The woman was naked. She looked like she was in agony; her face was contorted in pain. She was holding the little girl by the shoulders, and the girl was screaming like a cat on fire.
Suddenly Malloy was moving, charging across the room. He dived at them, knocking the little Asian girl out of the way and tackling Delilah.
As they fell onto the bed in a tangle of limbs, Delilah vomited, saturating Malloy in an avalanche of blood.
“What the fuck!”
A jolt of pain lanced through him, causing every muscle in his body to contract simultaneously like he’d been shocked with a taser. Images and emotions poured through his mind in a staggering hurricane of rage, violence, jealousy, madness, and pain. So much pain. More than he could take. More than anyone could take.
He looked down at Delilah and saw her slowly shaking her head.
“No. No.” There was horror in her eyes. She looked terrified, but not
of
him - for him.
“What? W-what did you do to me? What the fuck did you do to me?” He took Delilah by her wrists and shook her like he was trying to yank her arms from her body.
She continued to shake her head, that look of abject terror still marring what would have been a stunningly beautiful face. “I’m so sorry. It wasn’t supposed to go into you.”
“What did you do to me?” But he knew. He knew the moment it happened. He knew when he turned to his partner and saw Mohammed’s expression morph from one of fear, sympathy, and remorse to one of anger. He saw the same look on Trina’s face when she stepped into the room. He looked down and saw that she was aiming her gun at him.
“Run! You have to run!” Delilah said.
“No!” It was the woman they’d handcuffed on the balcony. She was standing in the doorway looking directly at Delilah.
“Take it back, Delilah. You have to take it back.”
Delilah shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t take it back. You don’t know what you’re asking me to do.”
Trina was still pointing her gun at Malloy, and he could see her slowly adding pressure to the trigger. Mohammed stood between the two of them, watching. His own weapon was in his hand, hanging by his side. Malloy was waiting for Mohammed to point it at Trina and order her to drop her weapon, but he just stood there watching. Then he stepped back to give Trina a direct line of sight. The barrel was now aimed at the center of his skull.
“Trina? It’s me. It’s John. Put the gun down, Trina.” He spoke to her in the calmest, most reassuring, non-threatening tone he could muster. Her aim didn’t waver. He was about to die. He knew it as certainly as he knew the sun would rise tomorrow. A bullet from a woman he had worked with for years was about to shatter through his skull and fly a large portion of his brain across the room while his best friend and partner stood by and watched.
“You’ve got to hold it in. It’s affecting them. All that hate and fear. It’s making them crazy, just like it does the animals. I can feel it affecting me too, making me want to kill you. You’ve got to hold it in.”
Malloy closed his eyes and looked into his mind where a maelstrom of madness stormed. He gathered all the pain, all the hatred and fear and rage and disgust and disappointment and envy and jealousy and sucked it into his subconscious. He buried it, suppressed it, as any good homicide cop would. He buried it in the place where he buried all the appalling things he’d seen in fifteen years on the job. He nestled it in beside the memory of that crack whore who was gang-raped by teenagers from a nearby high school, raped with baseball bats, pissed and shit on, and then doused with hydrochloric acid, the skin seared from her flesh while she was still alive. STILL ALIVE! While she was still conscious and screaming, begging for mercy, before she was bludgeoned to death and left under the bleachers, where a young cheerleader found her the next morning. He tucked it in next to the image of those boys’ faces when they were questioned and had smirked like it was a joke, like it was no big deal, because she was only a crack whore and they were the captain of the football team, the star runningback, the class valedictorian, the forward on the basketball team, the state champion wrestler with a scholarship to Yale. “So what’s the big deal?”
He crammed it under the memory of the heroin addict who microwaved her newborn child, sat in a narcotic fugue while her six-day-old infant screamed and cried as her blood boiled in her arteries and capillaries and her skin, fat, and muscles roasted because her mother forgot she had a baby and thought she was cooking a chicken. He pushed it deeper. Beneath the memory of the meth addict who raped, tortured, murdered, and mutilated his own elderly mother. HIS OWN FUCKING MOTHER! He slipped it in next to all the serial killer cases he’d studied, sick fucks like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacey, and Joseph Miles, next to the crime scene photos of their raped, mutilated, and cannibalized victims. He sucked it down, down, fathoms deep, eons deep, nestled it beside genetic memories from when the first man stood upright, the first ape-like Cro-Magnon picked up a tool to dig termites out of the ground, the first one-celled organism emerged from the protoplasmic stew.
