In This Skin (16 page)

    Switching off the radio, he realized there was no longer any movement in the branches above the car. Feathers had stopped falling. There came a sense that the entire world was holding its breath at that moment, expecting something to happen. He leaned out through the side window to look up. The crows were still there. Carved lumps of darkness hunched on the branches. They no longer moved, or cried out, or pecked restlessly at their neighbors' backs. What on earth were they doing? They hadn't all gone to sleep, surely?

    He thought: Crows are harbingers of death. They're here for the soul of the victim.

    The words pealed through him with all the morbid force of a funeral bell. At that moment the entire feathered nation of birds erupted in furious calling. Without rising from the branches, they flapped coal black wings. Feathers swirled in front of the windshield, a dark fog that obscured his view of the Luxor. And at that instant he heard a scream rise into the night air.

    

    

    It started with a scream… an awful scream, rising and rising in pitch, until Benedict had to slam his hands over his ears.

    Above him, birds beat their wings with frantic violence even though they remained on the branches, talons dug into bark. Their cries echoed from the building, multitracking the cacophony into a vortex of distorted screeches.

    The scream rose further in pitch and volume. Benedict still forced his hands against his ears, trying to dampen the sound so it would no longer hurt his ears. Just feet from the car a blurred shape tore past him in a thunderbolt of noise, light and fury. Benedict flinched, half expecting the speeding object to crash into the front of the Luxor. A split second later he realized what the projectile was: a motorcycle ridden at a speed that had to be little short of madness. Its rider had already lost control. The bike slid from under the guy, who tumbled across the parking lot. In a blaze of dazzling sparks the bike skittered across the pavement, too. Two seconds later both bike and rider slowed to a stop outside the main entrance of the Luxor.

    Benedict swung himself out of the car to walk-not run-toward the fallen rider. He swallowed, queasy. He anticipated finding a torn corpse, not a walker. Behind him, crows unfurled wings, creating a black surge through the branches-a weird Mexican wave effect. This surge of darkness ran along the line of trees from one end of the lot to the other. And all the time the infernal birds kept up their damn cawing. Hell… now he noticed even more birds on the roof of the building.

    As he closed in on what he'd taken to be the corpse of the rider, the guy suddenly sat up on the ground and dragged off his helmet, letting it roll out of his hands and across the blacktop. Benedict moved faster.

    Ever get that feeling of deja vu? he asked himself. This came close to an uncanny replay of Friday night, when he'd followed Ellery Hann to the steps. A shiver trickled up his spine. Come to that, was this Hann again? Had he grabbed a bike from somewhere then come tearing back to spill himself all over the asphalt?

    When he was thirty paces from the biker, he saw it wasn't Hann. Whereas Hann was slender, almost elfin-like, this guy was chunkier, with a dark beard. The man climbed to his feet and began to run. In an echo of Hann three nights ago, the biker lurched up the stairs to the Luxor's main doors. He pushed at the boards, then grabbed the leading edge of one and tried to tug it free.

    Christ, what now? Do I check the guy out? He took a hell of a fall. Or do I write him off as some crackhead and return to the car and go home?

    As for searching the Luxor for that damn videotape, tonight was a total bust. The place was busier than Grand Central Station. Noisier, too; the crows were going ape shit in the trees-flapping, crying out, calling like they'd seen something that excited them.

    Benedict stood at the bottom of the steps, watching the guy trying to break through the doors. But those things had been battened down firmly with slabs of timber. You'd need a 'dozer to bust through. One moment the guy had been battling with a furious kind of passion to open the doors, then he stopped. He'd not said a word but Benedict had heard his panted grunts. All of a sudden he leaned forward against the door, then slowly turned so he could slide down to a sitting position on the top step, his back to the building. Even in the postmidnight gloom, Benedict saw the streak of glistening black down the pale hue of the board.

    Only it wasn't black, Benedict realized on looking closer. Dear God. It was red. A wet, living red, rendered dark by the sodium flare of distant streetlights.

