Inheritance: A Novel Part 25

She fell asleep on the couch, still wearing all her clothes, and dreamed of the man who had come to live with them all those years ago. She hadn't thought of him in a very long while, but she could see him clearly enough in her dreams.

Magdalena also dreamed of the dead goat, the one she'd gutted on the dirt floor of the circular chamber inside the old factory. In her dream, it began to convulse. A man's hands emerged from inside its ribcage. She knew who the man was, even before she saw his face, and when Martin Henninger pulled himself out of the animal like a man pulling himself up through a hole in the floor, she wasn't surprised. Terrified, but not surprised.

But then he went about ridding the old factory of the men who did their drugs there, and that was terrible to watch.

So many men died, and in her dreams, she saw every one of them.

Magdalena went to the sink and washed the blood off her fingers. Her muscles still ached and her head was ringing, but she knew what she had to do. It was like a line drawn on a map in her head. She dried her hands on a paper towel and took her keys from the basket near the back door and got in her truck and drove to the Mulberry Green Mental Health Rehabilitation Center.

The building was on the fringes of the Vista Verde District just north of downtown, and didn't look like much of anything from the curb, just a crumbling white brick structure with windows of smoked gla.s.s. There was a small brick wall near the front walk that had the name of the clinic printed on it, but the floodlights at its base weren't working and it was impossible to see what the sign said from the street. Some kids had scrawled graffiti on the left side of the building. On the opposite side, a large copse of walnut trees separated the clinic from a three story Victorian style wood-framed house. The house was painted a light egg-sh.e.l.l blue and had evidently been converted into a law office.

That meant it'd be deserted.

"Good," she said. She didn't want to see anybody else hurt. Ever since her dream of the old factory, the dead had haunted her. This was an abomination that she was doing. The power her Abuela had taught her, it was not for this. It was meant to heal. Her Abuela would not approve, though of course her Abuela was no longer here. Martin Henninger was the conduit for the power now. Magdalena had no choice but to serve.

On the other side of the big blue Victorian was a washateria and a convenience store, both evidently open all night but deserted at the moment. Two gay men were walking across the parking toward the club down the street. Magdalena waited for them to walk out of sight, then got out of her truck and walked to the vacant lot across the street from the clinic.

Once she was in position, she began to mutter the commands Martin Henninger put in her head. The swarm started as a hum in the distance, but the sound grew steadily louder, until it was like the roll of a ba.s.s drum. From within the din, Magdalena could hear the steady clicking of millions of insect wings. There was a surge of wind at her back and then the sky above her darkened, filling up with wave upon wave of cicadas, their shrill drone elevated now to a deafening roar.

They swarmed past her and descended on the clinic, pounding against the building's backup generators. It only took a few seconds for the smell of smoke to drift across the street to her. She watched as the first tentative puffs of smoke darkened into columns and began to swirl into the night's sky, and when the front doors to the clinic burst open and a pair of nurses emerged, coughing and spluttering, waving away the still swarming cicadas, Magdalena got ready to move.

David Everett's body was in full revolt. It wanted heroin and it wanted it right now. He was shaking. He ached everywhere. His skin was wet with sweat and his teeth rattled from the waves of chills that swept through him.

They had him on suicide watch. Though his mind had been chewed to honeycomb by the drugs, he could still tell what these people thought of him. They weren't cops, but from where he was sitting there was little difference. He was still a prisoner.

The room-not a cell, but a room-had been stripped of anything that might conceivably be used as a weapon. There was no furniture besides a bare mattress. They took the sheets so he wouldn't hang himself with them. His clothes, too. Now he was wearing a green paper hospital johnny. It was soaked through and torn. He would have ripped it off if he'd had the energy. As it was, he could barely lift his eyes from the mattress to the door. The effort was too great.

Something was going on outside. Had been for a few minutes now. He'd heard voices and the sound of people moving fast in the hallway outside. The lights flickered but held. There was a faint smell of electrical smoke coming from the vent in the wall above him, but he wasn't thinking fire. He wasn't thinking about anything except heroin.

The lights flickered again-and then went out. He held his breath for a moment, listening to the dark outside his room. There was someone standing there.

He waited.

The door opened, and the figure of a woman appeared in the chalky gray outline of the open door.

David Everett managed to push himself up into a sitting position.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"A friend," said the woman's voice. Her Mexican accent was strong.

She came forward and knelt beside him.

"These are your clothes," she said. "Put them on."

"Where are you taking me?"

"Away from here."

"Where?"

"Don't ask questions," she said. "There isn't time."

The woman helped him to his feet, then kept a hand near as she let go, as if uncertain whether or not he would remain upright.

Everett wasn't so sure about that himself.

He steadied himself and waited to see if it would last. It didn't. A wave of nausea tore through his gut like a punch and sent him pitching forward. The girl grabbed him and held him, but wisely held off trying to make him stand up again.

"I'm sick," he said, wheezing.

"Heroin," she said, and even through his convulsions he could hear the contempt in her voice. She reached into her pocket and took out a wad of wax paper that held a black, sticky goo not unlike uncooked Mexican black tar heroin. She took it out and forced it into his mouth.

He sputtered at the bitterness of it, and tried to spit it out, but she wouldn't let him.

"Chew it," she said.

"What is it?"

"Not heroin. But it will help you. Chew it."

He did chew it, and almost immediately felt a flood of warmth in his throat and belly. It felt good. Not like heroin, but good. He could feel the crazy urgent need for the drug growing quiet, like it was being forced down into a box somewhere deep inside him.

