The cool, anemic rain couldn't disguise the musk of rot, the scent of corruption, riding the air.
Early winter, here, in Rubicon. The Wraithwell. Where the dead rarely, if ever, rested peacefully. Just outside the borders of Ninjatown, where Wayne Anastasio, underworld contract killer, was double-crossed and assassinated by members of his own organized crime family four years ago. Four years to the day.
In Rubicon, vengeance walked the streets clothed in memory and cemetery rot. There was nothing supernatural about it: in this place rage was as concrete as stone and the events that echoed down the corridors of Time left ripples that surged across an ocean of hate.
She hated dealing with the supernatural, her profession notwithstanding. She hated anything that couldn't be explained rationally. She hated being exposed to the secret dark side of reality.
She hated ghosts.
Electronic noise sputtered from her mike.
"I'm getting EM spikes all over the place," DeVeer said excitedly. The harsh electronic modulation of his voice startled Vanna yet further. "Ambient static is climbing, too! Got nothing on radar and spectrothermal scans are coming up with drifting cold spots in your immediate area, Vanna. You see anything?"
For a moment she didn't answer.
"Vanna? You there?"
"Switch the mike back on and tell him 'No,'" The Revenant advised.
Without hesitation, Vanna complied. "Nothing here, Walt. Listen, let's maintain radio silence for just a while longer, like we discussed during last night's prep meeting, okay?"
"Affirmative," DeVeer responded, signing off.
"Better?" she asked, turning her mike back off.
"Better," came the answer, like a benediction from a cobra, that hiss lingering in her ear and oozing venom.
Neither spoke during the long passage of a dark minute as the rain drained out from the gunmetal gray cloudbank above, hissing as if it would burn everything it touched with wintry heat. Vanna's knees and back began to stiffen as she remained crouched next to the building's rooftop ledge. She was afraid to move.
"I hate the park," the spectral voice said at last. "I hate it. Over the years Mandrill Park has been the Mob's favorite execution ground. I think we've murdered nearly two dozen people there over the past thirty years."
Vanna thought, Okay, fine. What does someone say to that?
A morose ex-hitman, a murder victim himself, crossing from beyond life's Great Veil, haunting Mandrill Park's twenty-acre-square, tree-festooned expanse. Vanna allowed herself a light sigh, shuddering slightly from the chill, her flesh crawling in the face of fear. She still couldn't stand the idea of turning her head to see the origin of that hollow voice.
She wasn't ready to look the Devil in the eyes.
"They wander that land, you know, walking in the shadows of the trees, through the cobbled paths of the Japanese tea garden, past the giant twin crosses of St. Alessandro, past the reflecting pool and the bocci ball field ... they wander. They fade in and out from shadow, friendless and alone, locked in silence, whispering in eternal gloom, weeping their crocodile tears. Liars, cheats, thieves, bullies, and rapists betrayed by other liars, cheats, thieves, and rapists. You gotta love it. Biblical irony as written by an angry circus clown ... great stuff."
"There is a certain poetic irony to it," Vanna commented past a dry mouth. "So, how come you're not down there among them, wandering lost and silent like the other phantoms?"
The answer surprised her. "A rough penance as dictated by the demons in charge of revenge. A balancing of the scales is needed. There are rules even in Hell. I'm not afraid of confronting the truths of my fall from grace. Yes, yes, I am one of the fallen, a tainted soul trapped on this earth haunting the world of the living. I am cursed to stay here until I put things right. Cursed by my love of rage. You call us ghosts, haunts or, if you're of a Biblical bent, 'revenants.' I do not wander, because I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death with balls bigger than those of anyone else in that valley."
"You're a liar, a bully, and a killer," Vanna hissed. "The world's a better place without you. No one mourns your passing. The only reason you're remembered at all is because you haunt Mandrill Park ... and because you're still a killer."
