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  Ivan appeared to be in his early thirties. He was thin, with a pasty complexion and long, straight hair--to be honest, he gave off more of a vampire vibe than a werewolf one. He wore a blue dress shirt that was probably expensive but looked like it had been worn for several unpleasant days.

  Driving around with a guy in a cage was a contemptible thing, but business was business. George and Lou had the luxury of turning down the worst of their job offers--they didn't do anything that involved kids, and never committed murder--but transporting a man in a cage across the state was depravity within their moral boundaries.

  "This is messed up," Lou noted.

  George turned back around in his seat. "You won't hear me argue."

  "I mean, who believes in that werewolf nonsense? 'By the light of the full moon...' What a load of crap. What are we in, the 1600's?"

  "Is that when people believed in werewolves?"

  "I dunno. Maybe I'm thinking of witches. But, c'mon, look at the world we live in." Lou tapped the GPS that rested on the dashboard. "This thing has street-by-street directions for anyplace in the world we wanna go. In a world where humans can accomplish this kind of technology, what kind of person still believes in the supernatural?"

  George grinned. "Maybe that GPS is supernatural. Maybe only the devil knows all of those streets. Or it could be ghost-powered."

  "I'm trying to make a serious point here. Why would you want to derail that?"

  "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But I don't think Bateman believes in that werewolf stuff for one second."

  "You think it's a cover?"

  "Yeah. Either our friend back there has got a stomach full of heroin and they're playing a practical joke, or they're trying to distract us from something else that's going on. There's definitely something screwy here, so we need to be careful."

  Lou nodded. "I agree."

  "You could just ask me," said Ivan. It was the first time he'd spoken.

  George turned around in his seat to face their prisoner. "What?"

  "You could just ask me if I'm a werewolf. That would be the polite and reasonable thing to do, instead of speculating amongst yourselves."

  "Fair enough. Are you a werewolf?"

  "No, I'm not a fucking werewolf! What the hell? Are you two really that stupid? You're seriously going to drive me to Tampa so that some pretend-scientist can slice me up?"

  "Hey, I don't care what you are. They could say you were the Easter Bunny and it wouldn't change anything. This is just a transport job."

  "Oh, sure. Transport job. He told you that I'm a werewolf, George. You know, those magical people who transform into scary wolves during the full moon, and can only be killed by silver bullets, and gobble up little children. Those people who are, you know, non-existent! Doesn't it bother you to be working for that kind of insanity?"

  "I don't think you heard me. You're just cargo."

  "Well, that's lovely. Nice humanistic attitude you've got there. Do much slave trading in your spare time?"

  "Hey, if you want to be allowed to talk, you'd better watch the lip."

  "You can't stop me from talking. I'm valuable merchandise."

  "Look, Ivan the Werewolf, I'm about as nice of a guy as you're liable to encounter in this kind of situation, but don't get the mistaken impression that I will let myself be disrespected. There's only one way that this drive will end, and that's with you being delivered to our destination. No other outcome is possible. However, there are several different moods that can hang over our afternoon until then, and I want you to think long and hard about whether you want to have a pleasant drive or an unpleasant one."

  Ivan pouted for a few moments. "You're taking me to a guy named Mr. Dewey, right?"

  "Dewey's his last name? I thought it was his first. But yeah, that's who we're going to see."

  "You know what he wants, don't you?"

  "No idea. A pet?"

  "You think that's funny? You think the idea of turning me into some madman's pet is just a joke? Do you even have a soul?"

  "You're right, that was inappropriate," George admitted, legitimately feeling as if he'd stepped over the line. "Believe me, I sympathize with your plight. It sucks."

  "He doesn't want a pet. Do you know what he wants?"

  "What?"

  "He wants me to bite him."

  "Seriously?"

  "Yeah. Can you imagine that? The sick, twisted lunatic wants me to turn him into a werewolf. I mean, to believe in werewolves in the first place you've got to have a gigantic screw loose, but to want to become one...?"

