He found it, placed on a small nail hammered into the top of the windowsill.

The key fit the dead bolt on the back door, but Valentine was able to open the door only an inch or two. A heavy chain across the inside of the door barred further progress. He reached into his bag of tricks for the rusty crowbar from the patrol car's trunk, fixed it to the chain near its mounting on the doorjamb, and pulled. The chain parted with a loud ting.

Valentine entered the kitchen behind the business end of the shotgun. The tabletop was a mess of dirty dishes and paperwork. The main light over the table was still on, bathing the littered octagonal surface in a puddle of yellow. A heavy electric typewriter sat before a chair, a cold mug of coffee next to it, nestled like a small brown pond in a forest of empty beer bottles. A raspy snoring echoed from the living room.

He looked at the typed report on the table, flipping to the second page. Apparently it was a statement by the one patroller standing sentry outside Touchet's VIP suite door at the New Universal Church building. A paragraph caught Valentine's eye.

When the cook entered with Mr. Touchet's nightcap of coffee, I heard him scream. I drew my gun and entered the bedroom. Mr. Touchet was facedown on the bed, nude except for a pair of socks. The young woman was trying to force up the window of the bedroom, not knowing that it was nailed shut. As I entered, she smashed it with an ashtray but I was able to restrain her.

After she was handcuffed and held down by the cook, I examined Mr. Touchet for a pulse.

He was dead. He had a steak knife handle sticking out of the back of his head right were the neck meets the skull. His back was coated with some kind of oil and he lay on a towel. There was very little blood on the towel. Mr. Touchet's bra.s.s ring had been removed from his finger and was placed around the handle of the knife.

The young woman was screaming obscenities at us, so I hit her. She had not been injured by Mr. Touchet; the bruise on her face was from me.

Valentine walked to the living room and looked in. Virgil Ames lay stretched out on a leather sofa, sungla.s.ses finally off, pistol belt looped around his arm. The air around him smelled of beer breath and stale flatulence. Beyond, in the gla.s.s turret-room, he could make out Maj.

Michael Flanagan. The major slept in his chair, phone in his lap, widespread feet propped up on his desk.

The prowling Wolf shifted the shotgun to his left hand and took up the parang. No making friends with this dog, he thought, putting the wedge-shaped point just above Virgil's Adam's apple. At the swift inward thrust, the late Virgil Ames opened his eyes. Valentine wiped his knife on the rich leather sofa and moved toward the office.

Major Flanagan woke when the blued steel of the shotgun barrel poked him between the eyes. As Flanagan sputtered into surprised wakefulness, Valentine changed the angle of the shotgun barrel, pointing it between Flanagan's outstretched legs.

"You wanted to see me, Major?" he asked.

"What the-?... Virgil!" Flanagan shouted.

"Dead, sir," Valentine reported. "Better speak up, or you'll be joining him in five seconds.

Tell me, is Molly Carlson still alive?"

"Virgil!" Flanagan cried.

Valentine stuck the shotgun toward Flanagan's screaming mouth. "Major, your screaming is not doing you any good, and it's giving me a headache, so cut it out. Or I might cut your tongue out and have you write down your answers."

"f.u.c.k you, Saint Croix. We don't just have Molly, we've got all the Carlsons, as of eleven this evening. If you back out of here and never let me see your face again, they might live.

You might even live."

The powerful, spearlike thrust of the shotgun shattered two incisors and left a worm-tail of lip dangling as it hung from a thin strip of bleeding skin. The major's hands flew to his wounded mouth, and Valentine clipped him on the side of the head with the shotgun b.u.t.t.

The major fell over, knocked senseless. Valentine busied himself with handcuffs and rope.

The house was dark when Major Flanagan came to. Valentine splashed cold coffee into his face. Groans rose from the Quisling just before he vomited all over himself. The paroxysm showed how securely he was tied into his office chair.Handcuffs fixed his wrists against the arms of the chair, and heavy lengths of rope coc.o.o.ned his chest and shoulders into the back. His legs were tucked under the chair and secured by ankle shackles with a short length of chain winding behind the central column that attached the chair itself to the little circle of wheels below.

