The Mall of Cthulhu Read online

  What, exactly, was she supposed to say to that? She figured McManus was trying to bait her, and, unable to think of a safe response, she said nothing.

  "Well. Back to work, then."

  "Yes sir." She watched as McManus walked away, then carefully pressed her hand against the slate-blue carpeting on the cubicle wall and flipped him the bird.

  Sighing, Laura sat back down and looked at the clock at the bottom of the screen. Shit! It was already ten, and she still had so much more work to do. There was no way she was going to make it to Queequeg's to see Ted this morning. On the other hand, she could really use the caffeine if she was going to be staring at grainy video for eight more hours. Maybe she could get Ted to deliver.

  As she dialed Ted's cell phone, Laura realized this was at least partly a passive-aggressive move. Maybe he wouldn't show up. Then she could just drink bad coffee from the lounge and she wouldn't have to see him. She felt guilty—as much as Ted needed her, which was very much indeed, and as tiresome as this got, she had certainly needed him when she had been captured by Camilla's hypnotic gaze, when she'd been powerless in the face of evil. She owed Ted not only her life, but very likely her soul as well, because if it weren't for him, she would have signed right on for the bloodsucking, and the day sleeping, and instead of being a cog in the machinery of law enforcement, she'd be an abomination, enduring the soulless eternity of the undead.

  Except, sitting here in a cubicle with slate-blue fabric walls under flickering fluorescent lights, it was very hard to believe in the undead. It just seemed impossible that a world as mundane as the one she inhabited also contained unholy murderous creatures of the night. Still, there were living humans every bit as evil as the undead, horrible sociopaths who terrorized and tortured and killed people. She'd joined the FBI in hopes of chasing them down, of being a strong woman who didn't need some skinny male nerd to rescue her, of being a woman who helped make the world safe for the living.

  Instead, she was looking for an old man in Florida—a pointless search for hay in a haystack—and she just didn't feel like dealing with Ted's babbling, with his neediness, with the pathetic wreck of his life that only reminded her that while she had a better paying job and some career prospects, she hadn't managed to get close to anybody else in the last ten years either. Well, how can you get close to anyone when you can't tell them about the central event of your life? How do you create a self that doesn't include the very event that made you who you are?

  Ted answered his phone. "Hey there, Clarise Starling! What's up?"

  "Confidential drudgery. Listen, I'm up to my neck in incredibly boring data that needs sifting through here. Any chance I could get a delivery?"

  "Sure. I'm happy to get a break. The usual?"

  "Ugh. You'd better give me an extra shot of espresso today. I'm gonna be here a long time, and this stuff is just so far from interesting that I'm going to need a lot of caffeine to get through it all."

  "Can do."

  Laura saved her work, walked through the cubicle maze hoping to avoid the eyes of McManus, her supervisor who insisted that it was suddenly urgent to pore through a year's worth of Florida ATM crap looking for Whitey, though he'd been missing for years.

  At the end of the hall, Laura swiped her ID to unlock the door. Inside the elevator, she swiped her ID to get downstairs. In the lobby, she waved at Hassan the security guard, and then headed outside to wait for Ted with her coffee.

  Only a few minutes later, Ted arrived with an extra-large Queequeg's cup in hand. God bless him.

  "Oh, thank you so much. I really don't think I could complete my workday without this. You really have no idea how boring law enforcement is."

  "Well, I know that you did not have a flirtatious conversation with a very hot young woman named after a Fleetwood Mac song this morning."

  "Shows what you know. I stopped by Big Love's desk just this morning."

  "Special agent Big Love?"

  "Yeah, she sits next to Gypsy."

  "Isn't that a Stevie Nicks solo song?"

  "I'm pretty sure it's Fleetwood Mac."

  "Who cares? Anyway, I think something's gonna happen. She lingered around the counter and gave me this heavy-lidded smile and told me she'd be back tomorrow."

  "She did not give you a heavy-lidded smile. That's an exclusively post-orgasmic look."

