A Kiss Before the Apocalypse Read online

  A finger of ice ran down Remy’s spine.

  With a look of resigned calm, Mountgomery raised the gun and pressed the muzzle beneath the flesh of his chin. “I never imagined I’d be this close to one,” he said, finger tensing on the trigger. “Angels are even more beautiful than they say.”

  Remy lunged, but Mountgomery proved faster again. The editor pulled the trigger and the bullet punched through the flesh and bone of his chin and up into his brain, exiting through the top of his head in a spray of crimson. He fell back stiffly onto the bed— atop his true love, twitching wildly as the life drained out of him, and then rolling off the bed to land on the floor. His eyes, wide in death, gazed with frozen fascination at the wing-shaped pattern created by his blood and brains on the ceiling above.

  Remy studied the gruesome example of man’s fragile mortality before him, Mountgomery’s final words reverberating through his mind.

  I never imagined I’d be this close to one.

  He caught his reflection in a mirror over the room’s single dresser and stared hard at himself, searching for cracks in the facade. Is it possible? he wondered. Had Peter Mountgomery somehow seen through Remy’s mask of humanity?

  Angels are even more beautiful than they say.

  Remy looked away from his own image and back to the victims of violence. How could a case so simple turn into something so ugly? he asked himself, moving toward the broken door, followed by the words of a man who could see angels and had dreamt of the end of the world.

  He stepped quickly into the afternoon sun and almost collided with the Hispanic cleaning woman and her cart of linens. She looked at him and then craned her neck to see around him and into the room. Remy caught the first signs of panic growing in her eyes and reached back for the knob, pulling the door closed. In flawless Spanish he told her not to go into the room, that death had visited those within, and it was not for her to see. The woman nodded slowly, her eyes never leaving his as she pushed her cart quickly away.

  Homicide Detective Steven Mulvehill stood beside Remy, as the team from the medical examiner’s office prepared to remove the bodies from the motel room. Remy leaned against his car, arms crossed. The two friends were silent as they watched the activity across the lot.

  A small crowd had formed, kept at bay by a strip of yellow crime-scene tape and four uniformed officers. The curious pack craned their necks, moving from one end of the tape to the other, eager to catch a glimpse of something to fill the misery quotient in their lives. It was something that Remy had never really understood but had come to accept: the human species was enthralled with the pain of others. Whether a natural disaster or a drive-by shooting, the average Joe wanted to hear every detail. Maybe the fascination stemmed from the fact that somebody else had incurred the wrath of the fates, and he, for the moment, could breathe a sigh of relief.

  Mulvehill and his partner, Rich Healey, had already examined the scene in the motel room and released the bodies to the coroner. Healey was still inside, supervising the removal.

  The detective took a long drag of a cigarette, expelled the smoke from his nostrils like some great medieval beast, then broke the uncomfortable silence. “You all right?” he asked. “You’re kind of quiet.” He took another pull from his smoke.

  Remy stared straight ahead, his eyes focused on the entryway of the room across the lot. “He saw me, Steven. Right before that guy killed himself, he really saw me.”

  Mulvehill was a stocky man, average height with a wild head of thick, black hair. He was forty-seven years old, divorced, and living the job. Remy had met him more than five years earlier, when a homicide investigation had intersected with a missing-persons case he had been working on. The two had been friends ever since.

  “He saw me for what I really am,” Remy said again, truly disturbed by what he was saying.

  Mulvehill looked at Remy, the last of the cigarette protruding from the corner of his mouth. “What, a shitty detective?” The cop smirked, taking the smoke from his mouth and flicking the remains to the ground.

  The case that had first brought them together had ended badly, the murder suspect dead and Mulvehill with a bullet in his gut.

  “You’re a riot,” Remy responded. “The stuff of Vegas floor shows. Really, if this cop thing doesn’t work out . . .”

  Mulvehill laughed out loud as he reached into his sports jacket for his pack of cigarettes. “And you’re an asshole. Tell me again what you were doing here.” He pulled one from the pack and placed it in his mouth.

  “Very smooth, Detective.” Remy grinned wryly. “It was simple surveillance,” he explained. “Wife suspected he was having an affair. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  Mulvehill lit up with an old-fashioned Zippo. He flicked the cover closed with a metallic click, then slipped it back inside his pocket next to the cigarette pack. He took a long, thoughtful drag. Smoking helped him think, he often said. Helped him focus. He’d tried to stop once, but it had made him stupid.

  “So he shows up here with his secretary, they go in, and after a while you hear the first shot?”

  Remy nodded. “That’s about it. By the time I got in there, he’d already killed the woman. I think he was getting ready to shoot himself, but I interrupted him.”

