Slowly, with effort, I climbed to my feet. As fast as I could without sprawling again, I made my way across the room. Past a bucket and mop, which stood there as if waiting for T.J. to get to work. Past tables, some of them, I now noticed, toppled over. Past the end of the long bar. At the back, the floor was cleaner. I pounded on the locked door that Norden hadn’t got through, the door to Axel’s lair.
“Axel!” I screamed. “Axel, get up here!” I pressed my ear against the door, but I couldn’t hear a thing. Was it sound-proofed? Damn it all, Axel had to know about this. I kept on pounding and screaming. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
My hand felt like I’d fractured at least a couple of bones and I was starting to go hoarse when I heard a lock click, and then two more. The door swung open toward me, and I had to jump back to avoid being hit. That made me fall again, thanks to the slime on the soles of my boots. Axel’s angry face loomed way, way up there, somewhere near the ceiling. But his expression changed to alarm when he saw me.
“What happened?”
“I don’t—All this—” The words weren’t coming. I gestured around the bar. “T.J.”
Axel’s brow lowered as he surveyed the room. “T.J. made this mess?”
I shook my head and saw a glint of metal on the floor a couple of feet away. I reached over and picked up T.J.’s ring, touching only the metal. A splinter of bone, absurdly white, stuck out of what was left of the finger. Wordlessly, I handed Axel the ring and the lump of flesh it encircled.
He squinted at it, turning it over in his big paw. He looked around the bar again, at the black, stinking goo, the bits of cloth and bone and hair. His hand closed around the ring as he squeezed his eyes shut. He stayed that way for a minute, completely still.
He opened his eyes and walked to the bar, where he set the ring down carefully, gently even. Then Axel did something that, a mere hour ago, I’d have sworn he’d never do. He picked up the phone and called the Goon Squad.
6
BACK BEFORE THE PLAGUE, CREATURE COMFORTS WASN’T A bar. The space had been occupied by one of those thirty-minute circuit-training gyms. Lucky for me. Axel’s storeroom had been a locker room, and it still had a working shower. It was heaven to stand under a stream of hot water and get clean. The Goons, I knew, would be annoyed, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t stand to have that stuff—whatever it was—all over me. Axel had dug out one of the old staff uniforms: a pair of chinos and a black polo shirt with FIT-IN-30 embroidered on the pocket. The clothes were a little big and smelled musty, but they were clean.
By the time I emerged from the storage room, rubbing my hair with a bar towel, the Goons had arrived. Norden and Sykes—damn, I’d hoped their shift had ended—stood talking to Axel as Sykes scribbled in a notebook. All around them, crime scene technicians wearing gloves, surgical masks, and bags over their shoes, swabbed samples of black slime and tweezered up scraps of what used to be T.J., depositing them in plastic bags.
Norden poked Axel with his finger, but the big bartender didn’t seem to notice. He looked over Norden’s head, staring with glassy eyes at the mess. As I came down the hallway, Norden’s head snapped around and he stopped in mid-poke. “I’m not kidding,” he said to Axel, while he kept his beady eyes on me. “This is a murder scene now. You’re going to let us through that door, or I’m going to send for a battering ram and bash it off its hinges.”
Norden stepped in front of me. “You,” he sneered. “I should’ve known. How come whenever something bad happens, you’re right in the middle of it?”
I wasn’t going to bother answering that. “Do you want me to make a statement or not? Because I’d rather be home in bed than hanging around waiting for you to decide if you want to talk to me.” Not that I’d be able to sleep, not after what I’d found here.
“Sykes will take your statement.” Norden shot Axel a significant look. “I’ve gotta make a phone call.”
One booth in the back of the room was relatively slime-free. Sykes and I made our way there and sat down facing each other. Across the room, Norden finished his phone call and went back to poking Axel.
“Why on earth do you put up with that jerk?” I asked.
Sykes shrugged. “We were partners before the plague. After this happened”—he gestured to indicate his zombified self—“my choices were join the Goon Squad or quit the force. Elmer could’ve transferred, but he stuck with me.”
I didn’t know which was more of a shock, the fact that Norden had a first name—and it was Elmer—or that he’d taken a job he obviously hated to stay with his partner. If I had to list Norden’s good qualities, I’d say he was rude, annoying, and an all-around prick. Somehow, “loyal” wouldn’t have come to mind.
“Yeah, he’s loyal,” Sykes said, like he’d read my mind. “And he’s braver than you’d think. But you’re right; the guy’s a jerk. Always has been. Even his own mother couldn’t stand him. He swore the feeling was mutual, but he went to visit her at the nursing home twice a week. I don’t know, maybe they enjoyed getting on each other’s nerves. Then she caught pneumonia and died a couple of days before the plague hit.” Sykes tapped his pen on the table. “I’m no psychiatrist, but I always thought he got mad at us zombies for coming back to life while his ma stayed dead.”
I watched Norden poking Axel, to make sure I’d stay mad at the guy. I did not want to come down with a case of the warm fuzzies for Elmer Norden. The less I knew about what made him tick, the better.
Sykes flipped a page in his notebook. “So tell me what happened.” He fished a pair of half-moon reading glasses from his pocket and perched them on his nose.
“I found …” I was going to say the body, but there was no body. “I found this.” I swept my arm to encompass the horror of the room.
“Start from the beginning. What time did you leave here this morning?”
“Right around closing time. Six, maybe a little before.” As Sykes took notes, I described how I’d realized I’d left my watch at Creature Comforts and how T.J. had promised to drop it off at my building.
“If you expected him to leave it with your doorman, why did you come back here?”
I didn’t feel like explaining that Difethwr had invaded my dream and spooked me. I was already spooked enough by whatever had happened here, so I settled for a half-truth. “I couldn’t sleep. It’s a valuable watch, and I was worried. Since I was awake anyway, I figured I’d save T.J. the trouble. I thought once I had my watch back, I’d quit obsessing about it and be able to sleep.”
Sykes nodded as he wrote, then peered over his glasses with crimson eyes. “May I see it?”
“What, my watch?” Until that moment, I hadn’t thought to look for my watch. “I don’t have it. T.J. said he’d put it behind the bar.”
We went to the far side of the bar and looked around. On a shelf beneath the cash register was a cardboard box with LOST & FOUND written in thick black marker on the side. I rummaged through it. There were baseball caps, sunglasses, umbrellas, a black lace bra (I’d have to ask Axel about that one), a set of keys, and two watches—neither one was mine.
“It’s not here.” Queasiness clenched my gut as I flashed back to Difethwr in my dream, taunting me with the watch and then destroying it. It couldn’t have been my actual watch; it must have been a dream-image. Boston was protected by a magic shield, maintained by witches from every coven in the city, whose sole purpose was to keep Hellions out. There’d been a breach in the shield last fall, but since then the witches had strengthened the spell. No way Difethwr could’ve waltzed into town to steal my watch.