The Demon of Montreal Page 9

  Chapter Nineteen

  The demon sat unmoving in the light of his shadow. Abby had seen him like that once before, an obsidian statue thoughtful enough to rival The Thinker. He hadn’t been sleeping, he didn’t sleep.

  She walked to him, the sweat cooling on her skin, and stood in the metallic blue of his aura. She felt his awareness of her presence, even though he didn’t speak. She stuffed her hand into a pocket and pulled out the snarled patch of hair she’d ripped from the rapist’s head. She held it out to him.

  Slowly, he raised a hand to accept the totem. “Are you okay?”

  Abby put a hand on her hip. She’d tried to clean herself up in a fresh water outlet, but it had been, largely, a failed attempt. No amount of water could clean away the bruises that already formed.

  “I’m fine.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t like this.”

  She wanted a cigarette.

  “I’m fine,” she repeated. “The beast is bigger too, growing faster now, right?”

  He exhaled. “True.”

  “So, then it’s worth it.” She bit her lip.

  “I worry…about you. You’re vulnerable.”

  She shifted her weight coolly. “You weren’t so worried that night in the church.”

  He broke from his statuesque stare and looked at her. His eyes were empty sockets. “That was before.”

  “Before what?”

  He shook his head.

  “You can’t get rid of me that easy,” she said. “I’m not going back. Ever. If you can do it, so can I.”

  “They can’t get me!” he shouted. His voice thudded in her ears. “But,” he said, nearly a whisper, “they can get you. They can take you away…forever.”

  She stepped toward him, touched his cheek just below where eyes ought to be. The chill of his essence cooled her.

  “Does a demon weep for lost love?” she whispered, bringing her heat to him.

  He shook his head and leaned a cheek into her hand, soft, loving, so cold. She could feel her touch warm him. She ached to give it. She stroked the smooth pate of his monochrome head and brought him closer to her youthful bosoms.

  “Fucking touch me,” she whispered, a command as much as a plea.

  His motions were gradual, as if moving out of time. Hands glided up, rested on the skin of her hips and she leaned into him, pressing a strip of naked midriff against lips that thawed with passion.

  He kissed her skin, his hands adrift, exploring.

  The dance was in her, erotic and shameless, like the girls on the stage. She’d watched them often enough to learn the art and long enough to catch the malady. She pulled up the hem of her tank top, inch by inch, forcing nudity against those dark lips.

  She moved, swayed in his caress so that her natural endowments became assets of control. The demon, now entranced, traced every stretch of exposed skin with greedy fingertips. The hem of her shirt vanished, the article become a ball on the floor. His fingers curled at the edges of her bra and pulled. She pressed a nipple to his waiting lips.

  Abby swooned in his cold touch, working the button of her jeans to free the rest of her. Unbound, she guided his hands to push away the last of that confining fabric. Tonight she would be his Julia.

  He slid her panties to her ankles. Cold breath shocked her skin. She stepped out of the thin strip of cloth, wholly naked and spread herself over the delicious touch of his willing fingertips, the needy suck of his kisses.

  Held in a cold embrace, she danced for him.

  Chapter Twenty

  Morieu stood over Elizabeth White. He’d been feeding her cigarettes for the better part of an hour, trying to gain her cooperation. She didn’t like inspector types, he knew by the sneer in her lip, in the flicker of eye that denounced trust.

  This of course did not surprise him. Not many enjoyed his company, if any and it didn’t bother him, not at all, because Adrien Morieu was not trying to be liked. Adrien Morieu had another agenda and at the current moment, it was getting this whore to talk.

  “And then?” he asked, left brow arched.

  The girl didn’t respond at once, she looked down at her cleavage and took a pull on the cigarette. “I told you everything.”

  Morieu adjusted himself. He sat half ways on the table, one leg planted firmly on the ground. He gave the girl an eye-level view of his crotch and had been carefully watching to see if she reacted. She didn’t. It meant sex was only a job for her, not an obsession. He stood up and walked behind the desk and leaned over it.