And Trina lowered her weapon.
Delilah rose from the bed and walked toward him.
Now Mohammed did raise his weapon. “Get back! Get away from him!”
“You can’t keep it in forever, you know. It’ll come out. And when it does, everything and everyone around you will try to destroy you. I’ve seen it. It almost happened to me before I figured out how to get rid of it.”
Malloy was shaking, his body trembling with the effort to contain so much hatred and pain. The pressure was building and the lid was threatening to blow off.
Delilah shook her head. “It’s no good. You can’t stop it. No one can hold all of that except me.” She looked at April and smiled a sad smile, a goodbye-forever smile.
“Delilah …”
The voodoo priestess, born of a long line of mambos going back to the slave ships and beyond, to the motherland, reached out her hand and caressed Malloy’s cheek. He began to twitch. Veins and chords stood out prominently on his neck and face. He could feel his heartbeat pounding in his ears, the blood rushing like a tempest through his arteries. The strain was killing him.
“No one except me.” She pulled Malloy close and kissed him. Malloy saw all the dark dreadful things from his past that he’d long suppressed, all the revolting, gut-wrenching memories and demons from Delilah’s congregation pass through his mind as Delilah sucked it all out of him and back into herself. She let him go and staggered backward.
She headed toward the door, and Trina and Mohammed instinctively stepped out of her way.
“Delilah? Are you okay?” April asked.
But Delilah’s anguish was too great for her to respond. April reached out to touch her but Mohammed grabbed her hand before she could, and Malloy saw the sudden realization of what she’d almost done cross April’s face as she shrank away from Delilah, weeping.
Delilah walked out of the room and down the stairs, wobbling on unsteady legs. Swarms of bees were already filling the foyer, pouring in through the shattered front door. Birds were flying in now as well. They attacked Delilah as she made her way down the stairs. Her screams were like the death of an angel, the dying of a sun.
“Delilah!” April called from the balcony. She tried to run to her but Mohammed held her back. They all stood watching as the foyer began to seethe with insects.
“Oh my God! What’s happening?” Trina shouted.
Rats, field mice, snakes, lizards, moths, gnats, spiders, scorpions, every animal that called the desert home crawled, scampered, fluttered, swooped, and slithered through the open door, joining in the assault on Delilah. The front of the house lit up with blue and red flashing lights as the ambulance arrived, along with a dozen squad cars. The foyer was a dense cloud of living, stinging, biting death. The EMTs couldn’t get through.
“Up here! He’s up here! We’ve got an officer down!”
“We can’t get through! We’ll try going around through the back of the house!”
Trina knelt down beside Mike, who was still breathing rapid, shallow breaths; he was still holding his chest. Blood spurted out between his fingers. Trina added pressure to the wound in an attempt to staunch the flow of blood. His complexion looked bad, pale, like something from the bottom of a lake.
Malloy knew what he had to do. He knelt beside Trina and leaned in close so Torres could hear him. “Where is he, Mike? Where’d you put him?”
Torres’s eyes focused on Malloy and then slid slowly over to Trina and back.
Malloy shook his head. “Don’t worry about that now. It’s too late for that. She needs to know. Where is he?”
“Who are you talking about?” Trina asked.
Mike’s eyes hardened.
“Mike, you don’t have much time. The EMTs can’t reach us. You’re going to die. Tell me where he is!”
“At my house … basement,” he sputtered.
“Who?”
“I’ll tell you on the way. Let’s get him out of here. We can’t let the EMTs see him. We’ve got to get him out of here. Can you handle this, Mohammed? There’s gonna be a lot of questions.”
Mohammed looked shaken and confused. “I’m going with you. I can’t stay here. I’ve got Emily outside.”
They looked at Trina. “I’m going too. He’s my partner.”
