Silent Prey (13 page)

“Come again,” he said, and turned toward the hospital.

Bekker rolled the window up and started back, the sack shoved under the seat; but he knew he wouldn’t make it without a sample. He
deserved
a sample. He’d had a revolutionary idea this night, the recording of the human aura . . . .

He stopped at a traffic light, checked the streets, turned on the dome light and opened the bag. Three fat twists of coke and two small Zip-Loc bags. Thirty small commercial tabs in one, two larger tabs in the other. His hands shook as he kept watch and unrolled one of the twists. Just enough to get home.

The coke jumped him and his head rolled backward with the force of it roaring through his brain like a freight train. After a moment, he started out again, slowly, everything preternaturally clear. If he could hold this . . . His hand groped for the PCP bag, found it; only two. But the coke had him, and he popped them both: the angels would hold the coke in place, build on it . . . . He could see for miles now, through the dark. No problem. His mouth worked, fathering a wad of saliva, and he popped a hit of speed, crunched it in his teeth. Only one, just a sample, a treat . . .

A red light. The light made him angry, and he cursed, drove through it. Another. Even more angry, but he held it this time, rolled to a stop. One more pinch of the white: sure. He
deserved
one more. One more hit . . .

He hadn’t taken an experimental subject in more than a week. Instead, he’d huddled in the basement, typing his papers. He had a backlog now, data that had to be collated, rationalized. But tonight, with the angels in his blood . . . And Davenport in town, looking for him.

In taking the other subjects, he worked out a system: hit them with the stun gun, use the anesthetic. And more important, he’d begun looking for safe hunting grounds. Bellevue was one. There were women around Bellevue all the time, day and night, small enough to handle, healthy, good subjects. And the parking ramp there was virtually open . . . . But Bellevue wasn’t for tonight, not after he’d just come from there.

In fact, he shouldn’t even think of taking one tonight. He hadn’t planned it, hadn’t done the reconnaissance that provided his margin of safety. But with the angels in his blood, anything was possible.

A picture popped into his head. Another parking ramp, not Bellevue. A ramp attached to a city government building of some kind.

Parking ramps were good, because they were easy to hide in, people came and went at all hours, many of them were alone. Transportation was easily at hand . . . .

And this one was particularly good: each level of the parking ramp had an entrance into the government building, the doors guarded by combination lockpad. A person entering the ramp in a car would not necessarily walk out past the attendants in the ticket booth. So Bekker could go in, and wait . . . .

The ramp itself had a single elevator that would take patrons to the street. In his mind’s eye, he could see himself in the elevator with the selected subject, getting off at the same floor, hitting her with the stun gun as they came out of the elevator, using the gas, hiding her body
between a couple of cars, then simply driving around to make the pickup . . . . Simple.

And the ramp was close by, on the edge of Chinatown . . . .

The rational Bekker, trapped in the back of his mind, warned him:
no no no no
 . . .

But Gumball-Bekker cranked the wheel around and headed south, the PCP angels burning in his blood.

Chinatown.

There were people in the street, more than Bekker would have thought likely. He ignored them, the PCP-cocaine cocktail gripping his mind, focusing it: he drove straight into the parking garage, hunched over the wheel, got his ticket, and started around the sequence of up-slanting ramps. Each floor was lit, but he saw no cameras. The sequence had him now, his heart beating like a hammer, his face hot . . . .

He went all the way to the top, parked, opened the cocaine twist, cupped some in his hand, snorted it, licked up the remnant.

And went away . . .

When he came back, he climbed out of the car, taking his collection bag from the backseat. A stairwell wrapped around the elevator shaft and he took the stairs down, quietly, the stairs darker than the main ramp area. Bekker was on his toes, his collecting bag around his shoulder, hand on the stun gun . . . .

At the second floor, he stopped, checked the anesthetic tank and mask. Okay. He rehearsed the sequence in his mind: get behind her, hit her with the stun gun, cover her mouth against screams, ride her down, get the gas. He stepped out of the stairwell, glanced into the tiny elevator lobby. Excellent.

Back to the stairwell.

He waited.

And waited.

Twenty minutes, tension rising. Fished in his pocket, did another cross, chewing it, relishing the bite. He heard a steel door close somewhere overhead, echoing through the ramp, and a few minutes later, a car went down. Then silence again. Five more minutes, ten.

A car came in, stopped on the second floor, high heels on concrete . . . Bekker tensed, his hand going quickly to the tank, flicking the switch once on the stun gun.

Then . . . nothing. The sound of high heels receding. The woman, whoever it was, was walking down the ramp to get out, rather than entering the stairwell or going to the elevator.

