Prelude to a Scream (22 page)

CABRINI CARPET

Sales

Installation

Service

1338 Mission St

San Francisco

415-864-2825

A woman's voice announced, “Well, that was painless.”

“Yessum.”

They were coming back. He wasted a look of pure nostalgia on the Toyota, but the truck may as well have been a mile away across open country in broad daylight.

Stanley backed away from the van, keeping its mass between himself and the front door of the house, backed across the asphalt in a direction at right angles to the one he would rather have gone, until he found himself in the shadows under a staircase. Just as he crouched toward a pair of plastic garbage cans a man appeared behind the van, walking backwards. Stanley ducked into the shadows behind the cans and watched the ground, his heart pounding.

Shoes scraped grit on the pavement behind the van. The two men grunted as they hadn't before.

“Damn Afghans is heavier'n them Persians,” a man's voice said.

“They got a tighter weave and a better arms deal with the Great Satan,” chuckled the other man.

“Maybe I should have kept it then,” said the woman icily.

“Oh Lord, lady,” said the second man. “Don't change your mind now.”

“Hey!” hissed the first voice.

“Shit.”

“Oh my,” said the woman's voice. But through the velvet tone of those two words passed a core of steel, like the tang of a knife through its handle.

“Ahm… Sorry lady. Vince is just… tired.”

“That's… quite all right. The streets are… clean around here. Just don't let the good side become… soiled. More soiled than it is, I mean. There might be… oil or something… where the cars park.”

“Yessum.”

“Pick it up, Vince,” she snapped.

“You heard the lady,” grunted the other man.

Stanley peered through the crack between the two garbage cans. He could make out several pairs of legs among the figures standing behind the van, though none of the torsos supported by them. The
dramatis personae
hadn't changed. It was still two men and a woman.

Green Eyes was called “Sibyl,” when she wasn't called “Ma'am.” The black guy was called Vince.

The two men were trying to get a carpet into the back of the van and, although they were talking about switching Afghans for Persians, it looked like the same carpet to Stanley, fringe and all.

But the black guy had dropped one end and now it splayed on the ground, partially unrolled. The white guy, unable to heft his end into the back of the van, still held his end of the carpet waist-high, and was muttering imprecations designed to encourage his partner to get his end aloft again.

As the black man stooped to gather up the spilled end of the carpet, Stanley glimpsed an extra hand there.

A white hand.

The hand was quite motionless, too. Its fingers folded an edge of the carpet against its palm, much as a sleeping child's might cling to the hem of its favorite blanket.

As briefly as Stanley glimpsed this hand it was gone, crushed against the belly of the black man as he heaved up his end of the roll and, with the other guy, manhandled the whole thing into the back of the van.

The white guy climbed in after it. The black man closed the door behind him and, wasting no time, walked briskly to the front of the van and climbed into the driver's seat.

The van's lights came on, its engine started, and it backed out of the driveway and across the cul-de-sac, directly toward Stanley. Less than ten feet from his hiding place the van stopped, its brake lights turning the underside of the staircase a brilliant scarlet. A gear lever on an automatic transmission clicked twice, the brake lights extinguished, and the van recrossed the cul-de-sac, heading up the hill toward Market.

The woman stood in the gloom of the front porch, watching the van until it was out of sight.

Crouched under the staircase behind the two garbage cans, Stanley was almost talking aloud to himself, ordering, willing the woman to go back into the house, shifting his eyes from her shadow to the pickup to the empty street at the top of the hill and back.

Still the woman lingered in the doorway, as if savoring the night air.

Stanley watched her in despair.

Finally she turned and went into the house. Stanley crouched toward the edge of the shadow beneath the staircase and waited, the fingers of one hand touching the asphalt just behind the shadow line, like a sprinter at his starting block. But he did not hear the front door close, nor the deadbolt slide home.

Straining for those audio cues, he waited. At the top of the hill you could drive east on Market, downhill, or west, up hill. If he sprinted to the truck, and if it started right away, and if the traffic up above wasn't too dense, and if the van wasn't driving too fast, and if the light wasn't red — he would have a fifty-fifty chance of turning the right way to catch it.