No hint of morning could be seen through the windows of the office. Valentine stood next to the desk, a breathing shadow.

A metallic ping sounded, and Valentine picked up the silver cigar lighter, waving the lit end hypnotically in front of Flanagan's face. Its dim red glow reflected off piggish, angry eyes.

"Okay, Uncle Mike, do you want to talk to me, or do I have to use this thing?"

"Talk about what?"

"Where Molly is."

"She's in the Order building in Monroe."

Valentine grabbed his pinkie and thrust the cigar lighter over it. An audible hiss was instantly drowned out by the major's scream. Valentine pulled away the lighter and stuck it back into its electric socket, pushing it down to turn it back on.

"Wrong answer. I read some of the papers in the kitchen. According to your report, you put her in a car for Chicago."

Ping.

"Why Chicago, Major?"

"We called the Illinois Eleven as soon as it happened. That's what they told us to do, send her to Chicago."

"Where in Chicago?" Valentine asked, extracting the lighten.

"How should I know? The Illinois Eleven don't like being questioned any more than the Madison Kurians," Flanagan said, watching the lighter wave back and forth in the darkness.

"No! G.o.d, Saint Croix, I don't know."

This last was addressed to the approach of the lighter to his left hand. Valentine forced Flanagan's fist open and inserted his index finger into the cigar lighter. The smell of burnt flesh wafted up into his nostrils as he ground the glowing socket home. Flanagan screamed again, and Valentine withdrew the lighter. He pressed it back into the socket, reheating it.

"The pain will stop as soon as you tell me where she is in Chicago. You want me to stick your d.i.c.k in this next?"

The tip of Flanagan's forefinger was a blackened lump of flesh and blisters. Even the fingernail was burned back.

Ping.

"I think they're putting her in the Zoo," Flanagan gabbled, seeing Valentine's hand move to pick up the lighter. "I've been there, it's on the north side of Chicago, near the lake. Lots of boats tied up permanent."

"Why there? I thought they just put everyone in the Loop when they wanted to do away with them." "They knew Touchet. They asked me if she was a real looker. I told them about her. I mean, if she weren't my niece, one of the patrollers would have raped her a long time ago.

Saint Croix, you haven't been around much. I've risked my job-my life even-to help my sister and her family. Molly was never going to be hurt." Sweat coated Flanagan's face, wetting his bushy eyebrows and running down his neck in rivulets.

"So what's this Zoo?"

"It's in a place called Lincoln Park. I've got a little map of Chicago in my desk, bottom drawer. Even has phone numbers for cab companies. The Zoo is... a big brothel, that kind of thing. There are a lot of bars there; they do sports, too. Kind of a wild place, anything goes, like Old Vegas."

Valentine popped up the lighter and left it resting lightly in its socket. "Good enough, Flanagan. There's one more thing I want before I go. I need a travel warrant made out for one Private Pillow. Giving him a week's leave or whatever you call it to go to Chicago. And some money to spend."

Flanagan's ma.s.sive eyebrows rose in surprise. "Madison paper's no good there. Our guys bring things to barter. Jewelry, beer, food, stuff like that. But what you're thinking is nuts.

I'd like to see Molly alive as much as her parents, but it ain't going to happen. There're hundreds of soldiers from Illinois, Indiana-Michigan, even. I've heard of officers coming all the way from Iowa and Minnesota to go to the Zoo. Even if you can find her, you'll never get her out. The Black Hole's a one-way-"

"Black Hole?" Valentine asked.

"I dunno where she would go for sure. But the Black Hole is kind of a prison. Women don't last long there. They're used... treated badly. Some of the men like that kind of thing. Never went there myself, but you hear stories."

"Just tell me where to find the papers to fill out."