  "That is peculiar," George agreed.

  "What do you think is going to happen to me when I bite Mr. Dewey and it doesn't do anything? Do you think he's going to say 'Oh, goodness gracious, my mistake!' and let me go, or do you think he's going to kill me? My death is going to be on your conscience. Can you handle that?"

  "I'm not that familiar with the werewolf legend, but you'd have to change into a wolf first, right? He wouldn't just make you give him a nibble on the hand as a human."

  Ivan sighed with frustration. "Fine, so when I don't change into a wolf, then he'll kill me. Are you okay with that? No problems working for somebody so severely wrong in the head? I don't know about you, but if I heard about somebody whose brain is so diseased that he's kidnapping innocent human beings in hopes of getting a werewolf bite, I'd stay as far away from him as possible."

  "I guess you're smarter than we are, then."

  "I guess so. I have to go to the bathroom."

  "Hold it."

  "I can't."

  "Think about the desert."

  "Do you have one of those things on your palm?" Lou asked.

  "What things?"

  "The star thing."

  "A pentagram?"

  "Yeah."

  Ivan held up his palm, which Lou checked out in the rear-view mirror. "No. And would you like to know why I don't have a pentagram on my palm?"

  "Because you're not a werewolf?"

  "Exactly! Because I'm not a werewolf! I manage a temp agency! This is bullshit!"

  "Again," said George, "the only way this is going to end is with you being delivered as promised. Pleasant or unpleasant. The choice is yours. Most people go with pleasant."

  "They're calling me a werewolf, but you're the ones who are inhuman!" Ivan said. "You're the monsters, not me!"

  "That's deep," Lou noted.

  "If you do this, it'll haunt you for the rest of your life. You will always be somebody who took an innocent guy to his death for being a werewolf. That doesn't go away. No matter how long you live, you'll never not be that person. Thirty years from now, when I'm long since tortured and dead, you'll still be the guys who were told that a man in a cage was a werewolf--a werewolf--and delivered him into the hands of a deranged maniac who believed in that kind of nonsense. Do you really want all those years of sleepless nights?"

  "Thirty years from now, one or both of us will probably be dead, too," said George. "Our work is pretty dangerous. I'm actually surprised Lou is still around. He really doesn't take care of his body."

  "Not only will you be the men who drove an innocent person to his death, but you'll be the men who casually dismissed him when he tried to explain the insanity of the situation. Even if I were a werewolf, you'd be the villains here."

  "Okay, you've talked enough," said George. "Shut up for a while."

  "Oh, I'm sorry, are my desperate pleas for my life annoying you? I wouldn't want to be an inconvenience. I certainly hope that my shrieks of pain when they're dissecting me don't cause an unpleasant sensation in your eardrums--I don't know if my mutilated body could live with itself!"

  George turned on the stereo, cranking up some classic Metallica to drown him out.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lycanthrope Chatter

  "Holy crap, look at all of those things." Lou pointed out the window at where eight or nine alligators were sunning themselves along the edge of the water. The wretched creatures were all along
Tamiami Trail--Lou had stopped counting about an hour ago when he reached one hundred, much to George's relief--but that was the most they'd seen at once. The fact that they were on the other side of a fence didn't provide much comfort.

  "That's why I'd never live in Florida," said George.

  "The gators?"

  "Yeah."

  "I don't think anybody ever gets eaten by them. Maybe in extreme cases, if somebody's dumb enough to go messing with them, but aside from that I think gator attacks are pretty rare."

  "Still, I wouldn't want to live around them."

  "We've got rats in New York."

  "Rats don't bite people's legs off."

  "If you lived in Florida, I can almost guarantee you'd never get your leg bit off by an alligator, whereas in New York City, I can almost guarantee you will get your car crapped on by a pigeon. Which is worse?"

  "I'd rather take the one-hundred-percent chance on pigeon crap than the one-percent chance on an alligator bite."