But if the brunette heard the truck start now she would become suspicious. After all, they had been in this cul-de-sac for nearly an hour, and beyond the three vehicles involved in this game, not a single other car had come or gone. Surely she would think it odd that a car would start up and leave immediately after the departure of the Cabrini Carpet van?

She was clever or perverse or both — wasn't she? — to tarry, as if to take the night air, while the van went on its way, while the van disappeared, into the big city. Just in case she wasn't alone here, she waited.

Or maybe she really
was
taking the night air. Right.

Stanley crouched behind the garbage cans, immobilized by her delay.

Then he heard the front door close, and the deadbolt shoot home.

But just as he put his weight on his forward foot, all set to sprint for the truck, he heard a thump on the car deck. Then another.

It was a sound he'd heard before. He froze.

A car alarm squawked. A car door opened. A foot scraped. The car door slammed.

A starter ground and the motor caught.

The BMW.

Bright white light spilled around the black cylinders of the two garbage containers, and Stanley made himself very small behind them. The light moved, the shadows moved with it, and he receded along with them, until he and the garbage cans were cast into complete darkness again, as, with an application of horsepower, the BMW swept around and suddenly accelerated out of the cul-de-sac, up the hill, and was gone.

Stanley shot out from behind the two garbage cans. At the second step of his sprint a sharp pain tugged at his lower back, but he kept on. It seemed to take him forever to cross the asphalt circle, as if he were trying to catch someone in a dream. In the renewed darkness his left knee glanced off the rear bumper of the now-invisible Jaguar. Another inch or two to his left and he would have exploded his patella. He kept on. Gaining the white Toyota at last he fumbled at the door handle until it opened, and fell into the driver's seat. The ignition key was still in the switch, and he twisted it. The engine turned over and caught. Breathing heavily he fumbled at the headlight switch, inadvertently pulling its stalk down so that, as he backed out of the driveway, the headlights came on and the left turn-signal began to blink. The passenger door was still open. He backed straight across the mouth of Perego Terrace, onto the wooden parking deck of the stucco house. He placed the gear lever in first, let out the clutch, and the rear wheels lost traction on the wood deck and squealed. The passenger door slammed itself shut as he accelerated out of Parajito Terrace and threw the little truck into second. The engine bogged. The old Toyota didn't have quite enough moxie to make the grade in second. He forced the gears back into first. The engine revved up and the truck crested the hill at Market.

His light was red. Market Street flowed both ways beneath it, a solid barrier of fast traffic. Seeing no choice, Stanley swung right, grabbed second gear, and accelerated down Market Street. Brakes squealed and a horn sounded behind him. The street wound to the left around a tall median wall and back to the right. He punched the truck into third. There was no sign of the BMW. The mouth of a street flashed by on the right. Avenue of escape. He pulled it into fourth. No van — what was its license number? He'd forgotten it! No. He hadn't. No, he wouldn't. He concentrated. The intersection of Clayton passed by on the left. Another avenue of escape. One. That was it. One, EL, yes, T0, 1ELT0…

He was doing fifty now and the mouth of other streets shot by, left and right. Market Street was straightening out, the median wall had tapered down to nothing, and traffic was visible in both directions. He coaxed the stub of a pencil out of the ashtray and wrote the license digits on the vibrating note pad without looking at it, in large figures, remembering them as he drove. Commercial license plate, should be seven figures. Alphanumeric mix. Standard California pattern, a numeral followed by three letters followed by three numbers. OneELT … that would make that naught a zero, 1ELT0 — gotcha: 36. Thank you, brain. A brown Dodge Ram, license number Cal 1ELT036. As he scribbled this he heard the expanded metal grid of the BART air vents growling under his tires and realized he had descended nearly all the way to the intersection at Castro. He looked up. The light was red. Traffic and people were already streaming through the intersection, directly transverse to his line of travel. He slammed on the brakes with both feet, and his front wheels skidded to a halt, two feet into the crosswalk. A big leather queen with a bleached crewcut and a naked beer belly framed by a black vest patted the Toyota's right fender, smiled, and kept walking.

