Blood of the Isir Omnibus Read online

  “You know what’s coming, boy.”

  “Not fair! I’m in my costume already!”

  “All right, all right,” I said holding up my hands in mock surrender. “But, when you least expect it…”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  I gave him The Eye and went back downstairs, grinning at this new-found freedom to navigate steps.

  Sig would probably spend the evening traipsing through the neighborhood with his pals, ringing doorbells, scoring candy, laughing and scaring the littler kids. There was a pang in my heart. I’d missed the years in which fathers walk with their sons while they trick-or-treat. I hadn’t been well enough to have made those trips around the neighborhood with him. I don’t remember even answering the door to give out candy. Maybe I didn’t.

  The weather report was normal for October in Western New York: It was going to be chilly and raining during prime-time trick-or-treat hours. Sig had already worked out how his rain suit could fit under his costume.

  He was dressing as a vampire for the fourth year in a row. His idea of vampires did not come from horror stories but from a kids’ show he’d watched when he was younger—Max and Ruby. The show was about a brother and sister and their “epic” adventures—many of which involved the brother dressing up as a vampire for some reason only kids could understand.

  Even so, when he talked about his costume and fake teeth that squirted cherry-flavored syrup into his mouth like blood, all I could think about was Chris Hatton and Liz Tutor. They weren’t vampires, but they weren’t quite human, either. The body count they racked up was absurd. They’d had this cave—an abattoir, more like—in which they’d stored bodies for later…consumption. I pushed all that out of my mind. I’d gotten good at it; I’d had a lot of practice.

  As evening fell, the weather grew even fouler than expected. The temperature fell to the low forties, and visibility dropped to almost nothing.

  “Remember when all he wanted to dress up as was Lightning McQueen?” Jane asked, walking up behind me.

  “Sort of.” I could remember his birthday parties, bits and pieces of past Christmases and a few Thanksgivings. I guess Halloweens didn’t make enough of an impression to penetrate the fog.

  “It looks like another miserable Halloween,” Jane said.

  This year was going to be different, though.

  “Yeah. Should we make him stay in?”

  “Nothing short of the end of the world could convince our little boy not to trick-or-treat—at least a little.” She smiled and picked up the bottle of cherry syrup that was waiting on the counter. “Think he’ll go through the entire bottle again this year?”

  “Of sugar-infused yumminess? Of course he will,” I said with a chuckle.

  “If you can answer the door for a bit, I’ll take the Sigster and his friends around for a while—at least until it gets too miserable.”

  “I could go,” I said.

  “Yes, you could, but then you’d be in bed, gorked to the gills on oxycodone by morning. You should have some real memories of Halloween this year.”

  “Think he’ll have any good memories with me in them?”

  Jane put her hand on the back of my neck, something that had not been possible until the previous July because of how much even such a simple gesture would have hurt. “He does have good memories with you in them. You make him laugh so hard Coke comes out his nose. That’s got to count.”

  I grinned and nodded. “I suppose so.”

  “Hank,” she said in her I-am-serious-and-I-will-brook-no-disagreements voice, “you are a great father, despite this stupid disease. What Siggy will remember about this time is your courage in the face of all this bullshit and misery and your commitment to making the best of it.”

  “I hope so. I’m not sure I’ll remember those particular things.”

  “Psssh! Like what you remember matters. I’m the boss of you, tomato-face, and what I say goes.” She gave me a little pinch on the back of my neck and a kiss on the cheek. “Now, quit it before I bust you one in the chops.”

  “Yes, ma’am! I’ll need a big bowl full of candy. Oh, and some candy to give to the kiddies, too.”

  She laughed and swatted my behind. “That candy is for those kids, Henry. I better not catch you eating any.” She looked me right in the eye as she reached into the bowl and took a mini Hersey’s dark chocolate bar and put it in her pocket.

  I grinned. Jane always made me feel better when it counted. I didn’t call her Supergirl for nothing. “Ma’am, I’m afraid I’ll have to frisk you.”

  “Hah! I know what you want, you…you man!”

