a terrible beauty Read online

  AN ORIGINAL NOVEL BASED ON THE HIT SERIES!

  A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

  JOHN J. MILLER

  ibooks

  new york

  www.ibooks.net

  DISTRIBUTED BY SIMON ft SCHUSTER

  PROLOGUE

  It was late September. New York City was in the grip of a lingering Indian summer. The cool promise of autumn had barely touched the streets. The temperature was scorching hot during the day and uncomfortably warm at night, but the old man walking down the dark, deserted street had more pressing things on his mind than the unseasonable weather.

  Something was following him. Something that wanted to kill him.

  the old man paused as he heard the sound of clanking chains being dragged on asphalt. There was almost an element of harsh music to the noise, like a rhythmically lurching techno-industrial dance mix. He thought he’d shaken whatever was following him by suddenly dodging into a dark cross-street, but that sound meant that it was still on his trail.

  He realized he shouldn’t be standing alone in the night, listening to strange sounds emanating from nearby alleys. It wasn’t a prudent thing to do. The streetlight on the corner, forty yards away, cast what little light there was on the pavement. He suddenly felt as if the dim illumination thrown by the flickering lamp could protect him from the unknown thing following him in the darkness.

  He took a faltering step, then another, but suddenly the noise of clanking chains was almost upon him. It had moved faster than anything human. He only had time to turn his head, time to see the thing looming above him like an avalanche of death with one long arm raised above its head.

  The figure was huge in the night, bigger by far than the old man. It was dressed in tattered rags and, yes, dragging several lengths of chain behind it on the sidewalk. A portion of its face gleamed like ivory in the darkness, and the old man saw that the thing wasn’t a man-it had only half a face. The rest was bare skull with flesh stripped away from bone and one empty eye-socket a deeper darkness than the night that surrounded them both.

  The old man recognized him now. He knew who he was and who had sent him. Worse, he knew what the creature was going to do to him.

  The old man took a deep breath so he could scream his lungs out, but choked instead on the stench emanating from the thing. The creature stank of the grave, of rot and mildew and wet ground. The old man put his hand out helplessly, and the thing’s upraised arm swept down with terrific speed and the old man caught a glint of light off a machete blade and then felt a terrible blow to the side of his neck.

  His head slipped sideways and hung downward, connected to his body by only a shred of flesh and skin. For a long, horrible moment, the old man still could see. He blinked rapidly at the gleam of white finger bones in the hand that wielded the machete, and, as his blood gushed out of his body in a pulsing column, his eyes closed and his legs failed and he slipped bonelessly to the sidewalk.

  The last thing he knew was the high, cruel laughter of the creature that had killed him, as he slid into welcome oblivion.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  I3rooklyn was not Sara Pezzini’s regular turf.

  She was a detective working out of Manhattan. She was young to be a detective, and, many thought, too beautiful. Being a young, beautiful woman made for constant battles in the cop world, but to Sara her age and looks were at most a minor distraction. Usually she had more important things to wony about.

  Currently her worries centered about what the press had already dubbed the Machete Murderer. Twenty-four hours earlier a headless and handless body had turned up in a Manhattan Dumpster. It was still unidentified. Twelve hours later two more corpses had washed up on the Manhattan side of the East River, also headless and handless. Although they’d been discovered after the first, the coroner had established that actually they’d been killed and dumped in the river twelve hours earlier than the Dumpster John Doe. The East River was just a lot bigger than a Dumpster, and it took longer for them to be found.

  Precinct Captain Joe Siry gave the case to Sara and her partner, Jake McCarthy. There was a reason for that.

  Though both were young, they were tough, smart, and dedicated if not entirely orthodox in their approach to police work. They got results. They’d already developed a reputation for solving the tough cases, the oddball killings, and to Siiy these beheadings and behandings already looked more than a little kinky.

  Jake concentrated on the Dumpster corpse and Sara the floaters. After twenty-fours of fruitless labor, they’d decided to call it a night, head for their respective apartments and grab some sleep. But, once home, Sara couldn’t sleep. Something was pricking at her consciousness, some little bit of information she should have looked at further, some avenue of investigation she should have explored.

  Besides, it was also a bad night for the voices. They nagged at her, not letting her sleep. She got up with a sigh, turned on her computer, and checked into a database she’d previously overlooked.

  And found the connection that led her to Brooklyn.

  Normally this meant, at the least, polite queries of the appropriate Brooklyn precinct, but Sara had no time for polite queries that often led to not so polite runarounds. She also didn’t like second-hand information. Secondhand information was often inaccurate information. She didn’t care to deal with other peoples’ mistakes. If mistakes had to be made she preferred to make them on her own. Nor did she want Jake involved, at least not yet. She didn’t want him to pay for her mistakes. Besides, the boy needed his rest.

  She found herself wandering around Cypress Hills, a quiet Brooklyn community with narrow, tree-lined streets and rows of mostly semi-attached two story houses. She liked it. It was mostly clean, mostly neat. There was a sense of age about the neighborhood, though a tide of recent immigrants from Haiti and India sprinkled among the older residents of eastern European origin also gave it a certain color and vivacity.