    Benedict ran up the steps. ”Hey, buddy, take it easy. I'm going to call an ambulance.”He unclipped the cell phone from his belt.

    The biker's face sagged as he began to lose consciousness. Even so, he shook his head. ”No,”he grunted. ”Take me inside.”

    ”Don't you worry I'll get you to a hospital.”

    Again the guy shook his head. Escaping his lips, a guttural ”No.”

    Benedict crouched down to see blood dribbling down the guy's chin. He also saw a bloody hole in his T-shirt just beneath the collarbone. As the guy sagged forward a few inches before pushing himself back up against the door, Benedict saw a corresponding hole high between the shoulder blades. The man had been shot.

    Benedict knew this didn't look good. The bullet must have top-sliced one lung before it exited. Blood pooled around the guy's buttocks, so it looked as if he sat on a red cushion. Benedict checked the cell phone.

    Damn, it was showing the ”no signal”icon. He had to make the call fast.

    This guy wasn't going to make it. He could hear the labored breathing; the ruined lung was working hard but it wouldn't be enough to…

    Benedict paused, then looked back. No. It wasn't the man's breathing he could hear. The birds made a sound that imitated the respiration of the wounded man. It was close to the rasping tone of a carpenter sawing wood. A slow tearing inhale, followed by a long sighing exhale.

    Crouching down beside the man, Benedict looked closely at his face. The man had a knife tattooed on his cheek and a swastika between his eyes.

    Now the eyes gleamed with a dull light as if a murky film oozed over each eyeball. The man found it hard to keep his head up. Gravity drew the man's chin to his chest with its gory hole. His breathing slowed, yet the rhythm stayed even.

    In the trees and on the roof the birds mimicked the sound of the breathing. Slowing the copycat sound of breath in, breath out. They were still again. Expectant. Waiting for the inevitable.

    Harbingers of mortality. Benedict found himself remembering the legend again. Crows were messengers of an imminent death. They gathered at places where doomed people would expire. They synchronized their cries to the rhythm of the dying's breath.

    What was it the old man had said in the video? Crows gathered here to try to capture the soul as it fled the deceased's body. If they were successful they flew in jubilant circles while crowing triumphantly. If, however, the soul was nimble enough to elude them, then they'd sit there despondent, before dispersing in ones and twos to fly miserably back to the cornfields outside town.

    Benedict felt a hand touch his foot. He looked down. The man had rolled his eyes up toward Benedict's face.

    ”I'm going to have to drive to a pay phone,”Benedict began.

    The man shook his head hard enough to send blood drops flying from his chin. ”No… don't even think about it. Get me inside.”He snapped his head back, knocking the boarded door with his skull. ”Get me in there!”

    ”The place isn't used anymore. There won't be a phone that works.”

    ”No. I've got to get in there… You're gonna help me.”The man's eyes burned with a sudden intensity ”You've gotta get me inside.”

    ”There's nothing in there.”

    ”There is.”

    ”Is there someone you know in the building?”

    ”No. I've gotta get home.”

    ”Home? It's an old dance hall. There isn't any-”

    The man stiffened as a sudden pain shot through him; he bunched one hand into a fist on his lap. All of a sudden the pace of his breathing changed. It quickened. It was shallower, too.

    In the trees, the crows matched the shift in respiration. Their cries became a rapid pulsing ah-ah-ah-ah-ah. They kept perfect time with the wounded bikers respiration. Damn the fucking things. It's just a fairy story, Benedict thought in dark fury. Those damn birds can't actually predict a man's death. They can't parody his dying breath.

    But they are! They're matching every stroke of his breath. When a blood clot caught in the back of his throat and he had to labor painfully to cough it free, the birds copied the crackling cough with mocking cruelty. When the pain from the man's smashed ribs made him grimace and stop breathing for a moment, they paused, too, filling the night with uncanny silence. Then he started aspirating again-faster, shallower, panting. The flooded lungs were failing to deliver oxygen to heart muscle. And the birds copied the sound, too. A shallow rasping sound issued from hundreds of beaks in diabolical harmony.

