The Wolf Gift (16 page)

He was becoming ever more tired, positively weak.

Yet it was a simple matter to make the secretive and rapid journey home.

Back in his room, he again confronted himself in the mirror.

“Anything new to tell me?” he asked. “What a deep voice you have.”

The transformation had begun.

He gripped the soft fur between his legs even as it was shrinking, vanishing, and then he felt his fingers emerging again to touch the wound in his shoulder.

There was no wound.

No wound at all.

He was so tired now he could scarcely remain standing, but he had to make sure of this. He moved towards the mirror. No wound. But was there a bullet locked inside him, a bullet that could infect him and kill him? How could he know?

He almost laughed out loud thinking of what Grace would say if he said,
Mom, I think I got shot last night. Can you run an X-ray to see if there’s a bullet lodged in my shoulder? Don’t worry, I don’t feel a thing
.

But no, that wasn’t going to happen.

He fell into his bed, loving the soft clean smell of the pillow, and as the pewter light of morning filled the room, he went fast asleep.

R
EUBEN AWOKE
at ten, showered, shaved, and went immediately to Simon Oliver’s office to pick up the keys to Nideck Point. No, Marchent’s lawyers didn’t care if he visited the place; indeed the handyman needed to see him, and the sooner he could take over having some repairs made the better. And would he make his own inventory, please? They were worried about “all that stuff up there.”

He was on the road before noon, speeding across the Golden Gate towards Mendocino, the rain a steady drizzle, the car filled with clothes, an extra computer, a couple of old Bose DVD players, and other things he would leave in his new refuge.

He needed this time alone desperately. He needed to be alone tonight with these powers—to study, to observe, to seek to control. Maybe he could stop the transformation at will or modulate it. Maybe he could bring it on.

Whatever the case, he had to get away from everything, including the voices that had drawn him into the slaughtering of four people. He had no choice but to head north.

And … and, there was always the remote possibility that something lived up there in those northern woods that knew all about what he was and might just share with him the secrets of what he’d become. He didn’t really hope for that, but it was possible. He wanted to be visible to that thing. He wanted that thing to see him roaming the rooms of Nideck Point.

Grace had been at the hospital when he’d slipped out, and Phil had been nowhere around. He’d talked to Celeste briefly, listening numbly as she recounted the horrors of last night to him in boiling detail.

“And this THING just threw the woman out of the window, Reuben! And she landed smack-dab on the pavement! I mean the city is
going crazy! It ripped apart two bums in Golden Gate Park, gutting one of them like a fish. And everybody loved your story, Reuben. The Man Wolf—that’s what they’re calling him. You could get a cut from the mugs and the T-shirts, you know. Maybe you should trademark ‘Man Wolf.’ But who’s going to believe what that crazy woman in North Beach said? I mean, what is the thing going to do next: scrawl a poetic message on a wall in the victim’s blood?”

“That’s a thought, Celeste,” Reuben had murmured.

When traffic stalled on the Waldo Grade, he called Billie.

“You scored again, Boy Wonder,” said Billie. “I don’t know how you do it. It’s been picked up by the wire services and websites around the world. People are linking to it on Facebook and Twitter. You gave this monster, the Man Wolf, some metaphysical depth!”

Had he? How had that happened—with his attention to Susan Larson’s descriptions, and her account of the creature’s voice? He couldn’t even remember what he’d written now. But they were calling him the Man Wolf and that was a small score.

Billie was raving about what had just happened. She wanted him to talk to the Golden Gate Park witnesses and the neighbors on Buena Vista Hill.

Well, he had to go up north, he had no choice, he told her. He had to see the scene of the crime where he was almost killed.

“Well, of course, you’re looking for evidence of the Man Wolf up there, right? Get some pix of that hallway! You realize we never had any pix inside that house? Have you got your Nikon with you?”

“What’s happening with the kidnap?” he demanded.

