The jagged valley he gouged across his wrist was already starting to heal into thin pink scar tissue. The blood on the floor was already tacky and turning brown. "Fuck." He dropped the razor with resigned disgust. The thin clink of it on the bathroom's tile floor made him think of a tiny funeral bell. "Shit." He walked out into the living room of his shabby apartment. He closed his ratty robe against a chill he suddenly felt. "Drink." He walked past the decomposing couch, squatting like a dirty beast in the living room, into the sparse kitchen. The refrigerator was empty except for half a bottle of brown mustard (which had started life as a full bottle of yellow mustard) and a three-month-old fortune cookie. The cabinet above it was the alcoholic opposite. He was spoilt for choice; the green bottles of gin mingled happily with the clear bottles of vodka and the amber tinted bottles of whiskey. He squinted, thinking as hard as he felt he should over this decision, and reached for a single malt scotch. He kissed the bottle hard and swallowed harder. He drained a fourth of the bottle in one go. He let the bottle hang precariously in-between his fingers as he sauntered back to the couch and fell unceremoniously into the middle of the battered thing. A fine mist of dust erupted around him. His eyes began to water as he took another long pull off of the bottle. "Dammit." He got back up and made his way into the bathroom. Every surface was grey and covered with a thin film of indiscernible substance. The blood from his ill-fated suicide was a Rorschach test on the tiled floor. His razor was missing and he wondered what kind of pest problem he had when the pests required arming themselves. He gently got down on his knees and inched himself into position in front of the toilet. He then began to violently retch. The regurgitated alcohol left hot gravel along the back of his throat. As the initial waves of nausea waned, he looked down with an acquiescent despair into the bowl. It contained: three human fingers, a ball of hair, and two bottle caps. The caps were from extremely cheap beer. One of the fingers was still wearing a wedding band. "Huh." The former owner of said fingers would be missed. He washed his mouth out with the brownish water that came out of every faucet in his apartment. He went back to the couch and the bottle, then, after two more tugs on the bottle, silently prayed he'd die in his sleep as he passed out. The corpse of John Belushi just wouldn't shut up. "Some poor slob ends up your dinner and they'll just blame it on pit bulls. Again. You should move to a farm or something. Did you try killing yourself again? Should try drowning since cutting or pills didn't work out." "Shut the fuck up, John. I'm not moving. I'm not found out. Yet." John Belushi sneered menacingly. "It's only a matter of time before the police find a hair sample or some blood. Then they'll come to your apartment. They'll find the money and the passports and those dog adoption catalogs you find strangely arousing..." "Jesus Christ. I get drunk and look at those things once, and I'm branded a dog-fucker?" John Belushi began to knock on his head with a closed fist. The look in his eyes was insanely urgent. The man's head turned slightly with confusion, and led credence to that his mannerisms were becoming closer to his animalistic side. "I suppose that means I should get some sense knocked into me, huh? You could've just told me y'know? There are subtler ways than beating the hell out of yourself..." John Belushi's eyes got buggy and wild. The sound of his fist against his skull became thunderous to the man. "Will you just..." "STOP!" he screamed as he violently woke up. He was drenched in a sickly sour sweat and found himself lying in a completely uncomfortable position on his couch. A spring from the dark patchy well of the couch's frame had thrust itself painfully in his side. Loud knocking was coming from the other side of his apartment's front door. "Peter. Peter Wolfe. Municipal police department. Are you home, sir?" The warm sweat on his skin dropped in temperature enough to make him shiver. The newer cold sweat scared him in ways the police never could. "Just a--just a minute." "We just want to ask you some questions, Mr. Wolfe. We'd be happy if you're wearing pants." This made Peter instinctively check if he was, indeed, wearing pants and sigh with odd relief that he was. He went to the bathroom and slammed down the lid of the toilet. Nothing like severed fingers to make a bad first impression. He sprinted back to the door and undid the door chain and the deadbolt. He cracked open the door enough to get a quick take of the cops before he committed to fully facing the proverbial firing squad. The cops could've been brothers. Maybe they were. White males, middle 30's. Slim builds, lean. The one on the left looks like he's got an itchy trigger finger. There's something quick and cruel behind his eyes. The one on the right gives off the impression of a feral jungle cat: patiently lethal, waiting for the moment to strike. He is the calm and his partner is the storm. "Thank you Mr. Wolfe. We won't take up too much of your time. There were some...attacks, we'll call them, in your neighborhood. Some residents report a large dog. One in particular described the animal as a..." the jungle cat cop flipped listlessly through a small