Damn. It wasn’t working. He glanced at his watch: another ten minutes. No more . . . His mind flashed back to the Twin Cities, to an actress. He’d fooled her by dressing as a gas company employee looking for leaks, had killed her with a hammer. He remembered the impact and the flush . . . . Bekker went away.

And came back, sometime later, with the telltale sigh. At the sound of feet below, and a woman’s voice.

The elevator doors opening, one floor below . . .

He picked up his bag, hurried around, went into the lobby, pushed the up button: the Bekker at the back of his mind saying
no no no no,
the foreground Bekker hot with anticipation . . .

The elevator came up, lurched to a stop, and the doors opened. Inside was a dark-haired woman with an oversized purse, eyes large, one hand in her purse. She hadn’t expected the stop at the second floor. She saw Bekker, relaxed. Bekker nodded, stepped inside, waited for the doors to close. The woman had punched six, and Bekker reached for it, then stopped, as if he were also going to
six. He stepped against the back of the elevator, looking up at the numbers flashing down at them . . . .

She had a gun in her purse, Bekker thought, a gun or tear gas. He thought about that, thought about that . . . got caught in a loop, thinking about thinking about it . . . and when he came back, groping in his collection bag for the stun gun, they were already at six.

He glanced sideways at the woman, caught her staring at him; he looked away. Eye contact might tell her too much . . . . He glanced again, and the woman seemed to be shrinking away, had her hand in her purse again. A tone sounded, a sharp
bing,
and the doors slid open. For a moment, neither of them moved, then the woman was out. Bekker followed a few feet behind, turned toward her, slipping his shoes off, expecting to pad after her, catch her unexpectedly . . . .

But the woman suddenly stepped out of her own shoes and began running, and at the same time, looking back at him, screaming, a long, shrill, piercing cry.

She knew.
 . . .

Bekker, frozen for an instant by the scream, went after her, the woman screaming, her purse skidding across the floor, spilling out lipsticks and date books and a bottle of some kind, rolling on the rough concrete . . . . She dodged between two cars, backing toward the outer wall, a can in her hand, screaming . . . .

Tear gas.

Bekker was right behind her, losing his bag, going after her bare-handed, the urgency gripping him, the need to shut her up:
She knows knows knows
 . . .

The woman had braced herself between the cars, her hand extended with the tear gas, her mouth open, her nostrils flexing. No way to get her but straight ahead . . .

Bekker charged, stooping at the last moment, one
hand up to block the tear-gas spray. She pressed the can toward him, but nothing happened, just a hiss and the faint smell of apple blossoms . . . .

She’d backed all the way to the ramp wall, the lights of the city behind her, the wall waist-high, her shrill scream in his ears, piercing, wailing.

He went straight in, hit her in the throat with one hand, caught her between the legs with the other, heaved, flipped . . .

And the woman went over the waist-high wall.

Simply went over, as though he’d flipped a sack of fertilizer over the wall.

She dropped, without a sound.

Bekker, astonished at what he’d done, panting like a dog, looked down over the wall as she went. She fell faceup, arms reaching up, and hit on the back of her head and neck.

And she died, like that: like a match going out. From six floors up, Bekker could see she was dead. He turned, looking for someone coming after her, a response to the scream.

Heard nothing but a faraway police siren. Panicked, he ran back to the stairs, up two flights, climbed in the Volkswagen, started it, and rolled down through the ramp. Where were they? On the stairs?

Nobody.

At the exit booth, the woman ticket-taker was standing on the street, looking down at the corner. She came back and entered the booth. She was chewing gum, a frown on her face.

“One-fifty,” she said.

He paid. “What’s going on?”

“Fight, maybe,” she said laconically. “A couple of guys were running . . .”

• • •

Twelve hours later, Bekker hunched over an IBM typewriter, a dark figure, intent, humming to himself “You Light Up My Life,” poking the keys with rigid fingers. Overhead, a flock of his spiders floated through the air, dangling from black thread attached to a wire grill. A mobile of spiders . . .

The PCP made the world perfectly clear, and he marveled over the crystal quality of the prose as it poured forth from the machine onto the white paper.

 . . .
refuted claims that cerebral-spinal pressure obfuscated reliable intercranial measurements during terminal brain activity as per Delano in TRS Notes [Sept. 86]; Delano overlooked the manifest and indisputable evidence of
 . . .

It simply sang—and that cockroach Delano would undoubtedly lose his job at Stanford when the world saw his professional negligence . . . .

Bekker leaned back, looking up at his spiders, and cackled at the thought. A gumball dropped, and he leaned forward, thoughtful now, Bekker the Thinker. He’d made a mistake this night. The worst he’d made yet. His time was probably coming to an end: he needed more work, he needed another specimen, but he had to be very, very careful.

Mmmm. He turned off the typewriter and laid his manuscript aside, carefully squaring the corners of the paper. Went to the bathroom, washed his face again, stared at the scars. The drugs were still with him, but he was also running down. Might even catch some sleep. When had he last slept? Couldn’t remember.

