Fallen Angels, Part five - Night is the time for Killing
#5 of Fallen Angels
Chapter Four
Night is the time for Killing
Inspector Quinn loves coffee.
Cappuchino, espresso, cortado - just give him a decent cup of joe and he'll love it with a passion that makes you suspect him of being secretly French. Only, I don't have hard proof to back it up. I don't have proof of him being a werewolf either, though he keeps talking about it, like it's a part of everyday life.
"I caught the scent of the suspect long before he could see me. Having a sense of smell hundredfold better than a human comes in handy when they don't wash."
When I arrived at S_aint Mary's Grace,_ Quinn was already waiting outside. He balanced two large lattes on a cardboard tray, while kicking at an empty dumpster with the polished tip of his Chelsea boot.
"They hauled the trash away two hours ago," he grumbled.
"Irene knew exactly what she was doing. Now the evidence is long gone."
I couldn't help laughing and Quinn shot me an angry glance.
"Not funny."
I tried to hide a grin with both hands, but it was no use. Last night, Irene admitted she took the bottle of bourbon from Gill's office and ditched it to protect his reputation. We had her cornered -our improbable duo of wolf and other. But it only took a single human girl to distract us from collecting the evidence. One pretty girl with an even prettier voice. Now exhibit "A" was heading towards the city dump at thirty miles per hour.
"Where WERE you?" I asked.
Quinn shrugged.
"Something Irene said made me long for the woods. So, I drove up to Farvale."
Farvale is seventy miles north of Oakfort, and a round trip at night takes hours. When Irene talked about taking long strolls under the full moon, I only thought it was a cute remark. But it triggered something deep within Quinn. Something as irresistible as Irene had been to me when she stripped naked, and she made us both drive all night.
I took a coffee from the tray, so strong it almost ate its way through the paper cup. I guessed Quinn had ordered a triple shot to stay awake after his nocturnal escapades, but he'd never admit as much.
I whistled. "Pretty strong stuff, buddy."
"I'll give it an 8 out of 10," Quinn replied and scribbled the score on the inside flap of a book of matches from Nsane Beans.
"Why Farvale?" I asked.
"Many full moons ago, when I first discovered I was a were, I'd go into the forests to shift," answered Quinn. "I'd pace the woods all night and howl. It became my home away from home. Last night I wanted...no... I needed to be there again.
- I wanted to go home."
I scratched my head. Sure, I didn't understand the inner workings of a werewolf, or what makes them tick, but how could the call of the wild be so powerful it made him get up and leave mid-interrogation with our key witness? Eventually I took comfort in the fact that I was the one with a diagnose. My friend was plain wolf-shit crazy.
"And yourself?" Asked Quinn.
I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks. "My night was a bit more intimate than that. I...spent it with Irene, while you were down on all fours."
Quinn almost choked on his coffee.
"You had sex with our key witness?"
"I was starvin' man!" I laughed. "Guys like me don't get laid every day."
"Count yourself lucky she didn't talk you into jumping in front of a train," sneered Quinn. "That girl spells trouble."
I was dizzy from confusion. Irene didn't strike me as mean spirited, yet we had both fallen victim to her ability to manipulate those around her. Somehow she had tugged at Quinn's nostalgic heartstrings, and I had been a clean pushover. But why would she go to extremes to protect the reputation of a dead man she hardly knew?
Quinn and I spent the morning going through the hospital journals and CCTV recordings to track the last day in Dr. Gill's life.
He met in at 8:30, and the CCTV showed him making a phone call shortly after.
"Can you trace that call?" I asked.
"He had the phone in his pocket when he jumped," replied Quinn. "It's completely trashed, but I've got a bunch of techies trying to decode the SIM card."
At 12:30 Gill performed an operation on a patient. The journal stated his name simply as "Toledo", a hobo living in a downtown shelter. He was scheduled for capping of a small brain aneurysm. That's when a weak blood vessel in the brain forms a bubble that can pop at any moment. It's no trivial surgery, but still it was one of Gill's charity operations for the penniless, and my respect for the man skyrocketed.
14:55, the front desk CCTV captured Gill leaving the hospital by the front door, carrying a styrofoam box.
17:10, Gill returns to the hospital, this time empty handed. The wing of the hospital where Gill had his office was not covered by CCTV, and once he disappeared off that last lobby camera, we couldn't trace him any further. We replayed the last few seconds over and over, one frame at a time, looking for any clue why he'd jump to his death a few hours later.
"Look! he's patting himself on the chest right there," said Quinn and froze the recording on one frame.
"Heart trouble?"
Quinn mirrored the gesture on his own jacket.
"No, he's checking if something's there."
"That's where I keep my wallet," I said. "Not that there's a whole lot in it to check."
Quinn slammed his fist on the table, causing a few nurses to shoot us annoyed glances. "This is getting us nowhere." Then he added in a whisper
"-and I can't catch a scent from CCTV footage."
I took a deep breath and prepared myself. If Irene was somehow involved with the case, I needed to know before I got even more emotionally attached to her.
"Dude, I'm going to look back in time and see what really happened."
Quinn frowned. "Are you sure you can handle it?"
The last time I provoked an episode, it had taken me days to recover. Days filled with frightening hallucinations, paranoia and voices, and Quinn felt guilty because it had been his idea.
"I've got to know, man."
Quinn sighed. "I'll get you something to drink."