“These kidnappers aren’t giving any assurance that the kids will be returned alive. It’s a standoff, with the FBI saying don’t transfer the money till the kidnappers come up with a plan. They aren’t telling us everything, but my contacts in the sheriff’s office say they’re dealing with real professionals here. And it doesn’t look good. If this damned San Francisco Man Wolf is so hot to bring superhero justice and vengeance to the world, why the hell doesn’t he go find those missing children?”

Reuben swallowed. “That’s a good question,” he said.

And just maybe the Man Wolf hasn’t gotten his act together yet, and is gaining confidence night by night, ever think of that, Billie?
But he didn’t say it.

A wave of sickness came over him. He thought of the bodies of those
dead men in Golden Gate Park. He thought of the corpse of that woman on the pavement. Maybe Billie should visit the morgue, and take a look at the human wreckage “the superhero” was leaving behind. This was no series of capers.

His sickness was short-lived, however. He was keenly aware that he had no pity for any of those creatures. And just as keenly aware that he’d had no right to kill any of them. So what?

The traffic was moving. And the rain had picked up. He had to go. The noise of the traffic was muting the voices around himself somewhat, but he could still hear them, like a bubbling brew.

He started surfing the radio for news and talk, turning it up loud to seal every other sound out.

It was either the Goldenwood kidnapping or the Man Wolf, with all the predictable jokes and ridicule of the beast and his dubious witnesses. The name “Man Wolf” was a favorite, all right. But there was still plenty of talk of a Yeti, Bigfoot, or even a Gorilla Man. One caramel-voiced commentator on National Public Radio compared the rampages and their ambiguous physical evidence to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and speculated that this could be a beast manipulated by a human handler; or a powerful man dressed in furred costume.

In fact, the more Reuben listened, the more it came clear that the idea of a costumed perpetrator was gaining favor. People weren’t accepting evidence or testimony to the contrary. And certainly nobody thought or guessed that this creature had any special power to search out injustice; it was assumed he’d stumbled on the situations in which he’d intervened. And nobody suggested that he could or ought to catch the Goldenwood kidnappers. Billie had been way ahead on that one. And so was Reuben himself.

Why not try to find those children? Why not cancel this trip north and start driving the back roads of Marin County scanning for those children and those three adults?

Reuben couldn’t get that out of his mind. Didn’t it stand to reason that the kidnappers could not have transported those forty-five victims very far at all?

Some talk show hosts were thoroughly disgusted that anybody was focusing on anything other than the Goldenwood kidnapping. And one parent had broken with the FBI and the sheriff’s office to publicly condemn both for not paying the ransom on demand.

The power Reuben had enjoyed last night, and make no mistake, he had enjoyed it, was nothing when he thought of the missing children, and those parents sobbing behind closed doors at the Goldenwood Academy. What if? But how exactly? Should he simply drive the back roads in the vicinity of the kidnapping, listening with his new acute hearing for the victims’ cries?

The trouble was, his hearing wasn’t very acute early in the day. It sharpened as night came on, and that would be hours from now.

The rain came down heavier as he pushed north. For long stretches, people drove with their headlamps on. When the traffic slowed to a crawl in Sonoma County, Reuben realized he’d never make it to Nideck Point and back before dark. Hell, it was twilight now at 2:00 p.m.

He pulled off in Santa Rosa, tapped his iPhone for the address of the nearest Big Man XL clothing store, and quickly bought two of the largest and longest raincoats they had, including a tolerable-looking brown trench coat that he actually liked, several pairs of superbig sweatpants, and three hooded sweatshirts, and then found a ski store for ski masks and the largest ski mittens they carried. He threw in five brown cashmere scarves that would be good for hiding his face right up to a pair of giant sunglasses, if the ski masks didn’t work or were too frightening, and the giant sunglasses he found in the drugstore.

Walmart had giant rain boots.

All this was powerfully exciting.

He went back to the news as soon as he was on the road again. The rain was almost torrential. The traffic moved sluggishly and sometimes not at all. He would definitely be spending the night in Mendocino County.

Around four o’clock, he reached the forest road leading directly to Marchent’s house—well, our house, that is. The news sang on.

