They Thirst (33 page)

"Andy!" she said, shocked. "Why?"

"Because they're going to be in the streets soon, going from house to house all across this city. And some night —possibly not tomorrow or the night after, but
some
night—they're going to come to our house." His voice cracked, and Jo squeezed his hand.

"What is it?" she pleaded. "Please tell me what's wrong!"

"All right. Yes, I have to tell you . . ." And then it all came out, from the incident at Hollywood Memorial to the living corpses found in East L.A. As he spoke, his voice became more and more frantic, more consumed with fear. Jo gripped his hands until she could feel the bones grinding. He finished by telling her of his outburst in the Dos Terros tenement, and how Sully Reece had driven him back to Parker Center in silence, glancing over at him once or twice as if he were one of those crazed transients who sleep on the grass under Beethoven's striding statue in Pershing Square.

He smiled grimly at her through haunted eyes. "My days on the force are numbered. I know that. I'm crazy, yes? Insane, just as they said my mother was. But my mother
knew.
For years I believed she shot my father because she was insane, but now I know differently. It took a great deal of courage for her to pull those shotgun triggers, but she
knew
that just because the thing looked like my father didn't mean it was truly him. She was trying to save our lives, and because I didn't understand' that I . . . I hated her for . . . a very long time." Tears sprang to his eyes and quickly he wiped them away. "Now I see them coming again. I see them conquering this city just as they conquered Krajeck. And when they've finished here . . ." New terror choked him "My

God, Jo! They'll number in the millions! No power on earth will be able to stop them . . .!"

"Andy," Jo said quietly, "when I was a little girl, my parents told me stories about the
vampir.
But those were legends, old tales that had been passed down from generation to generation. We live in a modern age now and . .." she stopped, seeing the fury in his eyes.

"You don't believe either? Jo, can't you see? They don't
want
us to believe because if we recognize them in our midst, we can guard ourselves against them. We can hang garlic on the windows and nail crucifixes to the doors! They want us to laugh, to say 'that can never be!' When we close our eyes, we help them hide, and we help them come one step closer to our front door!"

"You can't be certain," she reasoned.

"I am certain. I saw those bodies today. They'll be awakening soon, and the only thing I can do is rant and rave like a maniac. Oh, I can take a can of gasoline and a torch and try to burn them before they escape into the streets, but then what would happen? I'll be locked away, and tomorrow there will be twice as many
vampir
as there are today."

"Have you told anyone else?"

"No. Who could I talk to? Who would believe? I see in your eyes that you don't believe either. You've always thought my mother was insane, that she shot my father in a fit of madness, and that whenever she rambled on about the
vampir,
they were the imaginings of a fevered brain. But it's the truth! I know that now. I see it clearly!"

The bedside telephone rang suddenly. Palatazin reached over and picked it up. "Hello?"

"Captain Palatazin? This is Lieutenant Martin. Detectives Zeitvogel and Farris just called in with a positive ID on that plate you were tracing. It's 285 Zero Tango Hotel, and it belongs to a guy named Walter Benefield, residence Number Seventeen Mecca Apartments, 6th and Coronado near MacArthur Park."

"They're at the scene now?" His heart was beating so wildly he could hardly hear himself talk.

"Yes sir. Shall I send a backup unit?"

"No, not yet. I'm going over myself. Thanks for calling, Johnny." He hung up and rose from the bed, taking another shirt from the closet and hurriedly putting it on.

"What is it?" Jo said tensely. "Where do you have to go?"

"Across town," he said, reaching up on the closet shelf for his shoulder-holster. He strapped it on, then shrugged into his brown tweed coat. Jo was putting on her robe, and she followed him downstairs.

"Is it something about the Roach?" she asked. "You will be careful, won't you? You're not as young as you used to be, Andy. You let the younger men take the risks. Are you listening to me?"

"Yes," he said. "Of course." But he wasn't really listening—he was thinking that he could hear a distant voice, speaking urgently in his brain . . .

