“A little conspicuous, don’t you think?”
His lips rolled up between his teeth in a grim smile.
“I’m not willing to lose you again.”
“Well,” said the doctor, breaking in on the conversation, “if you want your guest of honor to be ready for next week, you’d better let her get some more rest now.”
“Yes,” the captain said. Sweat prickled across his brow. “Yes.”
“Oh, one last thing,” Donna asked, “where am I to be buried? I was always hoping for St Mary’s Cemetery. God’s Acre, and all that.”
The chief shook his head. “St Mary’s is too open, too hard to lock down.”
“St Charles-”
“You don’t want St Charles, with all those woods – paths everywhere and tree forts and kids with paintball guns and guys sitting on rocks smoking weird shit.”
“Where, then?”
“You’re going in with the Protestants. Burlington Cemetery’s got only one access road, and it’s backed by an impassible swamp. We’ll have the road blockaded and cops as thick as gravestones.”
“Sounds restful,” she said, drifting to sleep. The Son of Samael lay against the wall. He would be in a bathtub except that it was down the hall and shared by five other rooms, and the tub was grimier than the cockroach-littered floor. He lay against the wall, wincing with each turn of the splintered stick. Already, the rag around his wrist was tight enough to stop the bleeding, but he wrenched the stick one last turn, hearing the soft grind of the radius and ulna as they bowed against each other.
There, tight enough. He paused, giving himself two long, low breaths and gritting his teeth. Oh, to be done with this pulpy and fragile flesh. To at last be done. Leaning forward, he gingerly slid the second rag out from between his teeth and clumsily, with his one good hand, wrapped the cloth around the stick and his arm, just below the elbow. Fingers working with echoes of pain, he tied the cloth in a half hitch, and then a square knot. The tourniquet was complete.
He sighed. His vision was filled with prickly intrusions where pain and blood loss ate away at his sight. He lifted the wounded hand. It was a mottled blue. Maroon blood seeped from two wounds. One bullet had pierced his palm, cracked the carpal bone of his ring finger, and wrenched out the back of his hand, leaving a mess of splintered bone, oozy muscle, and ripped skin. The other had struck near the base of his thumb. It had torn away the careful stitching the surgeon had done, and left the thumb dangling loose.
Samael stared at the ruined hand. He would wait until all sensation was gone below the tourniquet, then cut the hand off entirely. He had done the same to the hands of others.
The amputation somehow pleased him. He would be rid of one hunk of flesh that not only could but did cause him agony. Perhaps, if this amputation worked well, he would take off the whole arm. Twenty pounds of meat and bone would put him that much farther from the mortal realm. If only he could whittle it all away and regain his angelic form…
Ah, the merciful numbness had come.
He had done this a hundred times. Now was no different. Ram the steel tip down just beyond the heads of the radius and ulna, thereby cracking the ligaments in the joint. Then, shove it through the wrist bones, and saw away at what was left.
He positioned the knifepoint in the shallow cleft above his arm bones. Leaning his sternum upon the butt of the knife, he lunged downward. The crackle of snapped ligaments and splintered bone edges was a white-hot flash in his mind…
Numbly, he realized he slumped over the knife and the pinned flesh of his wrist. He couldn’t breathe. There was a sound like swarming bees in his head, and piercing yellow lights…
He awoke, shuddering, atop the canted knife. He lurched back and sat, panting. His wrist was still pinned to the floor.
Pain. It was the basis of all human morality. Everyone was captive to it. Everyone was vulnerable insofar as others could torture and rape and destroy the body. That is why humans seek to do each other no harm. That is why they consider it wrong to beat or mutilate or kill. That is why they believe in going to Heaven or Hell.
But none of that mattered. He was not human, not anymore. He would toss away this hand as though it were a tin can.
Prying the blade up from the weepy wound, he set the tip again and lunged. The hand tilted away from the blade. One more lunge, and the appendage hung loose on tatters of flesh. He could see the floor through the three stabs he had made.
Only moments more, and I can toss this hand in with the others.
With a grim gritting of teeth, the Son of Samael set to sawing his own hand free.
TWENTY-FIVE
It was a beautiful summer day in Burlington. The cemetery was hilly and wooded, with graves that went back to 1828. Some stones had been rendered unreadable in the great wash of time. Small, one-lane roads of fresh blacktop wove between crimson-king maples and scrubby oaks. The gray-white stones stood in clean, solemn rows on a carpet of green.
Route W was closed for two miles to either side, from Route 11 to the doorway of the Country Vet. Between those two police roadblocks ran a road through harvested fields and past a grove that was thick with camouflaged National Guardsmen. One side of the road was parked full of funeral cars.
Burlington’s fourteen available officers (including the meter readers) had shown up in dress blues, specially ordered for the funeral of their beloved detective and her unborn child. Their handgun shoulder holsters made ominous mounds in the dark, straightjackets they wore. There were also seven riflemen from the National Guard, dressed in immaculate ceremonial garb and bearing ceremonial weapons that usually shot only blanks. Today the rifles were loaded with sixty-grain hollow-point shot. The officers of other departments wore their best as well, and carried fully loaded side arms. Even the local farmers, who had been warned to stay inside with windows and doors locked, sat behind their drapes, shotguns at the ready.
The police blockades had been ordered to get photo identification from anyone entering the area. They were instructed even to tweak the cheeks of their fellow cops, making certain those cheeks were real. Chief Biggs had sent no warnings of this unusual inspection. If the Son of Samael showed up as a cop, they wanted to catch him before he got anywhere near Detective Leland. She was there, but not in the bronze casket suspended over the grave. She was in an unmarked blue police car, parked near the cemetery gates. The vehicle had darkened windows of bulletproof glass. The woman herself wore a bunchy black dress with a high, lacy neck, such as old women sometimes mourn in. The ensemble was completed by a veil and a shallow, broadbrimmed hat. A makeup man had given her an enhanced nose, an enlarged chin, and gray-streaked eyebrows beneath a white wig. Silent and watchful, huddled in the dark-windowed sedan, she could have been the dead cop’s grandmother.
“Nothing yet,” she muttered into the tan wire that ran from an earpiece to the edge of her lips. “Many are ruled out on height alone, Chief.”
“Keep watching,” came the voice from the headset. She glanced along a picket of older, taller gravestones where the chief paced. She whispered, “He’ll show up. He won’t be able to stay away.”
Biggs’s voice was worried. “I just hope we haven’t scared him off, with all the security.”
“That just sweetens the deal for him – makes it even more of a challenge.”
“Somebody’s coming. We’ll talk later.”
Leland glanced out the window to see who approached the chief. It was a short, thin man in a red blazer, his side-burned head cocked inquisitively as he reached Biggs. There was a moment of tension, and then a nod and a handshake, traded words and smiles. Leland sighed, easing back in her seat. The man had been too short, too thin. That man there, though – no. It was Blake Gaines in a navy blue suit, down from his new post on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. He’d received a special invitation and right to roam the grounds, on condition he photographed the crowd. Gaines, smelling another exclusive, had showed up with notepad, camera rig, and even the Channel 4