Creepers (12 page)

He saw Louise to her door and promised to call soon. She thanked him for dinner and for being such a gentleman, which made them both laugh. He left without a kiss.

September 6

Thursday

Chapter 6

12:30A.M.-2:37 A.M.

Lester Baker strolled up St. Nicholas Avenue with the arrogant strut that was one of his trademarks. Uptown you didn't act tough unless you were tough, because there was a whole line of punks just waiting to prove they were better than you. Toughness came in many shapes--pimping, dealing drugs, killing people for fun or profit. Lester was aware of this unwritten law of not pretending to be what you weren't, and as he stopped outside, the Three Bells bar, he knew he didn't have to worry. He was one tough motherfucker. So maybe he wasn't a big-time deal and would never get his name in the Daily News, but he had the respect of his peers. In fact, the group of four men who waited inside the bar for him plainly worshiped Lester Baker. And that was enough for him. For now.

He pulled the door open and strutted into the smoky darkness without breaking his stride. The air conditioner at the Three Bells was an ancient machine, mounted over the front door, that made more noise than it did cool air. In the summer the bar was usually only a few degrees cooler than outside, but tonight as the city temperature began to dip, the bar was icy cold. Lester shivered as he approached the back booth where his friends Ronny, Jackson, Roy, and Sammy always congregated.

"Here comes the man," Jackson hooted with pride as Lester came into view through the haze. "Get him a brew, boy," he commanded Roy, pushing him unceremoniously out into the dirty aisle.

"What's happenin'?" Lester asked, sliding into Roy's vacant place.

"You tell us," Ronny said eagerly. At nineteen, he was the youngest member of Lester's group, but he was still a good man. And Lester knew that with time Ronny would become as proficient with a can of spray paint as he was.

"I thought we'd jes' hang out tonight, what say?" Lester said solemnly.

The three men around him groaned. Because they always left the plans for a night in Lester's hands, they were at the mercy of his moods. Sometimes Lester was flying high and wanted to tear up the streets--and that usually meant invading a subway yard where the cars lay like sleeping anacondas in the night . . . just begging to be spray-painted. Sometimes Lester was in a quiet mood and he'd just want to sit at the Three Bells and get quietly drunk on beer--tempered with a little reefer, of course. Most often Lester rode on an even keel, like tonight, and the evening could go either way. Only Ronny, who aspired to the group leader's expertise, was gravely disappointed when they didn't end up in the yard defacing the subway cars. Lester was Ronny's ideal.

For Lester Baker was "El Bee," the greatest subway graffitist in New York. Lester had his signature, striped black and yellow like the body of a bee, adorning more subway cars in more prominent places than any other dude in the city. Lester had fallen into spray painting by accident. Like so many kids, he oftentimes just rode the trains around the city to ease the boredom of his life and to take the edge off the frustration of being poor in a city where wealth meant everything. Lester had dropped out of school at age sixteen, and four years later he'd grown bored with just hanging out on the street He craved a little excitement, a little meaning to life.

One day Lester bought a Magic Marker pen and took it with him into the subway. For years he'd seen the names and fanciful designs covering every inch of every subway car, but this "artwork" never meant much to him. But that day, as his own pen touched a pristine square of cream-colored wall and the spot under the thick black scrawl of "Lester 131" (his street) became his, something changed in him forever. In this writing there was a pleasure so deep that it centered in his groin as if he were about to make love to a woman. "Lester 131" was no longer just a nameless face in the teeming ghetto; he was something, somebody.

Over the next months Lester practiced his skill with the dedication of a medieval apprentice shooting for a guild membership. He refined his signature, embellished it and transmogrified it to "El Bee," a pun on his initials, that was further enforced by the hymenopterous colors. Lester fell in with a group of young men for whom "writing" was a way of life. In a short time, he'd risen in the ranks to top man. El Bee knew the ins and outs of the subway yards from the Bronx to Coney Island; he knew the times of night it was safe to spray paint and he knew the best paint, the best time to go, the best way to get there and get out, and the best way not to get caught. In short, "El Bee" knew the best because he was the best.