"And you're an ex-cop who is now a ghost-hunter. You've gone from the brotherhood in blue and all the legitimacy that buys to this, living on the fringes, out where the buses don't run, dealing with crackpots and religious fanatics and kooks."
For some reason she couldn't fathom, Vanna felt compelled to say, "They licensed me. I'm a P.I. They let me keep my guns."
The phantom laughed. It was a hollow sound, like wind rushing through an old length of iron pipe. "Funny. They let me keep my guns, too. Actually, it was more like a condition of my ... how would you say it ... oh, my 're-enlistment.'"
"We're not crackpots or kooks," she said stubbornly.
"And I'm not a figment of your imagination."
"Yes, I know that now. I get it," Vanna admitted slowly. "But why would they do this, whoever they are, the powers in charge of life and death and right and wrong? Why would they let you loose on this city, on this world?"
"Still a cop. Still asking all the wrong questions," The Revenant chided. "The real question is 'even if I get them all, will I ever stop?' You really ought to think about that."
... even if I get them all, will I ever stop? ... The question chilled her and, damnably, no, she had never once looked at it that way. She kept her growing sense of doom inside and said aloud: "Nothing's changed. You're still a monster."
"As I said: you gotta love it," the apparition intoned with acid sarcasm.
"So what now?" Vanna asked, in spite of her misgivings.
No answer.
She spun around, her eyes scanning the rooftop through the gloom. A sudden gust of wet air threw water in her face. She blinked rapidly, her tension making her grit her teeth.
Nothing. He was gone.
The sudden concussive eruption of gunfire yanked an involuntary yelp out of her.
Bang. Kapok-kapok-kapok. Bang.
It was starting.
* * *
The Old Men, the Mustached Petes, had told them not to come back, had told them to stay away. They'd said that returning was tempting fate, that it would be tantamount to a slap across the face of an angry and vengeful God and that it was an open invitation for the Devil to have his way with them. They'd reminded them that this was Rubicon and that the things that happened here, good and bad but especially the bad, resonated down the dark corridors of history. What crap. They were a bunch of toothless old lions, caged up far too long, the memory of the ferociousness of their youth fading as the years accumulated, weighing them down like wet bags of sand. Superstitious.
Dead was dead. That was the way things really were in this life.
Carmine and Marcus Rodriggo reveled in their wealth and in their power, in their ability to generate fear, in the muscular influence they wielded over both the underworld community and in the corporate boardroom. They were educated, amoral, and predatory, and they were hungry hunters swimming in a sea of small fish, all waiting to be eaten. They were not accustomed to being told what to do or when to do it. They were made men, they'd sworn the blood oath, but they'd stayed true to their own ideas, kept their own identity, even when they'd apprenticed themselves to that doddering old fool, Don Pasquale Cavecchio. God above, but Cavecchio had tried their patience. But there was a pecking order within the Syndicate, within the influence of the Families, and if one wanted to rise within the ranks, a person had to occasionally cater to the strange requests of addled old men who saw cops and Feds hiding behind every bush and who saw old blood vendettas behind every smile. They lived too much in the past.
Giuseppi Vulpanella, the Cavecchio family consiglieri, had been their watchdog since they'd first been taken under Don Pasquale's wing years ago, and Vulpanella had guided them through the shark-infested and turbulent waters of local Mafia politics throughout the 1990s, when local organized crime had been at its lowest ebb. A string of no less than fifteen high-profile RICO convictions held in Sacramento and San Francisco Superior Courts had decimated the Cavecchio crime machine, but nothing had come so close to ruining the family as that trouble they'd had with that ungrateful, over-rated hitman, Wayne Anastasio. The man had been a goddamn hired gun, a high-priced target shooter, a pest exterminator, and nothing more. Yet they'd treated Anastasio like he was some kind of royalty because he'd once saved Vulpanella and Don Pasquale from a hit team of crooked cops. So far as Carmine and Marcus saw it, that had been Anastasio's job. He'd only done what he'd been paid to do. Over the ensuing years following that incident, Anastasio had become increasingly reticent about following orders, especially from young turks like the Rodriggos. He was picking and choosing his hits. Sometimes he disagreed with the opening of a contract on someone's life, respectfully arguing that the contract would negatively impact business and draw attention to the family's activities. A hitman with an opinion on family policy? Unheard-of. It should never have been tolerated.
