Johnny Halloween Read online

  At first. Bill had pushed for a comeback. Training Nardo was the only job he’d ever had, and he wasn’t happy about losing his one-and-only client. “Look at Sugar Ray Leonard,” he’d whined. “He didn’t quit when they fixed his eye. He made big money afterward.”

  “The gravy train’s done run its course. Bill. You’d better get yourself a job, because if you don’t take care of my sister I’ll put your ass in a sling.” Those had been the deputy’s exact words.

  Fuck it. Nardo rubbed his eyes and felt blessed relief from the dust. He dribbled in some eye drops as an afterthought and was still blinking when a blurry Dennis Wichita came jogging toward him.

  “You were right!” Wichita called. “There is something missing! The equipment shed was busted open, and the chalker is gone!”

  “The chalker?”

  Wichita pointed to the indistinct first baseline, which disappeared under a cloud of dust. “You know—the machine we use to line the field.”

  ****

  Nardo took Wichita’s keys and told him he’d be back in a hour or two with a full report, suggesting not too subtly that Lee Iacocca had designed the seat of the Dodge Dakota especially for sleeping off tough nights. Then the deputy thumbed his extender mic and arranged a meeting with Ron Allen at the Ascot Funeral Home parking lot.

  After Nardo related the story of the missing chalker and a good bit of family history, Ron asked, “Is your brother-in-law drunk, or is he just naturally insane?”

  “Who knows? Maybe the whole thing is a Halloween prank. Bill and his buddies might do something crazy if they got a real snootful. They might be out there this minute chalking dirty words on decent folks’ lawns.”

  “Halloween night.” Ron laughed. “And a full moon, to boot. Shit, I hate working mids. The only time to deal with nuts is in the light of day.”

  “If then.”

  They decided to soft-pedal it for a while. When they found Bill, they’d try to talk sense to him, convince him that the thing to do would be to pay for Wich’s truck repair and return the chalker. And maybe skip a couple of the county’s field maintenance bills, too, just to show that he was genuinely embarrassed about the whole thing. If Bill did that, and if he was very nice about it, maybe they wouldn’t worry about the 459, the 2002, and the big bad deuce rap. It sure as hell would save all concerned a whole bunch of paperwork, and Dennis Wichita had already told Nardo that the last thing he wanted to do was deal with his insurance company. Again.

  Nardo got behind the wheel of the patrol car and headed for the county line, thinking about Bill’s biggest contracts, the places he was likely to visit first. He’d start with the cemetery, then work his way back toward the heart of the county. Soon he found himself thinking about Häagen-Dazs and foil-wrapped beers and steak dinners—thick filet mignons smothered with mushrooms and garlic and red onions—but he couldn’t work up a good head of jealousy over Bill’s success. His brother-in-law was a real entrepreneur. Two years ago he’d started out with a mail-order book called How to Earn $50 an Hour with a Pickup Truck, and now he was….

  Hell, now he was driving around drunk while his loony buddies flew black leather kites off of his truck-bed.

  Nardo eased the blue-and-white Dodge Diplomat onto Old Howard Road, careful to avoid the many potholes that dotted the blacktop. Up ahead, a blue-and-red pickup was parked on the sloping shoulder. Nardo killed his lights as he pulled in behind it.

  Stepping onto the gravel shoulder, he took his nunchaku from the inside door panel. When he was a teenager, he had seen every Bruce Lee movie that had played at the Visalia Drive-In at least a dozen times, and he’d been sold on the preferred weapon of Okinawan rice farmers ever since, even though his police training with the chucks had disappointed him, concentrating on wrist locks rather than elegant flourishes and passes. Still, he had seen many a perp freeze at the very sight of them, and he thought that the chucks were a hell of a lot more intimidating than the nightsticks most cops carried or the tonfas favored by the California Highway Patrol.

  Nardo checked the truck. Nothing. He tried contacting Sylvia Martin with his extender mic, but he was too far from the station’s repeater and the signal was miserably weak, so he called in his position using the patrol car’s more powerful radio.

  Once again, code 4. Once again, investigating suspicious circumstances.

