Nevermore Page 2

  Which had been fine right up until the clerk asked why the two brothers had a big tin of salt in their hotel room, and Dean had gotten that wide-eyed look he got when somebody went off the script. With Sam watching and not even bothering to hide his grin, Dean had stammered for about half an hour before coming up with something about lactose intolerance. (“Dude,” Sam had said as they went back out to the car, retrieved tin in hand, “you do know that salt has, basically, nothing to do with lactose intolerance, right?” “Thank you, Mr. Wizard,” Dean had replied through clenched teeth.)

  Today, they were checking out and hitting the road, their latest job not having been a job at all.

  Dean was still talking as they headed out to the car. “But at least we got to see beautiful downtown South Bend.”

  “Yeah, real hot spot,” Sam muttered as Dean opened the trunk.

  “Hey, we go where the jobs take us.”

  “Or don’t. It really was a suicide, Dean. A normal, run-of-the-mill suicide.”

  Dean shrugged. “It happens.” He tossed his bag into the rear of the trunk, rolling it over the boxes of weapons and supplies. Sam did likewise, using only his left hand, as his right was still in a cast from when that zombie girl broke it back in Lawrence.

  Sam didn’t have the same attachment Dean did to the black 1967 Chevrolet Impala, the family car their father had passed on to Dean. (Then again, Sam sometimes thought he didn’t have the same attachment to his late girlfriend Jessica that Dean had to the Impala.) When the car was wrecked a couple of months back, Dean had rebuilt it pretty much from scratch, a process that took weeks of backbreaking effort.

  However, even Sam had to admit that the massive trunk was a great benefit, given that they lived their entire life out of this car. The rear of the voluminous trunk was taken up with three bags: Sam’s bag, Dean’s bag, and the laundry bag. That last one was starting to bulge.

  “We’re gonna need to do a laundry run soon, man,” Sam said.

  “Not here,” Dean said quickly. “I don’t think that cop was too thrilled with ace reporters Anderson and Barre. We’d better split before he decides to run my face through his computer.”

  Sam nodded in agreement. Dean was still wanted for a series of murders committed by a shapeshifter taking his form in St. Louis earlier that year, and there was just no way “a mutated freak who looked just like me did it” was going to fly with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

  Dean closed the trunk and they headed to the main office. Like most of the places the Winchesters stayed, the Bowles Motel and Lodge was dirt-cheap with minimal amenities. All they needed was a roof, a bed, and a working shower—though the latter was hit and miss with some of the places they stayed—and they weren’t exactly rolling in dough.

  Fighting demons and monsters and things that went booga-booga in the night was important, but it didn’t pay. They lived off credit card fraud, and Dean’s pool and poker winnings. That meant the Hyatt was not an option.

  They entered the shabby office, which had cracked wood paneling, a badly stained beige carpet, and a pockmarked front desk. An older woman sat behind that desk, puffing away on a cigarette while sitting under a red no smoking sign and reading a Dan Brown book. Her face was caked with enough makeup to allow her to attend a Halloween party as the Joker, and her hair was sprayed within an inch of its life into something that probably wanted to be a beehive. Sam was fairly sure he could have hit that hairdo with any weapon in the Impala’s trunk and not done a lick of damage to it. She wore a name badge that said monica.

  “Hey,” Dean said, “we’re checking out.”

  Monica took a final puff on the cigarette, then stubbed it out in the ashtray. “You’re Winwood, right?” she asked with a scratchy voice.

  Sam managed not to roll his eyes. Just once, Sam wished Dean would pick an inconspicuous alias.

  “That’s right,” Dean said with a smile. “We’re ready to check out.”

  “Yeah, there’s a problem. Your credit card was declined. I’m gonna need another one.”

  There was Dean’s wide-eyed look again, but this time Sam didn’t smile. “Declined. Really.” Dean looked at Sam helplessly, then turned back to Monica. “Could you try it again, please?”

  She gave Dean a withering look. “I tried it three times. That’s all they’ll allow.”

  “Did they say why?”

