Chapter 68: The Big Four Slashers, and the Girls Make Their Move
Danny's compensation request was specific and non-negotiable.
"Rocket launcher," he said. "Military grade, not civilian. And enough shells that I'm not rationing them mid-engagement."
Chief Holt stared at him across the desk for a long moment.
"Last month it was a suppressed rifle and a trauma kit," Holt said. "Now it's rockets."
"The target is proportionally more dangerous than last month's target."
"Danny, I am a small-town police chief in Connecticut. I have a department of eleven people and a municipal budget that doesn't survive election years."
"Your father-in-law is the mayor."
Holt picked up his coffee mug. Put it down without drinking from it. "I'll see what I can do," he said, with the tone of a man who had made peace with the fact that his life had become genuinely strange. "You take care of the problem first. Rockets come after results."
"Acceptable," Danny said. "I'll need the case files and whatever description Officer Briggs can give me of the physical details. Height, build, how it moved, whether the behavior changed after the shots landed."
Holt slid a folder across the desk.
Officer Joe Briggs was a thirty-year veteran who had the particular stillness of men who had seen enough that very little registered on their face anymore. He sat across from Danny in the break room and described what he'd seen in the Metzger parking lot with the flat precision of someone giving a statement they knew wasn't going to make sense and had stopped trying to make it make sense.
Large male subject. Six foot two, maybe more. Dark blue work coveralls, the kind mechanics wore, the kind that absorbed blood without showing it clearly. A white mask — not a Halloween store mask, something older and more specific, the kind of blankness that wasn't accidental. Kitchen knife, eight-inch blade, carried without any apparent concern about concealment.
"I put two rounds in his chest," Briggs said. "Center mass, both of them. He went down. I called it in, waited for backup, did the full protocol." He looked at Danny. "Next morning he's three miles away and there's a body."
"The way he moved before the shots — anything unusual?"
Briggs thought about it. "Slow," he said finally. "Everything deliberate. Like he wasn't in a hurry because he didn't need to be." He paused. "You ever watch someone walk who doesn't think anything in the world can stop them? It was like that."
Danny looked at the composite sketch in the folder.
The coveralls. The mask. The build that suggested something that had decided on a physical form and had been wearing it for a very long time.
He knew who this was.
Michael Myers.
Danny sat with the case file in his car and worked through what he actually knew versus what he'd absorbed from various sources, because the documented reality of Michael Myers was considerably more complicated than any single account suggested.
The core facts were consistent across serious documentation: a child from Haddonfield, Illinois, who had committed his first killing at age six under circumstances that the psychiatric establishment had spent decades failing to explain adequately. Institutionalized. Escaped. Returned home. The pattern had repeated across decades with the particular consistency of something that wasn't operating on human psychology.
The theological dimension was the contested part. Some Church documentation attributed Myers to a Druid sacrificial tradition — the Thorn cult, a lineage going back centuries, selecting a child from each generation to carry a curse that required him to kill his bloodline, the violence feeding something much older than Michael Myers as an individual. Other documentation treated the supernatural element as incidental — Myers as a human being who had passed through something that had burned away everything except the killing, leaving a residue that happened to be unkillable.
The practical operational reality was the same either way: Michael Myers was very difficult to permanently stop, had a demonstrated willingness to travel significant distances when the situation called for it, and had now apparently arrived in Connecticut and killed the Ghostface Killer.
That last part was the genuinely interesting problem. Ghostface was a human operator — possibly an organization at this point, the mask and persona having been picked up by multiple people over the years in the documented cases — and a human operator with a knife was not something that should have presented a terminal obstacle to a skilled killer. But Myers had eliminated him, which suggested Myers had either arrived in the area with a specific purpose or had encountered Ghostface incidentally and responded to the threat the way he responded to all threats.
Danny needed to know which.
He sent Art out before leaving the station.
If Michael Myers was operating in the area and Art found him, the encounter would at minimum generate useful information about current position and behavior. Art was unkillable in a way that made him genuinely useful for reconnaissance against targets that would kill anything else on contact.
The two of them in the same location was a prospect Danny found genuinely interesting from a professional standpoint.
He went back to school.
Noon.
Maria had been having the conversation with Alan in the mirror for twenty minutes, which she knew because she'd been watching the clock and using it as a fixed point while everything else in the conversation destabilized her.
"You've been thinking about it for two weeks," Alan said. Her reflection's posture was different from Maria's — the same face, the same features, but carrying them differently, the way an actor and a civilian could stand in the same position and communicate completely different things. "At some point thinking about it and doing something about it have to connect."
"It's not that simple." Maria pulled her knees up on the bed. "He has a girlfriend."
"Jennifer," Alan said, with the specific flatness of someone setting a chess piece down. "Whose existence he clearly hasn't let stop him from being aware of you."