He dropped his clothing on the floor, looked at the clock. Midmorning. Maybe a couple of hours, though . . .

He lay down, listened to his heart.

Closed his eyes.

Almost slept.

But then, just on the edge of oblivion, something stirred. Bekker knew what it was. He felt his heart accelerate, felt the adrenaline spurting into his blood.

He hadn’t done her eyes. It had been impossible, of course, but that made no difference. She could see him, the dark-haired woman.

She was coming.

Bekker stuffed a handful of sheet in his mouth, and screamed.

The car slowed and the window between the front seat and the backseat dropped an inch. The early-morning traffic was light, and they were moving quickly, but O’Dell was grumpy about the early hour. Lily hadn’t slept at all.

“You want a
Times
?” Copland asked over his shoulder.

“Yes.” O’Dell nodded, and Copland eased the car toward the curb, where a vendor waved newspapers at passing cars. A talk show babbled from the front-seat radio: Bekker and more Bekker. When Copland rolled his window down, they could hear the same show from the vendor’s radio. The vendor handed Copland a paper, took a five-dollar bill, and dug for change.

“I’m worried,” Lily said. “They could try again.”

“Won’t happen. They didn’t mean to kill him, and coming after him again, that way, would be too risky. Especially if he’s this tough guy you keep telling me about . . . .”

“We thought they wouldn’t go after him the first time . . . .”

“We never thought they’d try to mug him . . . .”

Copland handed a copy of the
Times
into the backseat. A headline just below the fold said, “Army Suspects Bekker of Vietnam Murders.”

“This has gotta be bullshit,” O’Dell grumbled, scanning the story. “Anything from Minneapolis?”

“No.”

“Dammit. Why don’t these assholes check on him? For all they know, the Minneapolis story could be a cover for an Internal Affairs geek.”

“Not a thing, so far. And the people in Minneapolis are looking for it.”

Silence, the car rolling like an armored ghost through Manhattan.

Then: “It must be Fell. It has to be.”

Lily shook her head: “Nothing on her line. She got one call, from an automated computer place saying that she’d won a prize if she’d go out to some Jersey condominium complex to pick it up. Nothing on the office phone.”

“Dammit. She must be calling from a public phone. We might need some surveillance here.”

“I’d wait on that. She’s been on the street for a while. She’d pick it up, sooner or later.”

“Had to be Fell, though. Unless it really was muggers.”

“It wasn’t muggers. Lucas thinks they were cops. He says one of them was carrying a black leather-wrapped keychain sap; about the only place you can buy them is a commercial police-supply house. And he says they never went for his billfold.”

“But they weren’t trying to kill him.”

“No. But he thinks they were trying to put him out of commission. Maybe break a few bones . . .”

“Huh.” O’Dell grunted through a thin smile. “You know, there was once a gang on the Lower East Side, they’d contract to bite a guy’s ear off for ten bucks?”

“I didn’t know that,” said Lily.

“It’s true, though . . . . All right. Well. With Davenport. String him along . . . .”

“I still feel like I’m betraying him,” Lily said, looking away from O’Dell, out the window. A kid was pushing a bike with a flat tire down the sidewalk. He turned as the big black car passed, and looked straight at Lily with the flat gray serpent’s eyes of a ten-year-old psychopath.

“He knew what he was getting into.”

“Not really,” she said, turning away from the kid’s trailing eyes. She looked at O’Dell. “He thought he did, but he’s basically from a small town. He’s not from here. He really doesn’t know, not the way we do . . . .”

“What’d you tell Kennett, about why Davenport was at your place?”

“I . . . prevaricated,” Lily said. “And I could use a little backup from you.”

“Ah.”

Lucas hadn’t been badly hurt, so Lily flagged a cab, took him to Beth Israel, then reported the attack. Because she’d fired her weapon, there had been forms to fill out. She’d started that night, and called Kennett to tell him about it.

“Should I ask why he was at your place at two in the morning?” Kennett had asked. He’d sounded amused, but he wasn’t.

“Um, you don’t want to know,” Lily had said. “But it was strictly business, not pleasure.”

“And I don’t want to know.”

“That’s right.”

After a moment: “Okay. Are you all right? I mean, really all right.”

“Sure. I’ve got a busted window I’ve gotta get fixed . . . .”

“Good. Get some sleep. I’ll talk to you tonight.”

“That’s all? I mean . . . ?”

“Do I trust you? Of course. See you tonight.”

Lily looked out the car window, at the city rolling past. Maybe she was betraying Lucas. Maybe she was betraying Kennett. She wasn’t sure anymore.

O’Dell said, “Cretins,” and his paper shook with anger.