notepad. "She described it as 'something that looked like it fell out of an angry bear that had been fucked by Satan'." Peter chocked a little at that. "We're just wondering," cruel cop muttered as he inched closer and tried to eyeball Peter's apartment, "if you heard anything or saw anything or own a pet of some kind..." Peter slid into cruel cop's eye line. "Nope." "Nope, what?" "No, I didn't see or hear a thing. And I...uh, hate dogs. Yep. Absolutely filthy things. I wish we'd use them to start fires with." "Be that as it may, we found some blood leading from the scene of the attack to the front of this building." Jungle cat cop reached into his pocket, making it very apparent that he was armed, and fished out a business card. "Here. If you remember anything, anything at all..." The card said Warren Vesper: Municipal Police Detective. Wolfe looked at the front of the card, flipped it over, looked at the back quizzically, and then flipped it back. He looked at the jungle cat cop. "You're Vesper?" Jungle cat cop smiled like it had been slashed on his face with a razorblade. This made Peter uneasy and oddly nauseous. "That's what the card says, Mr. Wolfe." Peter slipped the card into the threadbare pocket on his robe. "The card doesn't say who he. Does he have a card?" Wolfe asked snidely. Cruel cop sneered, bearing his teeth. A guttural growl thundered lowly in his throat. Vesper held his hand up, interrupting cruel cop from leaning forward and most likely, by Wolfe's estimation, throttling Wolfe to death. "His name is Buddy." Wolfe opened his mouth to spout one of the ten jokes he had just thought of but Vesper stopped him abruptly. "Names aside, Mr. Wolfe, if you remember anything call us." "Certainly, Officer---" "Detective," Vesper interrupted matter-of-factly. Peter chocked back a laugh. "Yes, sorry Detective Vesper." Wolfe left the door cracked open. "And Buddy," he added as he finally closed the door and locked it. He put his ear to the door and closed his eyes. He concentrated his preternatural hearing on the cops walking down the hallway. "I think he's fucking lying." "You think everyone's fucking lying." "Well, they are. I read that." "You couldn't read a stop sign..." "...could if I tried." "Moving on. I agree. He knows something." "I would like to kill him. "Let's hold off on that for now." "...and then eat him." Wolfe sloughed off his robe, took a shower, and got dressed. His wrinkled clothes fit him poorly. His shirt, a yellowing white dress shirt, hung limply over his wrists. His drab brown slacks were threadbare. He threw on a pair of battered sneakers and a beat up sheepskin jacket. If the cops were on his trail, he would have to either eliminate the evidence, or barring that, throw them off his trail. Peter stopped by a convenience store, picking up a Red Bull and a pack of Camel filter cigarettes. "Food," he muttered as he lit a smoke and took a long pull off of the can. He stopped again at a ramshackle newsstand. The two top selling papers had headlines pertaining to torture being legal and the nation's currency being on fire. Peter Wolfe didn't care. He scanned the lesser papers until he found what he was looking for. The Midnight Star's headline proclaimed a frog baby to be the lovechild of Elvis' ghost. Underneath that, the blurry picture could have been a German Shepard on steroids if Wolfe hadn't recognized it as himself. Peter scanned the tabloid. Late night park-goers had witnessed a large hairy beast dragging a drunken man into a heavily wooded area. The man was unidentified and the photo for the article was taken from one of the witness's iPhone. Wolfe noted the knotted mass of shrubbery in the blurred photo. Some half bright memory fringed in red made the park spot seem familiar. He put the paper back on the stand, took a drag of the Camel and dropped it, grinding it under his heel. Then, slamming the rest of the Red Bull and casually tossing it into a nearby trash bin, headed to the park with an anxious conviction. The bushes were cordoned off with yellow caution tape. Peter Wolfe thought cops only used that stuff in movies. He ducked under the perimeter and shuffled through the greenery. He closed his eyes and let the breeze waft by his nose. He filled his lungs with deep breaths when he picked up on scents that jogged those crimson memories. He could taste the metallic tang of blood on his tongue, feel the man thrashing and finally surrendering to his gnashing jaws. The bones, rent from flesh, splintering between his teeth, as he savaged his victim. It wasn't a wild chase, a true hunt, but it made his hungry belly full. Wolfe opened his eyes. They darted, quickly but razor sharp, taking everything in. He could see the signs of the struggle. But, more importantly, he found the tufts of rusty brown hair stuck on the bush's burs. He pulled the feathered clumps from the sharp thistle and let them loose. One less thing to worry about, Peter thought as the hairs danced away past the yellow tape. Wolfe slipped out from under the taped cordon and made his way casually out of the park. He did not feel the lupine gazes of Vesper and Buddy on him. "He just flittered away the DNA evidence," Vesper whispered matter-of-factly. "He thinks he's safe?" Buddy hissed. "He thinks he's safe. He has no idea what he's up against. We've been waiting almost a century for someone like him." "I'm hungry, Vesper." Vesper