still had a certain grandeur that he admired.

As the Impala rolled over the bridge—still moving at less than twenty miles an hour, but that was an improvement on their pre-toll-booth pace—Sam 32 SUPERNATURAL

turned to his right. It was a clear day out, so he could see the most famous skyline in the world: skyscrapers in gray and red and silver and brown all reaching upward, all different sizes and shapes, with the pinnacle of the Empire State Building rising above all of it. It was a complex mélange of constructed life, a monument to human achievement over nature.

The scholar in him wanted desperately to explore the inner workings of that monument, whether to play tourist and see the sights, like he and Jess had done in San Francisco, or to check out the underside of the place, see if the thousands of legends that had grown up around the city were true: the alligators in the city sewer system, the phantom subway conductor, the missile silos in eastside apartment buildings.

He sat back in the passenger seat with a sense of melancholy. Their lives didn’t allow for that sort of thing. They came in, they did the job, they left.

Hell, now Dean was on the feds’ radar, and, while Sam couldn’t find any specific warrant out for his own arrest (and didn’t Dean love giving him crap about
that?
), he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be ignored if they got the attention of law enforcement, either. They had to keep their heads down—which meant no self-indulgence. Seeing the Statue of Lib-erty, going to the top of the Empire State Building, Never

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exploring Central Park, even going underground to check to see about the alligators and the ghosts and the missiles, none of that could afford to be on the agenda. Them doing the job saved lives, which meant time spent
not
doing the job meant people might die.

That’s the job. And it needs doing.
One of the items on his eight-mile-long list of regrets was that it took Dad dying for him to realize that.

The exit for the Henry Hudson was right after the bridge ended, and to Dean’s loudly expressed relief, most of the traffic that took the exit was going southbound, which would take them into Manhattan. Almost nobody else was going north.

However, Dean’s desire to speed was tempered by the parkway itself, which was hilly, twisty, and turny, and Sam found himself once again holding the dashboard in a death grip.

Feeling the need to distract himself from the fact that Dean was using the lane markers as a guide-line more than a rule, Sam said, “So I checked out this guy’s band on the web. I’m starting to see why Ellen thought of us—they’re a cover band, and they do seventies rock.”

For the first time since the cars started moving slowly on I-80, Dean’s face brightened.
“Really?”

“Yeah, they named themselves after a DJ who died a couple years ago named Scott Muni.” 34 SUPERNATURAL

“Dude,” Dean said in a familiar tone. It meant that Sam didn’t know some arcane and pointless piece of musical lore that Dean thought was es-sential to being alive. Sam steeled himself for the tirade even as Dean said, “It’s pronounced ‘myoo-nee,’ not ‘money.’ They called him ‘the Professor,’

he was one of the greatest rock DJs of the sixties and seventies. You know Van Morrison’s ‘Cara-van’? The ‘Scottso’ he’s talking about is Muni.” Sam just nodded, despite not knowing the song or DJ in question, and not caring all that much.

He’d gotten enough of a tongue-lashing on the subject of Robert Johnson’s music during that Hellhound job.

“Well, Ash’s friend,” Sam said once he was sure Dean was done chastising him, “Manfred Afi ri, is the lead singer, and he plays guitar. There’s four other guys, a keyboard player named Robbie Mal-donado, another guitar player named Aldo Em-manuelli, a bass player named Eddie Grabowski, and a drummer named Tom Daley. They play weekends at a place in Larchmont called the Park in Rear.”

Dean shot a sidelong glance at Sam. “Seriously?” Sam shrugged. “That’s what the website says.” The road finally straightened, just in time for a sign indicating another toll.

“Oh, you have got to be freakin’ kiddin’ me!

Never

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Bad enough we had to pay six bucks to get into this town, now we gotta pay more?” Raising his eyebrow at the use of
we
in that sentence, Sam pointedly said, “You’ve got four bucks in your pocket.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Dean pulled in behind several other cars in the one and only lane labeled cash only, while other cars zipped through one of the six E-Z Pass lanes. Sam was starting to think it was a conspiracy.