Downstairs, the voracious miasma had begun to dissipate. Multitudes of insects, vermin, and other scavengers rolled out like the tide. In their wake were the skeletal remains of Delilah. Upstairs, April screamed for her dead lover.
She ran down the stairs and gathered Delilah’s remains into her arms. Crying like the world had ended.
“I love you, Delilah. We would have been happy together. We would have been so happy.” But she knew that in the end, Delilah had done the right thing.
Chapter 39
Mohammed and Malloy carried Torres’s limp, unconscious body out the front door as the paramedics made their way in through the back. In front of the house a sea of black and white squad cars bathed them in red and blue lights as they hurried across the driveway. Ignoring the uniformed officers, Detective Trina Lassiter flashed her badge and continued walking to Mohammed’s car.
Whenever one of the officers approached her, Malloy, or Mohammed, they would bark a random order at them before they could ask a question about Torres.
“There’s a little girl upstairs in the bedroom who may need medical attention. Go get her taken care of and get her statement if she can give one!”
“Go secure the crime scene!”
“Call CSU!”
“Call the ME’s office and have them send a meat wagon!”
“Don’t let anybody in or out of this house until CSU has processed the crime scene!”
When anyone managed to ask about the bleeding detective they were carrying, they would give a terse, obtuse answer and order them off to some other pointless task.
“Detective Torres isn’t feeling well so we’re taking him home. I need you to ID those bodies in there!”
“He looks like he’s been shot. Is he okay?”
“More okay then you’re going to be if you don’t get me some information on those bodies in there!”
Finally they made it to the car, still fielding suspicious questions and drawing inquiring stares.
“You know we didn’t fool anyone, right?” Trina asked. “The captain is gonna want to know why we left the scene of an officer-involved shooting after calling for back-up. It’s gonna look really bad.”
“That can’t be helped. We fucked up from the minute we set foot in that place,” Malloy responded as he slid behind the wheel of the Chrysler. This time Mohammed sat up front with him and Trina sat in the back with Emily, holding Torres as he slumped against the car door. His breathing had slowed, he had lost consciousness, and when Trina checked his pulse, it was barely there.
“Stop! Stop the car! He’s dying! We have to go get the EMTs!”
“I know he’s dying and the EMTs can’t help him. We’ve got to take him to Dale.”
“Dale! Dale McCarthy? You know where he is? Why isn’t he on fucking death row? Do you know what that sick piece of shit has done?” Trina had tears racing down her face. Her eyes were wild with anger and hurt. She looked at Malloy like he had betrayed her.
“Yeah, I know what he’s done. I guess maybe you should know too.” And so he told her. He told her everything. He told her about how Dale had tortured and murdered her and Harry and how Torres had forced him to bring them both back to life. Then he told her about what happened when she took Torres’s gun and shot Dale in the head. How everyone he’d healed, including her and Harry and Sara and Josh Lincoln had come undone, all the wounds reemerging at once.
“Then Dale regenerated. His body healed itself the same way he healed all of you.”
“And you, you saw all of this?”
“No. I saw what happened next. I saw when Torres made Dale bring all of you back to life again.”
Trina nodded, her mind filling in the unspoken implications, making the horrible connections and conclusions. Her rage building into something violent and terrible but ultimately impotent.
“So we can’t kill him or we’ll die too.” It was a statement. Not a question.
“Yeah. I’m afraid so. That’s why we can’t arrest him.”
“Because even though there’s not enough evidence to convict him of a capital offense, he might get himself murdered in prison,” Trina said.
Malloy nodded. “So we have to keep him somewhere where we can keep him alive. We didn’t tell you because we didn’t want you walking around with all of this on your mind. We didn’t want you and Harry to have to make the decision between bringing Dale to justice and staying alive. So Torres called me and Mo and we snuck Dale out of there and then Torres just said he escaped, but that he’d been mortally wounded and would probably die anyway and everyone was satisfied. They just assumed his body would eventually turn up inside one of the thousands of empty foreclosures around town. Meanwhile, Mo and I took him to Mike’s house, and I guess Mike has been keeping him there ever since.”
Trina looked like she’d been gut shot. She held her stomach and rocked back and forth, moaning. Tears raced down her face. “Oh God. Oh Jesus. I think I’m going to be sick.”