“Kid, shut up. Shut up and listen.”
It started back in the 1970s. No, I wasn’t around then, or if I was, I was still alive and I don’t remember. Bodies started turning up in odd places in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the range that separates San Judas from the Pacific Ocean. Usually dumped beside a highway overpass, all of them stabbed repeatedly by a four-edged blade like a bayonet. After the third turned up with the same M.O., someone noticed that all the dumping locations had graffiti on them, and that the same piece of graffiti was always there: a single word, “SMYLE.” It was a tag even the gang experts down in LA hadn’t seen before, and as a nickname for known criminals it didn’t connect with anything in the records. Some reporter remembered his college lit courses and suggested in a column that it might have something to do with Chaucer’s description of a murderer as “the smyler with the knyfe beneath his cloke.” For a few weeks the press was off to the races with that, but even after the murders were solved nobody ever confirmed it had anything to do with old Geoffrey C.
Anyway, the killings kept happening, I think there were six altogether, and after a while the police began to put a few things together. The guy had to have a car, and seemed to find his victims at night. All of them were young people from the coastal towns, and the theory was that he was taking them right off the sidewalks, either by offering them rides or simply forcing them into his vehicle.
Making a long story shorter, the police in Santa Cruz and Monterey and other coast cities began keeping an eye on the local universities and junior colleges, and one night an officer scoped a guy in a battered old VW van acting suspicious, driving back and forth along the road outside Cabrillo College. The driver spooked and ran, the officer called in backup, and it turned into a chase. It didn’t last long—you don’t outrun a police cruiser in a VW—and the van lost it on a turn and crashed into a streetlight. The driver’s side glass was broken and there was no sign of the driver, but the officers smelled gasoline so they approached carefully. Then the van exploded. The huge fireball shook windows for blocks. Burned two of the cops but not critically.
They found the driver’s body, or at least they were pretty sure it was the driver’s body. It was burned too badly to be certain, and they couldn’t get an ID from the dental records, but all the officers on scene swore nobody got out of the van. They also found a weapon in the wreckage, twisted and melted by the heat but pretty obviously the blade that had killed those half-dozen victims; a nasty, handmade thing about eighteen inches long, capable of making a wound that wouldn’t close up. In other words, he liked to see people bleed. They found a few things in the ashes that suggested the killer had been living in the van. Apparently he had also been carrying several cans of gasoline in the back and decided to go out that way instead of being taken to jail.
The murders stopped after that. End of story, right?
Twenty-two years later, they started again, here in San Judas. Same M.O., except the guy was burning his victims’ bodies this time, but one of the bodies was discovered by a passing motorist who had a fire extinguisher, and when they got the remains to the medical examiner there it was, that four-sided wound. And of course the tags were showing up again too, a little smaller this time and in odd places, hard to see, but the word “SMYLE” was spray-painted somewhere near each body. By the time the fourth victim was found out by the Salt Piers, the police had decided it must be a copycat. The length of time, and the fact that they were so certain the body in the van had been the murderer’s, didn’t really admit any other possibility.
But they were wrong. It was the same guy. They were right about one thing, though. He was definitely dead.
This was when I was in Counterstrike, the paramilitary unit where I first trained, and word came down to us that our superiors suspected the hairy hand of Hell. If “Smyler” had come back from the dead, then there was only one explanation, and it had horns and carried a pitchfork. That seemed pretty weird from our end, because the murderer’s M.O. was exactly the same as before, students and other young people. See, normally, if the Opposition have an asset like that they put him or her to work doing something more useful than just random killing. Leo, my old top-kicker, said they might be using Smyler to shake people up, improve the climate for Hell’s other operations, if you get what I’m saying. Like they taught us in Angel Training, the Opposition thrives in chaos, and it was pretty clear that chaos was what this guy was causing. The newspapers persuaded someone on the force to talk about the “SMYLE” tags and soon it was “Graffiti Murderer Returns!” and “Ghost or Copycat?” and all that bullshit. For months it was like Son of Sam had come to Jude. A couple of cruising dumbasses got shot at by scared college girls carrying their daddies’ guns, and half the waterfront tourist business dried up.
I won’t bore you with all the details of how we tracked the guy down. Counterstrike Unit Lyrae, also known as the Harps, have methods the cops don’t even dream of, and that was necessary, because Smyler was no longer a living man. Not that finding him was easy, even for us. Whatever made him into a psychopathic murderer had been refined and polished by Hell, and San Judas was a fuck of a lot bigger and easier to hide in than the little Pacific Coast towns he’d been haunting in the ’70s. He actually killed another one after we started looking for him, a paperboy out on his morning rounds, and that burned all of us in the Harps like fire. Also, he was beginning to spread his net wider now, and the papers picked up on it. It was like the whole city was going mental. We had to deal with him quickly. We got a lucky break, a tip from an informant that put us right on his tail.
It turned out the killer wasn’t even staying in San Judas itself, but in an abandoned junkyard down in Alviso that had been red-tagged by the EPA for toxins and was awaiting Superfund cleanup. What did Smyler care if the place would have killed anyone else? He was already dead. He wasn’t even living in the deserted office; instead, he’d made a burrow for himself in the piles of wrecked autos and discarded appliances, nesting down in the middle like a rat.
The Harps was the first unit to reach him, which was okay with us. Call it the sin of pride, but there wasn’t a CU who didn’t want to be the ones to get the bastard. Smyler wouldn’t come out, even though we had him surrounded. Finally we tossed a couple of incendiaries in after him. That worked. Maybe he didn’t want to die the same way twice, I don’t know. Anyway, when the flames started, he came out quick enough.
Did I say he was like a rat? More like a spider, at least when he came scuttling out of a hidden hole in the mountain of twisted metal and jumped down before we could even lift our guns and aim, his baggy, hooded black sweatshirt flapping and that ugly, long weapon in his hand. Smyler jumped on an angel named Zoniel so quick that he managed to stab him three times before Sam hit him with the butt of his assault rifle and knocked him off. Zoniel was so badly wounded that he had to get a new body, but Smyler got Reheboth even worse, putting that wicked, four-edged blade right through his eye and into his brain. Reb got another body, too, but he also retired from Counterstrike soon afterward and got a job upstairs. Said it wasn’t the getting stabbed so much, but that face-to-face moment with the guy just before the knife went in. Said he’d never seen anyone so happy.
The Highest Himself only knows how many more of us the little shit might have damaged, or how many of us might have gone down from friendly fire, because he was horribly fast and everybody was shooting wildly. But someone got lucky and raked him with an M4 full of silver rounds and took half his leg off. Smyler started trying to crawl away, leaving a trail of blood like a snail’s track, and at first I thought I was hearing his death-gasps, but after a moment I realized he was laughing in a terrible, dry, whispering voice. Laughing.