On the Man Wolf front, the coroner’s office had now confirmed that the dead woman of Buena Vista Hill had been only distantly related to the old couple she’d been torturing. And the woman’s own mother had died in mysterious circumstances two years before. As for the dead men in Golden Gate Park, both were now linked by fingerprint evidence to two baseball bat murders of homeless men in the Los Angeles area. The victim in Golden Gate Park had been identified as a missing Fresno man, and his family had been overjoyed to be reunited with him. The
would-be rapist of North Beach was a convicted killer, just released from prison after serving less than ten years for a rape-murder.

“So whoever this mad avenger is,” the police spokesman said, “he has an uncanny knack for intervening in the right situations and in the nick of time, and that’s all very commendable, but his methods have now made him the target of the largest manhunt in San Francisco history.”

“Make no mistake,” he went on to say when the frenzy of questions had been allowed to crest, “we are dealing here with a dangerous and obviously psychotic individual.”

“Is he a man wearing some kind of animal costume?”

“We’ll address this question when we’ve had more time to process the evidence.”

So tell them about the abundant lysozyme in the saliva, Reuben thought, but of course you won’t. That would only exacerbate the hysteria. And he’d left no saliva evidence last night, just whatever might have come from the claws with which he’d slashed his victims.

One thing was clear. People weren’t fearing for their lives with the Man Wolf. But nobody, or so the radio call-ins seemed to indicate, believed the Man Wolf had actually spoken words to the North Beach victim and witness.

Reuben was about to shut the radio off when the news came in that the body of one little eight-year-old Goldenwood Academy student had been found two hours ago in the surf at Muir Beach. Cause of death: blunt force trauma.

There was a press conference in progress at the sheriff’s headquarters in San Rafael. It sounded like a lynching.

“Until we have a concrete plan for the return of the children and the teachers,” said the sheriff, “we cannot accede to the kidnappers’ demands.”

Enough. Reuben couldn’t take any more. He turned off the radio. A little girl dead on Muir Beach. So these “tech geniuses” had done that, had they? Simply murdered one of their numerous victims to show they meant business? Of course. When you have forty-five potential victims, why not?

He was in a fury.

It was five o’clock, and dark, and the rain showed no sign of slacking. And the voices of the world were very far away. In fact, he heard
no voices. That meant, obviously, that he could no more hear over an infinite distance than an animal. But what were the actual limits of his powers? He had no idea.

Little girl found dead in the surf.

That was all the more reason, wasn’t it, to conclude that the other victims were not very far away at all.

Abruptly, he came to the top of the final rise, and in the beam of his headlamps he saw the enormous house looming ahead of him, a giant phantom of itself in the rain, far more grand than memory had allowed him to envision it. There were lights in its windows.

He was awed by the sight of it, awed by the moment.

But he was also miserable. He couldn’t stop thinking about the children—about that little girl on that cold beach.

As he pulled up to the front door, the outside lamps went on, illuminating not only the steps and the door itself, but flashing upwards on the façade at least as far as the top of the second-floor windows. What a glorious place it was.

Oh, how very far he was from the innocent young guy who’d first crossed that threshold with Marchent Nideck.

The door opened and the handyman appeared in a yellow rain slicker and came down to help Reuben with his bundles and suitcase.

The big room already had a roaring fire. And Reuben could smell the rich aroma of coffee.

“I’ve got some supper for you on the stove,” said the handyman, a tall lean gray-eyed person, very weathered and wrinkled, with sparse iron-colored hair and a colorless but agreeable smile. He had one of those pleasant, accentless California voices that gave no hint of his home base or origins. “My wife brought that up here for you. She didn’t cook herself, of course. She got it at the local Redwood House down in the town. And some groceries, too. She took the liberty—.”

“I’m so pleased,” said Reuben at once. “I thought of everything but food, thank you. And I was absolutely crazy to think I could get here by four o’clock. I am so sorry.”

“No bother,” the man said. “My name’s Leroy Galton and everybody calls me Galton. My wife is Bess. My wife’s lived here all her life, used to cook and clean up here now and then when there were parties.” He took the suitcase from Reuben, and hefting the bundles in one hand he headed back the hallway towards the stairs.