looked into Buddy's eyes and caught a glimpse of the hunger they both felt, but unlike himself, Buddy had no patience or tolerance for the discomfort. "We'll get some nice Italian. You like Italian. That should tide you over, yes?" Buddy wore the look of a puppy that had been kicked. "...yeah, sure." Peter Wolfe returned home, the apartment seemingly less derelict than before. He was proactive against his "condition" and taking matters into his own hands felt good. It was time to celebrate, he thought. This time every drink from the bottle (gin this time) was a little bit of sunshine in his stomach instead of the burning fire of misguided absolution. John Belushi still wouldn't just shut up. "You think you're so fucking clever, don't you?" Even in the dream, Peter could feel the lopsided grin sitting comfortably on his face. He nodded casually. "You're not smarter than the cops." "The police might have had a slight chance with the hair, but now..." "Not the police, you jackass," Belushi infuriatingly replied. "The cops." "Oh you mean Detective 'I-have-such-a-big-dick' and his partner 'Yes-it-is-I've-seen-it'? So, they grasped at some straws coming here. My quick-thinking and apt wit kept me one step ahea--" The loud rapping at the door was too piercing to be interpreted as John Belushi pummeling himself. The booze hadn't knocked him out as much as he would've liked it to. His eyes strained to open. It took a relative month for his leaden legs to take commands again. He heaved himself up and stiffly walked to the door. He squinted through the peephole. The walleyed visages of a smiling Vesper and a scowling Buddy bulged back at Wolfe. Peter was getting sick of the greasy cold layer of sweat that oozed out of him whenever those bastards showed up. He swallowed hard; his throat suddenly lined with sandpaper, backed hesitantly away from the door, and reluctantly unlocked it. With blinding speed, Wolfe was thrust back onto the couch. Buddy has his hands fast on Wolfe's chest, holding him down firmly. Vesper was closing the door quietly. He turned his attention to Peter. "Double murder. Tampering with a crime scene. Destroying evidence in an ongoing investigation. That's a hell of a couple days for you, Mr. Wolfe." Wolfe's eyes couldn't seem to find a suitable target to rest on. The bloodshot orbs spun from Buddy to Vesper to the door and boomeranged back to Buddy to start the cycle all over again. His confused look landed on Vesper. "Double murder?" Vesper sauntered over to his captive audience and loomed over him with a smile that was the complete opposite of reassuring. Vesper reached into his suit jacket, brandished a small steno notepad and flipping through it casually until he found what he was looking for. "One Mario Vincenti. Italian restaurateur. Tragically mauled and killed several hours ago. The report, when I file it, will tie it to the victim in the park from two nights ago." Wolfe just stared. Vesper took a breath. "Of course, when Buddy and I followed some, well, let's call them 'conveniently left' clues and leave it at that, we arrived to find the heinous perpetrator, Peter Wolfe, had vacated his domicile with nary a trace of his whereabouts." "What?" The word fell out of Peter's mouth like a heavy rock. "Am I to assume," Vesper said, then cleared his throat, "that something is unclear to you, Mr. Wolfe?" Buddy leaned in close to Peter's ear, his breath smelled like death and cheap mouthwash. "We're going to feast on you, boy." Wolfe looked up at Buddy as yet another sheen of sweat broke out all over his body. His heart was racing and he could only focus on one thing at a time. It suddenly dawned on him that Vesper was still chatting away. Vesper was pacing slowly by the door with his back to the rest of the room. "...see, every so often a totem occurs that is so pure and natural in it's essence, that not only does it act as a beacon for lesser--" Buddy snorted disapprovingly. "No, no. Not lesser, but not as...eh...concentrated. Where was I?" "...your blood will wash down the meat and we'll pick the leftovers out of our teeth with your bones..." whispered Buddy, being only that articulate when a meal was soon to be had. "Oh yes!" pontificated Vesper. "You not only act as a beacon, but consuming you will add your power, as it were, to us. You see, the Native American Karankawa tribe's rituals of cannibalizing their enemies was actually just the continuation of the totemistic consumption rites from times before there were even gods. In fact, Jesus Christ was one of ours. Wait, is 'totemistic' even a word?" Vesper finally stopped to take a breath and turned to face Buddy and Wolfe. "Well, an oral history will, in the end, do you no good in terms of ultimately surviving this little soiree." Wolfe saw Buddy greedily licking his lips out of the corner of his eye. Vesper slipped his pad back into his jacket and, with the same smooth nonchalant manner, pulled out a cruel knife. It was all curves and edges, polished to a silver paleness. Its hilt was gold, flecked with the black of old dried blood. Wolfe's heart was throwing itself against the hard cage of his ribs. His skin was hot enough to dry the sheets of sweat that had sprung from him previously. His eyes had ceased darting and were now taking everything in slowly. He could see the difference in Vesper's and Buddy's eyes from the time they met to