  “For stolen merchandise! Don’t worry, I was trained to frisk people.”

  She looked at me with a sly grin. “If you are good, trooper, I might let you frisk me later.” She waggled her eyebrows à la Groucho Marx.

  “Ma’am, I think you might be trying to bribe me.”

  “Give me a few hours, and I’ll let you bribe me.”

  “Promise?”

  She patted my cheek. “You know it, sailor.”

  “Eww! No gushy stuff in the kitchen!” said Sig. He was standing in the doorway to the front room, grinning to beat all.

  “I’ll gushy-stuff you,” I growled.

  Sig ran into the kitchen, his cape flaring behind him. Underneath it, he wore a black velvet brocade vest over a white shirt. If the splash of red from his favorite hoodie peeking out of his collar, the Nike running pants, and his sneakers spoiled the effect, he didn’t seem to notice. Or care.

  “Are you really going to wear running pants?” I winked at Jane.

  “Yes, Dad. No one cares if my costume is accurate to some horror movie. Anyway, this is what Max wore all the time.”

  “Are you really going to throw Max and Ruby at me?” He had gotten so tall while I was “away.” He came up to Jane’s nose—and she was five feet eight inches tall. “If you don’t quit growing, you are going to grow out of that cape, O’ littlest Jensen.”

  He shrugged. “Mom will make me a new one if I want.”

  “That’s right,” Jane said. “But the next one will be pink and purple.”

  He looked at her with mock scorn. “That would be silly, Mother. Vampires don’t wear pink.” He spotted the cherry syrup, and his eyes lit up like fireworks. “You remembered!”

  “Of course,” said Jane. “I am literally the most awesome person you know.”

  “You stole that line from that T-shirt Daddy bought me,” said Sig as he dug his fake fangs out of his pants pocket. “Fill ’er up, please.”

  She poured cherry syrup into the fangs’ reservoir. “There you go, Count Sigula. Now it is officially Halloween.”

  “Speaking of which, we’d better get moving, Momma. That candy won’t trick-or-treat itself into my bag.” He turned and dashed into the front room.

  “You’ll be okay?” Jane asked.

  “Of course. I am married to Supergirl, after all.”

  She flashed a grin my direction and turned to leave. “Oh, make sure the kids don’t take more than two pieces each—otherwise we’ll run out.”

  “Two pieces, aye!” I snapped a salute at her back.

  “I saw that, sailor.” She gave me a saucy little grin over her shoulder.

  I spent the next two hours getting up every minute and a half to answer the door. The candy seemed to be a big hit, especially getting two pieces of it. Princesses, zombies, ghosts, a few vampires, and a metric ton of superheroes—even the Silver Surfer—paid me a visit. The best costumes, however, were the twins dressed as Mario and Luigi.

  The temperature dropped from chilly to miserable, and the rain stayed constant. Jane had said that Sig didn’t usually stay out for that long but, as he was fond of telling me, he was twelve now, and everything was different. The frequency of trick-or-treaters fell toward nothing as the level of candy in the big black plastic bowl fell toward empty.

  I can’t say I was worried at that point, but I do remember thinking that it was stran
ge for the Sigster to want to stay out so long.

  As the temperature dipped into the thirties and they still hadn’t come home, I went out onto our front porch and looked around the cul-de-sac. All the houses on the circle were lit up and full of excitement—except for the Timmens’ house right across from us. It was like the missing tooth in a mouthful of shining white teeth. I could have sworn I’d seen them passing out candy earlier, but now it looked deserted. I stayed out on the porch until the cold started nipping at my finger joints. Except for a few cars, the neighborhood was quiet.

  I still wasn’t actively worried, though. Jane was a capable woman, and she had her cell with her. If something had happened, she would have called. They were probably warm and toasty inside the home of one of Sig’s friends.

  I stood outside wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of wool-lined slippers, and it was getting uncomfortable in a hurry—even for a “big, dumb Norwegian,” as my loving wife called me at times. I went back inside and sat down on the stairs to wait.