  "I think it's way less than one-percent."

  "Any percent is unacceptable."

  "It's probably not even one in a million. So what's that...one percent would be one in a hundred, so you'd times it by, uh...ten thousand?" Lou frowned as if mentally checking his math. "One ten-thousandth of a percent chance of getting a leg bit off by an alligator. That's pretty slim."

  "They also have hurricanes."

  "Again, low odds."

  "And it's too damn hot." George had grown up in Cleveland, and moved to New York City in his late twenties. As far as he was concerned, the entire bottom half of the United States could just fall off into the ocean.

  "I completely agree about the heat. That's what should keep you away from Florida--the climate, not the alligators and hurricanes."

  "Are you two entertaining yourselves?" asked Ivan.

  George turned around and glared at him. "Yeah, it's called a conversation. Do you have a problem with it?"

  "No, no, by all means, continue your insipid conversation."

  "We're driving across this miserable state on a road that has nothing to look at but alligators. Why shouldn't we talk about alligators? If we drive past an anti-abortion billboard, we'll be sure to have a spirited philosophical debate for your entertainment, but for now it's alligators and pigeon crap. Are you going to be okay with that?"

  "Sure. Go right ahead."

  George grinned. "You didn't think I'd know what 'insipid' meant, did you?"

  "Nope. Surprised the hell out of me."

  "Well I do. Fuck you, werewolf."

  Ivan settled back against the bars of his cage. "You know, if I was a werewolf, this cage wouldn't hold me. I'd be picking my teeth with your ribs in about thirty seconds."

  "Is that so?"

  "Yep."

  "Then I'd deserve it, because I would've let my guard down and failed to take the necessary precautions. If you do that, you deserve to have your ribs used as toothpicks. But Lou and I, we don't let our guard down like that. Would you like an example?"

  "By all means."

  "Right now, I want nothing more than to smack that smirk right the hell off your face. Not torture you, not beat you bloody--just smack you really, really hard. If we pulled off to the side of the road, I am ninety-nine point nine-nine percent sure that I could get in this smack with no danger to myself, and then we could proceed on our merry little way. But even though it would give me intense pleasure to do this, I'm not going to. Instead, we're going to continue to drive your werewolf ass to Tampa, just like we're supposed to."

  "Then I salute you," said Ivan, saluting him. "A lesser man would have succumbed, but not the mighty George."

  "You've become kind of sarcastic all of a sudden."

  "Hey, if I can't appeal to your common sense or your sense of decency, I might as well be a dick for the rest of the ride. How are we doing on gas?"

  "No need to worry yourself about the gas situation. We've got everything under control."

  "I'd hate to be stranded out here. I know how concerned you are about the alligators."

  George glanced at the GPS. "We're going to get gas in a few minutes at someplace called Hachiholata. Nice Indian name."

  "Native American," said Lou. "Indians are from India."

  "I thought 'native' was offensive?"

  "No, 'native' is offensive to people in the jungle with spears, like if you say 'the natives are restless.' Native American is fine. Did you know that the word 'midget' is offensive?"

  "To Native Americans?"

  "Very funny. To a little person, the word 'midget' is as offensive as the n-word to a black person. Can you believe that? You hear midget, midget, midget all the time, and it's like saying n-word, n-word, n-word. If a politician said the n-word, his career would be over, but he could probably say 'midget'--hell, he could probably tell a midget joke--and he'd be fine."

  "Can other midgets say midget?"

  "I don't know. But I don't say it. It's not their fault they were born like that."

  "So anyway," George said to Ivan, "we're stopping for gas in a few minutes. Does that make you feel better?"

  "It does indeed. Can we get a burger while we're there?"

  "No."

  "Come on, I'm starving."

  "No."

  "You can just toss it through the bars."

  "No."

  "What am I going to do, throw a deadly bun at you?"

  "You can't have a burger. Drop it."

  "It's pretty sad that a couple of big strong guys like you are scared of a man in a cage."