People were everywhere. Not dull, Castro Street on Friday night. He was in the left lane of three, completely hemmed in by cars and pedestrians. A two-ply wall of gridlocked traffic inched across Market, heading south down Castro toward 18th Street. Hundreds of people thronged in the crosswalks in front of him on both sides of the intersection, and he dimly registered that, sixty yards away, the Castro Theater had just released a large audience.

He was stopped.

He scanned every vehicle. Every face. There were plenty of each.

No Dodge van. No white BMW. No certain white guy, no particular black guy. No exact brunette. No hapless sheetrock taper, either.

He'd lost them all.

Stanley placed his elbows on the lower rim of the steering wheel, tented his fingers before his face, and scrubbed his eyes with the balls of his thumbs.

“Ted,” he said. He peeled his hands down his unshaven cheeks and looked up at the windshield, no longer seeing the traffic and lights beyond. “I'm sorry, Ted.”

Chapter Sixteen

C
ORRIGAN WAS SITTING IN
S
TANLEY'S
RENTED WHEELCHAIR IN THE
doorway of the shack, watching the pyramid.

“Come in,” said Stanley.

Corrigan didn't move. “Never spent time in a wheelchair before. It's pretty comfortable.”

“Yeah? You look about as laid back as a goldfish on a porch swing.”

Corrigan cast his eyes beyond the rooftop, toward the distant hills of Berkeley. “It's true that a badge is somewhat alienating,” he conceded. “What's your excuse?”

“I don't like being forced to join clubs I never heard of.”

“That includes the human race?”

“They look like me, they walk like me.” Stanley shrugged. “Maybe that's why I hate them.”

Corrigan produced his palm-top computer, held it up to the moonlight, and thumbed the ignition. “If you should become a statistic tonight, it'll be because you got run over while walking the white line down the middle of the information highway.”

“Not because of a bum kidney?”

“As the good Doctor Sims says, you keep taking those antibiotics, you'll be fine.” Corrigan pecked two thumbs at the tiny keyboard. “M-O-R-P-H-O-L-O-G-Y. That right?”

Stanley threw up his hands.

“Return,” said Corrigan, thumbing a final key.

They waited. Down on Brooklyn Place a car horn honked. An eastbound whisper from the ever-cool marine layer flirted with the threadbare wires draped over the alley, bringing with it hints of dialogue from a Chinese pornographic video, and the faint tintinnabulations of wind chimes.

“Ah.” The two caustics of Corrigan's eyeballs reflected tiny monochrome rectangles. “
Branch of biology that deals with the form and structure of organisms without consideration of function
.” He glanced up. “I'm a nickel-word man.”

Stanley sighed raggedly. “Well that's just nickeliferous.”

Corrigan clicked his tongue. “That's a good one.”

“You got
mono-renal misanthrope
in there?”

Corrigan didn't even flinch. “I got one right here in front of me. Why waste batteries?” He snapped the lid closed. “Batteries is money, you know.”

Stanley wedged himself sideways between the wheelchair and the doorjamb, but before he got over the threshold Corrigan slapped a fat envelope under his chin and said, “When you get a light struck, have a look at these.”

Stanley dropped the envelope next to the sink. “Coffee? Codeine? Whiskey? Antibiotics?”

“Column A,” said Corrigan. He folded his hands over the palmtop and contemplated the view. “Quite the location you've got here.”

“You should see the parties I throw,” Stanley said, filling the blackened bottom half of the espresso-maker with water. “I feel I should warn you, Corrigan.”

“Warn me, Ahearn.”

“This espresso machine is aluminum, and they say aluminum accelerates your Alzheimer's.”

“That's okay, Ahearn. You should see what we drink out of at headquarters.”

“Ah yes, the public trough.” He tamped an inch of Safeway's cheapest into the machine's bail. “Styrofoam, I presume.”