  At nine o’clock, I could no longer claim not to be worried. There hadn’t been a single pack of skeletons, zombies, or video-game characters ringing the bell for a half-hour, and yet there was still no sign of Sig or Jane. I called her mobile, but it went straight to voicemail.

  I couldn’t stand to wait any longer. I had to do something. I changed into warm boots and wrote a brief note asking Jane to call me immediately when she got in. I considered going on foot, but one look at the ice-cold rain froze that thought. I got in the truck, cranked up the heat, and turned on all the seat heaters. They would be cold if they were out walking in the night’s freezing soup.

  I idled to the corner at the end of the street and scanned the road in both directions. Not a single soul moved outside. It looked like the set of an apocalypse movie, all drifting fog and flickering shadows. I turned right and crept around the neighborhood. Sig’s closest friend lived on the street that cut our neighborhood into two parts. I stopped in front of his house and climbed out of the truck.

  The porch lights were still on, but a single sheet of paper was taped to the door. “No candy,” it said in crayon. I rang the bell and waited.

  Evan, Sig’s friend, opened the door and gaped up at me. He still had some of his Halloween makeup streaking his face.

  “Uh…hi, Mr. Jensen. We don’t have any more candy. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay, Evan. Are Sig and his mom here?”

  Evan shook his head. “They went home when we finished getting candy.”

  “What time was that?” I asked.

  Evan frowned down at his arm where his watch would have been if he’d been wearing one. “No watch,” he muttered. “That was stupid.”

  “It’s okay, Evan, your best guess is fine.”

  “I think it was about an hour or two ago.” Evan shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m only twelve.”

  “I know, buddy,” I said. “It’s okay. That’s close enough.”

  “Okay. Wanna talk to my mom or dad?”

  “No thanks. I’d better get home and see if they’ve shown up yet.”

  Without a word, Evan turned and ran toward the back of his house, letting the door swing shut behind him.

  I got back in the truck and drove toward home. My stomach ached like I’d been sucker punched and my knuckles creaked and snapped on the wheel. As I drove up the road toward our house at the end of the cul-de-sac, something caught my eye in the shrubs near the Timmens’ front porch. I twisted the steering wheel, and the truck’s headlights and fog lamps swept their front yard clean of shadows.

  Something dark was wound around the trunk of the shrubs to the right of their front door. Something black. I got out and hobbled toward it, grimacing as the cold bit into my ankles and feet. I fell to my knees and wrestled with the black cloth at the base of the bush to unwind it. Cold ate into my knees like acid, making the position even more painful than normal. Finally, I worked the cloth free of the bush and held it up. It was Sig’s vampire cape. The neck was torn.

  I struggled back to my feet and limped to the front door. The house was dark, but I rapped my knuckles against the door’s wooden frame. Maybe they’d turned off the lights to signal they had no more candy.

  Bobby and Bobbie Timmens thought sharing the same first name was cute. I’d always thought it was kind of stupid, but hell, what do I know? They also wore matching sweaters quite a bit. They were that couple. They referred to themselves as “the Two Bobbies,” and so the rest of us did, too.

  After twenty seconds that felt like hours, I knocked again and pressed the doorbell several times. No lights came on, and nothing stirred. It felt like I was being watched, but there was no movement—no noise at all inside the house.

  “Bobby! It’s Hank,” I called, ringing the bell again. The house remained silent. Not even Bobbie’s dogs barked.

  I walked to the garage access door at the end of their porch and peered into the dark garage. Only one of their cars was there; their huge Ford Expedition was gone. Maybe they’d gone to dinner when they ran out of candy.

  I tried to convince myself that the cape in my hand wasn’t Sig’s, but the red lining with its secret pockets said differently. Maybe the wind ripped it off Sig’s neck as they walked home. That was garbage, though, and I knew it. The wind was strong, but it wasn’t that strong.

  I stared across the street, willing my eyes to pierce through the rain and the dark and see people moving inside my house. With a sigh, I got back in the truck, throwing Siggy’s cape into the passenger seat, and backed across the circle and into my own driveway.