  Sara found Fulton Street, which seemed to be the heart of the community, the main street, and business district. It was fairly early on a warm September evening, and the street was still crowded. The pedestrians were a mixture of black Haitian, brown Asian, and white eastern European, though the European population seemed to consist mostly of older people with only a few youngsters here and there. The stores that lined the streets were mostly mom and pop types, and though it was nearly ten o’clock at night, most of them were still open. Although Sara passed three curiy joints and a couple of Caribbean-style coffee shops, there was nary a golden arch in sight. For some reason, maybe because it gave the community a stamp of individuality and independence, Sara liked that.

  She found what she was looking for at the entrance to an arcade already crowded with young people. Three young black men, in their late teens or early twenties, were heading into the dark cave to slay virtual dragons, steal virtual cars, and blow away virtual citizens by the score. The one wearing a black Batman T-shirt had a cross tattooed on his left cheek, reaching from his eye-socket to his jaw line. Another had a cross tattooed on the back of each hand.

  She followed them surreptitiously. The arcade was incredibly noisy with computer-generated beep-bop-boops, the sounds of racing engines, and continual muffled blasts of artificial gunfire. The third member of the group, she saw, had the tattoo on his neck, under his jaw and running down to his shoulder.

  As she’d discovered on the ’net, the cross tattoos were the recognition sign of the gang called The Saturday Night Specials. They would have other, probably more elaborate, cross tats on their bodies hidden by their clothes, but they all had to have at least one visible at all times as a recognition sign both to those members of the public who were aware of the gang and, of course, other gang members.

&
nbsp; They stopped before “Blast Billy the Kid,” a quickdraw shooting game, and Sara went up to them before they had a chance to feed their quarters into it.

  “I’m looking for a friend of yours,” she said.

  The oldest of the three Specials, the one in the Batman T'shirt with the cross on his cheek, looked her slowly up and down.

  “You found me, momma. Can I do?”

  “Probably not,” Sara said.

  She took out a photo and held it up so all three could see it. It was a Polaroid taken by the coroner, showing a thin torso that had three crosses tattooed on it, one large one between the flat male breasts, flanked by smaller ones under each nipple.

  “Achille—” one of the Specials blurted, and the one with the cross on his cheek threw up his hand against his chest, silencing him.

  “What makes you think we’d recognize some skinny guy’s tats?”

  Sara smiled. “They’re gang symbols. Specifically, for The Saturday Night Specials. Each gang member has a unique, identifying tattoo. You should know that, considering you all have the recognition cross on your face or hands or neck.”

  “It’s not a gang,” the spokesman said. “It’s a social club.”

  Sara shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “What you'want him for?” he asked Sara.

  “I don’t want him,” she replied. “I’ve got him. His body, anyway. He’s dead.”

  She pulled out another photo, this one a full body shot, showing—or not—the missing heads and hands. The bangers glanced at each other. The one who’d blurted the name looked a little queasy.

  He’s the one, Sara thought, I can break.

  “You a cop?” their spokesman asked.

  “Do I have to show you my badge?”

  The three again exchanged quick glances.

  “No. I guess not.” He pursed his lips and seemed to come to a decision. “Look here, momma—”

  ’’That would be ‘Detective Momma’ to you.”

  He smiled, without humor. “Sure. Whatever you say. Listen, uh, Detective, this ain’t no place to talk. Meet us in the churchyard. Say, about an hour?”

  “Churchyard?” Sara asked.

  “Yeah—St Casimir’s. Right down the street. You’re a cop. You should be able to find it.”

  The voices roiled in Sara’s brain like an angry medusa. “Insolent brat-”

  “-teach him a lesson-”

  “-teach him to mock us.”

  Later, Sara said silently. Aloud, she said. “I’ll manage. In an hour, then.”

  She left the arcade, suppressing a smile.

  A little way down the street, on a cross-street running roughly north and south, Sara saw an old, dark, stony mass of a building poised on the crest of a sloping hillside south of Fulton. The church looked as if it had been built sometime around the turn of the century, give or take a couple of decades, and hadn’t seen prosperous times recently. It was constructed of dark stone that hadn’t been sandblasted in a couple of generations. The sloping churchyard was almost entirely taken up by a cemetery whose monuments ranged in age from the last century to last month. As Sara climbed the worn concrete stairs leading up the hillside, she could see that the churchyard was neatly maintained, but many of the older tombstones were in need of straightening or more serious repair. Like a schoolteacher with a dusty eraser, the toxic city air had rubbed out many names and dates with its acidic breath, leaving behind sad, blank slates that had once commemorated generations of New Yorkers.

  It was dark and quiet. A nice place for a secret meeting. Or, of course, an ambush. She settled down in the darkness behind a concealing tombstone. She didn’t have long to wait.

  The three gangbangers showed up fifteen minutes later. Cheek Cross, as Sara thought of him, evidently had high ambitions, and had seen this as an opportunity to begin his long and probably bloody climb to the top.

  “I just got off the phone with the man,” he was telling his associates, “and he said this was our chance.”

  “Our chance?” asked Neck Cross, who had blurted out the name “Achille” when Sara had first showed them the photo.

