Dark Specter (30 page)

“Why?”

“Someone might see us.”

I looked around. We were surrounded by woods on one side and ocean on the other.

“That’s bullshit. Anyway, what if they do?”

She looked down, shaking her head.

“You don’t understand.”

“That’s what Sam’s always saying. I guess I’m just not up to the intellectual demands of living here. Fortunately I’ll be back with my own kind soon. Now then, have you got something to tell me or what?”

She grabbed my hand and pulled me over to the jumble of rocks leading down from the bluff.

“Just come with me. Please!”

I decided to humor her. Below us, the sea swell slushed and slurped on the underside of the smooth basalt ledge. When we reached it, I turned to Andrea and smiled tightly.

“OK, lay it on me.”

She shrugged.

“I don’t know where to begin.”

“Try the beginning.”

“It’s … I mean, how do I know if I can trust you? Sam said that you were friends. You might tell him everything …”

I gestured impatiently.

“I won’t. You have my word on that. Besides, we’re not really friends. He’s just someone I knew years ago, at college. Like I told you, I’m leaving soon and I won’t be back. And the only regret I have about that is that I would like to have spent more time with you, Andrea.”

She pushed back her hair distractedly.

“Me? Why?”

I smiled at her.

“I thought women weren’t supposed to ask that. Anyway, I don’t know. I can only say that out of all the people here, you’re the only one who seems completely real.”

She narrowed her eyes, as though suspecting some trick.

“You mean you think the others are specters?”

I gave an expressive sigh.

“Please, Andrea! Don’t give me that crap.”

“You don’t believe in it?”

She seemed amazed.

“What’s to believe?” I demanded. “The gospel according to Billy Blake? You don’t buy into that, do you?”

A sea gull flew by, emitting sounds like a squeaky gate. Andrea swung around as though someone had touched her. She seemed to be getting more agitated by the moment.

“We all do,” she murmured. “We have to.”

“But supposing you don’t? Supposing you lose your faith, what happens then?”

She did not reply.

“Do you want to leave?” I suggested. “Is that what this is all about, Andrea?”

Her head shook in a spasm.

“You don’t understand!”

I turned and started to climb back up the rocks.

“Stop!”

It was a cry of desperation.

“You mustn’t go yet! Please come back!”

She looked so helpless I found myself taking pity on her. Maybe she really was crazy, I thought. If so, she was in good company. I climbed back down.

“You’re absolutely right!” I told her sharply. “I don’t understand a fucking thing. I don’t understand why you asked me to meet you. I don’t understand what you’re so afraid of. I don’t understand what you’re doing here in the first place.”

She sidled past me, putting herself between me and the bluff.

“It’s no use trying to cut off my escape,” I said. “If you want me to stay and listen to you, you’d better start talking sense. Fish or cut bait, Andrea.”

She looked up above my head, as though seeking inspiration.

“You know about Lisa, right?” she said.

“Sam’s wife, the one who drowned?”

“The one who drowned.”

She continued her circular movement, ending up back in her original position. I turned to face her.

“Lisa was a friend of mine. She invited-me here when she bought the place. There were a bunch of us. Most of them left. I stayed.”

A movement caught my attention. Behind Andrea and slightly to one side, someone had appeared on the rocky outcrop high up at the other side of the cove.

“Someone’s watching us,” I murmured.

I couldn’t make sense of the perspective at first. The figure seemed to be farther away than the rock it was standing on. Then I realized that it was not an adult but a child, dressed in the clothes I had discovered in my room earlier, the denim shirt and jeans. The outfit now looked strangely familiar.

Andrea had turned to look.

“I don’t see anyone,” she said with a puzzled frown.

I hardly heard. A terrible madness had gripped me, a senseless certainty I knew was impossible, but which I could not shake off.

“David!”

“There’s no one there,” said Andrea.

The child stood rigidly still. His face was expressionless.

“David! It’s me, your father!”

