The Night Beat

be chugging along, too. I wondered what she’d been before she’d become a hooker. Besides a girl from what I guessed was a pretty strict family.
    “Yes.” I directed one last question to the resurrected. “Again, I want to know -- what did you see and hear right before and right after you died?”
    I didn’t expect a lot and wasn’t surprised. The bums and hookers all looked confused. The bum with a daughter answered, seemingly for all of them. “A big, horrible monster came outta nowhere and ate us all before we could run. Then, the pain stopped and it went all black. I thought we got to see some kinda light when we died,” he added in the tone every sinner uses when they find out they really did have responsibility for their souls.
    “The light is for those ascending,” Martin said gently. “The choice is for those like Frederick and Cynthia, who are in a moral and mental state to make it. The darkness is for those who have not yet…been called.” He looked right at Jerry and Bobby. “And the hellfire is for those who know their choices -- and choose incorrectly.”
    Jerry seemed to have recovered his junkie decorum. “You don’t scare me, weirdo.”
    “You should be scared,” Miriam said. “When the time comes and you are called, I promise you -- I will destroy you myself.”
    “Scared me,” Jack whispered to me.
    Bobby looked away from Martin and back at me. “I saw the monster, but I also saw something else. It was smaller than the monster and it shimmered. I thought it was the drugs, they do stuff like that.”
    “Shut up,” Jerry snarled.
    Bobby shook his head and went on, talking faster. “There was a sound, like millions of buzzing flies or insects or something. And it…it was like the sound went into the shimmering. And all that went into Tomio, after we all died -- that was the last thing I saw, that shimmering thing go into him. He opened his mouth and it sort of flowed in.”
    “He’ll kill you when he comes back,” Jerry said almost gleefully.
    Bobby gave him a look that said what we were all thinking. “We’re already dead, you moron.” He looked back to me. “I don’t care what happens to me, but if you’re right, I don’t want anything to hurt my wife and kids. I never thought this would touch them. Please…do whatever you need to do to me, but keep them safe. Keep everyone’s families safe.”
    The resurrection was fading. The bodies moved back to their graves. I had only seconds. “We’ll do everything we can to protect the people close to you -- I promise.”
    There was a collective sigh, and then the bodies went back to very clearly dead. Black Angel Two worked fast, and soon there were seven neatly filled graves in front of us. Martin said some prayers over the graves, then we were done.
    “What now?” Jack asked quietly.
    I looked to Martin, Edgar and H.P. “It’s exactly what I think it is, right?” They all nodded.
    Jack coughed. “What do you, and apparently everyone else but me, Freddy and Cindy, think it is?”
    “Well, on the good side, it’s probably not the Prince.”
    “Oh, good. So, what’s the bad side?” Jack asked.
    “I’m pretty sure that Abaddon is already here, since they did the incantation a while ago. So this would be Apollyon.”
    “Those are the same name for the Devil,” Freddy said. “Book of Revelations.”
    “Scribes can get confused,” Miriam said. “They’re actually two different beings, and have nothing to do with the Devil. Yahweh is not their master.”
    “No, the Prince is.” I heaved a sigh. “I think it’s time to go back to the alleyway and take another look at the portal from Hell.”

Chapter 26
     
    There was a little discussion about who was traveling how. I stood firm and insisted Jack and I had to remain with the car, so we got to drive over. Sadly, Ralph insisted on coming with us. Happily, the moment he so insisted, Hansel and Gretel also insisted. So we had the three of them in the backseat. Ralph and Hansel were panting and Gretel was grooming. I felt like we’d either joined Animal Control or were running our own mobile pet grooming business.
    “I’m sure Freddy and Cindy are asking the same thing,” Jack said as we drove out of the cemetery. “What’s with the number eighteen and what’s also with the idea of three different schemes?”
    “The number is only significant because it’s a common number we’re placing again and again at the scene of the crime.”
    “Yes,”