  “No, no reason. You wanna call the credit card company? You can use this phone.” She picked up the desk phone—which, Sam was appalled to see, was a rotary dial—and held it up for Dean to take.

  “Uh, no, that, uh—that won’t really help.”

  Sam realized why Dean was stalling. He had other credit cards, but none of them said Dean Winwood on them.

  Quickly, Sam stepped forward, reaching into his back pocket, and said, “I’ll get it.” He removed one of his own fake credit cards from his wallet and handed it to Monica.

  She took it and stared at it, which Sam had been hoping she wouldn’t do, since this one didn’t say Winwood either. “Thought you two was brothers.”

  Without missing a beat, Sam said, “We are, but I was adopted. By the time I tracked down my birth parents, they had both died, so I changed my name to McGillicuddy in tribute to them.”

  Monica’s face split into a rictus that Sam supposed could’ve been called a smile. “That’s so sweet of you. What a nice boy you are.” She ran the card through the machine, then entered the total for the three nights they stayed.

  The wait for the machine to check was interminable. Dean, to his credit, had recovered, and he had his best poker face on.

  Finally, after several eternities, the machine beeped and the word approved appeared on the small screen.

  “All right,” Monica said, still smiling, as the whirr of a printer could be heard under the desk. “Here’s your card back, Mr. McGillicuddy.”

  “Thank you,” Sam said, retrieving it and putting it back in his wallet.

  “Such good manners. Mr. and Mrs. Winwood obviously raised you both right.”

  Dean smiled. “Yes, ma’am, they did a bang-up job.”

  Monica then handed the printout, as well as the credit card machine’s receipt, to Sam. “Just sign here, and you can be on your way.”

  Once that was all done, they went back outside. “Nice save there, Sammich,” Dean said with a grin. “Y’know, I’m finally starting to get it.”

  Sam frowned. This sounded suspiciously like the beginning of a lengthy diatribe, the end of which would be a joke at Sam’s expense. “Get what?”

  “Well, Sammy, we grew up together, and that whole time, nothing about you ever screamed ‘lawyer’ at me. So when you told me that you were applying to law school, it kinda threw me. But I’ve been watching you the last year, and I think I figured it out.”

  Here it comes. Sam tried not to groan.

  “You can shovel manure as good as anyone I’ve ever met. That line you pulled on Monica there with the adoption? Beautiful. And with a straight face.”

  In fact, Sam’s skills at lying—both in terms of pretending to be someone else and also misleading people as to the true nature of his life and of the world itself—had been one of the things that attracted him to the law. His life as the child of a hunter of supernatural creatures, and of being trained to be a hunter himself, had given him these skills anyhow, and it only seemed natural to put them to good use.

  That wasn’t what he told his brother, though. “Yeah, I can pull the wool over people’s eyes. And I do most of the research and know most of the lore. And I’m good with the weapons and the hand-to-hand.” They arrived at the Impala, and Sam gave his brother a grin as he stepped up to the passenger door. “So, uh, what do I need you for, exactly?”

  Before Dean could construct a reply, his phone started playing Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.”

  “For that matter,” Sam added, “I’m the one who showed you how to download ringtones.”

  Pulling the cell phone out of his poc
ket, Dean scowled. “I would’ve figured it out eventually.” He flipped it open and glanced at the number, which caused his eyes to go even wider than they had in the office. Putting the phone to his ear, he said, “Ellen?”

  That surprised Sam. Ellen Harvelle ran a roadhouse that catered to hunters. He and Dean had recently learned that Ellen’s late husband died when he was on a hunt with their dad, and it put a bit of a strain on their relationship—especially since they only found out because Ellen’s young daughter Jo snuck out and went on a hunt with him and Dean against Ellen’s very strenuous objections.

  Years of listening to loud music and using firearms had played merry hell with Dean’s hearing, so he kept his cell’s volume up way too loud. That meant Sam could hear Ellen’s tinny voice over the phone’s speaker.

  “Listen,” she said, “I may have a job for you boys.”