"We been hangin' out for three days now, Lester," Ronny complained loudly. "How's about doin' somethin' 'stead of turnin' into some kinda winos?"

Lester stared him straight in the eyes, then laughed. The sound of his voice broke the tension, and the others laughed with him. "Maybe you got a point there, my man. What say we hit the yard tonight? Do some real fine work for the peoples of this muthafuckin' city to "predate?" He contentedly sipped his beer and waited for the expected response from the others.

"Now you's talkin', brother," Sammy threw in. Sammy was the quietest member of the group and had the least talent. But he was good at shoplifting, and it was his duty to supply the paint, rubber gloves, flashlights, face masks-- everything they might need to work at peak efficiency.

"Well, come on, what we waitin' for?" Jackson urged. He was jealous of Lester's reputation. El Bee was good, but he wasn't all that much better than Jackson LaPierre. And one day Jackson'd prove it!

Lester appraised Jackson for a second, then eased a slow smile across his face. "We waitin' for me, Jackson, that's what we's waitin' for. So let's relax and enjoy this good brew. My treat." Lester felt expansive tonight, like he did anytime he was going out to do some writing. Nothing ever went wrong when he and his men went into the yards. Nothing.

An hour later El Bee led the way across the tracks toward a string of subway cars corralled at the back of the yard. He chose out-of-the-way cars deep inside the pen; cars that were on the periphery of the compound were dangerous, for it was too easy for even the laziest patrolmen to skirt the edges of the area in their halfhearted search for vandals. Only the most dedicated company man plunged into the middle of the yard looking for trouble, and Lester knew this breed of man was rare indeed.

El Bee paused for a second, holding his hand over his right shoulder to signal the column of men behind him to halt; he thought he'd seen something moving in the darkness. He knew the cops were getting smarter. Sometimes they even hid back among the trains and waited for the graffiti artists to come along; then they jumped them and hustled them off to the office, where all hell broke loose. Most guys who got caught just got chewed out for their mischief, but more and more these days, the authorities were getting just plain mean. They were forcing families to pay for the cleaning of the subway car, and there was no way Lester's mother could come up with the two hundred bucks; hell, she had trouble scraping together three bucks for a half-gallon of cheap wine.

When he was convinced that he and his men were actually alone, that the motion was nothing more than his imagination playing tricks, Lester signaled his men forward. Each of them carried a small canvas bag that held the essential tools. They were no amateur punks jiving around destroying property for the hell of it. They were professionals, men whose names meant something to the cognoscenti of subway art. This was El Bee and his boys, the creme de la creme of subway graffitists.

The troop rounded a corner behind a line of cars as cautiously as a commando team assigned to take a fortified hill position. Lester's heart began to race and his breath grew shallow. Before him, in the washed-out light of the moon that hung over the yard, a string of newly cleaned subway cars sat like lambs awaiting slaughter. Lester knew he was home. The familiar rush of adrenaline coursed through his body, moving him ahead faster, lighter on his feet. El Bee was about to strike again.

Fifteen minutes later, their work lights were set up around the various cars like miners' lamps in a coal field. El Bee and his men had begun to work. Lester worked the first car, knowing this was the one most passengers would see as it pulled into the station. Next to him Jackson agonized over his "High Jack" moniker, and two cars down, Ronny, Roy, and Sammy were working inside a car. They were novices, and as such, weren't allowed to embellish the full side of a car.

Lester had been working for some time on his own name, carefully spraying the outlines of the letters along the side of the car, so the unblemished windows bisected them evenly. He wasn't interested in covering the glass; that was sloppy, too easy, the sign of a beginner. He'd just finished the last E when he got the sudden and unmistakable feeling he was being watched. He stopped casually and looked around, trying quietly to alert Jackson; the other three were too far away to signal. Definitely, something had changed in the air. There was the feeling of another presence--presences--and the hair on the back of Lester's neck prickled at the thought.