    Benedict knew that the time for an ambulance had passed. The man's breathing (echoed by the birds) built to a climax. His body shook. His face lifted to stare in horror at the sky then with a single wrenching spasm, his body slumped sideward, his eyes fixed. The eyelids froze, too, in mid blink.

    With a shudder, Benedict climbed to his feet. The crows were still again. They'd stopped calling. Not one moved in the darkened trees.

    But according to the myth this isn't the end of the process, is it?

    Benedict asked himself. He stared at the dead biker at his feet. Then the shrill, excited cries of the birds drew his attention back to them.

    In less than a second the birds had taken off in one shrieking black mass. A thousand feathered demons, baying excitedly calling to each other. He watched them ascend in a swirling mass against the stars. For all the world, it looked as if they plunged through the night sky in search of prey. They zigzagged, lunging after something that Benedict could not see.

    The birds pursue the fleeing soul of the dead man, Lockram had said.

    Right at that moment Benedict believed. The birds were in pursuit. They called to one another, urging their neighbors to fly faster and not let their quarry escape.

    The sound came all too suddenly And Benedict flinched. With the abruptness of a roar of victory from the crowd at a football game the birds all cried out at once. The cries quivered with a nerve-bruising intensity At that moment he realized he could also hear sirens emerging through the whoops of the birds. He looked across the parking lot to see half a dozen patrol cars come swinging through the entrance. Blue lights spun.

    Above them, a helicopter hung in the sky Benedict turned to gaze down at the man with a bullet hole in his chest.

    The chase was over.

    

    

    The detectives would need a statement later. Benedict had no problem with that, although the cop reassured him that the helicopter had recorded all the important details with its nightscope TV camera.

    Benedict's involvement was strictly limited to that of innocent bystander who just happened to witness the closing stages. The cop didn't show any reticence in reporting the facts to Benedict as they watched the coroner's van pull away with the corpse in the back.

    The biker had been a two-bit crook, by the name of Garth Pearson, who'd been out of jail for a month. He'd stolen a motorcycle, bought a gun, then gone out to raid an all-night store. An off-duty policeman picking up a snack happened upon the robbery and planted an accurate.38 round through the chest of the crook who was threatening to blow the clerk's head off. The crook dropped the gun. Fled to the bike. Made it as far as the Luxor, where Benedict saw him die. The cop's matter-of-fact tone told Benedict that the situation was a regular occurrence. If anything, a single shot had saved tax dollars on a trial and jail time. The police weren't even interested in why Benedict had chosen to spend the middle hours of the night sitting in his car in a lonely parking lot. But then, insomnia, or solo jaunts to deserted industrial zones weren't illegal.

    Chicago PD had better things to do with their time than investigate the harmless excursions of night owls like Benedict West.

    As most of the cars and vans rolled away into the night, leaving just Benedict and the last pair of cops who sluiced the blood from the steps, the crows returned to sit in the trees, where they called to each other.

    The sheer elation of the creatures crackled in the air.

    A cop paused as he opened the door of his cruiser. ”One thing, Mr. West.

    We'll take a full statement in the morning, but did Pearson say anything to you before he died?”

    ”Only that he wanted to get inside the old dance hall over there.”

    The police officer glanced at the Egyptian facade of the building. ”In there? Did he say why?”

    ”He told me he was trying to get home.”

    The cop smiled. ”He wouldn't find his home in there. Home for Pearson was a bail hostel way over on the other side of town.”He shrugged. ”But if you can drop into the station tomorrow, sir, to give us the full story, we'd be obliged.”

    ”I'll be there.”

    The officer noticed the noise the crows were making in the trees. He and his partner turned to look at them. ”What in damnation is wrong with those things?”

    ”They're in a good mood.”Benedict felt a grim smile tug at his mouth.

    ”They've just caught something for their supper”