There was no reaction. I shoved my way past Andrea, sprinted across the cove and hurled myself at the rock face.

T
he day after the double slaying in Carson Street, Charlie Freeman came by Grady to check on the surviving white victim. It was a routine follow-up to a case which another detective had initiated, and in which he himself took no particular interest. Freeman was a good old boy of thirty-seven from a remote stretch of Wilkes County who had never pretended to take much serious interest in anything except fishing, hunting and his dog, Reb.

He parked his pickup in a gimp slot right in front of the main door of Grady and walked on in. After lingering a little longer than was strictly necessary with the receptionist, a bottle blond with buns of steel and alluring eyes, Freeman took the elevator up to the twelfth floor. The duty nurse on the ward he’d been directed to was one of those Germanic types, as broad as she was tall, and looked like she could plow the upper forty without the help of a mule any day. She told Freeman that the patient’s condition had improved somewhat, but that he was still critical and could not be questioned.

“You get a name, anything?” asked Freeman.

“He hasn’t opened his lips except to take a sip of water.”

Charlie Freeman looked around him vaguely.

“Stuff he had on him, where’s that?”

“His personal belongings will have been bagged and taken to the depository.”

Freeman rode down with an extended black clan, all of them in tears except for one man who was fixating on something far beyond the modest dimensions of the elevator. Down in the basement, Freeman traversed a grid of aggressively lit corridors. On the far side of a pair of open double doors, a woman was mopping an empty operating theater.

“Hey, that place’s so clean you could do major surgery in there!” Freeman shouted, barking a succession of abrupt laughs.

The woman shrugged and said something in Spanish. Freeman continued on his way, scowling. Reason the country was going down the tubes, you couldn’t share a joke no more. They either didn’t get it or they disapproved. Pretty soon you’d have to run every gag past a committee of previously battered lesbians of color or risk a lawsuit. Well, he didn’t give a rat’s ass. Live free or die.

The depository was presided over by a black guy tall enough to have been a basketball player maybe ten, twenty years ago. Charlie Freeman flashed his ID and asked for the belongings of Patient #4663981.

“You got a warrant?” the clerk asked.

“This here is a murder case and the guy is a suspect.”

“I can’t release nothing without a warrant.”

It would take at least half a day to get a warrant, by which time Freeman would be off duty. Fine, it weren’t no sweat off of
his
balls.

“I can let you look at it, you don’t open the bag,” the clerk added, apparently intimidated by Freeman’s silence.

He disappeared into a room lined with lockers. Freeman stood whistling tunelessly and staring at a photograph on the wall, some forest scene. Saturday, he’d go to Pete’s, have supper, tie one on. They’d both get half a bottle of rye in the bag, then go jack-lighting Bambi’s mother in the woods.

The clerk returned to the window with a large transparent plastic bag sealed with a sticker labeled 4663981. Freeman picked it up and inspected the contents: a Smith & Wesson revolver, a wad of twenty-dollar bills, some small change, a bus ticket and a flat metal key crudely stamped CENTRAL. He mauled the plastic, trying to turn the key over.

“You break that seal, you’re in violation,” the clerk told him.

Freeman agitated the bag like a hound dog shaking a possum until the key flipped over. On the other side, the number 412 was engraved in the metal. He dropped the bag on the counter.

“Have a good one,” he said, turning away.

“You bet,” muttered the clerk.

Freeman walked up to the main floor, where he dished out another helping of intensive eye contact to that sweet thing behind the desk. Now there was a body built for the long haul. He fired up a Camel and walked over to his truck. The bumper sticker read
MY WIFE? SURE. MY DOG? MAYBE. MY GUN? NEVER
.

Freeman unhooked the car phone and called in to tell HQ he was heading over to the Central Hotel, where it looked like the white perp had been staying. The Chief liked to keep tabs on everyone since it got out that three of the boys had been spending their afternoons playing pinochle in the back room of a midtown bar when they were supposedly trying to find the torso to which four recovered limbs and a head had originally belonged.

