The Last Nightingale (29 page)

“You started that way with each one. ‘I have to empty you out.’ Three times, I heard you say that. And with Mrs. Nightingale, the first one, you even made her guess what it meant to say ‘I have to empty you out.’ She wasn’t that frightened at first, was she?”

“I didn’t want her frightened at first. I wanted to experience her intact personality. I wanted to hear her speak while she was still thinking that she would bluster her way out of everything. She thought that she still had a life to defend.”

“And you used your knife. Little cuts. Little cuts, hour after hour, until you dissolved her into a babbling, grown-up baby.”

“That’s the part I love. Watching all of their haughty pride dissolve, their opinions, their judgments, their rejections. Everything that makes one a unique creation eventually collapses into the
sameness of infantile shrieks and babbling. And that, my friend, is triumph.”

“Over who?”

“Whom,” he corrected. “Over whom. And what do you mean?”

“Well, that’s what confuses me. Because while you were killing Mrs. Nightingale, you kept talking to her like she was your father. Telling her how you’re just as much a man as she is, only you didn’t mean her, you meant your father. And you hate your father for rejecting his only son for some silly little game with a bunch of boys. Only you weren’t killing him this time, because you already killed him the first time.

“And Amy, the older daughter. Did you know that you were talking out loud when you started pretending that she was your mother, and bawling her out for not keeping her husband at home so that he couldn’t sire a bastard son? Did you think that you were just alone and safe inside of your head?”

Tommie did not reply, but he slowly turned to face Shane. All the pretext of civility fell from his face. His eyes seemed to sink back into his head.

“Now I know exactly how I’ll do it. I’ll leave you tied to that beam and haul you out to the Golden Gate
before
I go to work on you. If I start here, I may not be able to stop myself and you’ll bleed out before we get you into the water.

“And then, just before you and your beam go into the water, I’m going to treat you to exactly one hundred little slices from your head to your toes. Your blood in the water will draw sharks from incredible distances. And there are plenty of them lurking around the mouth of the Bay. I trust they will eat you slowly, because of the beam, you know. Surely it will slow down their rate of consumption so that you can savor the experience of being eaten alive at sea. Eh?”

Shane leveled his gaze. “You killed your mother and father for money.”

“I killed them for throwing my life away!”

“And the younger girl, Carolyn. Even while you were dancing her all around the room, you kept telling her to stay away from you, to stay out of your life. At the time, I didn’t know that you were talking to me. Through her, you’ve killed me once already, haven’t you?”

With that, Tommie paused for a long moment and studied Shane’s face.

“But you killed yourself all those years ago, back when you killed them,” Shane added. “Ever since then, you’ve just been walking around with a dead thing where your soul should be.”

“How poetic,” said Tommie. He snatched up a writing pen, dipped it in an ink bottle, and announced, “I have this custom, just this little thing I do. Sort of a trademark, lately.” He picked up a small notebook, opened it and dictated to himself while he wrote:

“Even if The Last Nightingale could be revived, how would it tolerate the cure? Knowing that Life merely awaits to devour it again …”

He read it over silently two or three times, then happily exclaimed, “It will work perfectly for your suicide note, little bastard brother!” He dropped the notebook into a large section of oilskin. He folded it snugly inside and tied it with thick twine.

“There. Waterproof. Good enough so that the note will still be readable when they find it on your body. In case there’s anything left of you to wash up on shore. Not bloody likely, the sharks and whatnot. A hundred little cuts. So forth.”

Tommie tucked the oilskin envelope into his coat pocket, then reached down into some box that Shane could not see. When he stood, he produced a thick muslin potato sack. He stepped up to Shane and raised the sack overhead, then Tommie let his mask of civilization fall away again. This time his dead-eyed face melted into the expression of a man so nauseated by his own existence that he could never be at peace with the outside world.

A moment later, the bag swooped down over Shane’s head and everything went pitch black. He felt Tommie’s hands pulling the bag all the way down over his shoulders, and a rope was tied around
his shoulders and chest, keeping the sack in place. Next he felt the thick board that bashed him across the side of his head, but only for an instant before unconsciousness overtook him.

