The Devil's bed

Bo felt his hand rising under the power of another hand. An alien finger wormed its way into his mouth, prying his jaws apart. The finger tasted of leather.

Bo bit down hard.

“Jesus, God,” the voice screamed. “He tried to bite my finger off.”

Bo dimly aimed the gun in the direction of the voice and he fired. The sound of confusion followed, the clatter of upended furniture.

“Move, goddamn it,” someone shouted.

Two figures, vague in Bo’s vision, merged with the dark near the back of the house. A door slammed shut. Everything fell quiet.

Slowly, Bo stood, wavering in his stance, trying to pull his senses together. His head hurt and his eyes still felt heavy. He took a step forward, and he stumbled, but not from his own weakness. He looked back at what he’d tripped over. His heart nearly broke.

Diana Ishimaru lay at his feet, her eyes half open. Had it not been for the small, bloody hole in her forehead, Bo might have thought she was simply staring at the ceiling. Although he knew it was useless, he reached out and felt at her neck for the pulse that was not there. From beneath her head, from the exit wound Bo knew would be large and ugly, blood leaked, spreading across her clean beige carpet, staining it steadily fiber by fiber.

“No,” Bo cried. “God, no.”

He stood up and gripped the gun tightly in his hand. He wanted to kill the men who’d done this. He wanted to blow their fucking hearts right out of their fucking chests.

He stumbled toward the dark at the rear of the house where the men had fled. As his thinking cleared, he realized the uselessness of pursuing them. They were well gone by now. He looked back and saw that he’d tracked blood across the room. Her blood.

He stared down at the gun in his hand. It was a Sig Sauer. He checked the registration number. His Sig. And he was pretty sure that the only prints on it were his as well.

Slicing through the sound of the storm outside came the whine of a siren approaching. Someone had called the police.

chapter thirty-nine

Otter opened the side door of the church and stared as if Bo were an apparition straight from a nightmare.

“Christ, Spider-Man, you look like shit. You’re soaked to the bone.”

Bo stepped in out of the night and the rain. Barefoot and dripping wet, he stood before his friend.

“What happened to your shoes?”

“I was in a hurry.”

Otter looked past him at the wet, empty street. “Where’s your car?”

“I walked.”

“From your place? Barefoot? In this rain?”

“I need to sit down,” Bo said.

Otter shut and locked the door. “Come on downstairs. We’ll get you into something dry.”

It was a big, stone church, quiet and deserted at that hour. They walked past vacant pews dimly illuminated by a single light above the altar. Otter opened a door to a stairway and they descended to the basement. They crossed through a large gathering room with a kitchen off to one side, then they snaked down a couple of hallways, past the boiler room, and through an open door that let them into Otter’s quarters.

The room, whitewashed cinder block, reminded Bo of a monk’s cell. A narrow bed, a table and two chairs, a chest of drawers straight from the Salvation Army, a small kitchen area with a compact refrigerator, a sink, and a short counter on which sat a microwave and an ancient-looking electric coffee percolator. Through a door at the other end, Bo spied a tiny shower stall and a toilet. Plants hung in every corner, Otter’s own touch that mitigated the austerity of the place. Despite what Bo knew must be a lack of direct sunlight, the plants seemed to be thriving.

“Get out of those wet things,” Otter said. “I’ll be right back.”

He left the room and Bo stripped off the sweats Ishimaru had given him. Otter came back in a few minutes with an armload of folded things that included pants, shirts, socks, tennis shoes, and even a clean pair of boxer shorts.

“You prayed up a miracle?” Bo asked.

“Donations. We’re collecting for a mission in Africa.” He took Bo’s wet clothes and hung them in the bathroom. “You look like you could use a cup of java.” Otter went to the cupboard above the sink and brought out a can of Folgers. He started coffee percolating.

“The police will be looking for me,” Bo said.

“You do something criminal, Spider-Man? Thought you’d outgrown that behavior.”

Over his second cup of coffee that night and dressed in his second ensemble of borrowed clothing, Bo laid out for Otter what had happened.

At the end, Otter shook his head. “And I thought I was the one who saw spooks everywhere.”

“I know it sounds crazy, Otter. I can imagine what the police would say.”

“You got to tell ’em, Spider-Man, no matter how crazy it sounds. You got to let somebody know.”

“Nobody’s going to listen to me. I’d end up in a locked cell, and right now I don’t want to be anyplace NOMan could find me.”

“What do you think they’re up to?”

Despite the coffee, Bo wanted to lie down. He felt weary in every muscle, his feet were bruised, and he knew his thinking was fuzzy and desperate.