  “Really? ’Cause—”

  “It’s for Ash. He wouldn’t ask himself, but I figure he did you two a favor, so you might be willing to do him one back.” Ellen seemed to be barreling through the conversation, not letting Dean get a word in.

  Or, at least trying not to. Keeping Dean quiet was usually a forlorn hope. “Sure, I guess.” He smirked. “Always had a soft spot for that mullet-head. What’s he need?”

  Ellen gave the particulars of the case to Dean, and did it in a lower voice, so Sam couldn’t make it all out. Ash was a deadbeat drunk who nonetheless was a genius and able to track demons via computer, a trick Sam had never mastered despite many attempts. As Dean had once said, Ash’s geek-fu was strong. Sam didn’t entirely believe his claim to have gone to MIT—for starters, he said it was a college in Boston, and anyone who’d gone there would know it was in Cambridge—but he did believe that Ash had the know-how, based on the times he’d helped him and his brother out.

  “Okay. We’ll check it out.” With that, Dean flipped the phone shut and looked out the driveway. “That road’ll take us to 80, right?”

  Sam tried to remember the map. “I think so, yeah. Why, where’s the job?”

  Dean grinned. “The town so nice, they named it twice: New York, New York.”

  “Really?” Sam turned and went back to the trunk. “Open it up, I wanna show you something.”

  “Something in New York?” Dean said, joining him at the back, since he had the keys.

  After Dean opened the trunk, Sam took a folder out of his bag. “It may not be anything, but I noticed a couple of murders that took place there.”

  “Sam—it’s New York. They get, like, fifty murders a day.”

  “Which is why these two probably flew under the radar.” He took the clippings, photocopied off newspapers he’d looked at in several different public libraries they’d visited recently. “First, we got a guy bricked up in a building’s basement.” Sam handed Dean an 81/2 by 11 sheet of paper with a filler news story in a section of the New York Daily News dedicated to community news about a man named Marc Reyes, who was found bricked up in the basement of a house in the Bronx.

  As Dean glanced over the photocopy, Sam went on: “And this past Sunday, two college kids were beaten to death by an orangutan.”

  Dean looked up at that. “Seriously?”

  Sam nodded. “That’s two murders that are right out of Edgar Allan Poe short stories.”

  “That’s kind of a stretch,” Dean said as he handed back the story about the bricked-up man.

  “Maybe—but they both took place in the Bronx, and Poe used to live in the Bronx. Plus, the first murder was on the fifth—they didn’t find the body until two days later, but it happened on the fifth, which was—”

  “The last full moon,” Dean said with a nod. “Yeah, okay, maybe, but—”

  Tossing the folder back into the trunk, Sam said, “And the orangutan was on the last quarter.” He didn’t need to add that lots of rituals were based on the phases of the moon. “It’s not that big a deal, but since we’re going to New York anyhow, I figured we could look into it while we—uh, do whatever it is we’re doing.”

  Dean slammed the trunk shut. “Haunting. Some friend of Ash’s is having ghost issues. So who’s he gonna call?”

  Sam chuckled. They both got into the car, Dean in the driver’s seat. “That’s really weird.”

  “What, that there’d be a haunting? We see them all the time.”

  “No,” Sam said with a shake of his head, “that Ash would have a friend.”

  With a chuckle of his own, Dean slid the key into the ignition. A grin spread on his face as the Impala hummed to life. “Hear that engine purr.”

  Squirming in the passenger seat, Sam thought, I swear to God, if he starts petting the dashboard again, I’m walking to New York.

  However, he was spared that. Dean shoved a Metallica tape into the player, twirled the volume up, and the car was filled with the guitar opening to “Enter Sandman.”

  Dean turned to him. “Atomic batteries to power.”

  Glowering at his older brother, Sam said, “I’m only gonna say, ‘Turbines to speed’ if you don’t make a comment about me in short green pants.”

  Dean pulled the gearshift down to R and said, “Let’s move out.” He backed out of the parking spot, then brought it down to D and sent them out onto the open road.