  “Let me make myself clear,” he said. “I don’t want to know about who raped you, yes?” He smiled, wolf-like. “Cause darling, I don’t care about it.” He chuckled in a monosyllable. It seemed almost too obvious. The girl had been recounting the details of the rape over and over again like some broken record, despite Morieu’s prodding on other matters.

  He raised his hands and shrugged, giving her is best jester’s smile. “You see, Mademoiselle, the real crime here is not who deflower the harlot in the alleyway. No. The real crime is that someone decide to take the law into their own hand, oui?” He swallowed and smacked his lips. “So, I will say again and then I will lock you up for a long time if you don’t tell me what I want to hear. Who help you?”

  The woman twisted her face. Morieu’s words had finally sunk in. He didn’t think he would have had to spell it out so simply, brutally, but the girl couldn’t have had an IQ above eighty.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Oh, well. Think! Tell me what you saw. I want to know every little detail!”

  She swallowed. “It was a girl.”

  Morieu nodded. “A girl? Now, that’s a start; please go on.”

  “Thin, pale, white skin and—”

  “—black hair, oui?”

  “Oui, Monsieur.”

  “The lady…tell me everything about her. How exactly did she save you? What method did she use? We’re not going to go anywhere until I know as much about her as you do.”

  * * * *

  Abby dragged the body by both ankles, wheelbarrow style, along the craggy corridor. The underwear had bunched up between two hairy legs from the friction of her pulling and the yellowing T-shirt now securely wrapped like a noose around the neck. It looked ridiculous.

  It never ceased to amaze, the frumpy disposition a human body could assume, especially post mortem. Death had no shame. All a man’s secrets were laid bare by it. The body had belonged to a one Gustav Dieter, a German nationalist who, it seemed, came to Montreal to traffic in the drug and sex trades.

  She’d grabbed a good fistful of hair off his greasy head after piercing the shaft of his cock with live electrodes. Hours later, Simon had found him lying naked with an ice pack between his legs.

  Now she could spy the whole man, black haired from neck to yellow-chipped toenails. Of course, the dead more closely resembled a slab of meat than humanity. Hard to believe that just two nights ago, he had come across so threatening.

  “Not so virile tonight, are we buddy boy?”

  She almost felt shame for her irreverence, but the drag of his weight drew her attention more than any bout of regret. The deadweight would be nothing to the infant monster. The sweet air of its tunnel-womb wafted through the breezy tunnel.

  The beast sat awake, waiting, all nine hundred-something eyes glinting like wet glass in the gloom. Fear stung her, gut to fingertip, for she had never known the monster to be stirring when she arrived. It reached forward at once, groping its cold meal with knobby, ill-shaped fingers.

  Abby jumped, making quick to get out the path of those hungry hands, lest she end up crammed into that sickening stomach orifice, all cozy-like with Dieter. The audible skull pop inside that foul hole made her gag reflex quiver.

  “Wait, you need to—”


  The Thousand-Eyed Thing’s instinct had already taken care to gouge out the eyeballs before continuing its meal. She listened to the sucking sound as it planted the roots into its soft porous skin.

  “How many do you have?” she asked more to herself than the thing, trying to count as it lurched in a coital dance with Dieter’s defunct corpse. She couldn’t take it anymore. “You’re so totally disgusting.”

  She turned about, making a bee-line toward the end of the tunnel, when she felt a breeze tickle the thin hairs of her neck. It sent a jolt through her nerves and she spun on her heel in time enough to watch the receding mitt of a hand shrink back into the solemn shadow.

  “Fuck you. Just…fuck you.”

  It leaned forward on all fours, a bloated and wrongly grown toddler, its outstretched hand pawing at the open air. The half-digested Dieter flopped to the floor beneath its gut.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m not your fucking meal ticket. Eat the German.”