The Rodriggos had convinced Giuseppi Vulpanella that enough was enough and that the only reason Anastasio was behaving the way he did was because he had been turned—he was working for the Feds.
It wasn't true, but the evidence the brothers had manufactured and presented to Don Pasquale had certainly made it look true.
Carmine and Marcus had learned that the truth was fluid, always in flux, and that you could make it whatever you wanted it to be.
And whatever it was you wanted to eventually come true, like dreams and ambitions, could be made true, could become real, if you really lied like you meant it.
The brothers had changed the course of the crime family's history and its fortunes, making themselves kings in the process. All they'd had to do to make it happen had been to spill a little blood...
And spilt blood dried and faded with time.
But that was then. Years had passed. Nothing could be done to alter the events of the past.
Now was the only time the brothers Rodriggo trusted or believed in.
NOW...
Vanna Diamante had lunged off the roof and was charging down the stairwell of the observation building as she shouted into her com-mike.
"Professor! Walt! Pick up, dammit, pick up! We've got a situation! Get over to Wes' position at the nightclub! Floor it!"
DeVeer's voice sputtered back across the connection. "What's happening, Vanna? Stay calm and tell me what's going on..."
"Stay calm, hell! I just got my own personal visitation from The Revenant! Wayne Anastasio's ghost was close enough to me to touch my hair and now I just heard gunfire! Now you get your ass over to back up Wes, dammit! I'm on foot, I'll have to meet you there soon as I can!"
"The Revenant spoke to you! But nothing registered on...."
"I said I heard gunfire, Walt...!"
"Okay, okay, I'm starting the van now, Vanna!"
"Goddamn it, shuddup and drive!" Vanna shouted as she cleared the third floor landing, descending recklessly tow and three steps at a time. "And get into that nightclub any way you can and when you do go in hot!"
"Gotcha!" DeVeers responded tersely.
She burst out into the night, her lungs heaving, legs pumping as she sprinted the block and a half over to The Last Bet.
She heard more gunfire and she heard voices screaming.
Too slow, goddamn you, too slow! Move, Vanna, MOVE! she thought as her mind gave way to her police training. She pulled her firearm out and switched off the safety.
She skidded on a puddle of water and careened off the driver's side of a parked car as she rounded the corner. She stumbled and almost went down on one knee but fought to stay erect. Sweat mingled with rainwater on her skin and the evening's gloom rolled over her like icy ink. She immediately noticed that the night seemed darker, the shadows more dense and opaque, as she neared the club. The neon glare from nearby shops, the delicatessen, the laundromat, didn't seem able to penetrate the gloom. She entered the alley that led to The Last Bet's parking lot.
Thirty or more screaming, screeching people were congregated in the open lot, many of them stumbling around under the dim, flickering glare of the nearby streetlamps and there eyes were wide with fear and horror. Quite a few of them had blood streaming from superficial cuts and wounds on their faces and exposed arms and one short-haired woman was bleeding from her ears. The group was disoriented, seemingly unable to leave the scene of the danger that drove their collective hysteria. They couldn't venture beyond the confines of the parking lot. The sudden crash of breaking glass made Vanna duck down, she crouched low and whirled about, looking for the origins of the sound. A small rectangular window at the front of the club was broken out from the inside. From her vantage point, she couldn't see in past the shattered opening.