  "Well, I do make a hell of a latte." Poor poor Ted. Maybe Go Your Own Way really was flirting with him, and he'd get laid, and then he'd fall in love, and then he'd have to explain, because Ted always had to explain, he couldn't come up with a cover story, he'd come to the point where he either didn't trust her enough to tell her about the vampires, or else he did trust her enough and he'd tell her about the vampires and she would think he was nuts and he'd be devastated.

  This, of course, was wildly different from what happened in Laura's relationships. Because she wasn't crazy enough to think that anybody would ever believe the part about the vampires, so there was always an important part of herself she wouldn't share, and eventually there'd be a fight, often with screaming and tears, you're so distant, you don't trust me, this isn't a real relationship, and Laura would say this is how I am, take me or leave me, and thus far, everyone had taken the latter option.

  She returned to the present, and the matter of Ted's supposedly orgasm-inducing espresso drinks. "Well, I'm drinking one of your lattes right now, and I have to say I'm not even close."

  "Yeah, well, you don't play for my team."

  "So your lattes are so good they induce orgasm, but only in straight women. What about gay men?"

  "I don't know. Okay, okay, it wasn't the latte. Maybe it was just looking into my sensitive, tormented eyes."

  "Anything's possible, I guess. Anyway, thanks for bringing the coffee over. I'm going to be working late tonight and probably tomorrow, but maybe we can have Indian food on Thursday." She actually wouldn't be working late tomorrow, but goddammit, it had been ten years. She needed to carve out a little bit of Ted-free time.

  "Oh . . . " He looked a little crestfallen, and Laura felt guilty. "Well, okay. I'll probably have a date by tomorrow anyway." He glanced at his watch. "Oh shit. I gotta get back or Michelle is going to chew my ass, and if she were just a little more attractive, I might enjoy that, but as it is, it's just no fun at all."

  "Okay. Say hi to Sara for me."

  "Ha! It's Rhiannon!" And he was gone, running back to his coffee-slinging. As Laura headed inside and began the x-raying, metal-detecting, badge-showing, and badge-swiping ritual that would allow her to get back into her office, she did kind of envy Ted. Usually she felt some combination of tenderness, gratitude, worry, and annoyance, but now she added a little dollop of envy. Ted was the fuckup, the perpetual slacker who had his life ruined, and she was the achiever, the one who didn't let the trauma hold her back. And yet he was practically skipping back to his workplace, while she was definitely trudging. And neither one of them seemed able to sustain a relationship with anybody else.

  Well, there was really no point in thinking like that, or in thinking at all, except about whether Whitey was dumb enough to open a bank account and access it from a strip mall in Boca Raton. She took a long sip of her latte, and while she was nowhere near orgasm, she did have to admit that Ted made a hell of a good coffee drink.

  Three

  Ted approached Queequeg's and decided that the best way to avoid Michelle's wrath over his now-seventeen-minute break would be to try to sneak in the back and pretend he'd been back there arranging bags of sugar or something.

  He walked through the filthy alley behind Queequeg's, squeezed past the rusting dumpster and winced at the smell, then cursed as something brown dripped from the dumpster's black plastic lid onto his apron. He opened the back door and beheld stainless steel counters, the fridge, a mop bucket, giant jugs of ammonia and giant foil bags of coffee. He threaded his way past the cleaning supplies and giant bags of coffee, and pushed the stainless-steel swinging door to the front. The door r
efused to swing open wide enough to allow him access to the front.

  "Shit," Ted said under his breath, "I bet fucking Michelle did this, just so I'll have to pound on it and then she can come and yell at me about my seventeen minutes. Shit!" At the last word, he pressed his shoulder against the door and shoved with all his weight. It moved a crack. He shoved it again and again until there was just enough room for him to squeeze through. He had made so much noise it was going to be completely obvious he was late, but at least he'd deny Michelle the satisfaction of having him pound on the door.

  He squeezed through, and immediately tripped over whatever had been blocking the door. "Fuck!" he said as he went sprawling. "Michelle, you'd bett—" He stopped as he realized that Michelle was what he had tripped over. Well, Michelle's big, long body anyway. Ted felt a sick rush of adrenaline such as he hadn't felt in a decade, and he screamed—Michelle's apron was soaked in blood, and Ted felt it, still warm, seeping through the fibers of his clothes from the floor.