"What is that?" he said.

"Just put your clothes on. We have to go right now."

"Okay." He let go of her arm and stood on his own, both surprised and sobered to find the convulsions and the pain were gone. And his vision was clearer, too. He took a deep breath, expecting a fit of coughing, and found only air.

"Hurry," she said. "Get dressed."

Now they were standing in the shadows outside the Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office, watching the darkened building.

"What are we doing here?" Everett asked.

Magdalena didn't answer him. She was swaying, her eyes half-closed, the eyelids fluttering as she muttered what sounded like nonsense to Everett.

"Who are you? What's your name?"

Again, nothing from Magdalena.

He gave up on her and went back to looking at the quiet building. It looked closed to him.

"They're not closed," Magdalena said.

Her voice startled him. Everett looked at her, wondering if he had asked the question aloud or not. He didn't think he had.

"Tell me who you are," he said.

"They're not closed," she said again. Her eyes were open now. She was staring directly at the building without blinking. "Inside, you'll find three people-two women and a man. The man has a gun."

"A gun? What are you talking about, lady? I'm not going in there."

"Look at me," she said.

A police car rolled by at a crawl on the road on the far side of the building, and Everett ducked down deeper into the shadows.

"Look at me," she said. Her voice was flat but stern.

"There are cops all over the place," he said.

"The police won't bother us. Look at me."

He glanced at her and started to say, "f.u.c.k this, let's get out of here," but the look on her face stopped the words in his throat. Her face had changed. It was still her, but there was something else there with her, inside her. He stared into her eyes and felt himself slipping away.

"Look at me," she said.

"Okay," he said. But he may not have said the word out loud. He couldn't tell, and his mind wasn't paying attention to that now anyway.

"Use a large rock to break into the front door. The people inside will try to stop you. Don't let them. There will be towels inside. Use the towels to hold open the doors leading down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. Do you understand?"

He nodded, his mouth hanging open.

"Go," she said.

Everett walked up to the front door and looked at it. The whole thing was made of gla.s.s. When he put his face against the gla.s.s he could see into the waiting room beyond. There was a table, a couple of small couches, a plant in the corner. On the far side of the waiting room was another door. It looked solid.

The door in front of him had no handle. Confused, he blinked at it until he realized it was one of those automatic doors meant to slide open when someone was standing in front of it. He looked to his right and saw a buzzer on the wall, a rock garden beyond that. He went to the rock garden, picked up a stone the size of a cantaloupe, and tested its heft. Good and heavy.

He went back to the door, lifted the rock, and broke out the gla.s.s.

They hadn't had a call all night, and for that Melinda Sanchez was grateful. It gave her a chance to catch up on her reports, and after the mess at the Morgan Rollins Iron Works, there was still a stack of them standing about a foot high in the In Box on her desk.

The only trouble was she couldn't make herself do it.

"Thinking about Wayne?" Julia asked.

Julia was Julia Culpepper, who had the desk across the aisle from her. They were both twenty-five, pretty, well-built. Julia was dating Dylan Hodges over at Bexar County Homicide, and the two of them introduced her to Dylan's partner Wayne Taliaferro at a triple shooting the week before. She and Wayne had hit it off. There'd been a date, a couple of phone calls since, another date next weekend. Things were going well.

"You were, weren't you?"

Melinda just smiled.

"You're going out with him again, right?"

"Maybe."

"Maybe. Jesus, Mel, spill the beans, would you? Did you guys...?" She looked around to make sure their other partner, Randy Sprouse, wasn't listening. "You know?"

Melinda tried to sound sufficiently shocked when she said, "Julia! No, of course not. I just went out with him once."

"Oh, lighten up, Mel. There's nothing wrong with f.u.c.king a guy on the first date. If it feels right, you gotta do it."

"Julia!"

But despite her best efforts, Melinda couldn't keep the snicker out of her voice. It had felt pretty darn right, and it had almost come to that.

Randy muted the commercial that had just come on the TV and got up and stretched. He was older by far than the two of them-had actually been a cop longer than the two of them had been alive-and regarded just about everything and everybody with a weary, if not a little sour, indifference. He was nice, though.

He saw the conspiratorial looks on their faces and said, "What?"

"Nothing," Julia said.

Melinda shrugged, and they both giggled.

"You girls are talking about dating cops again, aren't you?"

"Why, Randy?" Julia asked, hitting him with her fluttering eyelashes. "You jealous?"

Randy laughed. "Yeah, right. Girls, Randy is too old to be feeling randy these days. I get all the s.e.x I can handle just watching my wife do housework. Who's the guy this week?"

"Same guy," Julia said. "Smarta.s.s. It's been the same guy for the last two months."

"Oh, well, who can tell around here? You girls make me feel like I work in Peyton Place sometimes."

Melinda arched a questioning eyebrow at Julia.

Julia said, "That's like The O.C. for old people."

"Cute," Randy said. But before he could say anything else they heard the sound of gla.s.s breaking.

"What was that?" Julia said.

"It sounded like it came from up front," Melinda said.

They were all standing now. Randy moved to the video monitors near the opposite end of the room, and Melinda and Julia followed him. The three of them looked at the monitor that showed the front door. The camera there was mounted on the outside and pointed down across the plane of the doors so that it would give a profile view of anybody standing there. Melinda studied the screen, but all she saw was a pile of gla.s.s shards on the ground.

"Call Campus Police," Randy said to her. "Julia, come with me."