  Its head bowed to the snap and pop of misplaced vertebrae. It held together like some rickety old building scheduled for demolition. Leaning back on its pumpkin-knees, its gut-mouth gurgled then swallowed in spasmodic jerks. A pair of blood-soaked feet disappeared like ham hocks down a garbage disposal. Crimson-colored shark teeth gnashed reflexively.

  Somehow she’d had to watch all that. Somehow turning away from it had been nigh impossible, like some kind of pornographic stage show. The thing gazed back at her with its eye-planted sponge head, something like tears trickling down from each socket, dripping in tiny waterfalls.

  “You poor, sick, fucking thing,” she said.

  * * * *

  Finding Mafioso had not been as difficult as at first she had expected. The fat man she had seen earlier at Le Sexe Machina showed up on a schedule. Evidently, he had the hots for one dancer in particular, the buxom Delilah.

  Abby had spent the better part of a week studying his habits and getting to know his routine. She’d managed a skip trace on his license plate and learned, at least, his name, James D’Orion. The name meant nothing, of course, but it was more than she’d had to start with.

  Whether or not he was Mafioso wasn’t so much in question, he was connected. Abby had done her homework, spending rainy, frigid afternoons in the Westmount Public Library ransacking newspaper files. She’d managed to connect a lot of faces to the mob.

  D’Orion rubbed elbows with Nicky ‘The Mouth’ Marducci—according to headlines in The Gazette, November 19th, 2006. Page 7A. Crime Boss Walks Away Clean—from time to time at the club giving Abby all the probable cause she needed.

  After that, the task was merely one of getting close enough to the sausage-fingered fool to secure a personal item of clothing or some kind of body sample.

  Once Simon had a personal item of any type, fate or magic seemed to work the trick the rest of the way. He could track them for as long as he needed and inevitably make their contribution to the infant monster. Simon’s power worked like that, a sort of voodoo ruse.

  Getting that close to D’Orion wasn’t so easily scored. For one, he was always surrounded with an entourage of half-naked bimbo types, and when Delilah worked, he paid big wads of cash to keep her close at hand, fondling the goods with an over-zealous avarice. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, D’Orion was bald.

  No loose strands to grab on a quick run-by. She’d have to yank at his tie or steal his shoe or something, neither a good choice.

  Presently, he slapped Delilah’s jiggly ass and sucked on a spit-soggy cigar.

  A light blinked on in Abby’s forebrain. The cigar! She’d overlooked the most obvious totem. Get the man’s cigar butt and voila, she’d made headlines again.

  Of course that would be the end of her mafia busts, for a while anyway. Ideally, D’Orion would lead her to the nest and she’d be able to…to what? Get hair samples from all the crime lords?

  No, don’t be a dumb shit, Abby. You can get this one. Worry about the rest later. You’re bound to find more. For now, get the one.

  Watching D’Orion now made her heart race, an almost sexual appeal revved up inside her. Is that what they call the thrill of the hunt? The anticipation mounted with every passing minute. All she had to do was walk over and grab the stupid ashtray. After that she could walk, run or skip out of the skin club and trust in Simon.

  She waited, her double drink glasses sweating beads beside her. She thought the bartender had tossed her a funny look when he’d set them down. He was beginning to get wise to this skinny raven-haired bitch who never did get a visitor in this godforsaken titty bar.

  Her moment came about twenty minutes later. Delilah perched herself on the fat fucker’s lap, her pointy little nipples claiming his field of vision, nearly poking his eyes out. He had no other choice but to put the cigar down. Now or never. Abby had seen two waitresses dumping ashtrays already.

  She began the approach. Slow and cat-like, she fancied herself a lean and wily panther. The dim lights and disco ball afforded for natural camouflage. Delilah’s jiggling breasts did the rest to keep D’Orion otherwise engaged. She swept across the room, a faded silhouette. White smoke curled up from the stogie stub, beautiful in a way she’d not noticed before. Was that saliva in her mouth? Thrill of the hunt? No, thrill of the kill!

  She stepped. Reached.

