CHAPTER 13
Open House
I followed Pettis out of the supermarket. The sun was perched on the high wire of the horizon. In twenty minutes it would fall into night.
Pettis led me up the block past a dry cleaner’s and the post office, then turned into the small court that fronted the town’s hotel, a picturesque reproduction of an Old West boarding house. Hitching posts curbed the parking spaces, and there were swinging doors into the lobby. Inside, there was lots of varnished Ponderosa pine.
We walked past the abandoned front desk through the dining room. Bubble windows were set in the high-raftered ceiling, shafting dim ovals of twilight onto the polished floor. I held my shotgun up. Pettis seemed unconcerned, swinging his rifle at his side.
At the back of the dining room, we pushed through another swinging door to the kitchen. It was a mess. Pans had been scattered from their shelves. A long knife stood straight out of one wall. The aluminum sinks were scratched and tarnished. A section of the floor was ripped up, linoleum peeled back, floorboards cracked, a new network of nails holding them in place.
“No way that’ll hold,” Pettis said angrily.
Three piles of bones lay next to the sink. Pettis paused to kick one of them, scattering the bones. He went to a battered steel door that looked like it led to the back alley but instead opened onto a short hallway. The hallway ended in another door, this one low and almost square, a solid piece of windowless steel bordered by concrete.
Pettis knocked with the butt end of his rifle on the square door. There was an answering knock. Someone said Pettis’s name, muffled through the door. Pettis answered, “Yes.”
The door opened, revealing a slight, balding man with spectacles that had been mended at the bridge. He looked scared, his rabbit eyes darting from Pettis to me and back to Pettis.
“He’s with us tonight,” Pettis said, and the man, who had been ineffectively blocking the entrance, moved aside. There was a stool set near the hinges of the door and he collapsed onto it. Under the stool was a .38-caliber pistol. The man opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He began to tremble.
Finally, he blurted out, “How long I gotta stay here, Cowboy?”
Pettis didn’t look at him. “Till the sun goes down.”
The man’s eyes went wide with fear. “You won’t—”
“I won’t leave you here, Cooper,” Pettis snapped. “You’re no goddamn good to me. I’ll send two men up in a little while.” Seeing Cooper’s lips trembling to speak again, Pettis added, “Before the Moon rises.”
As Cooper closed and bolted the door behind us, a look of mild relief filling his frightened features, Pettis turned to me and snorted, “Engineer.”
We walked a narrow hallway that ended abruptly in a steep flight of stairs down. Pettis descended without hesitation. He was a graceful man, his movements catlike.
There was another short hallway at the bottom of the stairs. At the end of it was another door. Pettis banged impatiently on it. It opened immediately to reveal a young girl of twelve or thirteen.
“Didn’t I tell all of you not to open this door without knowing who’s on the other side?” Pettis said sharply.
“I—I heard—”
“Don’t tell me what you heard. That could have been anyone up there talking to Cooper.”
A short woman with dark hair appeared. She put a slim hand on the girl’s shoulder and moved her gently back, confronting Pettis herself.
“I asked Amy to watch while I went to the bathroom,” she said harshly.
“You should have been here yourself,” Pettis answered. “The girl—”
The woman turned and walked away.
Pettis’s face flared in anger. He turned to the door we had passed through, slammed and bolted it.
“Myerson? Biancalata?” he called.
Two young men appeared. One of them had glasses with lenses as thick as a thumb.
Pettis looked at his watch. “In fifteen minutes, the two of you go upstairs with shotguns. Send Cooper down. And by the way, you did a lousy job with the kitchen floor up there.”
“We did what we could.”
“It stinks.”
The two didn’t look pleased as they walked away.
“More engineers,” Pettis said derisively.
“How many people have you got down here?” I asked.
Pettis looked at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “We had forty to start. Now there’s eleven. With you, twelve.” He began to walk away. “For now.”
I followed him through the narrow entranceway into a large but claustrophobic room. Industrial metal shelving lined one entire wall. The opposite wall held a row of lockers. The center of the room was carpeted with sleeping bags.
Seeing me studying the double row of recessed ceiling lights, Pettis explained, “Battery system.”
In one far corner, a group consisting of another engineer type with a cigarette in his mouth, a young man in a private’s Army uniform, two older women, and an older man who looked startlingly like pictures I’d seen of Robert Oppenheimer, talked over a card game.
Pettis called, “Doc?” and the old man turned his head to regard us with his bird-black eyes.
His accent was English. “What is it, Cowboy?”
“What time tonight?”
“About seven-ten. I should think it will be the worst we’ve seen.”
Doc went back to the game of poker, giving his fan of cards the same rapt attention he had given Pettis’s question.
I must have looked blankly at Pettis, because he said, “Moonrise. Each night, as the Moon waxes, the wolves have been worse.”
I remembered the date, December sixteenth. “Tonight it’s full.”
“That’s right,” he answered, quietly.
Myerson and Biancalata appeared. They were armed, and Pettis brought them upstairs. Cooper scurried down with cries of thankfulness.
I tried to talk to him but he would have nothing to do with me. He went to a corner of the room where he sat turned to the wall, talking to himself.
I walked past the poker game to the small kitchen behind the common room. The woman and the young girl were cooking on an electric range, emptying open cans of chili into a large saucepan.
“Was this place built as a bomb shelter?” I asked.
The woman nodded curtly without looking up. “The owners of the hotel built it in 1962. They thought Kennedy was going to blow the world up. There’s even a morgue built into the back.”
“Biancalata and Myerson didn’t look too happy about taking first watch,” I said.
“That’s because they’ll be dead in an hour,” she answered, tight-lipped. Her knuckles were hard white on the wooden spoon she used on the chili.
“What do you mean?”
She still refused to look at me, staring at the pot of chili in front of her.
“Why doesn’t Pettis just leave the hallway empty upstairs, and guard the door leading into here?”
The young girl spoke up. “Because if someone doesn’t stop them upstairs, they’ll rip the door open here and kill us all. If somebody kills a couple of them upstairs, the rest go for the dead bodies. They go into a feeding frenzy. But last night they killed the men upstairs and almost got in. There were more of them than there were the first night, and they were stronger. Tonight…” She left her thought unsaid, gathering the empty chili cans and carrying them from the kitchen.
The other woman stood tense, her hand gripped tight around her spoon.
Innocently, more out of curiosity than provocation, I asked, “What do you have against Pettis?”
She looked at me then, with the hard icy glare of fear. I thought she would strike me. Her face was splotched red, and tears cornered her eyes.