"Being aware of someone isn't—"
"Maria." Alan leaned forward in the mirror, which wasn't physically possible but happened anyway. "He sees you. He's known about me since the beginning and hasn't run. He told me directly that this would require you to make the choice, present and in agreement. That's not a man who's dismissing you."
Maria thought about the conversation under the tree she'd been building toward for weeks. The thing she wanted to say, the specific words, how they would feel to say out loud to an actual person rather than to her own reflection.
"What if she gets angry?"
"That's not your problem to manage," Alan said. "That's between her and him."
Maria looked at her hands. "You won't do anything to her."
A pause. "I'll be measured."
"Alan."
"I will be measured," Alan repeated, which Maria understood was the closest she was going to get to a commitment.
The girls' restroom on the second floor, between third and fourth period.
Jennifer had made a calculation that morning. Maria's continued presence in Danny's orbit was a variable that needed addressing before it became a pattern, and the appropriate place to address it was a private conversation, direct and clear, with Heather and Cara present for emphasis rather than escalation.
The conversation did not go the way Jennifer had calculated.
The person who came out of the restroom stall when Jennifer finished her opening statement was not Maria in her usual configuration.
Alan looked at Jennifer with the kind of calm that came from genuinely not being afraid, and said something in return that was considerably more direct than anything Maria had said in her entire enrollment at this school.
Jennifer was not accustomed to being spoken to that way.
What followed was the specific kind of confrontation that restrooms were apparently designed by fate to host — three against one, and the one was winning. Not because of size or weight, Alan was smaller than any of the three, but because of the particular advantage held by someone who had absolutely no concern for social consequence and was willing to use whatever was immediately available and hurt.
Heather lost a significant amount of hair. Cara retreated to the door. Jennifer, who was coordinated and athletic and genuinely competitive, found herself struggling to hold position against someone who fought like the concept of de-escalation had never occurred to her.
They regrouped in the hallway.
"She's insane," Heather said, hand to her head.
Jennifer straightened her jacket. She was already reclassifying the situation. Maria-who-was-apparently-not-Maria was a different category of problem than Maria who wouldn't make eye contact, and the approach required adjustment accordingly.
She went to fourth period and thought about it.
After school.
Maria found Danny under the oak tree at the east end of campus where he usually sat when he was between things and didn't feel like being inside. The afternoon light was flat and cold. Other students moved past in clusters, enough ambient activity that the conversation had cover but not enough to make it impossible.
She'd rehearsed what she wanted to say. Standing in front of him, all of it left her and she said the true version instead, which was shorter and more honest and considerably harder to get out.
He listened without interrupting.
When she finished, she closed the remaining distance and hugged him, because it was either that or lose her nerve completely, and she'd decided she was done losing her nerve.
He was surprised. She could tell because he was usually several steps ahead of any given situation and this had caught him without a prepared position.
"You genuinely feel this way," he said, after a moment. "This isn't Alan."
"It's me," she said, into his shoulder. "Alan just helped me get here."
Across the quad, Jennifer had come out of the main building with Heather and stopped. The expression on her face processed several stages of response in rapid succession and arrived at something controlled and measuring.
Danny held Maria at arm's length and looked at her. "Jennifer hasn't agreed to anything."
"I know," Maria said.
"That matters."
"I know that too." A small pause. "Alan says she'll come around."
"Alan and Jennifer had a restroom confrontation this afternoon," Danny said.
Maria winced slightly. "How bad?"
"Nobody's in the hospital," he said. "That's the ceiling I've set."
He didn't say yes. He didn't say no. He said something that was an acknowledgment of what she'd said and a deferral of the question to a moment when all the relevant parties were in a position to have it properly, which Maria understood was as much as she was going to get today and was, in its way, more than she'd expected.
She went to find the bus. Danny watched her go.
He was already thinking about Michael Myers.
He'd left Art in the field east of town before school, in the general area where the second Ghostface killing had occurred. Art was patient in his own specific way and would wait as long as necessary. If Myers was still in the area — and Myers tended to stay in areas once he'd chosen them — the encounter was going to happen whether Danny engineered it or not.
He texted Chief Holt.
Identified the target. Michael Myers, Haddonfield origin. Unkillable by conventional means in his current operational state — the chest shots put him down temporarily but didn't hold. Need the rocket capability before I engage directly.
Holt's reply came back after a minute.
Working on it. How long do you need?
Danny thought about the camping trip, the Christmas break timeline, the Annabelle situation still unresolved, and the portrait in the locked room at Collingwood Manor that he'd been putting off because he didn't yet have a clear read on what he was dealing with.
Three days, he sent back. I'll find him before then. Just have the hardware ready when I need it.
He picked up his bag and walked toward the parking lot, and behind him Jennifer was watching the direction Maria had gone with the expression of someone who had revised their assessment of a situation and was now doing the longer calculation.
The woman who was eventually going to make both Jennifer and Alan recalibrate was still several weeks out.
But she was coming.
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