  I should have called the police right away, but I dithered next to the phone, picking up the handset and putting it back down several times. I didn’t want to admit that what I feared was a possibility. Finally, I picked it up, put it to my ear, and dialed the local trooper station.

  By the time the doorbell rang a half-hour later, I was almost out of my mind with worry and impatience. I had wanted it to be a miscommunication. I had hoped Jane and Sig would stroll in so we could say it was all a mistake and send the troopers on their way.

  I opened the door to a uniformed trooper and two cops in plain clothes. “Come in.”

  “Hello, Mr. Jensen. I’m Sergeant Kamphaus. We met a while back, if you remember. Detective Johnson and Detective Spaulding are with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department.” He gave me a little one-shoulder shrug. “Jurisdiction.” Johnson was short and heavyset. He had curly hair and bloodshot eyes. Spaulding was tall and rangy, with laugh lines etched into the skin around his eyes.

  “Okay,” I said. “We can sit in the kitchen.”

  “Mr. Jensen,” said Spaulding after we’d taken our seats, “I understand you believe your wife and son to be missing?”

  Johnson had his thumb on the little button that opened and closed his ballpoint pen. He clicked it while Spaulding talked.

  “Yeah. They went trick-or-treating earlier in the evening, and they never came home. I was the primary on a case a few years ago…well, I guess it was a bit longer than that. The Chris Hatton serial case.”

  Johnson grimaced. “I remember. The Bristol Butchers.” His pen went click, click, click.

  “Yeah. Hatton and I spoke on a couple of occasions, and he threatened to ‘take care’ of my family and to ‘take them away from me.’ Maybe he’s making good on that threat.”

  “Why would you think that?” asked Detective Spaulding, leaning forward. “After all these years?”

  I raised my hands in a helpless shrug. “They’re missing.”

  Spaulding shook his head. “We don’t know that for sure, Mr. Jensen. It’s only been a few hours.”

  “No, no,” I said. “You don’t know my wife like I do. She’d be here, or she would have called. At any rate, it’s past my son’s bedtime, and we are sticklers about that. Jane especially.”

  Spaulding glanced at Kamphaus, and the sergeant gave a short nod. “I understand that you were injured in the Hatton case? S
ome kind of explosion—”

  “Yes. Seven years ago. But not by an explosion.”

  “—that left you concussed. You were in the hospital.”

  Frustration began to bubble through me, and I shifted position in the chair. “Yes.”

  “While you were recovering, there was…some kind of incident?” Spaulding acted like he was embarrassed, but he was watching me with sharp eyes that didn’t miss a beat.

  “Yes. I got my bell rung pretty good.” I looked at Kamphaus, and the compact trooper returned my gaze with a bland expression.

  “But it was more than that, right?” asked Johnson, still toying with his ballpoint pen, clicking it at random times.

  I looked into his bloodshot eyes and scoffed. “If you already know the story, why ask me about it?”

  “Come on, Hank,” said Kamphaus. “You know they have to ask.”

  “I know,” I said in a low tone of voice. “I don’t have to like it, though. Yes, Detectives. I was injured badly that night. I blacked out and woke up in the hospital. I had a concussion and other injuries. I’m told I went off the deep end a bit.”

  Johnson clucked his tongue and clicked his pen. “Post-traumatic stress disorder, it says here.”

  I drummed my fingers on the table for a moment and then looked at each of them in turn. “It was a long time ago.”

  “You’ve been disabled in the years since?” asked Spaulding.

  “Yes. The doctors say it’s rheumatoid arthritis.”

  “My mother-in-law had that,” said Spaulding. “It’s a horrible disease.”

  “It’s an absolute monster,” I said.

  “It didn’t let my mother-in-law age gracefully.” Spaulding looked down at my hands as he said it, but looked up, rabbit-quick and wolf-eyed to catch my reaction.

  “Given what it’s done to me, I can see how that could happen.” To be honest, I was taken aback that he would say something so disheartening to someone suffering from the disease.

  “How have you been doing with it?”