  "We're not scared of you."

  "Yeah, you are. You're scared that if you toss me a hamburger and fries I'll somehow use them to my advantage. That, my friend, is fear. You have to be pretty damn afraid of somebody for them to intimidate you with a sack of fast food."

  "What about those overcooked fries? Those tiny sharp hard ones at the bottom of the bag? You palm one of those, we let our guard down--smack! French fry in the eyeball."

  Ivan stared at him for a long moment. "You know, I can't tell if you're kidding or not."

  "I'm kidding, but you still don't get any food."

  "See? Fear. Knee-shaking, bone-chilling fear. It's okay, we all have our phobias--it's not your fault that yours is a helpless man in a cage. I'm going to take it as a compliment."

  "Is this supposed to be the part where my masculinity is so threatened that I give you a burger just to prove I'm not scared?"

  "I wasn't thinking about your masculinity, necessarily, but that was the general idea, yeah."

  "I'll make you a deal, werewolf. If you can go ten full minutes without talking, we'll buy you a value meal."

  "Seriously?"

  "Well, I was serious, but you just talked."

  "Prick."

  "Now I'm going to buy the biggest, juiciest burger they've got, with mayo and ketchup and onions and bacon and maybe even bleu cheese, and I'm going to eat it right in front of you. Do you prefer fries or onion rings?"

  "Onion rings."

  "I'm going to get those, too. Big greasy ones, with just the right amount of breading. Some places use way too much breading, so it's like you're eating fried dough, but I'll make sure that these onion rings are perfect." George felt kind of guilty after he said that. He normally didn't behave like this, but something about Ivan just annoyed the living hell out of him.

  Ivan smiled. "You both realize that you're going to die today, right?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "You heard me. We're all having a grand old time right now, busting each other's chops, kidding around like best buddies, but what you two don't realize is that you're in hell. You're burning in hell right now and you can't even feel the flames. If you walked right up to the devil and tugged on his horns, your soul could not be more damned than it is right now."

  "I don't think that's how damnation works," said George. "I think God has to do it or you have to make some kind of deal for vast wealth or something." He nudged Lou. "Did you mak
e any deals with the devil recently that I should be made aware of?"

  "If I had, we sure wouldn't be spending our day driving this loudmouth across Florida."

  George looked back at Ivan. "Sorry. Your intimidation tactic didn't work."

  "A pity."

  "Intimidation is a big part of how I make my living, so let me give you some pointers. First of all--and this is a big one, Ivan, so write it down--when you're trying to intimidate your opponent, the most important thing to remember is to not be locked in a cage in his van. If you fail to follow that rule, your chances at a successful intimidation attempt drop to just about nil. Did you write it down?"

  "Unfortunately, I don't have a writing utensil."

  "Well, then just try to remember it. Your 'hell' speech works much better when you're not in a cage, that's all I'm saying."

  "You're a confident man, George. I admire that. I enjoy licking up blood that comes from a confident man."

  "That's gross."

  Ivan nodded. "Yes, it is. Also irrelevant, since what I'm really going to do is set off this explosive device that's strapped to my left leg."

  George felt a sudden flash of panic. He couldn't help it. Then he immediately relaxed--the little creep was just messing with him. "Oh, really?"

  "Yes."

  "Bateman captured you and caged you up without realizing that you had a bomb on your leg?"

  "You've had me in the car for two hours without realizing it."

  George looked at Ivan's leg. There didn't seem to be a bulge, but...

  "I call bullshit."

  "Or maybe Bateman knows about it. Maybe we just haven't reached the designated detonation point yet."

  "Or perhaps you're conversing out of your ass."

  "Aren't you going to order me to pull up my pant leg?"

  "Nope."

  "Not going to pull a gun on me?"

  "I might pull a gun on you if you don't shut up, but I'm not going to do it to make you pull up your pant leg."

  The female voice of the GPS announced that they had one mile left until their exit.