  The homicide detective idly brushed some ash from the lapel of his navy blue sports coat. “So you think this guy could somehow see you—the real you.”

  Mulvehill had been near death when Remy found him lying in a pool of blood in an abandoned water-front warehouse. To ease his suffering and calm the terrified detective, Remy had revealed his true countenance. Death is only a new beginning, he had reassured the man.

  Remy nodded, replaying the conversation with Mountgomery inside his head. “I didn’t drop the facade at all, haven’t done it in a long time. But the way he looked at me—and that smile. He was definitely seeing something.”

  The doctors said it was a miracle that Mulvehill had survived the shooting. After his recovery, the homicide detective had come looking for Remy, who had denied nothing—and offered nothing. But Mulvehill knew he had encountered something very much out of the ordinary, something that couldn’t simply be attributed to loss of blood.

  Remy knew that Mulvehill’s mother and grand-mother had been strict Catholics, and had tried to raise him in the faith as well. As a young man, he had gone to church to please them, but he had believed Christian doctrine to be nothing more than fairy tales, fantasies to relieve the fears of the devoted when faced with their own mortality. But since his own brush with death, and his encounter with a certain private investigator, the Boston detective wasn’t quite sure what he believed anymore. In fact, he’d even started to attend Mass again. Just to be on the safe side, he’d told Remy.

  But Remy had shown Mulvehill his true face by design. He had revealed himself on purpose. This was something else altogether. This dead man had seen beneath his mask.

  “That ever happen before?” Mulvehill asked, interrupting Remy’s brooding. “Besides when you wanted it to, I mean?”

  Remy looked at his friend. “Not to me, but throughout the ages there have been holy men, visionaries, who could glimpse the unseen world and its inhabitants— usually before some kind of change in the world— something of great religious significance.”

  Mulvehill sucked a final drag from his cigarette. “Anything coming down the pike that you know of? New pope or something?”

  Remy shrugged. “Well, the guy did talk about having dreams about the end of the world, the Apocalypse. He thought he was doing the woman a favor by killing her, thought I was here to take them up to Heaven.”

  Mulvehill looked at his friend with a serious expression, a new, unlit cigarette having appeared almost magically in his mouth. “When the time comes, will you carry me up to Heaven?” he asked, fishing for his lighter.

  Remy grinned. “Sorry, that’s not my job, but I imagine you’re gonna have to drop a few pounds if you want anybody carrying your sorry ass up to—”r />
  Their playful banter was cut short by a sudden commotion. Healey ran from the motel room and beckoned to one of the uniforms. They exchanged some words and the cop spoke rapidly into his radio, then followed the detective back into the room. Mulvehill grumbled beneath his breath, threw his latest smoke to the ground, and hurried toward the crime scene.

  Remy followed, that strange, uneasy feeling in his gut returning.

  “What’s going on?” Mulvehill asked a second uniformed officer who stood just outside the motel room.

  An ambulance pulled into the parking lot, sirens wailing, and screeched to a halt in front of the open door. Two EMTs jumped into action, hauling open the doors at the back of the vehicle and removing their equipment. Another ambulance had been there a short while ago, but it was gone now. There had been no lives for its technicians to save.

  The uniform speaking to Mulvehill appeared shaken. He made brief eye contact with the detective and then looked back into the room, which buzzed with surprising activity. “I think the other detective said something about them being alive.”

  A harried-looking paramedic pulling a stretcher barked for them to get out of the way as he pushed through the door. Another followed with a second stretcher at his heels.

  There was a growing excitement among the gathered crowd, anticipation crackling in the air. They moved closer, an undulating organism hungry for anguish not their own.

  Mulvehill shoved the officer aside and stormed into room 35, with Remy close behind. The blanket-covered bodies of Peter Mountgomery and Carol Weir were atop the stretchers, oxygen masks on their faces. They were deathly pale, the damage done by gunfire blatantly evident. How could they possibly be alive?

  Remy stepped back against the wall as emergency workers pushed the stretchers past him, then approached Mulvehill and his partner, who stood beside the queen-sized bed. “It’s the damndest thing,” Healey was saying, obviously flustered. “They were getting ready to bag ’em when they felt a pulse on the guy. They checked the woman just to be sure, and she was still alive too.”

  Mulvehill looked at Remy, his expression that of someone who had just been slapped.

  “Steven?” Remy asked, concern growing in his voice.

  “Why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air,” Mulvehill told his partner, squeezing the man’s shoulder in support.

  Healey excused himself and headed for the door, shaking his head as he went. From outside they heard the mournful sound of sirens as the ambulance departed the lot.