Flanagan gave detailed instructions, and soon Valentine had his travel warrant. The major applied his seal and signed it; Valentine had freed the man's uninjured right hand to do so.

The major wiped his face with his good hand. "You're tough, Saint Croix. I had no idea."

So he thinks fawning is his ticket to safety. Interesting. Has it gotten him out of jams with the Kurians? Valentine thought. He put his new papers and the folded map in one of the front pockets of his shirt. He then walked over to the front of the desk. The shotgun leaned up against one of the carved wooden lions.

"Take my car. It's in the garage, and the keys are in my breast pocket here. I'll tell them you went north. I'll keep the Carlsons under lock and key for a few days, then release them.

We'll shout questions at 'em for a few hours; don't worry, they'll be fine. Of course, Molly can't ever come back here, but I'm sure you can get her somewhere safe up in the woods if your plan works. Watch yourself in Chicago, though. Must be a hundred Reapers there, easy. But if..."

The major stopped in openmouthed amazement as Valentine brought up the shotgun, pointing it at his head. "No, Saint Croix. Be fair! I gave you everything..."

Valentine put the b.u.t.t tightly to his shoulder and placed his finger on the trigger. "You once said that if it were up to you, you'd hand me over to the Reapers for not having a work card.

Well, now that it's up to me, I'm going to follow a little rule we have in the Wolves. I call it Special Order Twelve, section Double Ought. Any high-rank Quislings bearing arms against their fellow men shall suffer death by firing squad." "You said you wouldn't kill me!" Flanagan shrieked, holding out his hand, palm outward.

"I said the pain would stop," Valentine corrected, pulling the trigger. The dark room exploded in noise and a flash of blue-white light like an old-fashioned flashbulb. At the last instant, Flanagan flung his arm across his face, but the blast of buckshot tore through his arm, head, and the back of the chair. Bone, blood, brain, and wood from the chair splattered the brick wall behind the chair.

Valentine went through the house, filling a pillowcase with anything of value he could find: Virgil Ames's sungla.s.ses and beaded pistol belt, Flanagan's cheroots and electric lighter, a solid silver cigarette box, gold jewelry belonging to the missing Mrs. Flanagan. The liquor cabinet contained two bottles of bonded whiskey. They joined the other contents of the pillowcase.

He went into the furnished bas.e.m.e.nt and flicked on one of the electric lights. A pool table filled one end and a small workshop the other. Three rifles hung from an ornate gun-rack, set between two eight-point deer heads. Valentine's eyes lit on an old Remington Model 700. He shouldered it. Then he crossed to the workshop and found a tin of kerosene. He opened it and splashed it along the pool table, carpet, and wood paneling. He struck a match and tossed it into the puddled liquid on the pool table. Flames began to race across the green baize surface. Sure that the fire was well on its way, Valentine climbed back up the stairs.

Frat pulled the car out of the field and onto the little path leading back to the road. "Now what, Lieutenant?" he asked. Oddly enough, Frat had asked no questions about what had transpired in his uncle's house.

"Where can I catch the next train to Chicago? Not a station, though. I mean to jump on."

Frat considered the problem. "The line connecting Dubuque goes right through Monroe. A train goes along that every day. Takes you right into Chicago, or the meatpacking plant, that is. You'd be in the city by tonight. You'll know you're close when you go through this big stretch of burned-out houses. Reapers burned out a huge belt around the city. Great Suburban Fire, it was called. Happened before I was born. Then they did something to the soil so nothing but some weeds grow. Mile after mile of old street and rubble. Of course, I was pretty young when I saw it. But you'll never find Molly in the Loop. You could look for days. How you gonna get her out again?"

"They didn't put her in the Loop. She's in someplace called the Zoo."

Frat smacked his head. "Zot me! I shoulda thought of that! They would put someone who looks like her there. My momma used to tell my older sister, "What you trying to do, get a job at the Zoo?" whenever she didn't like what Phila was wearing."

"What else can you tell me about Chicago?"