  The full moon shone a chalky white-blue, the color of an oyster. Nardo hustled quietly across a weed-choked drainage ditch and through a tangle of scrub oak that partially circled the cemetery fence, glad for the moon because it made his flashlight unnecessary. He started to swing open the rusty gate before he saw the men, and the squealing hinges would have given him away for sure if not for the loud chanting that began at the same instant.

  “The darkness, the darkness,

  The light, the light,

  At midnight, at midnight,

  On Halloween night.”

  Nardo dipped low, taking cover behind a leafy oak. He’d nearly walked right into it.

  There were about ten of them, and just like Dennis Wichita had said, they were flying kites. Nardo saw three bat-shaped silhouettes darting and diving before the bright moon, though it didn’t appear that any of the men were holding kite reels or paying much attention to the aerial acrobatics.

  One of the men came forward, pushing something that looked like an old lawn mower. The chalker. The man bent low and jammed his arm into the machine, first to the wrist, then the forearm, then the elbow, and when he stood up, in the brief moment before the heavy, leathery sleeve of his robe descended, it appeared that he had lost his right arm.

  Nardo inched back toward his patrol car. It was a trick, he told himself. Damn spooky, but just a trick. Still, he wanted to call Ron Allen for backup.

  The one-armed man pulled another man forward, and a third man started to push the chalker, circling the first two. Nardo’s hand drifted to his gun.

  Darkness… Light… Midnight…. There was a sudden series of sharp beeps—someone’s wristwatch signaling the hour—and a circle of flame exploded between Nardo and the crowd. Inside the circle, two ashen faces swam against a roiling red-orange background, and Nardo immediately recognized Bill as one of the men.

  A glint of metal amid the flames. A knife arcing above Bill’s head.

  Bill and the other man disappeared behind a curtain of sparks.

  Nardo banged through the gate and sprinted through a tombstone obstacle course. The sparks were flickering low, but rising curls of mushroom-colored smoke hid his progress from the chanting men. Again, he went for his gun, hesitated just an instant at the thought of an elaborate prank, and instead pulled his chucks and dove for the circle just as a dozen sprinklers fountained water over the cemetery lawn.

  The flames were quenched almost instantly. The edge of the circle glowed orange, and as Nardo passed over it he saw Bill again, saw the cartoon-like outline of a bat glowing red on the grass at his brother-in-law’s feet. Then the wind kicked out of Nardo’s lungs and he felt like he was elbowing through something alive, like you’d feel if you were flailing around in the guts of a whale, and the chanting that boomed in his ears suddenly increased in pitch until it became a shrieking whine. But all he could think about was getting there, getting to the knife that even now was descending toward Bill’s heart, and he whipped the chucks around the one-armed man’s wrist and levered the two sticks together.

  There was a sound like an ear of corn being stripped from its stalk as the man’s wrist powdered. His hand fell away. The knife landed at the point of the bat-design’s left ear.

  “Jesus.” Nardo pulled his gun as the tall man dropped to his knees. “Jesus!”

  The screeching whine screamed to a deafening pitch. Nardo whirled toward the robed men. A few of them crouched at the perimeter of the circle, dying beneath cascading fountains of water, puddling to nothing like outcasts from The Wizard of Oz. Nardo was ready to surrender to a feeling of crazy relief—Bill already had and was laughin
g heartily at the wild sight of dissolving devil cultists—but then Nardo saw that several others had escaped the sprinklers; they had transformed themselves into huge black bats, not kites, and now they flapped leathery wings and dived before the full moon, staying well away from the sprinklers.

  Hot wind blasted through the circle, a scorching twister driven by the circling bats. A black shadow washed over the moon, and Nardo’s mind couldn’t accept the reality of the dark silhouette until his patrol car came crashing down, shattering marble tombstones and collapsing a section of wrought-iron fence. The creatures that had dropped the car darted to the edge of the cemetery, and just as Nardo noticed that the water from the sprinklers wasn’t penetrating the circle, the sprinklers sputtered and dripped off to nothing.

  Bill swore. “Those bastards turned off the timers. They’re gonna come for us now, Nardo. Christ, do something!”

