Darkfall (22 page)

“How’d this happen?” Aunt Faye demanded.

Penny hesitated. More than anything, she wanted to tell Faye all about the creatures with shining eyes. She wanted help, protection. But she knew that she couldn’t say a word. They wouldn’t believe her. After all, she was The Girl Who Had Needed A Psychiatrist. If she started babbling about goblins with shining eyes, they’d think she was having a relapse; they would say she still hadn’t adjusted to her mother’s death, and they would make an appointment with a psychiatrist. While she was off seeing the shrink, there wouldn’t be anyone around to keep the goblins away from Davey.

“Come on, come on,” Faye said. “Fess up. What were you doing that you shouldn’t have been doing?”

“Huh?”

“That’s why you’re hesitating. What were you doing that you knew you shouldn’t be doing?”

“Nothing,” Penny said.

“Then how’d you get this cut?”

“I... I caught my boot on a nail.”

“Nail? Where?”

“On the gate.”

“What gate?”

“Back at the school, the gate where we were waiting for you. A nail was sticking out of it, and I got caught up on it.”

Faye scowled. Unlike her sister, Penny’s mother, Faye was a redhead with sharp features and gray eyes that were almost colorless. In repose, hers was a pretty enough face; however, when she wanted to scowl, she could really do a first-rate job of it. Davey called it her “witch look.”

She said, “Was it rusty?”

Penny said, “What?”

“The nail, of course. Was it rusty?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you saw it, didn’t you? Otherwise, how’d you know it was a nail?”

Penny nodded. “Yeah. I guess it was rusty.”

“Have you had a tetanus shot?”

“Yeah.”

Aunt Faye peered at her with undisguised suspicion. “Do you even know what a tetanus shot is?”

“Sure.”

“When did you get it?”

“First week of October.”

“I wouldn’t have imagined that your father would think of things like tetanus shots.”

“They gave it to us at school,” Penny said.

“Is that right?” Faye said, still doubtful.

Davey spoke up: “They make us take all kinds of shots at school. They have a nurse in, and all week we get shots. It’s awful. Makes you feel like a pin cushion. Shots for mumps and measles. A flu shot. Other stuff. I
hate
it.”

Faye seemed to be satisfied. “Okay. Just the same, when we get home, we’ll wash that cut out really good, bathe it in alcohol, get some iodine on it, and a proper bandage.”

“It’s only a scratch,” Penny said.

“We won’t take chances. Now put your boot back on, dear.”

Just as Penny got her foot in the boot and pulled up the zipper, the taxi hit a pothole. They were all bounced up and thrown forward with such suddenness and force that they almost fell off the seat.

“Young man,” Faye said to the driver, even though he was at least forty years old, her own age, “where on earth did you learn to drive a car?”

He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Sorry, lady.”

“Don’t you
know
the streets of this city are a mess?” Faye demanded. “You’ve got to keep your eyes open.”

“I try to,” he said.

While Faye lectured the driver on the proper way to handle his cab, Penny leaned back against the seat, closed her eyes, and thought about the ugly little hand that had torn her boot and ankle. She tried to convince herself that it had been the hand of an ordinary animal of some kind; nothing strange; nothing out of the Twilight Zone. But most animals had paws, not hands. Monkeys had hands, of course. But this wasn’t a monkey. No way. Squirrels had hands of a sort, didn’t they? And raccoons. But this wasn’t a squirrel or a raccoon, either. It wasn’t anything she had ever seen or read about.

Had it been trying to drag her down and kill her? Right there on the street?

No. In order to kill her, the creature—and others like it, others with the shining silver eyes—would have had to come out from behind the gate, into the open, where Mrs. Shepherd and others would have seen them. And Penny was pretty sure the goblins didn’t want to be seen by anyone but her. They were secretive. No, they definitely hadn’t meant to kill her back there at the school; they had only meant to give her a good scare, to let her know they were still lurking around, waiting for the right opportunity....

But
why?

Why did they want her and, presumably, Davey, instead of some other kids?

What made goblins angry? What did you have to do to make them come after you like this?

She couldn’t think of anything she had done that would make anyone terribly angry with her; certainly not goblins.