Once they got through and went over another, smaller bridge that welcomed them to the Bronx, Sam said, “We wanna get off at 246th.”

“Okay.”

The road continued to curve menacingly past several exits, most for streets numbered in the 200s, before they reached the right exit.

Within seconds they were completely lost. They drove up and down several hills, and went on several roads that did not go straight, and were frustrated by jumps in the numerical sequence of streets.

The area was also surprisingly suburban looking, with some really big houses that had yards—neither were images that Sam associated with being in New York City, especially after the view of crammed-together skyscrapers he got from the GWB.

“I thought this city was on a grid,” Dean said through clenched teeth.

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“That’s Manhattan, Dean,” Sam said patiently.

“Great.”

The road angled down and to the right, nearing a T intersection. Sam caught sight of a green street sign that identified the upcoming street as East 248th Street. “There!” he said pointing, “that’s 248th.

Turn right.”

“I swear to God, Sammy, if it’s not on this block, I’m turning around and going back to Indiana.” Sam refrained from pointing out that regardless of whether they were going to Afi ri’s house or back over the bridge, they were still lost. Besides, he got a look at one of the house numbers they passed.

“We’re on the right block. There, that’s his place.” There weren’t any parking spots on the street, but there was a driveway next to Afi ri’s place, so Dean parked the Impala there.

Once the car came to a stop, Sam hopped out, grateful for the chance to stretch his long legs for the first time since they’d gassed up in Scotrun, Pennsylvania. His knees popped as they straightened.

“Nice,” Dean said, and Sam had to agree. The house was a

three- story Colonial, with a stone chimney on the side, a wooden front porch, complete with porch swing, and a dark wood front door with a small stained-glass window.

All Ellen had provided Dean was a name and address, as well as the name of the band the guy Never

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was in, so they had no way of knowing if he’d be home. A ring of the doorbell followed by a full minute of waiting indicated that he wasn’t.

“Fine, let’s break in,” Dean said, reaching into his jacket pocket for his lock picks.

Sam put a hand on his arm before he could remove the paper clip in question. “Let’s not. We’re supposed to be helping this guy, remember?”

“We’ll tell him Ash sent us.”

“And if he doesn’t believe us and calls the cops?

Dean, we can’t afford to commit felonies unless we absolutely have to, and we’re not there yet.

Hell, we just got here. Look, he probably has a day job. Let’s check out the Poe thing and come back in the eve ning when he’s more likely to be home.”

Dean stared at Sam for a second. The way Dean’s eyes were going back and forth, Sam could tell that his older brother was trying to figure out a way to be right and for Sam to be wrong and was failing miserably.

Finally, Dean turned around and went back to the car. “Fine, but we ain’t goin’ nowhere until you figure out how to get us out of this nuthouse.” He opened the driver’s side door. “Which crime scene you wanna hit fi rst, the house with the bricked-up guy or the street where the monkey spanked back?”

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Sam smiled. “Neither. The orangutan that killed those two kids was from the Bronx Zoo. We should start there. Say we’re with, I dunno,
Wildlife Conservation
magazine or something.”

“No, not that—
National Geographic
.”

“Uh, okay.” Sam shrugged. “Not that it matters, but why not
Wildlife Conservation
?”

“ ’Cause that’s run by the WCS, who’re the people who run the Bronx Zoo. It’d be like investigat-ing something on the Skywalker Ranch and saying we were with
Star Wars Insider.
They’d know we were bogus right off.” With that, Dean got into the car.

Sam opened his door and folded himself into the front seat. “Since when do you know so much about animal magazines?”

“Cassie was a subscriber.”

That got a grin out of Sam. Cassie was one of Dean’s ex-girlfriends. Given Cassie’s crusading character, based on the one and only time Sam met her in Missouri, he wasn’t at all surprised that she supported the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Sam pulled out the maps to figure out the best route to the zoo. While he did so, Dean asked,