Four damp bodies sprawled on the pavement, in the center of the stampede. They didn't move, and from the position of one of them, they looked to have been brought down as they were moving away from the club. Vanna couldn't tell whether or not they were dead or merely unconscious, but she didn't see any blood and none of them had the look of mobsters. Innocents caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A misty smoke was issuing sluggishly from out the open front door to the club. It smelled of copper, spilled beer, burnt wiring and ash. She could hear the rhythmic thumping of the bassline to the music being played inside. A dull green and red glow, disco lights, bar sign neon, she didn't know which, seemed to come from within.
She didn't see Wes Lusko anywhere.
A sudden screech of tires heralded the arrival of DeVeers and the van. The scholarly investigator threw the door open and leapt out into the melee. He waved to Vanna that he would try to manage the crowd.
"Go get Wes!" she heard him shout.
Gathering her courage, her cocked weapon out at arm's length in front of her, she cautiously went inside. She flinched as a bullet whizzed past her face and smacked into the wall beside her. She didn't hear the shot because the pulsating music was so loud she felt as though it were a physical net hanging over her and pressing against her.
A constant cascade of electrical sparks fantailed up from an overturned mixing soundboard and the ornate modern art glass-and-neon-tubing chandelier at the vast room's center, over the dance floor, was hanging by a pair of electrical cables. Tables and overturned chairs littered the space and there were clumps of discarded clothing draped helter skelter off the uprooted furnishings. Overhead, the refrigerator-sized chandelier spat sparks to rain down onto the floor. The smell of smoke and burning copper was far stronger and a hazy stinging mist rode the air, making her squint against the flickering light.
There were easily a dozen bodies on the floor. Ragged holes had been punched through their torsos. At least two of them had skulls misshaped by massive head trauma. Discarded weapons lay near their bodies. Vanna could clearly see that they were dead.
The place was on fire and the overhead sprinklers were running, spraying cold water everywhere. The fire was slowly dying out, but flames still licked at the pool table and at the DJ booth, crackling with a mischievous and destructive glee.
Carmine Rodriggo was standing on top of the bar and he was screaming a stream of obscenities as he fired off round after round from a large automatic handgun. He aimed shots at every point of the compass and raged hysterically. One of his pant legs was torn and he was bleeding from a gash in his thigh.
Marcus Rodriggo was on his knees against the side of the bar and a long bar of shiny brass, part of the interior's mutated Art Nouveau decor, was sticking out from his abdomen. Blood pooled thickly around his body. He was still alive, still conscious, and he was holding his own weapon, a revolver, out at the end of a trembling arm. He was breathing in wet wheezes past clenched teeth. Vanna figured it was he who had shot at her.
"He's killed me, Carm, the fucker's killed me! Look at me, man! Shit! He can't do that, Carm, he can't do that! He's dead, dammit, he's dead!" Marcus wailed.
"Over here," she heard a man's voice whisper. Vanna dropped to her stomach and rolled toward the sound.
Wes Lusko. He was behind an overturned table, his old Army-issue Colt .45 Commander in his gnarled fist. He waved at Vanna to join him. She quickly scuttled over as yet another bullet smacked into the floor in the space she'd occupied only seconds earlier.
"Thank God," she muttered as she drew close beside him.
"I dunno about that, boss," Wes intoned. Not looking at her, he waved the barrel of his automatic over toward the western side of the club, past a pair of raised stages where spotlighted dancers usually danced in cages. She followed his gaze.
A tall man in a dapper gray suit. He had the look of an aristocratic dandy about him, more like a gambler and a rogue than an executioner. He seemed insubstantial, fading in and out of existence. In each of his gloved fists were large, shiny silver guns. Nickle-plated .45 automatics.
Wayne Anastasio. The Revenant.
He was smiling. It wasn't a pleasant sight—the right side of his face was nearly gone, the flesh and muscle exposed or ripped away, and what little remained intact looked like raw hamburger decorated with skull fragments. Amazingly, a fresh flow of blood drooled from out the ruined mess, as if time and ghostly physics would not allow the fatal wound to close. Vanna was suddenly glad she'd decided not to look at him while they spoke on the rooftop.