“Actually,” Corrigan replied mildly, “it's galvanized zinc. You pay rent here?”

Stanley set the machine on the stove and scratched a match.

“It's worth at least three hundred a month, isn't it? Four hundred? I'm curious. My career insulates me from some of the crueler facts of life.”

The propane ring bathed the base of the coffee machine in a soft blue flame. Stanley waved out the match and dropped it in the sink. “Come on Corrigan,” he said. “You know exactly what goes on here.”

Corrigan's eyes were following the thin stream of headlights flowing west over the upper ramp of the Bay Bridge. Whoever decreed the upper deck of that particular bridge as westward-flowing really knew what they were doing. “Yeah, I guess I do. You pay no rent. No garbage or utilities, either. You have no telephone service. These practically add up to positive cash flow, in this world we are deconstructing for ourselves — or, as a cop I should maybe say, that other people are deconstructing for us. Still, it makes you pretty independent, being phoneless; hard to get in touch with; toward which, as a professional misanthrope, you are naturally inclined.”

Stanley poured milk into an enameled metal cup. “What is this, Corrigan? You got a hole that needs a pigeon?”

“I like to categorize people, I guess. Define them. You could say it was a
cop-ly
thing to do. But, as an American, you might prefer to look at it as
individuation
.”

“You tried astrology?”

“The girlfriend looks after the eldritch side of things.”

“Iris' mother?”

Corrigan said nothing.

“Damn,” said Stanley after a while. “I haven't come across that word since I read H.P. Lovecraft.”

“That was his favorite word, I believe,” mused Corrigan, without missing a beat. “Lovecraft used ‘eldritch' like Kerouac used ‘sad.'”

“That's a lot of authors for one cop.”

“Only two.”

“You consider astrology eldritch?”

“No,” said Corrigan mildly. “I consider it bullshit.”

Stanley pushed open the window sash next to the door and sat gingerly on the sill. If he'd suspected he'd torn open his incision before, his thoughts were definite on the subject now. It stung, and it was damp. He pointed north. “You know there's an alley named after Kerouac, right over there?”

“I know,” said Corrigan. “It used to be called Adler Place. Specs' bar is still there, though.”

Stanley nodded his head in the dark.

The Love Boat was parked at Pier 19, all lit up. After a few moments of watching it Stanley said, “You think Lovecraft will ever get a street named after him?”

“Sure,” said Corrigan. “Later. In the space station nostalgically named after San Francisco.”

Stanley frowned thoughtfully. “We're nearly the same age. You and I…?”

This personal question, too, Corrigan avoided answering. But, Stanley realized, Corrigan was only three or four years older than he was.

Two minutes of silence passed, during which an entire floor of lights suddenly became extinguished in the TransAmerica Pyramid, and steam began to percolate through the works of the espresso-maker.

Corrigan heaved a sigh. “Take a look in that envelope, will you?”

“Why should I?”

“I'm afraid there's an excellent reason.”

“Let's have coffee first.”

“Suit yourself. I was just thinking the other day about how I was getting too much sleep lately.”

The espresso-maker's sound announced that all its water had boiled away. Stanley pulled the machine from the flame and replaced it with the tin of milk. Soon enough, he had two steaming mugs of
cafe au lait
.

“Sugar?”

“Nah.”

He handed a cup out the window to Corrigan, then showed him a fifth of Bushmills. “Nudge?”

“No thanks.”

“Sweater?”

“What is this,” Corrigan growled, “a goddamn camp-out? Take a look at the motherfucking pictures, why don't you?”

Stanley nudged his own coffee, tasted it, then set his cup on the counter. “What I like best,” he muttered, more or less to himself, staring at the envelope, “is a nice Irish coffee with the midnight mail.”

Somewhere a garbage truck hydraulically yawned, upended a dumpster over itself, and redeposited it on a sidewalk with a crash.

Stanley snapped on the light over the sink.