  His brain shut down. What was happening was clearly impossible, which meant that he was actually in bed having a nightmare, and if he could only scream loud enough, maybe he'd wake himself up. He kept screaming. He stood up and looked around. He had a second to register the fact that there were two corpses at the corner table, and that the new artful splatter pattern, red against the orangey-yellow walls, was probably their brains. Something dripped off the wall and landed with a wet splat. Ted continued to scream. A man in a suit lay in front of the counter, half of his face hanging off of his skull, and intestines drooping out of his abdomen. There was blood everywhere.

  All of this took maybe a second. Ted's brain started to kick into gear again, and he was annoyed by the sound of screaming, unaware that it was coming from him. He turned and saw another guy in a suit, Mr. Half-soy, Half-caf, standing in front of him with a gun.

  "Where is it? Where the fuck is it, slacker boy? Do you want to die fast or slow?"

  Now, this was actually a question Ted had given a fair amount of thought over the last ten years. Not simply the speed at which he wished to die, but whether he wanted to live at all, whether there was any point to his being alive. His grandmother had always told him that God has a purpose for every life, and he figured that his purpose was to dispatch a colony of vampires from a major research university, that God had wanted him to remove that evil from the earth He'd created, and the fact that he was still alive was pretty much of an oversight on the part of the Almighty. And it was a shame that his purpose hadn't been to be the patriarch of an enormous happy family, but most people don't get what they want.

  So now a man with dark hair and a gray suit that was covered in blood was pointing a weapon at him and asking him how he wanted to die. If he'd wanted to, Ted might have been able to have a quite lengthy conversation about this issue, but something in him, the part of him that had killed multiple times in one evening ten years ago, woke up for the first time in ten years and asserted that it would rather not die at all.

  Without thinking, Ted grabbed a pitcher of milk that still had steam coming from it off the cappuccino machine and tossed it in Half-caf's direction while diving under the counter. The gunshot and the scream happened almost simultaneously, and Ted was showered with broken glass and crumbs of muffins and brownies as the baked-goods counter exploded over his head.

  Half-caf was still screaming, and Ted said, "I've killed a lot worse than you. I killed a fucking colony of vampires—vampires, man, not some pussy with a gun, vampires! With a fucking axe! So Don't!" As he said this, Ted saw himself grabbing the gigantic stainless-steel urn of Decaf Sumatra off the warmer and tossing the steaming contents over the counter onto Half-caf's prone form, "Fuck!" And now it was the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, "With!" And good old Colombian to finish, "Me!"

  Half-caf was still screaming and would hopefully be covered in third-degree burns. Ted turned to run away, then stopped. He grabbed a cloth and wiped the foam off the wand. He hadn't liked Michelle, but her insistence that the milk always be steamed fresh had probably just saved his life, and he wasn't going to pay her back by letting her be found with a dirty wand. He ran through the back room and out the back door, and, with no plan in mind, he ran for the harbor. He reached the fountain at Post Office Square—jets of water hitting columns of slate. A few early lunchers were already gathering on the benches that ringed the fountain, and they gaped as he ran through it, watching the blood diluting and running off him, staining little streams of water pink until they swirled down the drain. He ran again, past men and women in suits and the odd family of tourists. Finally he could see the Boston Harbor between the buildings ahead of him. He came to Long Wharf and ran past the tourists signing up for whale watches, the school kids filing into the glass-and-steel aquarium, past more tourists strolling obliviously out of the lobby of the hotel on his left, all the way to the end of the pier, where he stood, looking out at the boats going back and forth across Boston Harbor and the planes coming in low to the airport across the water. He vomited until there was nothing else left in his stomach, and then he just heaved over and over again, while strings of bilious mucous dripped down from his mouth and made iridescent streaks on the surface of the water.