“We have a further development in that case,” the sergeant told him. “Woman called in, wanted to know if either the guys involved was named Dale Watson. I tried to take her particulars but she hung up on me. Got the number off the tracer, though. She was calling from the A-l Motel on Ponce. Probably nothing to it, she sounded kind of screwy. But it might be worth checking out.”

“I’ll swing by there,” said Freeman, happy to have an excuse to stay out of the office. Anything beat riding a desk all day.

He shoved a Reba McEntire tape into the deck and cruised up Piedmont. One block before the corner of McGill, a Toyota four-by-four coming out of a side street did a California stop, then swung right across the oncoming traffic into the turn lane, forcing Freeman to brake sharply and thereby miss the light. He leaned out the window and gave the elderly Chinese driver an emphatic number one, but she didn’t notice that either, of course.

The Central Hotel was on Peachtree, a five-story block of fancy brickwork with white bay windows overlooking the interstate. It would have been demolished years before, except for a political dispute over the future use of the land. Freeman got out of the truck and field-stripped his cigarette, just like his daddy taught him to when they were out hunting. The lobby smelled of sweat and smoke and failure. A cadaverous bald man peered out over the desktop. Freeman shoved his ID in the guy’s face.

“Detective Freeman, homicide. One of your guests ended up catching a bullet last night.”

A perfect, comic-book curve of a smile split the man’s soft beardless face like a ripe fruit.

“Exit only!” he said softly. “Ped Xing!”

Charlie Freeman peered at him.

“Yeah,” he said. “So anyway, he’s hovering between life and death like they say over at Grady and I’m here to find out who the hell he is plus any other details that might rise to the surface, you with me?”

The man’s smile grew even wider.

“Wrong way!” he whispered.

“I see the register? Guy was in 412.”

The bald man stood up. His smile had completely vanished. He reached toward a bank of numbered pigeonholes, with hooks for keys, drew a slip of thin cardboard from the opening marked 412 and laid it on the counter. It was only now that Freeman noticed that the man’s right hand was a shriveled knob, a vestigial thumb drooping at an angle.

He picked up the card. It had spaces marked “Name,” “Address” and “Rate.” Underneath was written
ROOM MUST BE PAID FOR IN FULL BY
12
NOON—NO CREDIT CARDS—NO OUT-OF-STATE CHECKS
. The occupant of Room 412 was registered as William Hayley of Grand Rapids, Michigan, no street address. He had checked in on the ninth and had paid the $55 in cash for three days running, the last time being the previous morning. Charlie Freeman pushed the card back. The man behind the desk was gazing at him with a look of utter despair.

“It’s past noon,” said Freeman, “and this guy didn’t cough up his fifty bucks. I guess I’ll go check out the room. You got a pass key, something?”

The man extended his deformed hand toward the registration card. Grasping the edge with his dwarf thumb, he flicked the card away to reveal a flat metal key. Freeman looked at it with a frown. He was certain the key hadn’t been there before. When he looked up, the clerk’s uncanny smile was back in place, his whole face beaming with barely contained glee. He reached out suddenly and laid his stump on Freeman’s arm.

“Pass with care!” he said with a stifled giggle.

Charlie Freeman nodded.

“Thanks, buddy. And listen, they ever get around to tearing this place down, give me a call. Maybe I can fix you up with a job as a street sign.”

The fourth floor of the hotel consisted of a single corridor running the length of the building. Room 412 was halfway along on the right. Charlie Freeman knocked perfunctorily, then unlocked the door and stood looking around. The air was hot and stale. Greasy light filtered in through the window. The bed was unmade, and there was a pile of clothes on the floor, a T-shirt, jeans, a pair of basketball shoes. On a shelf above the sink lay a toothbrush and a comb. There was a book beside the bed. Freeman picked it up and flipped through several pages. Poetry, it looked like.