  THREE

  On the road

  Interstate 80, approaching the

  George Washington Bridge

  Thursday 16 November 2006

  “How can there be so many people on one road?”

  Sam tried not to laugh out loud at Dean’s plaintive cry, the fifth time he’d asked the question in the last ten minutes—a time span during which the Impala had moved forward maybe fifty feet.

  They’d been driving all night. Sam had suggested they stop at a motel overnight, but Dean wanted to get there quickly. They had stopped in a motel in Clarion, Pennsylvania, to shower and change clothes, paying for it with one of the fraudulent cards, but didn’t stay the night. Instead, they worked their way across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, taking it in turns to sleep or drive.

  Unfortunately, that meant they arrived at the approach to the George Washington Bridge smack dab in the middle of the morning rush hour, and traffic was bumper-to-bumper.

  Dean was about ready to jump out of his skin.

  “There’s gotta be a faster way to get into the city.”

  Sam didn’t bother looking at the map, since they’d had this conversation several times already. “The Lincoln Tunnel and the Holland Tunnel are farther away from the Bronx, and they’re tunnels—they’ve probably got more traffic ’cause they have to squeeze more cars into fewer—”

  “All right.” Dean pounded the steering wheel. Ash’s friend lived in a neighborhood called Riverdale, which was also in the Bronx, which meant it would be easier for Sam to investigate the Poe murders. “That other thing you were talkin’ about,” Dean said. “You said they were all from Eddie Albert Poe stories, right?”

  “Edgar Allan Poe, yeah.”

  “Right, whatever. He’s the guy that did ‘The Raven,’ right?”

  Giving his brother a sidelong glance, Sam said, “You’ve read a poem?”

  “They did it on The Simpsons once. Hey, c’mon, move it, will you!” Dean suddenly screamed at the car in front of them. “Christ, you don’t have to leave fifty car lengths between you and the guy in front of you!” Again he pounded the steering wheel. “I swear, these people got their drivers’ licenses from freakin’ Crackerjack boxes.”

  “Anyhow,” Sam said, as much to take Dean’s mind off his frustration as anything, “the guy bricked up in the basement is from ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’ The orangutan is from ‘The Murders on the Rue Morgue’—which, by the way, was the first detective story.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, that story was an influence on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he created Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Well, thank you, Marian the Librarian.”

  Sam was glad to hear Dean teasing him, as it meant
he wasn’t letting the driving get to him—

  “Hey! Use the freakin’ turn signal, will you?”

  —much. “I took a lit class as an elective at Stanford—it was called ‘American Hauntings,’ all about the use of the supernatural in American fiction, including a lot about Poe.” He shrugged. “I was curious, after all the weird stuff we’ve seen, what the pop culture interpretations of what we do were like.”

  “What, X-Files reruns didn’t do the trick?”

  “Honestly, Dean, you should read Poe’s stories. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ‘The Masque of the Red Death’—some of this stuff sounds like it could’ve been right out of one of our jobs. You gotta wonder what he saw to make him write that. I mean, he practically created the horror genre.”

  “So, Professor, whaddaya think the deal is with these murders? Phases of the moon, re-creating old short stories—sound like any ritual you know?”

  “Not offhand, but there’s something else. Before, when I had the maps out? I was checking something, and both these murders were exactly one mile from the Poe Cottage.”

  “First of all, what’s the Poe Cottage?”

  “Poe lived in the Bronx for a few years in a little cottage.”

  “Dude, I’ve seen Fort Apache—the Bronx doesn’t have cottages. Hey, jackass, pick a freakin’ lane!”

  Sam suddenly felt the urge to get a firm grip on the dashboard with his good hand. “It did in the nineteenth century. The Bronx didn’t even become part of New York City until the 1890s or so. Anyhow, because Poe lived there, they preserved the cottage—and his wife died there.”

  Dean nodded. “Okay, so the place has some emotional significance. Still not connecting the dots.”

  Shrugging, Sam said, “Me, either.”

  “Second of all, why didn’t you tell me this when you were playing with the maps? I thought you were trying to find alternate routes.”