Twilight was rapidly dropping into darkness while the horse-drawn taxi clipped along at a brisk trot on its way back to the Mission Dolores. Vignette struggled to grasp the rapid turn of events. As usual when she let herself get caught up in the business of grown-ups, she soon found herself stuck between shouting men without being able to figure out what the problem was. Sergeant Blackburn had raced her away from Tommie Kimbrough’s house and back to the station to get more men to go capture him. But everybody was all excited about the fat man in charge who was arrested that day. She stood mute around the angry adults, but felt only disgust for the policemen yelling at the sergeant. Nobody would help him because there was no boss around to give orders.

Now he had her in this cab, forcing her to return to the Mission to wait all alone in that stupid toolshed without Shane—because of course nobody could let a girl go along to catch a murderer. Worst of all, the sergeant seemed to be able to completely shake off her best attempts to manipulate him by trying to appear too scared to go back alone.

He just smiled at her. “You have to wait where it’s safe, Vignette.”

“Shane’s out there. If he can be there, I can be there!”

The sergeant laughed out loud at that, and he didn’t bother to argue with her. She was glad to see him laugh, since his face seemed so tired and worried. Maybe it was safe to ask him.

“Why wouldn’t the other cops help us?”

“It’s called command confusion.”

“They didn’t seem confused.”

He laughed again, a little. “Well they all seemed crystal clear about not wanting to be of any help.”

This was good, Vignette thought. She had him talking and he
seemed to be feeling friendlier at the moment. Maybe if she could keep this up . . .

“If I was with you, I could still wait in the taxi, but if either of you got hurt, then as soon as you got back I could start helping to bandage you up while we run for a doctor! You can’t argue with that!”

“Got me there. I can’t argue.”

“So can I come?”

“No.”

They rounded the corner and pulled up next to the Mission. She flashed him her very best look of betrayal and hurt, but he just put his hand on her shoulder and smiled.

“I want you to wait here so I know you’re safe, because if I have to worry about you I might not be able to do my best to help Shane.”

“If we’re together, we can look in two different directions at the same time!”

“Vignette, this man is madness itself.” He lifted her down and put her at the curb. “I have to go.”

The sense of worry and fear were too much for her. She turned and ran back into the cemetery, to at least be around the place where her brother lived.

Once she was gone, the cabbie turned in his seat and asked, “What now, sir?”

“Well that’s the thing, actually,” Blackburn replied. “I need this carriage to drive up to the Golden Gate. I’m on the trail of a man who I believe has killed a couple of dozen people so far. I expect to find him up there tonight, because he has one more victim to kill there.”

“You mean
that’s
what the little girl was talking about? A real killer? Some sort of maniac killer? And you’re going after him?”

“Yes indeed. In fact, it looks like I’m all that there is, at the moment.”

“Sir, there’s no light at all up there! Can’t see your ass, if you don’t mind me sayin’ so. Fog covers moonlight, starlight, all of it.”

“I believe you. That’s why I’m prepared to offer you double your rate all the way out there and back tonight.”

“Very generous, sir. But I can’t possibly risk my horse in that—”

“I’ll triple your rate.”

“Triple now? Triple? Sir, you’ll be down twenty dollars that way.”

Blackburn pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket, leaving himself with nothing but a few coins. “I have to go right now. You can either take the money to drive me up there, or you can take the money for renting your rig to me, and I’ll drive myself. But I’m telling you,” Blackburn said, “I could sure use one more man along with me, tonight.”

“What, to go after this maniac?”

Minutes later, Blackburn sat alone in the rented hack, steering his way up to the Navy Presidio, a huge expanse of preserved land that fronted onto the strait of the Golden Gate. The search would require as much luck as skill, since there was plenty of deserted and rocky shoreline where the Pacific Ocean poured into the San Francisco Bay.