now: how they become more almond-shaped, more feral, less civilized. He could see the hairs on their heads start to muss, becoming ungroomed and wild. He could feel the hairs on the back of his own neck start to stand up. He could smell the remnants of bloody murder on Buddy and the high citrus notes in Vesper's cheap, shitty aftershave. His heart continued to trip hammer in his chest and his hands balled themselves into fists. He was sure that his slight shaking was felt by Buddy, who had eased his grip during Vesper's speech. Wolfe took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Beyond the darkness, past the pulsating reds and purples and black underneath the lids, John Belushi's smile took up most of his face. "Fuck them up, kiddo." Wolfe's eyes snapped open and he felt the adrenaline rush that his lupine alter ego afforded him. He pushed himself against the slackened grip of Buddy, putting the hardest part of his forehead into the bridge of Buddy's nose. The sharp crack rang through the apartment. A hot gush of blood cascaded down his face. The blood was not his. He could sense, with its contact on his skin, that every word Vesper had said was true. He felt the animal, the True Beast, inside of him. He felt the centuries of hunts, of freedom, of power run through him. He stood up and faced Buddy. Buddy was holding his ruined face in his hands. Blood and snot pushed themselves through the cracks between his fingers. "Fudder! Ub brod ma fuddin' nobe!" Wolfe cast a casual glance over his shoulder at Vesper. The horror in Vesper's eyes met with Peter's look, which said: "Hey. Watch this!" Buddy languidly looked up, the fire of hateful violence starting to dwindle. That fading ember was snuffed out as Wolfe pounced at him and, with teeth as cruel and sharp as razor wire, bit out his throat. Buddy's howling scream gurgled weakly from his new orifice as Peter stood back up. Peter looked down at Buddy as the death rattle wetly ceased. The blood was soaking into his shirt and pooling around the front of his pants, making Wolfe think of a rape victim. He heard the clank of Vesper's knife hitting the floor. He spun around to Vesper, who was wearing a face shotgun-blasted with fear and loathing. Peter Wolfe was lazily chomping on Buddy's throat bits, gore running over his teeth, lips, and chin. He swallowed greedily and sighed. "And what," Wolfe mused, "are going to do with you?" Vesper's whole being slackened, not out fear, but out of ill-conceived confidence. His smile (that same razor slash of a thing that was more facial than actual mouth) materialized as Vesper got out and flipped through the pages of his notepad. "Upon further investigation, this officer--" "Detective," Wolfe corrected coldly. "Um, well, yes. This detective was able to ascertain that the suspect, one Peter Wolfe, is in no way connected to the case. The actual perpetrator was utilizing, squatting perhaps, in Wolfe's apartment while Wolfe was out of town. A fact Wolfe was able to support wholly with witness testimonies and to the satisfaction of the Municipal Police Department." Vesper took a deep breath and continued. "The suspect was found on the premises and mortally wounded Detective Lindsey Budd. The perp then escaped while Detective Vesper attended to his ailing partner." Vesper looked up from his notes; hope halfheartedly gleaming in his eyes. "...and they lived happily ever after?" Wolfe clucked his tongue and seemed to mull over Vesper's new take on things. After a beat of silence, after the tension between the two had grown thick enough to cut through, Wolfe spoke up. "You're close. Everything but the end." John Belushi flashed across Wolfe's brain. He was doing a line of coke off of a naked woman's ass and laughing maniacally. Wolfe violently lunged at Vesper, feeling claws at the end of his forelegs, his suddenly sharp fingernails. One hand held Vesper fast at Vesper's shoulder, the other plunged deep into the detective's chest. Amid the dry crackling of splintered chest bones, the soggy sucking sound of Vesper's heart being torn from his chest was paramount. Wolfe treated the muscular mass, wet and deep red, as a savored succulent fruit: taking hungry bites from it. Wolfe's eyes, lighted anew with his power, met Vesper's eyes, the cold light of fervent hope dying quickly. The hard thud of Vesper's body echoed softly in Peter's ears as Peter walked slowly with conviction to the cabinet above the refrigerator. The bottle of scotch was half empty from days ago. In his present condition and situation, Peter Wolfe decided (for once) to see the bottle as half full. He felt like he had punched out God. He could go out, drink a bathtub full of booze, and sexually satisfy one hundred women. That's how he felt, if he was being honest with himself. He drank slowly as the sun set, sending soft orange light through the filmy windows. He drank slowly as the moon rose. He held up the now empty bottle and peered through it, catching some of the moonlight. He could see the full silver dime of the moon trapped in the oily glass. He lowered the bottle but kept his eyes on the pale disc in the inky sky. He smiled, despite himself. He would be busy taking care of Vesper's and Buddy's bodies. But Hell, why not go out and enjoy his newly fought for and earned freedom? That booze bathtub and night of loose women wouldn't wait for him, now would they...?