“No more of that,” he said, and the whistling fell silent. Price’s stare was inhuman in the dark, a stark opposition to the utter humanity of the rest of him, his smile cracked wide and his cheeks pinked with cold.
“Odd choice of a meeting place.” Price rapped once on the wide serriform door closest to him. The sound pinged all through the wide alley of units. He knocked again, this time tapping out the first five notes of “Shave and a Haircut” with the backs of his knuckles. Again, the sound reverberated through the dark. There was a lull, and then the Apostle’s infernal haunt tapped back:Two bits.
Price’s grin widened. “I see you brought your friend.”
The trivializing moniker rankled the Apostle beyond measure. The thing that loitered in the distance, rotten and reeking, was his unwelcome curse. His unholy affliction.
And Price knew it.
“Don’t play with him,” he snapped. “He’s not a toy for your amusement.”
“You’re feeling defensive of the guy,” Price said. “I get it. You spend a lot of time together.” His grin was unwavering, his smile wolfish in the light. “Did you know prisoners of war used that call and response to identify fellow soldiers in captivity? We’re not too different, your little buddy and I.”
Somewhere nearby, that horrible thing was dragging itself, unseen, along the ground. The Apostle could hear the toes of its boots scuffing pavement. The boots it died in, water stained and peeling apart.
“He is not,” the Apostle said, with far more rancor than he’d planned on, “mybuddy.”
“Yikes.” Price slid his hands into his pockets with a level of indifference that only served to heighten the Apostle’s annoyance. “I’m just making conversation.”
“Well, don’t,” the Apostle ordered, his grip tight against the shard in his pocket. “In fact, don’t say anything. I’ll talk, you listen.”
He was met with an obdurate silence and that glittering black stare. He took a moment to soak in the peace of it, knowing it was bound to be short-lived.
“A hiker found Kostopoulos at the bottom of a ravine. The official police report says he fell, but my source at the coroner’s office says differently. I’m told he looked as though he’d been chewed up and then spat out—a fact that you might be aware of, had you not been too preoccupied to return a single one of my calls.”
When Price said nothing, the Apostle reached into his back pocket and retrieved the rolled-up folder he’d brought from his car. Wetting his thumb, he made a show of padding through several sheets of bulleted notes, which Meeker had inexplicably compiled in Comic Sans.
“I’ve had Mark on a special assignment these past few weeks. You know how he gets restless without an activity to keep him occupied.”
Price, as expected, continued to hold his tongue.
“Did you know,” the Apostle began, feeling needlessly jubilant over this minor victory, “that Delaney Meyers-Petrov has an old family cat named Petrie?”
No answer rose to meet him save for the far-off peal of an ambulance siren, there and then gone. When he glanced up from his notes, it was to find all traces of that ever-present grin wiped clean from Price’s mouth. Over his shoulder, the Apostle could just make out the knife’s edge of a face, grotesque and hollowed, grinning a wide, winsome grin.
“Mark made a little note for himself in here,” he went on, trying not to look directly at it. “He’s written ‘likes canned tuna.’ It would seem he’s earned the trust of the Meyers-Petrov family pet. Makes you nervous, doesn’t it? Mark can be a bit volatile from time to time.”
Again, Price was quiet.
“Let’s see what else.” The Apostle flipped to the next page. “She organizes her books alphabetically by author. She prefers morning showers to evening. She opts for sensible underwear, nothing with laces and frills.” He peered up at Price again and found that the boy’s face had gone bloodless in the dark. Fishing through the interior of his coat, he withdrew a rumpled woolen cap and lobbed it through the air like a Frisbee. “Say what you will about the fellow, but Mark Meeker is relentlessly thorough.”
Meyers-Petrov’s beret landed on the pavement between them. Price drew in an audible breath.
“That’s neither here nor there,” the Apostle said, satisfaction climbing through him. “I’m not interested in her sleeping habits or her family pets or her undergarments. No, what interests me is the fact that nearly every single evening, Meeker has followed her from Godbole’s campus all the way to Park Street Station. Would you care to wager a guess as to where she goes from there?”
Still, Price was silent. The Apostle fingered the bone shard, clenching his teeth against the shock to his system. In front of him, Price’s eyes had gone tightly shut. His hands balled into twin fists at his sides.
“Speak,” the Apostle ordered. “I despise a one-sided conversation.”
“Leave her alone.” There was no smile in Price’s voice—no glimmer of laughter, no streak of arrogance. Only the cold scrape of a plea dressed as a command. It should have thrilled the Apostle to see the vainglorious Price knocked down a peg. Instead, those black eyes opened and he felt chilled to the bone within the unflinching crosshairs of the boy’s stare.
“You won’t even deny it?”
“Deny what?” Price stood without moving, the air around him restless. “That you’re stalking a student? It seems pretty clear to me.”
The Apostle wasn’t the sort of man to fly into a rage—wasn’t the type to rend his garments or gnash his teeth when the going got tough.
Emotionless, his wife called him once, during an argument. Her eyes had been jeweled in tears, her face misaligned in hurt. He’d been disgusted by the red blotch of her cheeks, the ugly way her mouth curled in on itself when she was sad. He’d always found crying to be such a waste of time.