The envelope was plain manila, 9 by 12 inches, with a button-and-thread fastener. Stanley hadn't seen such an envelope in a long time. He studied it. The string looked like waxed dental floss except, like the two buttons, it was the color of dried blood. Other than its model number and size, printed along the sealed seam opposite its flap, the envelope was unmarked.

“Aside from the fact that I associate it with you,” said Stanley, still not touching the envelope, “What's bothering me about this?”

“I'm sure I don't know,” said Corrigan. He sipped his own coffee. “Unless you already have an idea what's inside it.”

Stanley frowned. “How the hell would I know that?”

“Beats me,” Corrigan admitted, blandly ingenuous. “Foresight would imply you had brains. But,” he added, “your interest in hookers — let alone what that envelope contains — proves you in short supply.”

“Fuck you, cop.”

“Ahearn,” said Corrigan tiredly, dropping his eyes off the bridge and staring at the gravel at his feet, “thanks for the cup of coffee. Now, I don't want to be rude. It's not in my nature to be rude. But as soon as you get over your cozy clairvoyant qualms and have a look inside that envelope there, we're going to have a chat for real. You know it, I know it. I'm being nice about it, and you're not. You apparently have all night, but I don't. So quit stalling, get it over with, and let's talk. Because starting right now, if you don't take a look at that envelope, like, immediately, I'm going to drag you by your ears down to my office on Bryant Street, and nail them to a desk. Then for sure we'll find out who's got all night. Now, how's the audio? Is this clear?”

“Keep your shirt on.”

“I'm done with that: hop to it.”

Stanley unwound the thread and opened the envelope.

Pictures, all right. Like Corrigan said.

Colored pictures.

The first one was of a purple sleeping bag.

It could have been the one he himself had been found in, six weeks ago.

Something was inside it. Something that tapered from one end, possibly the feet, a yard up to what might have been hips, to shoulders, abruptly to what could easily have been a head.

There was a hand showing at the seam. Its fingers curled around the edge of the nylon, like… a sleeping child's might curl around the edge of its quilted comforter. This disconcerted Stanley. Had he not seen just such a hand in just such a pose not two hours ago? He looked up momentarily, but resisted a glance over his shoulder. Had Corrigan found Ted? Already?

Get a grip, he told himself: that's impossible. Green Eyes isn't done with Ted yet. The sleeping bag comes later.

Stanley lingered over the first photo. What struck him about the shot was that the hand seemed outsized, adult, too large for the apparent mass of the body inside the sleeping bag, which could have been that of a child. The apparent mass seemed… diminished.

A fringed, green blur across the top of the photo was probably a tree limb.

So. A sleeping bag in a sylvan setting.

A park, maybe.

He set the first photograph aside.

The second picture was… disconcerting.

The setting had changed. Now the subject was brightly lit, with no shadows or blurred details.

The subject was a human head.

Face up, the head stared straight at the camera. But the stare was sightless.

The head had no eyes.

The lids were there, but there were no eyes behind them. The lids were sunken, like two little graves.

The head lay against a stainless steel table.

Obviously, the head belonged to a dead man.

A man whose eyes had been removed.

For better or worse, the head seemed to be still attached to a body. A sheet was pulled up beneath the chin.

Beside the head, parallel to its vertical axis, lay a child's one-foot ruler.

Stanley hesitated over this photograph for a long time.

To be sure, it was fascinating.

Certainly there was additional detail to be had from a prolonged study of the image. But Stanley hesitated because something about it
disturbed
him.

Stanley also hesitated over the second photograph because he had a distinct foreboding.

Caught between these two sensations, Stanley was pretty sure he didn't want to see the third photograph—let alone the fistful of others that would follow it.

So stalled, Stanley's mind ground almost to a halt. Yet his hands, operating external to his will, inevitably dealt him the third photograph.

A torso, hips to neck, naked and the color of lead.

And the ruler, again. It was yellow.

Mute and shocked, Stanley mechanically shuffled the second picture back over the third, checking.

It certainly looked like the same ruler.

He set the second photograph aside, face up.