As the sun fell from the sky, Garcia had begun to fidget, throwing long looks around him as if checking on posted sentries. Except they were alone here, the soft footfalls of the canine squad well beyond their hearing. As the last traces of orange tinged the skyline, the shadows cast by the crypts around them grew. The patches of gray that in early evening had circled the monuments like little skirts now spread like spilled blood, staining the grass and the stone walkways, tinting the newest of the marble monuments in a slow, inexorable creep of darkness that silenced all sound, except for the occasional hoot of an owl, and the noises of discomfort that they made themselves as they waited for a man with a gun. A man with a gun and, they suspected, a bag in which to carry away the bones of someone long since dead.
Garcia shifted again in his seat. “Mind if I smoke?” he whispered.
“Smoking will land you in the cemetery.”
“Funny.” Garcia felt his pockets and a moment later a cigarette glowed in his mouth. “I figured we’re waiting rather than hiding. If those dogs don’t get him, I’m not sure we will.”
“True,” Hugo said.
They sat in silence as Garcia smoked, the breeze rising and falling, the trees around them chattering like giants one moment and the next falling quiet, watchful.
“It is a strange place this, non?” Garcia dropped his cigarette on the ground and put his foot on it. “Three hundred thousand bodies, right here.”
“Strange as in creepy?”
“A little. Perhaps it is our childhoods that make it so. Graveyards are nothing if not locations for all the things that scared us, ghosts, vampires …”
“Zombies,” Hugo added.
“Precisely. Is it any surprise we carry these fears with us into adulthood?”
“I wasn’t aware I had.”
“Everything pushed out by logic, is that it?”
“I don’t believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, either.”
“Logic and reason make for a pretty dull existence.”
Hugo stood and put his hands on his hips, arching his back to stretch. “I lead an interesting life. Or used to. Don’t tell me you believe in those things?”
“I’ll believe in ghosts before I believe in Santa Claus,” Garcia said. “But I’d have to see one myself.”
“Well, you’re in the right place.”
They fell silent again but Garcia didn’t seem to like the quiet, or the stillness. He shifted on the bench. “You think he’ll come early or late?”
“He has a lot to do,” Hugo said. “If he comes at all, my guess would be early.”
“And if he doesn’t come? We wait until the next new moon?”
“That’s one option. Or we go a different route.”
“Such as?”
“Assuming we’re not tossed from the investigation because it’s all about terrorism, I’d suggest profiling the victim.”
“You mean victims.”
“No. I think the couple was unlucky. I think they stumbled on our guy as he was heading to someone’s grave site. Probably Jane Avril. So profiling them would be a waste of time, and possibly misleading.”
Garcia patted his pockets again, looking for a second cigarette. He was about to speak when the sound of stone on stone, a low grating, swept past them.
“Merde, what was that?”
Hugo checked his watch. Ten. The timing was right. He looked around, unable to pinpoint where the sound had come from.
They heard it again, a scraping that was almost a rumble, for no more than a second.
“What is that?” Garcia whispered.
“No idea,” said Hugo, on his feet. “But I don’t hear any dogs. Either they aren’t close or they haven’t picked up anything odd, scent or sound.”
“Should we radio, get someone over here?”
“Maybe,” Hugo said. “But those guys are patrolling their quadrants, I don’t want to mess them up unless we have to. Let’s go take a look.”
He thought the sound had come from the other side of the Casimir-Perier statue, but there was no wall there, no way in or out of the cemetery. Someone hiding in a crypt? Hugo thought it unlikely the dogs had missed someone when they swept through at closing time.
He started forward, Garcia in his wake. They kept to the grass, skirting the cobbles that made up the roundabout, staying close to the trees and crypts as cover, and Hugo not wanting the sound of his boots to alert any intruder. He walked with a flashlight in his hand, but switched off, comforted by the gentle weight under his left armpit of a more lethal tool.
Halfway around the circle Hugo stopped to peer into the night, looking for movement of any kind, straining to hear a noise that didn’t belong. Nothing. He looked over his shoulder at Garcia who shook his head. They moved on, feet silent on the grass.
They stopped again at the far side of the statue, either side of an oak tree, and Hugo was about to keep going when a screech let out behind them, deeper into the cemetery, and a black silhouette flashed between two narrow headstones.
“What the hell was that?” Garcia whispered.
“Raven,” Hugo said. But the noise had startled him and his heart hammered in his chest. He took three slow, deep breaths. “Keep going?”
“Merde!” Garcia cursed and flung himself at Hugo, slamming him into the tree and then rolling him down its side onto the ground. Shards of bark splintered onto them and Hugo heard the distinctive crack of a pistol, and the immediate whine of a bullet going overhead.
“Where is he?” Hugo hissed, reaching for his gun.
“Four or five crypts deep.” Garcia ducked as another bullet slammed into the tree. His head pressed to the ground, he held the walkie-talkie to his mouth. “This is Garcia. Division thirteen, by the Casimir-Perier statue, south side. He’s here and he’s shooting, let the damn dogs go.”
Hugo didn’t wait. The tree was their only cover and whoever wanted them dead had a thousand stone shields protecting him as he moved about. It was a matter of time, probably seconds, before he found a clear line of sight. Hugo got to one knee and a bullet kicked another handful of bark into his face, stinging his cheeks. But it told him which direction he needed to go.
“I’ll cover you,” Garcia said. “Go!”
Hugo ran to his left, putting the tree between him and the shooter, sprinting for the nearest row of tombs. Behind him, Garcia fired three shots and he heard each one zinging off stone. Hugo reached the first tomb, a low rectangle of granite, and he hurdled it, pulling himself behind the head-high mausoleum beside it. He kept going, knowing that the shooter would expect him to pause, get his bearings, maybe shoot. But Garcia was still exposed and Hugo wanted to invert the element of surprise. He circled the area where he was sure the intruder lurked, moving swiftly and quietly between the rows of the dead, gun in his hand and his eyes scanning for movement.
Hugo saw him. A short, stocky figure, no more than a silhouette moving between the headstones, weaving like he’d been here before and knew where he was going.
Hugo angled to his left, aiming to cut the man off, keeping the bobbing figure at the edge of his vision, losing him and then spotting him again. Hugo felt his breathing go ragged as he closed in on the man, but he was slowed as a crypt the size of a small house loomed, forcing him wide again, dropping him ten yards farther behind his quarry and taking the man out of his sight.
He rounded the building and stopped in his tracks.
A man, short perhaps, his head seeming unusually large in the darkness. Hugo was more certain about the man’s eyes, impossibly black and staring at him down an extended arm, down the barrel of a gun, the rest of the man’s body hidden behind a granite fleur-de-lis.