"Jackson, you see anything?" Lester whispered to his nearest companion.

"I ain't seen nothin'. What's up?" He barely looked up from his work.

"Never mind." Lester picked up the first can of yellow paint to fill in his name, but the irritating feeling was still with him. He now had the unmistakable impression he was being observed. The cops had started using dogs to sniff out intruders and to hold them at bay; if they were onto him and his men there was no alternative but to pack up and run.

If they were onto him.

Lester carefully stowed his gear in his bag and began a routine check down the line of cars. Shit, if the cops caught them, all hell'd break loose. He already had a long record for defacing city property, and if he got caught again, he surely wouldn't be able to talk his way out of it. He walked past Jackson, who was completing his work, then on two cars away to the others. Here the three boys worked inside together, their lamps casting eerie, flickering shadows through the windows while they blithely defaced what had taken two transit work crews so long to clean. Obviously they neither heard nor sensed anything wrong, anything unusual. Only Lester was worried, and for the first time in his career, he was getting a case of the jitters.

El Bee was returning to the first car when he saw movement. It came from his right on the opposite side of the car he was passing. Something flashed by the open space between cars at exactly the same time Lester did. He was being followed. But it wasn't a TA cop. No way. It was something low, creeping along near the ground as it shadowed him. Lester swallowed hard as fear replaced curiosity. He froze in place, then waited.

Nothing.

He keened his ears to catch the foreign sound of movement. Before him, in the darkness, the steady hiss of Jackson's spray paint played out a familiar tune. Behind him the muted laughter of his three buddies reminded Lester that he'd have to reprimand them later for talking on the job. He listened harder, then heard it. A swishing sound, a rustling, really, as if something were rubbing itself along the car's far side. It was the sound cloth made when it rubbed against metal, accompanied by the sound of stealthily running feet.

Lester pinpointed the sounds. He wanted to run, but his feet were rooted to the place where he stood trembling. The running sounds fanned out beyond him and Jackson in one direction, to the others behind him. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead. There were several of them, possibly four or five, and they were spreading out. If they clambered through the sections between the cars, Lester and his men would be surrounded. Trapped. Jesus, were the cops really getting so much flak from above that they'd actually begun doing their jobs?

In a flash of fear-driven inspiration, Lester dropped full out to the ground as if he were about to do a set of pushups. He peered under the car. Not more than ten feet away, something stared back at him. Instinctively Lester hauled out his flashlight from his belt and flicked it on. The sharp beam exploded out into the darkness, cutting a wedge-shaped slice of black from the night. A growl of anger and surprise pierced the silence as the thing angrily waved its arm at the blinding light, then sprang behind the wheel housing, momentarily disappearing from sight.

Lester scrambled to his feet, allowing the flashlight to tumble from his hand. In the split second before the intruder leaped out of sight, Lester saw it clearly. His mind wanted to label the creature as human, but the thing was like no man he'd ever seen before. Wild shocks of hair framed staring, hate-filled eyes. The snarling mouth was an angry gash in the dead white translucent skin. All the time it had been hunched over in a ball, supporting its weight on the backs of its hands. The hands. It was they that Lester remembered most. The hand that had reached out into the night, snapping at the light from the flashlight, trying to strangle it. The hand whose knobby fingers ended in inch-long fingernails that curled downward like talons. The hand of a killer who waited, a few feet away in the darkness, for the right time to strike.

Lester turned without another thought and ran into the darkness alongside the row of subway cars. He didn't see Jackson until he collided with him and almost knocked him over.

"What the fuck...?" Jackson began. But the moment he saw the terror carved onto Lester's face, he instantly stopped talking.

"There's somethin' out there," Lester shouted. "We gotta get outta here, man."