"I wasn't planning on telling anyone, Tom. It's not their business and it's not my business."

"Good boy."

"Are we done? I have school in a few hours."

"Almost. I just need to make sure we really understand each other, okay?"

Before Ben could respond, Tom landed a fist in his solar plexus and knocked the wind from his body. Ben had never been a fighter. He didn't have any plans on becoming one, either. He dropped to his knees and tried to suck in a breath, but it didn't happen.

Tom helped him along with a knee across his cheek. Ben was already seeing constellations when his head rebounded off the door. That was pretty much all she wrote on the subject. Ben fell flat against the ground, the ringing in his head enough to make him wonder if he'd been permanently damaged.

The ugly blond giant with the acne scars leaned down and appraised his condition. Apparently he wasn't quite satisfied with his handiwork, because he kicked Ben in the ribs, and then in the stomach, the crotch, and the upper thigh.

"I'm glad we had this chance to talk, Ben. I feel much better about the situation than I did before." He crouched over Ben and looked down at him with malignant eyes. "Remember, it's our little secret. But you know what? Just to show there are no hard feelings, I can give you a night with Maggie for half-price. Would you like that?"

The nausea rolled through his stomach and mingled with the agony in his testicles.

"You give it some thought. Trust me, she's an amazing fuck."

Ben closed his eyes, wishing he could come up with a properly obnoxious retort, and settling instead for not puking out his spleen. His eyes stayed closed until Maggie woke him up.

"Shit, Ben." She was looking down at him, her eyes worriedly checking the damage to his face and head. "What happened to you?"

"Tom came by. We talked."

"That prick. He's a fucking animal." She took his arm and helped him sit up. The axis of the universe didn't completely fall away, but it sure felt to Ben like it wanted to. He coughed several times and leaned his head back against the door, hoping he wouldn't make himself look like more of a loser and hurl. "Come on, let's get you inside." She offered her hands and he took them. Maggie pulled and he leaned into it, letting her give him the much-needed boost.

A few minutes later she was helping him to his bedroom again. "We gotta stop meeting like this." He broke a smile and looked at her face, her perfect face, now marred by her anger. "People are gonna talk."

"Shut up," she was smiling as she said it. "I'm trying to stay pissed off."

"Okay. Shutting up now." He sat down hard on the bed and felt the room spin a bit.

"You don't look good. I'm gonna call you an ambulance."

"No. Don't do that. They'll have to tell the cops."

"So?"

"You don't need the grief if I talk to the cops." He lay back on his bed and clutched at the sides of the mattress to make the spinning go away. "I just need to rest."

"Why would there be trouble for me if you talked to the police?"

She wasn't getting it. He wasn't really in the mood to discuss it with her. So he closed his eyes, and a few moments later he was asleep again.

III.

Some plans don't work out the way you want them to, no matter how good they look on paper. Brian Freemont knew that going into his excursion to the campus, but he'd tried anyway and met with resounding failure.

He hadn't figured that at a potted ivy university like Winslow Harper he would have trouble finding just one of the girls he'd had celebrations with before. He was mistaken. If any of his previous conquests were there, they were doing a great job of not being seen. The closest he came to finding a familiar face was the girl from the church the morning before, and while he wanted to get to know her better, he also didn't think he could intimidate that one. Maybe if he was in uniform, but not in his street clothes. And there was something weird about her: every time he saw her, there were crows all over the place.

So after spending most of the day on the campus and looking at what he could not touch, he'd decided to call it a day and head off for a couple of beers. Half a keg or so later at the Rusty Scupper, he ran across Boyd and Holdstedter, the detectives on his wife's case, as they were coming into the restaurant with the homicide detectives, Bob Longwood-the walking mountain-and Nancy Whalen, who was still on Brian's list of most fuckable cops.

He smiled at them as he was heading for the door.

As an afterthought he looked at Boyd and said, "Heard you had another disappearance."

"Yeah, we did." Boyd pinned him to the wall with his eyes. For a short little guy, he had a lot of attitude. "But we also found the body of one of our missing college students, so it's all balancing out."

Somewhere a roller coaster was dropping the apex of its first hill at high speed: Brian's stomach felt like it was in the front seat of that roller coaster. The beer he'd been drinking through the last few hours mingled with his steak dinner and threatened a violent rebellion.

"Really? Well, that's great. Not for the girl, of course, but wonderful."