Confused, miserable, frightened, she opened her eyes and looked out the window. Snow was piling up everywhere. In her heart, she felt as cold as the icy, wind-scoured street beyond the window.

Wednesday,
5:30 P.M.-11:00 P.M.

—THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS

—MAURICE FREEHILL

CHAPTER FOUR

At five-thirty, Jack and Rebecca went into Captain Walter Gresham’s office to present him with the manpower and equipment requirements of the task force, as well as to discuss strategy in the investigation.

During the afternoon, two more members of the Carramazza crime family had been murdered, along with their bodyguards. Already the press was calling it the bloodiest gang war since Prohibition. What the press still didn’t know was that the victims, except for the first two, had not been stabbed or shot or garroted or hung on meat hooks in traditional
cosa nostra
style. For the time being, the police had chosen not to reveal that all but the first two victims had been savagely bitten to death. When reporters uncovered that puzzling and grotesque fact, they would realize this was one of the biggest stories of the decade.

“That’s when it’ll get really bad,” Gresham said. “They’ll be all over us like fleas on a dog.”

The heat was on, about to get even hotter, and Gresham was as fidgety as a toad on a griddle. Jack and Rebecca remained seated in front of the captain’s desk, but Gresham couldn’t remain still behind it. As they conducted their business, the captain paced the room, went repeatedly to the windows, lit a cigarette, smoked less than a third of it, stubbed it out, realized what he had done, and lit another.

Finally the time came for Jack to tell Gresham about his latest visit to Carver Hampton’s shop and about the telephone call from Baba Lavelle. He had never felt more awkward than he did while recounting those events under Gresham’s skeptical gaze.

He would have felt better if Rebecca had been on his side, but again they were in adversary positions. She was angry with him because he hadn’t gotten back to the office until ten minutes past three, and she’d had to do a lot of the task force preparations on her own. He explained that the snowy streets were choked with crawling traffic, but she was having none of it. She listened to his story, was as angry as he was about the threat to his kids, but was not the least bit convinced that he had experienced anything even remotely supernatural. In fact, she was frustrated by his insistence that a great deal about the incident at the pay phone was just plain uncanny.

When Jack finished recounting those events for Gresham, the captain turned to Rebecca and said, “What do you make of it?”

She said, “I think we can now safely assume that Lavelle is a raving lunatic, not just another hood who wants to make a bundle in the drug trade. This isn’t just a battle for territory within the underworld, and we’d be making a big mistake if we tried to handle it the same way we’d handle an honest-to-God gang war.”

“What else?” Gresham asked.

“Well,” she said. “I think we ought to dig into this Carver Hampton’s background, see what we can turn up about him. Maybe he and Lavelle are in this together.”

“No,” Jack said. “Hampton wasn’t faking when he told me he was terrified of Lavelle.”

“How did Lavelle know precisely the right moment to call that pay phone?” Rebecca asked. “How did he know
exactly
when you’d be passing by it? One answer is that he was in Hampton’s shop the whole time you were there, in the back room, and he knew when you left.”

“He wasn’t,” Jack said. “Hampton’s just not that good an actor.”

“He’s a clever fraud,” she said. “But even if he isn’t tied to Lavelle, I think we ought to get men up to Harlem this evening and really scour the block with the pay phone ... and the block across the intersection from it. If Lavelle wasn’t in Hampton’s shop, then he must have been watching it from one of the other buildings along that street. There’s no other explanation.”

Unless maybe his voodoo really works, Jack thought.

Rebecca continued: “Have detectives check the apartments along those two blocks, see if Lavelle is holed up in one. Distribute copies of the photograph of Lavelle. Maybe someone up there’s seen him around.”

“Sounds good to me,” Gresham said. “We’ll do it.”

“And I believe the threat against Jack’s kids ought to be taken seriously. Put a guard on them when Jack can’t be there.”

“I agree,” Gresham said. “We’ll assign a man right now.”

“Thanks, Captain,” Jack said. “But I think it can wait until morning. The kids are with my sister-in-law right now, and I don’t think Lavelle could find them. I told her to make sure she wasn’t being followed when she picked them up at school. Besides, Lavelle said he’d give me the rest of the day to make up my mind about backing off the voodoo angle, and I assume he meant this evening as well.”