  Mulvehill cleared his throat and fumbled for his cigarettes. “They’re still alive, Remy,” he said, the package crinkling from inside his coat pocket.

  “That’s impossible. I saw the woman’s body, Steven. Mountgomery shot her in the forehead.” He pointed to the center of his furrowed brow. “And just to be sure, he put another one in her heart.”

  Mulvehill was silent, glancing around at the several spots where blood had been spilled. It had already begun to dry, ugly dark stains that would never be completely washed away.

  “I saw him put that gun under his chin and blow his own brains out.” Remy pointed to the wing-shaped stain on the ceiling. “That’s brain matter up there. They can’t possibly be alive.”

  Mulvehill looked away from the ceiling and shrugged his broad shoulders. “Did you not see the ambulance take them out of here?” he asked. “They’re alive. They both have pulses.”

  The feeling in Remy’s gut grew more pronounced.

  “Hey, it’s not a bad thing—two people are still alive,” Mulvehill reasoned. “Maybe it’s a miracle or something.”

  “Or something,” Remy repeated as he turned and walked from the motel room, leaving his friend to make sense of it all.

  Though Remy looked and acted like a human being and chose to live like one, he was nothing of the kind. On occasion, his body functioned on another level entirely. He could feel things, sense things, that others couldn’t. And right now there was something in the air that no one else could feel, something unnatural.

  As he walked across the parking lot, he glanced at his watch and swore beneath his breath.

  Late again.

  Remy got into his car, knowing that what had begun in room 35 of the Sunbeam Motor Lodge was far from over, and that two hundred and fifty dollars a day plus expenses wasn’t going to come close to compensating him for what he feared was waiting on the horizon.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Remy stopped his car as a group of Northeastern University students crossed Huntington Avenue on their way to the dorms from afternoon classes. Impatiently, he glanced at his watch, angry with himself for being even later than usual. One last student cut across at a run to catch up with the gaggle, and Remy continued on toward South Huntington.

  Well, at least something's going right, he thought, as he caught sight of a car pulling away from a space directly across the street from the Cresthaven Nursing Center. Remy performed an amazing feat of parallel parking, locked up his vehicle, and jogged across the street through a break in the dinnertime traffic.

  He pulled open the nursing home's front door, and took a moment to compose himself as he was bombarded with a sensory overload the equivalent of storming the beach at Normandy. Smell, sound, emotion, taste; they all washed over him, pounding him, as they did every time he visited. The first time, he was nearly driven to his knees by the onslaught, but he quickly learned that a few deep breaths would help him to center, making the experience bearable.

  “You are in some deep doo-doo, my friend,” called out a large black woman dressed in a light blue smock and white slacks. She walked around the reception desk, waving some papers at him. “That poor woman's been waiting for you over an hour. I told her you were caught in traffic, but I don't think she's buying it.”

  Remy smiled as the woman playfully tapped him on the shoulder with the forms.

  “I think she's catchin' on to us,” she said conspira-torially, looking Remy up and down as she moved on through the lobby.

  He waved to the receptionist, then stepped up behind the nurse. “No one must know of us, my Nubian goddess,” he whispered in her ear.

  The woman began to laugh, bending over and slapping her leg with the paperwork. “You are a crazy white boy, you know that?”

  “Joan, you wouldn't have me any other way.” Remy smiled. He paused for a minute, enjoying the sound of laughter in a place where the atmosphere could often be so oppressive. “How is she today – giving you a hard time?”

  “If she's not careful, I'm going to toss her out on the street,” Joan said, walking with him toward the ground-floor nursing unit. She moved away as a light came on outside a room on the opposite end of the hall. “Your mother's in the TV room,” she called over her shoulder. “Why don't you go on and see her now so we can get some peace. Meet me in the supply closet at the usual time, and don't keep me waitin'.”

  Remy laughed as he turned, amused, but not only by Joan's invitation.

  Your mother.

  No matter how often he heard it, the lie always struck him funny. The staff at Cresthaven would never believe the truth, that Madeline Chandler was, in fact, his wife. The lie existed because of what he was, of course. He appeared human, but had never been that. And he did not age.

  He stopped in the doorway to the TV room as an old man pushing a walker struggled through. He looked up at Remy with red-rimmed eyes, confusion and turmoil in his gaze.

  “Have you seen Robert?” the man asked, his voice like the rustling of dry leaves. “He was supposed to take me home.”

  An aura of despair radiated from him in waves, nearly pushing Remy back with its strength.

  “I have to get home. Who's gonna take care of the house? Have you seen Robert?” the poor soul repeated, already forgetting that he had asked that same question only seconds before. “He was supposed to take me home.”