  Big meaty hand of the bouncer settled on the nape of her neck.

  Shit!

  He yanked so hard, her feet slipped. She held onto his tree trunk of an arm like a skittish tabby now.

  “Stay back!” his thick voice sounded in her eardrum. Then she was on the floor, scrambling to get up and away.

  D’Orion didn’t notice, engaged with fleshy baubles as he was. Abby knew better than to push it. She couldn’t afford to get kicked out. She resumed her former position and waited. Plan A would have to do, then.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Simon Kadoza stood before his child. It had been a long while since he’d tended to the newborn, having delegated the routine duty of its feeding to Abby. Tonight he’d heard the creature’s mewling warble from down the tunnel, a call to its mother.

  He hadn’t realized how much the beast had grown.

  “You’re nearly ready, are you?” he asked, stroking the soft brow of the infant as it leaned forward to the master’s stroke.

  It quavered. He could feel the thing’s hunger, a deep, craven need to feast. Its growing sinews and bones required a fantastic amount of energy to sustain, which only increased with size.

  “You need to eat soon, baby,” he said.

  The creature nodded and made the awkward if not familiar motion of bringing right hand to head.

  Simon studied the oblong melon shaped head. “Yes,” he said. “I know, nine hundred and ninety six.”

  * * * *

  Abby’s quarry was on the move. He always left the same way, through the back alley door. By the time he stepped outside, Abby had already engaged the ignition of her stolen Vespa. She hoped she’d be able to keep pace with him if he hopped on any of the city thoroughfares. A Vespa was the best she could do, the car option having failed for various reasons.

  She watched as his sleek, black Mercury Sable rolled out of its parking stall, onto an adjoining side street. She didn’t want to follow too closely, but she didn’t want to lose him either. She eased on the throttle and pulled forward.

  She caught up with him after he’d begun cruising on Sainte Catherine, which was good. She blended in now and could follow without worry of being spotted. Cold air bit her knuckles, her face. Her helmet was a pink, open air type that made her skin feel as if it would crack and break apart in the frosty air of late autumn.

  She made an effort to follow one to two car lengths behind, but this proved tricky. Once, she underestimated traffic timing and had to blow a red light. Luckily no cops.


  A few other times, she ended up directly behind D’Orion waiting for the green light. That proved more nerve-racking than running stoplights. She wondered how obvious a girl on a pink Vespa with a matching helmet was. Probably not very, but too close for comfort none-the-less.

  Seemingly too soon, it ended. The town had grown dark around her with the urban terrain become industrial. D’Orion slowed to about twenty kilometers per hour and convinced Abby she’d been burned. They trolled near the piers of the Saint Lawrence where she could smell the earthen damp of the river. She wanted more than anything to turn around and high tail it out of there, but she hadn’t come this far to chicken out. Worst case, she could run up and yank on his tie or scrape some skin under her fingernails. How much did Simon need anyway?

  D’Orion just kept meandering down the boulevard which was now featuring warehouses for its choice of real estate. Finally, Abby realized with quite some relief that he was looking for an address. She lay off a little and drifted back. Long, painful ages of time passed. Every second unnerved her worse than the last until, finally, the asshole turned into a warehouse parking lot. Abby backed way off so that her Vespa began a tremulous, off-balance shimmy. She couldn’t have him spot her now. Cold numbed her face.

  D’Orion’s car sat dark in the lot. She turned off the scooter and let it drift to a corner of the building, where she hid it behind a dumpster. The warehouse sprawled, but contained enough windows to make for ready eavesdropping.

  This is it! She thought. My chance to take out the mob!

  Not really all tonight, she knew, but a damn good start.

  She hunkered down and ran Army style along one side of the structure. The windows up ahead shone with pale iridescence, undoubtedly some secret mobster meeting taking place behind them. She slowed and carefully snuck and, putting fingertips to ledge, pulled herself up to see through the glass. Men, about half a dozen, stood in a circle. That was all she caught before her strength gave out.