  Before the last sentence had issued from Bill’s lips, a huge bat dived toward him, its steely incisors dripping saliva. Nardo fired just as the creature dodged up toward the moon, and then another sound cut at the men inside the circle, the sound of a bullet ricocheting off metal. Three tiny flashes exploded at the circle’s perimeter, and the bullet fell spent on the singed grass before Nardo could begin to react.

  With the stump of his wrist, the one-armed man rapped on the invisible barrier. Three echoing knocks, like knuckles on a empty oil drum. Then the man laughed, and his laughter increased in pitch until it was an ugly shriek.

  Bill snatched up the cultist’s knife and moved to finish him, but Nardo held him back. “Let me go, damn it. The bastard tried to kill me!” Bill pointed the knife at the singed grass beneath his feet. “And besides, look what the fucker’s done to my Kentucky bluegrass!”

  ****

  They couldn’t leave the circle. None of the bat-things could enter, though they kept trying. The creatures battered the invisible barrier like moths drawn to a well-lighted window. As soon as the blistering wind dried the grass, the things landed and slammed their furry bodies against the barrier, folding their wings and using the tips of their long, bony fingers as pole vaults. Hell, Nardo had never seen a bat pole-vault over a tombstone before. That was weird enough, but the snot trails they left on the invisible wall when they bashed it with their rubbery pink snouts were just plain disgusting.

  Okay. They couldn’t get in, and Nardo and Bill couldn’t get out. But the scorching whirlwind could pass straight on through. It burned Nardo’s lungs, hotter now than it had been at the ballpark, though he couldn’t understand how that was possible.

  The one-armed man stood at the opposite side of the circle. He refused to meet Nardo’s gaze. Bill sat in the circle’s center, nervously tugging brown clumps of Kentucky bluegrass, the knife cradled in his lap. It had been about a half an hour, Nardo figured, since they’d been trapped.

  Nardo spoke first. “This boy is pretty quiet, isn’t he. Bill? I mean, considering all the excitement.”

  “Now, hell yeah, but you should’ve heard him earlier. As soon as his boys pulled me off my mower he starts in with ‘All glory to Satan’ and some shit about the full moon and Halloween and sacrifice and rebirth, and they’re all bowing down to him like he’s the Grand Poobah or something. C’mon, Nardo, we already know the bastard ain’t human. He lost a good chunk of his anatomy to the chalker, and he ain’t even bleeding.” Bill quit pulling grass and gripped the knife. “Why don’t you just let me whack the fucker’s head off and we’ll see if he’s still so cheery!”

  “Naw,” Nardo said. “That happens, maybe we’re stuck here forever. Our friend here is probably the only one who can tell us the way out of this fix we’re in. Maybe he’s got some little way we can help him out, and we can just call this whole evening a standoff.” Nardo stared down at Bill. “Now, be a good boy and give me that knife before you get us into trouble.”

  Protesting, Bill did as he was told, and Nardo tucked the blade under his belt, noting with satisfaction the cultist’s appreciative smile. Nardo returned the grin, then winked at Bill. Good cop, bad cop. It had worked before. It was probably a brand new scam to a werebat, or whatever the hell this guy was, and maybe it would buy them some time.

  Nardo pointed his pistol at the cultist’s severed hand. “Sorry about that. Bet it hurt like hell.”

  “Not much.”

  “Well, I guess it’ll put a crimp in your human sacrificing for a while. Damn shame, I suppose. I hope it doesn’t get the man downstairs all pissed off at you.” Nardo wiped sweat from his brow. “Look, I’ve read Rosemary’s Baby and I’ve seen Brotherhood of Satan. Isn’t this the point where you’re supposed to offer me three wishes, or immortality, or something?”

  “That could be arranged.”

  “C’mon, Nardo, let’s ice this fucker—”

  “Put a sock in it. Bill.” Nardo slipped his .357 into its holster and raised his empty hands to the cultist. “Do tell,” he invited.

  “Well, Sheriff—”

  “Don’t gild the lily. Make it Deputy.”

  “Very well, Deputy. There is one way out of this situation, and that is to raise that knife and plunge it into your friend’s heart.”

  “I wouldn’t call him a friend. He’s my brother-in-law. But say I do that little thing. Then the walls come tumbling down and you just let me go?”

  “That would be telling.”

  “Well, do I have some time to think it over, at least?”