  He wiped his mouth on his damp, cold apron and decided he could not continue to wear it. He reached back to untie it so he could throw it in the trash, and as he took it off, he felt the CD in the pocket. He grabbed the CD and stuffed it into the right butt pocket of his pants, then stuffed the apron into a garbage can overflowing with Dunkin' Donuts cups, and dialed Laura's number.

  "What's up, Ted?" she answered, and Ted suddenly found himself unable to speak. He knew that the minute he opened his mouth, he'd start to cry. He tried whispering.

  "Laur," he said. "I'm in trouble."

  Four

  Laura sat on her couch and watched the news on the flat screen TV hanging on the wall. Channel eight just couldn't get enough of the blood-spattered walls of Queequeg's, while channel twelve favored the police composite sketch of Ted which had been made from the recollections of customers. Fortunately Ted had largely let his wand do the talking in his time at Queequeg's, and so most of the customers couldn't really summon up anything too specific. They had gotten the pale skin, the goatee and the long, dirty-blond hair, but there were probably ten thousand guys in Boston who fit that description, and those identifying features could be easily disposed of. Of course, the police probably already had all his personal information off the hard drive in the computer in the Queequeg's back room, which meant that they'd probably already searched Ted's apartment, and they'd be pulling the logs of his cell phone (which, GPS chip and all, now resided at the bottom of Boston Harbor as Laura had instructed), and pretty soon her phone would ring, and at that point she'd have to either summon up her prodigious lying skills or else just give him up and be shed of him forever. (The forever that would be an eternity of blood-soaked nights if not for Ted, she reminded herself.)

  But if they had the hard drive, why were they holding back Ted's name? And all the accounts listed four people dead of gunshots and said nothing about a horribly burned man with gunpowder all over his hands. Either they were holding this back (though Laura couldn't imagine any reason why they would do this, since the burn victim was the shooter, and they'd want to reassure the public that this case was closed) or somebody had come for him, probably only seconds after Ted left. And probably taken the hard drive from the computer, which meant somebody knew who Ted was, but it wasn't law enforcement. In which case perhaps he wasn't so stupid to run and call her instead of staying put and calling 911. In which case she might owe him an apology.

  Then again, she was putting her law-enforcement career in jeopardy just having him in her apartment, even though he was only officially a "person of interest" rather than a suspect. And if the whole thing had happened the way Ted described it, surely the ballistics, the bloody footprints, all the physical evidence would show that the shooter was in front of the counter, and that T
ed had been behind the counter the whole time. Right?

  Well, a small, nasty voice from a dark corner of her mind said, That's if it happened as Ted described it, and he hadn't just snapped. For ten years he'd had nightmares, for ten years he'd been a wreck—was it possible that he'd just had a psychotic break and reenacted his killing spree of ten years ago?

  No, that was ridiculous. Ted didn't have a gun. And people didn't just go on killing sprees and not remember it, except in cheesy movies when they were possessed by demons or something. Which Ted was not. Right? Well, who knew. It always seemed unlikely to Laura that everybody involved in the Omega house colony was gone. Somebody must have started that particular chapter of the Vampire Sorority, and she didn't think it was Bitsy. Was someone involved in the dark arts getting revenge on Ted? Wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if they'd used him as a puppet to kill innocent people, after he'd killed so many, uh, things that were neither innocent nor people?

  Laura chided herself, tried to bring herself back into the world she'd felt so sure of at work this morning, the world of cubicles and fluorescent lights. The dark arts probably weren't real. After all, just because vampires were real, it didn't necessarily follow that werewolves and demons and the boogeyman and the tooth fairy and Santa Claus were all real. Since joining the Bureau, she'd done a lot of unauthorized poking around in files and had never found anything anywhere that even suggested the existence of anything but incredibly depraved but otherwise normal humans.

  She flipped through the cable news stations, which had picked up the Queequeg's massacre story and were now going into talking-head mode. She stopped as one red-faced guy was yelling, "Queequeg's is the embodiment of godless secular liberalism! It's not surprising at all that this hippie-era, Manson Family White Album degeneracy comes home to roost at the very place that foments it!"