"Be careful," Jo said, buttoning his coat for him. "Remember ___"

. . . and the voice was telling him that after tonight things would never be the same in his life again because tonight he would take a step that would change the fate of a million people.

". . . let the younger men take the risks. Do you hear?"

He nodded, kissed her, and walked out of the house into the still, cool night. At the car he turned back and said to her, "Remember to lock the door." Then he slid behind the wheel, aware of the weight of the .38 beneath his left arm. He started the engine and drove away into the darkness.

At twenty minutes after midnight Palatazin was sitting in his car at the curb of Coronado Street, two blocks from MacArthur Park. The sign MECCA ROOMS-DAY, WEEK, OR MONTH blinked in glaring blue neon in the middle of the block; the building itself was made of yellow brick with ornamental blue tiles that might have looked decorative twenty or more years ago. Now the whole thing looked cheap and tawdry; many of the tiles were cracked and blistered with spray-painted slogans in Spanish scrawled across the side of the building that faced a narrow service alley. Every so often a drunk would stagger out of the Club Feliz next door and barely make it into that alley before throwing up. Coronado Street caught some of the neon glitter from 6th Street and Wilshire Boulevard but was in itself essentially dark, its old buildings that dated from the twenties clustered together like a flock of black crows.

Across the street a match flared inside a parked white Chevrolet. Palatazin could see Farris's profile as he lit his cigarette. Farris was a big, bulky man whose favorite sport was professional wrestling; he had black, beetlelike eyes that could freeze a suspect a block away. Around Parker Center he was called The Wheel only half-jokingly because when he rolled over somebody, they didn't get up for a very long time. Palatazin could see the dark outline of Zeitvogel's head on the driver's side; he thought he could feel Zeitvogel watching him instead of the Mecca, but he brushed off the notion as paranoia.

When Palatazin had reached the scene from his house, Zeitvogel had briefed him on the situation: At around nine o'clock he and Farris had come to the Mecca to check the sixteenth name on their list. No one had answered Benefield's door, but they'd run into the building's manager downstairs. He'd taken one look at the composite picture and positively identified it as being the man who rented Apartment 17. So Zeitvogel then ran the name Walter Benefield through the Vehicle ID computers and gotten the tag number back on a '73 gray Volkswagen Beetle. Then he'd called in to tell the night-watch officer, Lieutenant Martin.

An hour before midnight, the manager, Mr. Pietro, fumbled with his keys in the narrow, dimly-lit corridor and finally slipped one into the door of No. 17. "I wouldn't do this if I couldn't tell it was important," he said to the three policemen standing around him. "I mean, I know you cops wouldn't want to invade anybody's private property without good reason, huh?"

"We have good reason," Palatazin told him. "And we're not invading, Mr. Pietro. We're simply going to look around for a minute or two."

"Oh, sure, sure." The lock clicked open. Pietro switched on the lights, and the men stepped inside. The room was claustrophobic, and instantly Palatazin was aware of a bitter aroma that might have been burnt almonds. Clothes were piled on a chair and scattered on the floor, and the bed was unmade. Palatazin saw the pictures of weightlifters taped up around the headboard. He had started toward that corner of the room when he sensed a scurrying motion from a battered old card table. He stopped and stared at three wire-mesh cages filled with huge, black roaches, tumbling and roiling over each other; he drew his breath in sharply. "Look at that," he told the others.

"Jeez!" Mr. Pietro said incredulously. "What's he doing with all those . . .
things
in here? Listen, I run a clean place. .."

"Yeah," Farris said and peered into one of the cages. "Ugly little suckers, aren't they?"

Palatazin stepped away from the table and looked at the pictures on the wall, then back at Pietro, who looked thoroughly revolted. "Where does Benefield work, Mr. Pietro?"

"Out in West L.A. He works for one of those bug-spray companies, you know, exterminators."

"Do you know the name of the company?"

"Nope. Sorry." He glanced at the roaches again and shivered. "Jeez, do you think Benefield's bringing his work home with him or something?"