"Why don't you go back to Hell, you sick crazy motherfucker!" Carmine screeched at the apparition. "Go back to the Hell I sent you to!"
"Oh, but I can't, old friend, not without you," The Revenant answered in clear, polar tones. Anastasio raised his twin automatics.
Roaring like an enraged lion, Carmine fired again and again at the specter, emptying his clip at the figure of the ghost.
The fusillade of bullets had no effect.
Anastasio fired once, from each weapon.
Something resembling tracer bullets, a comet-like streak of red light from the muzzle of each of his guns, ripped through Carmine's face and chest, knocking him off the bar and into the shelves of liquor bottles lining the wall behind it. Glass and wood shattered. Carmine Rodriggo's body fell heavily, landing out from sight behind the bar.
"Ahhhh, God- damn- it!" Marcus wailed around a mouthful of mucus and blood as he clicked his empty weapon at the deadly apparition.
Anastasio's image rapidly drifted across the room and grew steady as it stopped in front of Marcus. The mobster looked up at the grievously ruined face of the dead contract killer and uttered a sigh of resignation.
"Last call," Anastasio said in his eerie, sepulchral tones. He leveled one gun at Marcus' face and fired. The man's head jerked and the back of it exploded.
Silence reigned inside The Last Bet as the sprinkler system suddenly clicked off and the music from the automated DJ abruptly stopped.
The Revenant turned to the side to face Wes and Vanna's position, only moving his head and fixing them with a baleful stare, and he said softly, "You need to leave now. Things are about to happen. Things that are only for the dead to know. The living cannot stay."
He didn't have to tell them twice.
(The Watchers in the darkened room stiffened and sobbed, their voices as one. They saw everything as if they were there and they watched the horror and the violence play out through the woman's unprotected mind. Her thoughts intermingled with their own, her raw emotions intoxicating and frightening in their intensity. Her regret pained them as if it had stabbed through their own hearts. In the room, but not in the room, they watched the night's events play out from behind their collective mask of anonymity...
The Balance was being forcibly put right, and without their intervention, but the act of reckoning was creating new scars on the sensitive membrane between the Land of the Dead and the World of the Living—scars they knew would keep bleeding until they healed. The Watchers dreaded the possibilities of what could happen hereafter, as Chaos held sway on a rainy night in the Wraithwell.)
* * *
The local police staged a half-assed investigation of the massacre at The Last Bet, but this was Rubicon and everyone knew the story of The Revenant. For two full weeks the city's streets were quiet: no deals were made, no money was collected, no beatings or murders were committed. There was an unspoken agreement that right now, after the terror and chaos unleashed in The Last Bet, no one wanted to tempt fate.
He was still out there. He could come back.
The city council paid Spectrehouse Security twice the agreed-upon payment with the caveat that no one in the small organization ever talk about what had happened. There were no worries about that, though, because who would ever believe them?
Vanna Diamante took a month-long vacation in Hawaii, just sitting in the beach and not talking with anyone in particular, a haunted woman keeping mostly to herself. She thought a lot about the nature of what little she understood about the world around her and she mourned as she realized that her life was now set on a course that would regularly include the intrusion of nightmares and bloodshed.
It was early winter. Fat charcoal clouds sitting in a twilight sky over the city skyline, crouched like angry predators warring over the torn carcasses after a hunt. Cold winds carrying the scent of pollution and the metal-tinged scent of exposed iron from the skeletal frames of new buildings being erected, snaked across the skyline, winding a serpentine path through the canyons between tall buildings: the perfume of industrial waste and concrete decrepitude.
The rain couldn't clean the scent of corruption from the air.
And in Mandrill Park, things without faces and shadows that moved against the wind, continued to hold sway in a place that defied every celestial law. The park waited. The park slumbered fitfully. There were yet other nightmares waiting to be born, other revenants awaiting vengeful resurrection.
T H E E N D