I sat down with a bottle of bourbon in the waiting room next to the operating theater, and put in a brave effort to get staggeringly drunk as fast as I could. One nurse caught me drinking and threatened to call security. Quinn led her outside and through a round porthole in the double doors I watched him explain the situation to her. While I drank, I tried to imagine what he was telling the nurse to calm her down.
Everything is cool. My friend is a half-demon from hell. When he drinks, he sees an alternate reality.
Or
Hi toots! I'm a werewolf and my friend is a demon. And we solve crime.
The episode washed over me, hard and unexpected, before I even had the time to giggle. The whole world turned into a black and white work of moving line-art. I dropped to my knees and retched. I needed to puke and everything spun as I was stuck halfway between the reality that was the present and that of yesterweek. A transparent porter passed by, wheeling a ghostly patient on a gurney. The patient was sedated and covered with a thin blanket. His head was shaven clean.
A brain surgery? The face of the patient was gaunt, his cheeks were hollow and he sported several days worth of stubble growth.
This had to be one of the charity operations that made Gill so popular.
The doors closed behind the porter with a soft whoosh, and I was left in the waiting room with an old man in a hospital gown, who read an issue of TIME magazine upside down. I staggered from my chair and was about to enter the operating room, when the nurse opened the door from inside.
"Hey! You're not supposed to be in here," she said, looking right through me.
Was she a product of the past, the future or the present? Was she speaking to me or to someone else? I couldn't tell anymore I peeked through the round porthole and watched the operation taking place. Even though the Doctor's face was halfway hidden under a surgical mask there was no doubt. The man performing the operation was Tracy Gill.
"Gill?" But isn't he supposed to be dead?" I blurted out, and the image of the nurse walking back to her post split into a long series of frozen time-shots. An army of identical nurses crowding around tens of changing patients, all with their skulls sawed open and the soft tissue of their brain exposed and glistening in shades of eerie gray. So many days, so many brain operations, and all stacked into one singularity somewhere in time and mind.
There was a strange tension in the air -a sense of unease. As the minutes passed by, anger replaced unease and then, burning rage replaced anger. Someone was bottling up emotions and was about to blow.
Where did it come from?
I looked around, but I was still alone in the waiting room with the confused octogenarian.
Are you the one burning up with fury? I wondered.
"Hey, pops," I asked. "Have you seen any angry strangers around?"
Honestly, I didn't expect an answer and I guess I was only thinking out loud, but he looked up very slowly, with glaucomic eyes focused on infinity.
"Only you," he mumbled. "You'll hurt Winnie the Pooh."
I tried to get eye contact with the old guy, but his blind stare was fixed firmly on a door labeled utility. I was out of my skull from drinking, and staggered towards the door. But the moment I put my hand on the handle, a noise like that of a thousand licking tongues erupted from behind it. I drew a deep breath.
Remember, whatever you see in there isn't real - it's only in your mind, I reminded myself. Then I yanked the door open.
The room was filled with buckets, brooms and mops - and snakes.
They scaled the walls, slithered around on the floor and hissed with seething anger. Each of them bore an identical human face. A face I had come to know well.
They all had the face of Irene.
The shock of recognizing Irene sobered me up enough to drive back to the Phantom Cat Nightclub,
"You did it!" I screamed. "You pushed Gill out of that window.
Mind telling me WHY?"
"I guess I lost my cool," replied Irene, matter of fact.
I leaned against the bar of the Phantom Cat to get my bearings. The room spun, partially because I was still drunk, and partially from the shock that our key witness was now our prime suspect, and the girl who made my pants explode last night was a murderer.
I should have waited, I realized. Waited until my mind was clear again, but I also knew I had days of living nightmares ahead of me - the price-tag of drink-induced insight.
"You went through all the trouble of sending Quinn off to Farvale and spending time with me, just so we wouldn't recover that damn bottle. What prints were we going to find on it, anyway?" I slurred.
Irene laughed. "The bottle came from a all-night grocery store on Seventh. You'd find a whole bunch of prints on it - but not mine."
"So why the trouble of covering your tracks?"
"Word gets around. When the nurses talk about a skinny stranger who can see into the past, I knew you'd look me up sooner or later, if I hid the bottle."
"Wait! You WANTED me to find you?" I was stunned.
"I know what you are," said Irene. "And I know what your friend is. I knew it from the moment you stepped into the club. The way your friend chose a table by the window, the way he stared at the moon during the show. I knew it was tugging at him... so, I primed him."
"Primed?"
"I made him open to my suggestions by singing to him."
"Singing_Fly me to the moon_ made Quinn drive all the way to Farvale? "
"Nostalgia, " she said. "It's one of the emotions I know how to evoke."
"Nostalgia AND lust," I replied, knowing I had fallen victim the night before. "So, which one did it take to kill Dr. Gill ?"
Irene didn't reply. She walked to the window and looked at the traffic outside.
"I wanted to get to know you," she said quietly. "And your friend was in my way."
I laughed. "I'm hardly the most inspiring company. I hear voices and see things that exist only in my brain. I get paranoid, and..."
I hesitated before the last bit. But she had to know.
"And I turn into a demon, when they are out to get me..."
Then I backtracked.
"-But it only happens on rare occasions..."
And I backtracked some more.
"- And it's probably not even for real..."
Irene reached out and grabbed my hand.
"Daniel," she said. "Circus freaks get lonely too."