Just as the cabby warned, the lack of light became a real obstacle at the northern tip of the peninsula. There were no structures and no lights anywhere. The air smelled of incoming rain, and the early arriving clouds sucked up any moonlight before it hit the earth.

He slowed the horse to a brisk walk and proceeded toward the shoreline. The sound of the wind was in his ears, topped by the clip-clop of the horse’s gait. He strained to hear any trace of voices, any noise that might tip off another person’s presence. Nothing came back to him. He slowed the horse to a gentle walk, letting it stumble along the rutted road at the only safe speed.

Even then, there was no sound in the air to guide him. Just the rushing wind and the big animal’s steps. After a few more moments, he caught the first faint sounds of surf on the distant rocks.

He leaned into each crash of each wave, straining to hear a voice in the pause between them. There was nothing, still nothing, just wind and waves and horse hooves in darkness so thick that it held his vision down to a few yards in any direction.

Fear twisted his stomach and tightened his jaw. His muscled body felt the lack of sleep and the night all around him seemed impossibly huge. He wished that in such times he had some kind of abiding religious faith to sustain him. But it still seemed to him that God had ripped his family away in one icy blow, telling him that his ambition as a family man was denied. His heart had frozen to the spot, that day. Now he couldn’t pray anymore for the same reason that he couldn’t just start another family again, as people used to advise him. Back when they still did.

While he drove slowly through the night, he still had a bitter taste in his mouth about the casual disrespect from the officers hanging around the station. There was no Station Chief to direct traffic; discipline was gone. So there was nothing else to do but venture out to the Presidio alone and see if there wasn’t some way that he could ruin The Surgeon’s plans for the night. His frustration mounted at the slow pace while he drove the horse forward. It felt as if the elements conspired to slow him down.

Soon the sounds of the sea became the dominant noise, combined with the rushing of the sea winds, the clatter of the buggy wheels on the rutted road, and the steady clop of the horse’s walk. There was too much ambient noise for him to hear any signs of other people. He wondered how this was going to do any good.

In the seaward distance on his right-hand side, he could just make out the flashes from the rotating beam of the big gas-powered marine searchlight. That fixed his current location near the narrowest part of the Golden Gate passage.

The chill in the air seeped through his light jacket and an involuntary shiver rippled through him. At this point the mist hovering over the ocean water was dense enough to steal the last hint of light from the sky. He pulled the carriage to a halt and tied back the
reins. It was quieter, then. He felt encouraged that he might hear something this way. He would just have to carry out the rest of the search on foot.

Shane was in and out of consciousness throughout the rugged ride to the north shore in Tommie’s horse-drawn wagon. He remained bound to the beam by several turns of thick rope. Time after time, he rolled back up to the surface of awareness, and it would occur to him that he could work his way out of the ropes, if only he could gather his strength and focus his energy. But that same strength flowed back out of him every time, and he sank back into the dark nothingness.

When enough time passed that he could come back to the surface and stay, the thing that roused him was a sharp drop in temperature and the sensation of cold wind blowing across his body. He shivered uncontrollably, while clouds of spray flew through the air on wave blasts that sounded like cannons. He rolled his eyelids up and found the strength to hold them open. There was almost nothing to see in the darkness and fog. But in the background there was a slow and rhythmic pulse of light that had to be coming from one of the searchlights along the shoreline leading into the bay.

Shane was instantly wide awake and panting with fear when he realized that the monster was making good on his threat to kill him at the Golden Gate.

Now he felt the beam dragged backward a few feet. Then the head end of the beam was tilted up and rested on a rock, so that it held him up at an angle. A few seconds later, the next searchlight strobe flashed across the feral grin on Tommie Kimbrough’s face, hovering right over him. All traces of his dress and makeup were gone.

“I developed a whole new expertise in handling rats with the plague,” Tommie said, “just for you. I was going to wait until you
died that terrible death, then haul your carcass out here and push it into the surf.”

Shane knew that his only chance of survival in this desolate place was to distract Tommie long enough to allow him to wriggle free of the bindings and make a run for it. With luck, he might disappear in the thick darkness.