  With the stump of his wrist, the cultist pointed to the edge of the circle. The dust was dry now, powdery, and the swirling wind was beginning to thin the boundary. “Even now the dust of my life scatters. See? My brothers have stirred Satan’s breath. That is the only thing that keeps us alive, the only thing that can penetrate the circle until the dust is charged with the blood of the living. And that must happen soon, for when the circle is no more, I will be no more. And then my brothers will be most unhappy, for you will have sentenced them to death. You two won’t last an instant against them.”

  Bill inhaled deeply. “Satan’s breath, huh? My ass. I’m a Christian man, and I can breathe this air just fine.”

  Nardo shook his head. “Well, Bill, maybe God doesn’t approve of you transporting devil cults in your Dodge Dakota. I don’t recall anything about that in the Ten Commandments, but maybe it didn’t make the short list.”

  “Levity in the face of doom is admirable, Deputy. But if you’re going to make a decision, you’d best make it soon.”

  Nardo whistled. “Kind of one of those moral dilemma things, huh?” He ran his finger over the blade. “I just have one other question, then. If I do this for you, will I be flapping around for all eternity?”

  “There are worse things.”

  Nardo returned the knife to Bill. “Don’t get any ideas about turning the tables on me, Billy. You sprout bat wings, you’ll have one hell of a time scratching your ass.”

  The cultist whispered something, but his words were eclipsed by the angry shrieks of his winged brethren.

  Nardo pulled the one-armed man to his feet. The bats hovered at the edge of the circle, furiously beating their wings, kicking up the powdery remnants of the cultist’s arm, uncovering the scorched grass below.

  Nardo lashed out. A left jab. A hard one. The one-armed man’s nose collapsed; his cheeks cracked and caved in, and Nardo pulled his second punch as the man hit the edge of the circle and crumbled within the folds of his leathery robe.

  “If you would’ve hit Carl Williams like that, we wouldn’t be in this fix,” Bill said. “’Course, Williams had two hands and could hit back.”

  “Don’t start.” Nardo grabbed the cultist’s robe and shook it at Bill’s feet. Bits and pieces hit the ground. Some bounced. Some didn’t.

  “Look, I don’t want any part of this,” Bill whispered.

  Nardo grabbed the cultist’s withered cock, powdered it in his fist, and sprinkled it at the edge of the circle. He glanced at Bill. “I did that little bit because I didn’t want to
hear you complain. Now get busy, and I mean directly.”

  “Even if we grind this sucker up, he ain’t gonna last forever. Those furry bastards will just keep on flapping, and pretty soon we’ll be right back where we are right now.”

  “I don’t plan to be here all night. Sylvia Martin knows where I am. I can’t reach her with my handpack, but pretty soon she’ll send Ron Allen along to check on me, and—”

  The sound of a siren rose in the distance. Nardo fumbled with his extender mic. Ron was in range, and he hailed him easily, the signal strong and clear.

  “No, this isn’t a gag, Ron…. Yes, we’ve got a dangerous situation here…. I guess the most I can say right now is that hostages have been taken, and I want to hear a hell of a lot more sirens before I see any lights.”

  If the bats understood, they didn’t panic, and they didn’t break away to pursue Ron Allen. Instead they flapped, screeched, and circled, intent only on their fallen brother and the men who had killed him. Nardo couldn’t help watching the things. He knew that they were consumed by the need for revenge, and he figured that the hunger for his blood was probably the only thing that kept them from powdering away to nothing.

  But they couldn’t last forever, not without the ceremony. That was plain enough. Satan’s breath tore thatches of red-brown fur from their chests. Shingles of leathery flesh drifted over the cemetery like falling leaves. The bats’ anger was stirring the wind and speeding their destruction. It was a race they couldn’t win.

  Nardo bent down and helped his brother-in-law. A gray cloud mushroomed up from the cultist’s crumbling hand. Blinded, Nardo rubbed his eyes, but Bill pulled Nardo’s hands away.

  “Watch yourself. Here, use my bandana, but be careful.”

  Nardo cleaned his eyes and almost said something stupid and sentimental about blood being thicker than water.

  Bill beat him to it, then added, “I’m sorry about that Carl Williams crack. Really.”