Boyd looked at him for three heartbeats without saying a word, and then he smiled. There was nothing friendly or jovial about the way Boyd's lips pulled into a curl. "Yeah, the best part is, the perp left evidence."

"Really?" Forget roller coasters; his stomach lurched hard to the left and then to the right before it decided to just quiver and churn.

"Yeah," Boyd nodded and Brian was vaguely aware of the other three detectives looking at him, and each and every one of them was smirking; little I-know-a-secret expressions on their faces. "The moron left a condom behind. Just chock-full of nice, genetic tests waiting to happen." The detective came closer, and looked up into his eyes. "I got a rush job put on it, 'cause I think I'm close to getting this one solved."

All the happy had officially been drained out of Brian's day, and his stomach decided enough was enough: he muttered an "excuse me" to the detectives and ran for the men's room at high speed. He shoved the door open, knocking the man on the other side off his feet, and before he could apologize he was on his hands and knees in the room and vomiting across the tiles and the legs of the man he'd run down.

The man was understandably upset. "Jesus Christ!" He pushed himself back across the tiles with an expression of disgust plastered across his face.

Someone chuckled from the doorway behind him, but Brian was far too busy to bother with the distraction. His stomach seemed determined to remove every last iota of food and drink he'd had since graduating high school.

"You're a mess, Freemont," Holdstedter's voice was not at all sympathetic. "Call a cab. I see you get into your car and I'll lock you in cuffs myself."

"Uhhh," the voice came from near the sink. "This freak is a cop?" Brian looked at the man standing up in front of him. He was busily pulling off his blue jeans and soaking the vomit-crusted legs in the sink. A pair of bright pink boxers adorned his hips and hid the upper portion of his hairy legs; his reflection was glaring at Brian. There wasn't a part of the exposed skin that wasn't covered with a pelt of black hair, except for his face and the top of his head, which gleamed in the bright lights.

"Yes, sir. He is. Not his proudest moment, or ours, either."

"No kidding?" Sarcasm made the vomit victim's voice even more nasal. "What's your captain's name?"

"O'Neill, sir. James O'Neill."

"Well, Captain O'Neill can expect a call. I don't know if there are charges I can file, but I'm definitely filing a complaint." The man was pissed and not at all thrilled about wringing his jeans out.

"Technically, I could book him for Drunk and Disorderly if you wanted." Holdstedter was being very professional, very helpful. Brian wanted him dead.

From a considerable height advantage, the civilian looked down at him and a smile that was far too similar to Boyd's spread across his face. "Yeah. Do that. Bust him. Please."

Holdstedter looked down at him, too, and was reaching for his cuffs. "You go right ahead and wash up, Freemont. Then we're gonna take a ride."

As it turned out, the detective did not actually haul Brian off to the processing center. He saved that for a couple of the beat cops he called to the scene.

The four detectives were all watching him as he was taken away. None of them laughed, but all of them were still smiling at him.

Life sucked.

He was released from the drunk tank at ten A.M. He was home half an hour later. He showered and shaved and then went back to sleep.

The official reprimand was waiting for him on Captain O'Neill's desk when he got to work.

Life sucked royally.

IV.

Alan Tripp woke up in a hospital room. His chest felt like it was on fire and his hand was a shrieking symphony of pain. A male nurse was looking at him with wide blue eyes, and as soon as he woke up, the man moved over to take his pulse and blood pressure. He didn't know why the man was bothering: there was already a heart monitor and cuff attached to his left arm. He could hear the constant, steady beeps that mirrored the beating of his heart.

"How are you feeling, Mr. Tripp?" Friendly and professional, just like the ones that dealt with him when Avery was born.

Avery. Thinking about his son made the room swim into clearer focus. "I'm fine," he lied. He was far from that particular state of existence. He doubted he'd ever be anywhere near fine again.

"There are some police officers who would like to talk to you." The man looked at him with sympathy. "Do you feel up to talking to them?"

No. No, he did not feel up to talking to the fucking police. He felt like crawling under the hospital bed and dying. "Sure."

Detectives Boyd and Holdstedter came into the room a few minutes later, both of them looking freshly scrubbed and well rested. They introduced themselves and the blond one poured him a Styrofoam cup full of deliciously cold water.

"Can you tell us what happened at your house, Mr. Tripp?" The shorter of the two men asked the question, his face almost masklike.

"My son killed my wife and then ran away with her body."