  “Our chance to go big, dog. He said I got to handle this

  cop. I got to get her off the case. Then, I move up, and I bring my bros with me.”

  “We got to kill her?” Neck asked, clearly uncomfortable. “We got to do the job,” Cheek said. “You just back me. That’s all.”

  He took a snub-nosed pistol out of his pocket and caressed it lovingly.

  The voices took exception to his apparent plan. “Impudent fool-” they told Sara.

  “-let us punish him-”

  “-punish him severely.”

  Sara almost laughed.

  I don’t need your help with these morons, she said to herself. She drew her .45 from its snug hiding place in the small of her back, and stepped out into the open from behind the tombstone.

  “School’s out, boys,” she said, the barrel of the .45 centered on the middle of Cheek’s chest, not more than seven feet away. “Welcome to the real world.”

  Their eyes got round, their jaws dropped. Cheek made an abortive move to raise his pistol, but Sara only shook her head. “Freeze or die.”

  He froze.

  “I need only one of you bozos to give me the info I need, and you’re not my favorite banger right now.”

  She approached him, smiling.

  “Hey,” Cheek said, trying to laugh. “You’re here early.” “Early bird gets the scumbag,” Sara said, and slapped him on the side of the head with the barrel of her automatic. He went down like a bag of cream of wheat. She turned to Neck Cross. “You.”

  “Me?” He swallowed hard. His eyes were soft and scared. Sara could almost smell the fear coming off him in waves. He’s the one, she thought again. She tossed him a pair of handcuffs.

  “Cuff yourself to that bush.” It was more a sapling than a bush, with a main trunk that was almost too big for the cuffs. He fumbled in his haste to comply with her orders, but finally succeeded in chaining himself to the tree.

  He’ll be an easy nut ta crack, Sara thought.

  She waved her pistol at the last Special.

  “Come with me."

  “Where?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Where we can have a little chat. Privately.”

  “I don’t—”

  She jammed her gun barrel into his solar plexus, hard enough to hurt but not to stun. He made no more protests as they went off into the depths of the graveyard.

  “Far enough,” Sara said. “Now, call for help. Not too loudly.”

  “Help,” he said tentatively.

  She pushed the barrel of her gun up one of his nostrils.

  “Like you mean it,” she suggested.

  He called out in a low voice, but with some desperation, like he meant it.

  “Now groan a little. Moan, too.”

  He did. Sara reached out and grabbed the flesh between the thumb and index finger of his left hand. She squeezed and twisted and he went down to his knees with an authentic yelp of pain, cut short as she released him. He kneeled in the dark, looking up at her with fear in her eyes.

  “You’re crazy, man,” he said.

  Sara nodded. “And don’t you forget it. Now get out of here.”

  He looked at her as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. -

  “You got it right,” she said. “Scat.”

  She didn’t have to repeat herself. He took off between the tombstones as if the wolves of hell were on his track. Smiling, she/went back to the banger she’d left cuffed in the other part of the churchyard.

  He was practically shaking with fear as she walked up to him, stopping a moment to check on Cheek Cross, who was still dreaming on the ground.

  “What’d you do to Henri?” he asked, eyes wide.

  Sara shook her head.

  “You don’t want to know. But I’ll tell you—he wasn’t smart. He wouldn’t answer my questions.” She fell silent, lookin
g at him. He started as she touched his forehead with the barrel of her automatic, and ran it down his nose, around his mouth to the tip of his chin. He was trying not to shake, but failing. “On the other hand, you strike me as a smart guy. You let me know what I want, I let you go. Simple as that. If you don’t tell me what I want to know...” Sara let her voice trail off, and shrugged.

  “What you want to know?” Neck asked. “I’ll tell you what I can.”

  “Of course you will,” Sara said. “You’re the smart one.” She showed him the photo again. “You know who this is.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes, yes. That is Achille de Petion. I’ve know him a long time-”

  ”He was a member of The Saturday Night Specials?” “Yes, of course,” Neck said, eagerly.

  “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know-”

  Sara shook her head. “Not what I wanted to hear.”

  She lifted her automatic.

  “I swear, I don’t know. I know he was in trouble. He and the doc.”

  “Doc?”

  “Doctor Caradeuc. Dr. Cladius Caradeuc. He has a clinic farther down on Fulton. They was involved in something, together. I don’t know what. They-something went wrong. We heard whispers, is all. Something went wrong.”

  “Caradeuc.” She took out another photo, showed it to him.

  He squinted at it in the uncertain light.

  “I don’t know if that’s him. Could be. He’s got no head, man. Like Achille.”

  “Observant,” Sara said. “Ever think of going into police work?”

  He cringed as she took him by the wrist, but she only unlocked the cuffs from his arm and the tree.

  “Get out of here,” she said, “and take your friend.”

  Neck scuttled back, and after a couple of tries managed to heave Cheek up from the ground, and, hugging him to his chest, started to drag him out of the churchyard.

  “One last thing,” Sara said.

  He stopped and looked at her.

  “Take my advice. Find another social club to join. You're not cut out for this one.”

  He looked at her as if seriously considering what she said, finally nodded, and disappeared into the night.

  CHAPTER