"I doubt it." Palatazin looked over to where Farris was going through
a
chest of drawers. "Take it easy with that, Farris, we don't want to tear the man's furniture apart. Mr. Pietro, what time is Benefield usually at home?"

"All hours, in and out." Pietro shrugged. "Some nights he comes in, stays a little while, and then leaves again. I've gotten to where I can recognize all the tenants' footsteps now, you see. My ears are real good. Anyway, he don't keep no regular hours."

"What sort of person is he? Do you talk with him very much?"

"No, he keeps to himself. Seems okay, though." Pietro grinned, showing a gold tooth. "He pays his rent on time, which is more than you can say for a lot of them. No, Benefield doesn't talk too much. Oh, one time when I couldn't sleep and was listenin' to my radio, Benefield knocks on the door—I guess it was about two in the morning, couple of weeks ago—and he seemed to want to talk, so I let him in. He was real excited about something, said . . . I don't know, it was crazy . . . that he'd been out looking for his old lady, and he thought he'd seen her. Two o'clock in the morning." Pietro abruptly shrugged and turned to watch Zeitvogel rummaging under the bed.

"Old lady? Do you mean girlfriend?"

"No. His mom. His old lady."

Zeitvogel said, "Here's something," and pulled out
a
box of magazines from under the bed. It was an odd mixture of comic books, muscle magazines, and porno. Zeitvogel held up a couple of publications devoted to bondage, and Palatazin frowned with distaste. Lying on the bed were a pair of black handgrips used for strengthening hand and wrist muscles. Palatazin picked up one of them and tried to squeeze it, finding the resistance quite powerful. He made the connection between them and the crushing hands that had killed four young women
₍
and laid the grip back down where it had been. He checked the bathroom, finding a tub with a couple of inches of standing water in it. In the medicine cabinet there were bottles of Bufferin, Excedrin, Tylenol. It seemed that Benefield was plagued with headaches.

"Captain," Zeitvogel said, offering him a yellowing Kodak snapshot as he came out of the bathroom. The picture showed a blond, slightly rotund woman sitting with her arm around a young boy on a sofa. The boy wore thick glasses and had a crewcut, and he was smiling vacantly into the camera; the woman's legs were crossed, one fleshy thigh over the other, a crooked grin on her face. Palatazin studied the photograph for a moment, catching what he thought was a strange, glassy look in the woman's eyes, as if she'd been drinking too much. "Have you ever seen Benefield's mother, Mr. Pietro?" he asked.

"Nope. Never."

Farris was probing around the stove and sink. He bent down, opened a cupboard, and brought out a bottle half-filled brownish liquid. He unscrewed the cap and sniffed it, and in the next instant dark motes were spinning in front of his eyes. He jerked his head away and said, "Shit! What's this stuff?" He quickly capped it and coughed violently a couple of times, having the sensation of oil clinging to his lungs. His nostrils seemed to be on fire. Palatazin took the bottle from him and sniffed around the cap. "Mr. Pietro, do you know what this is?"

"Looks like old piss to me."

Farris caught his breath and looked under the sink again, bringing out a few dry rags. "Don't know what that is, captain, but it's
wicked.
The smell of it down here'll knock you out."

"Zeitvogel," Palatazin said quietly, "go down to your car and call in on our friend, will you? Let's see if he's got a rap sheet."

Zeitvogel was back in fifteen minutes. "Bingo, captain," he said. "Benefield's got a long record of assaults, a couple of molestation charges, a Peeping Tom, and an attempted rape. He spent eight years in and out of mental wards and did a stretch at Rathmore Hospital."

Palatazin nodded, staring at the cages full of scrabbling roaches. He put the bottle back where it had been and closed the cupboard. He wanted to shout, "YES, WE'VE GOT HIM," but he knew that wasn't the case. There was a long way to go yet in proving that Benefield had anything to do with the four murders. "We'll wait for him to come home," Palatazin said, trying to keep his voice steady. "Mr. Pietro, we're going to be outside in our cars.