Frat turned the car onto a road heading south. "It's big, really big. But what you got going for you is that there's people from all over, so strangers don't get noticed. If you cause any trouble, they grab you and throw you in the Loop. They use the old United States money there, too, but it has to be authorized. The bills they've authorized have a stamp on them, kind of like the stamp on our work cards. I'm pretty sure some of your people who fight the Kurians are there, but I don't know how you would ever find them. And I'd hide that big curved knife of yours. Too many of the soldiers know about those."

They reached a bend in the road. Frat pulled the patrol car to the side.

"Frat, you've been a great help. You know what to do now, right?" "Drive fast with all the lights on, like I'm hurrying somewhere," Frat recited. "Put the car in a ravine and then walk to that bridge. Go cross-country and keep out of sight. I think I can manage."

"I'm sure you can."

"All you have to do now is go south, and you'll hit the railroad tracks. They curve where they run along the Sugar River, and I bet they'll slow down. Lots of guys b.u.m rides. As long as you got ident.i.ty papers, you're okay getting into Chicago. Just take my advice and don't cause any trouble until you're sure you can get away with it. Getting out again isn't so easy.

They check the trains heading out for runners."

Valentine offered his hand, and Frat shook it. "Listen to Gonzo on the way back, pup. You can learn a lot from him."

"Yeah, he's cool. He thinks a lot of you, by the way. Says the Wolves in Zulu Company call you the Ghost."

"The what?"

"The Ghost. On account of you walk so smooth and quiet, like you're floating. And there's another reason: Mr. Gonzalez says you can tell when there are vampires around. He says it's spooky, but kinda comforting."

"The Ghost, huh? Well, have Gonzo tell them to keep their rifles clean and oiled, or I'll come back and haunt them. Good-bye, Frat."

"Good-bye, Lieutenant Valentine. Don't worry, I'll get everyone out, if Mr. Gonzalez just points the direction. You ain't the only one good at smellin' out Skulls."

While Valentine waited for the train in the morning shade beneath a willow, he ate from a bag of crackers and a brick of cheese he had taken from Flanagan's kitchen. He had already improvised a shoulder strap for his pillowcase of loot and admired the manufacturing on the stolen Remington rifle; he figured it would bring enough money for a bribe or two, or serve as one itself. He studied his map of Chicago, memorizing as many of the street names as he could. It must be quite a city, he thought. Over a hundred Reapers. Great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to die there.

Twelve

Chicago, October of the forty-third year of the Kurian Order: The Second City is still a town on the take. A resident twentieth-century Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist once suggested that the motto for the city should be "Where's Mine?" Nowhere is the art of bribery, corruption, and widespread beak-wetting more common than in the-Kurian- controlled, Quisling-run City of Big Shoulders. No one is even sure exactly how many Kurian Lords run the city, as the Kurians divide it not by geography but by business and property ownership. A Kurian Lord might control a steelworks in Gary, an automobile- parts plant on the West Side, several apartment buildings on the Gold Coast, and a few antiquated airplanes that fly out of O Hare. His Reaper avatars will travel among holdings, going into the Loop for regular feedings.

To prevent the Reapers from taking too much of an area's vital labor force, the Loop system was developed lifter twenty years of fractious and chaotic rule. The Kurians had little use for the high-rise business centers of the downtown, and after emptying the a.s.sorted museums and stores of anything they fancied, they created the walled enclave as a dumping ground for undesirables. Here the Reapers could feed without worrying about taking a vital technician or mechanic and starting a series of inter-Kurian vendettas that might escalate into a full-scale feud.

The workers of Chicago enjoy a security that few other communities under the Kurians know. But their existence depends on paying their way in old federal greenbacks. The dest.i.tute receive a quick trip into the Loop. But the elite Quislings who run the city for the Kurians ama.s.s sizable fortunes in a variety of barely legitimate ways.