Gresham sat on the edge of his desk. “If you want, I can remove you from the case. No sweat.”

“Absolutely not,” Jack said.

“You take his threat seriously?”

“Yes. But I also take my work seriously. I’m on this one to the bitter end.”

Gresham lit another cigarette, drew deeply on it. “Jack, do you actually think there could be anything to this voodoo stuff?”

Aware of Rebecca’s penetrating stare, Jack said, “It’s pretty wild to think maybe there could be something to it. But I just can’t rule it out.”

“I can,” Rebecca said. “Lavelle might believe in it, but that doesn’t make it real.”

“What about the condition of the bodies?” Jack asked.

“Obviously,” she said, “Lavelle’s using trained animals.”

“That’s almost as far-fetched as voodoo,” Gresham said.

“Anyway,” Jack said, “we went through all of that earlier today. About the only small, vicious, trainable animal we could think of was the ferret. And we’ve all seen Pathology’s report, the one that came in at four-thirty. The teeth impressions don’t belong to ferrets. According to Pathology, they don’t belong to any other animal Noah took aboard the ark, either.”

Rebecca said, “Lavelle’s from the Caribbean. Isn’t it likely that he’s using an animal indigenous to that part of the world, something our forensic experts wouldn’t even think of, some species of exotic lizard or something like that?”

“Now you’re grasping at straws,” Jack said.

“I agree,” Gresham said. “But it’s worth checking out, anyway. Okay. Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Can you explain how I knew that call from Lavelle was for me? Why was I drawn to that pay phone?”

Wind stroked the windows.

Behind Gresham’s desk, the ticking of the wall clock sudddenly seemed much louder than it had been.

The captain shrugged. “I guess neither of us has an answer for you, Jack.”

“Don’t feel bad. I don’t have an answer for me, either.”

Gresham got up from his desk. “All right, if that’s it, then I think the two of you ought to knock off, go home, get some rest. You’ve put in a long day already; the task force is functioning now, and it can get along without you until tomorrow. Jack, if you’ll hang around just a couple of minutes, I’ll show you a list of the available officers on every shift, and you can hand-pick the men you want to watch your kids.”

Rebecca was already at the door, pulling it open. Jack called to her. She glanced back.

He said, “Wait for me downstairs, okay?”

Her expression was noncommittal. She walked out.

From the window, where he had gone to look down at the street, Walt Gresham said, “It’s like the arctic out there.”

The one thing Penny liked about the Jamisons’ place was the kitchen, which was big by New York City apartment standards, almost twice as large as the kitchen Penny was accustomed to, and cozy. A green tile floor. White cabinets with leaded glass doors and brass hardware. Green ceramic-tile counters. Above the double sink, there was a beautiful out-thrusting greenhouse window with a four-foot-long, two-foot-wide planting bed in which a variety of herbs were grown all year long, even during the winter. (Aunt Faye liked to cook with fresh herbs whenever possible.) In one corner, jammed against the wall, was a small butcher’s block table, not so much a place to eat as a place to plan menus and prepare shopping lists; flanking the table, there was space for two chairs. This was the only room in the Jamisons’ apartment in which Penny felt comfortable.

At twenty minutes past six, she was sitting at the butcher’s block table, pretending to read one of Faye’s magazines; the words blurred together in front of her unfocused eyes. Actually, she was thinking about all sorts of things she didn’t
want
to think about: goblins, death, and whether she’d ever be able to sleep again.

Uncle Keith had come home from work almost an hour ago. He was a partner in a successful stockbroker-age. Tall, lean, with a head as hairless as an egg, sporting a graying mustache and goatee, Uncle Keith always seemed distracted. You had the feeling he never gave you more than two-thirds of his attention when he was talking with you. Sometimes he would sit in his favorite chair for an hour or two, his hands folded in his lap, unmoving, staring at the wall, hardly even blinking, breaking his trance only two or three times an hour in order to pick up a brandy glass and take one tiny sip from it. Other times he would sit at a window, staring and chain-smoking. Secretly, Davey called Uncle Keith “the moon man” because his mind always seemed to be somewhere on the moon. Since coming home today, he’d been in the living room, sipping slowly at a martini, puffing on one cigarette after another, watching TV news and reading the
Wall Street Journal
at the same time.