Detective Boyd's voice was doubtful. "Your son Avery?" He recognized the man. It had taken a moment for him to connect the pissed-off detective he'd seen during the search for Avery with the soft-spoken man standing in front of him now.

"Yes. Avery did it. I saw him."

"Do you have any idea why?"

"I think he was feeding on her."

Both detectives stared at him in horrified silence for at least half a minute. He understood how they felt.

Finally Holdstedter spoke up. "Feeding on her? He was eating her flesh?"

"I don't know. She was dead, her blood was all over her neck and the bed and his mouth and I think he was eating Meghan." He heard the sound of his voice rising, scaling up in octaves and volume alike, but he didn't seem to have any control over the words or volume. All of the horror of the previous night crawled back into his mind and left him ready to scream, so he did. "My little boy killed her and started eating her fucking neck, detective! He had blood all over his mouth and down on his shirt and his goddamned teeth were pink with it!"

The whole room went dark red, shading to near black at the edges of his vision. The two detectives looked at him with doubtful expressions and his excitement grew in leaps and bounds. "He wasn't Avery, but he looked like him! He was too strong! No one is that strong, you hear me? No one in the world is that strong! I tried to choke him to death and he bitch-slapped me! That goddamned freak threw me out a window!"

Somewhere near his left side the heart monitor was beeping erratically, and his vision went darker still, redder, more like the color of his wife's life as it drained all over the bed.

He was irritated by the sound of the monitor so he reached out and slapped at the thing, doing little more than bruising his fingertips. He grunted and reached for it again, this time pushing the device and the attached IVs to the ground. The needle in his arm pulled free and he barely even noticed. It was just one more pain and it didn't matter, not anymore . . . nothing mattered except that he find his son and punish him for what he'd done to Meghan. He had to know where her body was and where Avery's body must surely be, because there was no way that Avery had done what he knew the boy had done.

The nurse reached for him to calm him down and Alan screamed at the man for his efforts. "Get away from me! I want Meghan! I want Avery! You find them goddamn you!"

He looked toward Boyd and reached for the man to shake him to make his case clear. He wanted his family back because something was wrong around these parts.

His hands touched the lapels of the detective's jacket and were knocked away hard and fast. Before he could grab a second time the other detective was on him, wrenching his hands away from the shorter one and pulling them behind his back.

It didn't matter. None of it did. Alan laughed, because he couldn't make the words come out anymore, and he flexed, pulling his arms free from the larger man's grip. He was still turning to face the blond when Holdstedter's fist slammed into his face and knocked him off his feet.

He was still screaming and laughing and crying out his frustrations when the two men pinned him to the ground and called for restraints. The blood had soaked through his bandaged hand, and the sight of the dark red oozing through the cotton was enough to send him over the edge. He kicked Holdstedter in the balls, and swung his body around, determined to get out of the room and the building so he could find his family and bring them back together.

He didn't want any of this, didn't want to piss off the cops or hurt anyone, but his mind was screaming signals at him that didn't make sense and he couldn't stop himself.

Boyd stopped him instead. Alan fought back for several seconds as the detective slipped in behind him and got him into a chokehold. He was still fighting all the way back into unconsciousness.

V.

"He's a mental case. Elementary school kids do not go around eating their mothers."

"He kicks like a mule."

"I wouldn't know. I kept my balls away from him."

"Love the sympathy, man." Danny was walking like he'd been horseback riding for the last week.

"Oh, I got sympathy for you. I'm not even gonna tell the girls who give you the eye that your nuts are broken." They stepped out of the hospital and into the parking deck. Boyd reached for a cigar.

"You're all fuckin' heart."

"Yeah, I know. I'm an old softy." He plunked the cigar into his mouth and ruminated on it for a few minutes as they walked.

"Something happened to him. He wasn't like this last week."

"You see his hand?"

"The bloody one?"

"Yeah, Danny, the bloody one. I watched when they changed the bandages."

"I was a little busy trying to find my testicle."

"You get that taken care of okay, did you?"

"Yeah, they're both there now."

"Anyway. He got the shit bit out of his hand. Either he was killing his wife or son and they bit him, or one of them went crazy."

"He didn't kill his wife or son. I'd put money on that and kiss Whalen's husband."

"You going all sweet on Nancy's husband, Danny?"

"Not as sweet as you are on Nancy."

"Shut your mouth. That sort of shit just causes troubles."

"It's mutual. I thought she was gonna crawl under the table and give you a hummer right in the fucken restaurant."