One might wonder what the point of wealth is with the Kurians in control, but the Kurians have become infected with the viruslike corruption that seems to thrive in Chicago and are often bought off by their ostensible slaves. The top Quislings use their money to bribe the Kurians not with cash, but with 't.i.tal auras, the one thing the vampiric Kurians prize above all else. The Quislings buy captives from a soulless body of men and women called the Headhunters, who in turn buy them from wandering bounty hunters who lurk on the fringes of the Kurian territory, grabbing everyone they can. These latter- day fur trappers pick up strays in a circle moving clockwise down from northern Michigan, across southern Indiana and Illinois, and then up the eastern sh.o.r.es of the Mississippi to the northern woods of Wisconsin.

When a wealthy Quisling has turned over enough vital aura to the Kurians, a bra.s.s ring is awarded. Only in Chicago is this practice of "buying" bra.s.s rings allowed. With the security of cash and a bra.s.s ring, these robber-baron Quislings then retire to Ringland Parks, a twenty-mile stretch of stately homes along the sh.o.r.e of Lake Michigan just to the north of Chicago, the only large area of suburbs to survive the flames that desolated greater Chicagoland. But as bra.s.s rings cannot be pa.s.sed down to sons and daughters, their progeny are left with the tiresome task of doing it all over again.

Chicago has become what Vegas was to the pre-Kurian world: an anything-goes city where anything, including human life, can be bought or sold if the price is right.

The Chicago skyline looked to Valentine like the bones of a t.i.tanic animal carca.s.s. His position atop the freight train gave him an un.o.bstructed view as the train bore southeast, straight as an arrow in flight, toward the city. He would have felt naked and defenseless riding the rocking platform, clattering across the uneven points on the rail line, but for the companions scattered across the last few boxcars. Now and then other hitchers made the run-and-vault onto the line of cars.

He first spotted the skyline in the blackened ring of former suburbia that encircled the city like a burned-out belt. It reminded him of a picture of the town center of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb: nothing but rubble and cracked pavement. He wondered what the Kurians had done to the ground to poison the plant life; just dry-looking brown weeds and the occasional withered sapling grew from the bare patches of soil. He wondered why the Kurians wanted to create this vista of desolation. He asked an Illinoisan, a thirtyish man who had hopped on as the train left the hills north of Rockford.

"The Chicago Blight?" the man said, looking at the expanse as if seeing it for the first time.

"You got me. My brother is in the Iguard, and he says it's a no-man's-land between the Chicago Kurians and the Illinois Eleven. They depend on each other, but they had a big fight back when I was just five or six. Anyway, the Blight makes them refrain from wandering out of their territory to feed. Then I got a sister-in-law in Chicago, and she says it's to make getting out of Chicago harder. Guess burning everything was easier than building a wall that would have to run for fifty or sixty miles. But I've still heard of a few people managing to run across it in daylight. If they get lucky and dodge the Security Service and make it out by nightfall, I've heard of people escaping Chicago just using their legs. A lot of times they run right back, though; it's more dangerous downstate. I've been trying to get a good- paying job in Chicago for years, but I don't have the toke for a good position." "You don't have the toke? What's that?" Valentine asked.

"You must be on your first trip to Chicago, blue boy. A toke is like a tip, but it's more of a bribe. Money's the best, but it's got to be their authorized stuff. You try to palm off a bill you picked up in Peoria, and you're asking to get your face smashed in. Cigarettes are good tokes, too. And if you are doing anything major, like getting a cab ride or checking in to a hotel, you toke twice, once when you arrange it and again when you're done. If the first one is too small, they might blow you off and look for someone else. If the second is too small, they'll just swear at you, but you'd better not expect any more favors. I've seen fistfights over too small a toke at the end of a cab ride, so be careful. But getting back to my point: For me to get a decent factory job, I'd have to toke the doorman, the union boss, and the manager. Maybe a couple of managers. And those would be big tokes, in the thousands.

Hard to sc.r.a.pe up that kind of money on the farm."