Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  Harod stared at her. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  Maria Chen pulled back the slide, aimed the cocked weapon at the refrigerator, and looked away with eyes half shut.

  “Wait!” said Harod. “Would you care to have breakfast with me?”

  Harod brought both hands to his temples and rubbed. “I’d be delighted,” he said at last.

  Maria had brought four covered Styrofoam cups and after they finished the eggs, bacon, and cold hash browns they each had a second cup of coffee.

  “I’d pay ten thousand dollars to know who hit me,” said Harod.

  Maria Chen produced Harod’s checkbook and the Cross pen he used for initialing contracts. “His name is Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry. He comes from Charleston. Barent thinks that he’s here after the girl, the girl is here after Melanie Fuller, and they’ve all got something to do with Willi.”

  Harod set the cup down and mopped at spilled coffee with the flap of his robe. “How in hell do you know that?”

  “Joseph told me.”

  “Who the fuck is Joseph?”

  “Ah, ah,” said Maria Chen and pointed a finger at the refrigerator. “Who is Joseph?”

  “Joseph Kepler.”

  “Kepler. I thought I’d dreamed that he was here. What the goddamn hell is Kepler doing here?”

  “Mr. Barent sent him down yesterday,” said Maria Chen. “He and Mr. Colben were outside the hotel yesterday when Haines’s men radioed about the sheriff and the girl getting away. Mr. Barent did not want the two to leave. It was Mr. Colben who first Used the bus.”

  “The what?”

  Maria Chen explained. “Fan-fucking-tastic,” said Harod. He closed his eyes and slowly massaged his scalp. “That goddamn cracker cop gave me a goose egg the size of Warren Beatty’s ego. What the fuck did he hit me with?”

  “His fist.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit,” said Maria Chen.

  Harod opened his eyes. “And you heard all this from that inflammable hemorrhoid J. P. Kepler. Did you spend the night with him?”

  “Joseph and I went jogging together this morning.”

  “He’s staying here?”

  “Room 1010. Next to Haines and Mr. Colben.”

  Harod stood up, caught his balance, and lurched toward the bathroom. Maria Chen said, “Mr. Colben requested that you be at the command trailer at ten A.M.”

  Harod smiled, returned to pick up the automatic, and said, “Tell him to stuff it up his ass.”

  The ringing began at 10:13. At 10:15:30, Tony Harod sat up and groped for the phone. “Yeah?”

  “Harod, get the hell down here.”

  “Chuck, that you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Stuff it up your ass, Chuck.”

  Maria Chen answered the second call that evening. Harod had just finished dressing to go out to dinner.

  “I believe you’ll want to take it, Tony,” she said.

  Harod grabbed the phone. “Yeah, what is it?”

  “I think you’ll want to see this,” said Kepler. “What?”

  “The sheriff you went waltzing with yesterday is out and moving.”

  “Yeah, where?”

  “Come down to the command trailer and we’ll show you.”

  “Can you send a goddamn car?”

  “One of the agents at your motel will drive you down.”

  “Yeah,” said Harod. “Look, don’t let that shithead get away. I have a score to settle with him.”

  “You’d better hurry then,” said Kepler.

  It was dark and snow was coming down heavily by the time Harod stepped into the cramped control room. Kepler looked up from where he leaned over one of the video screens. “Good evening, Tony, Ms. Chen.”

  “Where the fuck is this cracker cop?” said Harod.

  Kepler pointed to a monitor showing Anne Bishop’s home and an empty street. “They went up Queen Lane past the Blue Team observation post about twenty minutes ago.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “We don’t know. Colben’s men were unable to follow.”

  “Unable to follow?” said Harod. “Jesus Christ. Colben must have thirty or forty agents in the area . . .”

  “Almost a hundred,” interrupted Kepler. “Washington sent reinforcements in this morning.”

  “A hundred fucking G-men, and they can’t follow a fat, white cop in a ghetto full of jigaboos?”

  Several of the men at consoles looked up disapprovingly and Kepler motioned Harod and Maria Chen into Colben’s office. When the door was closed, Kepler said, “Gold Team was ordered to follow the sheriff and the young blacks who were with him. But Gold Team was unable to carry out orders because their surveillance vehicle was temporarily disabled.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Someone had slashed the tires on the fake AT&T truck they were in,” said Kepler.

  Harod laughed. “Why didn’t they follow on foot?”

  Kepler sat back in Colben’s chair and folded his hands across his flat stomach. “First, because everyone on Gold Team was white that shift and they thought they would be too conspicuous. Second, they had standing orders not to leave the truck.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Kepler smiled ever so slightly. “It’s a bad neighborhood. Colben and the others were afraid that it might be stripped.”

  Harod roared. Finally he said, “Where the hell is Chucky baby, anyway?”

  Kepler nodded toward a radio receiver on the console along the north wall of the office. Static and radio babble muttered from it. “He’s up in his he li cop ter.”

  “Figures,” said Harod. He folded his arms and scowled. “I want to see what this damn sheriff looks like.”

  Kepler keyed the intercom and spoke softly. Thirty seconds later a video monitor on the console lit and showed a tape of Gentry and the others passing. A light-enhancement lens spotlighted the scene in a green-white haze, but Harod could make out the heavyset man among the young blacks. Pale numerals, codes, and a digital time record were superimposed along the bottom of the screen.

  “I am going to see him again soon,” whispered Harod. “We have another team out on foot, looking,” said Kepler. “And we’re fairly certain the whole group will be going back to that community center where the gang’s been congregating.”

  Suddenly the radio band-monitor began squawking and Kepler turned it up. Charles Colben’s voice was almost quaking with excitement. “Red Leader to Castle. Red Leader to Castle. We have a fire on the street near CH-1. Repeat, we have a . . . negative, make that two fires . . . on the street near CH-1.”

  “What’s CH-1?” asked Maria Chen. “Community House,” said Kepler, switching channels on the monitor. “The big old house I just mentioned where the gang’s headquartered. Charles calls it Coon Hole 1.” The monitor showed the flames from half a block away. The camera seemed to be in some vehicle parked along the curb. The light-enhancement equipment turned the two burning cars into pyres of light that blobbed out the entire image until someone changed the lens. Then there was still enough light to see dark figures scurrying from the house, and brandishing weapons. Kepler switched on the audio. “. . . ah . . . negative, Red Leader. This is Green Team near CH-1. No sight of the intruder.”

  “Well, goddammit,” came Colben’s voice, “get Yellow and Gray to cover the area. Purple, you have anybody coming from the north?”

  “Negative, Red Leader.”

  “Castle, you copying this?”

  “Affirmative, Red Leader,” came the bored tones from the agent in the control room of the trailer.

  “Get the E-M Van we used yesterday over there to douse that fire before the city gets involved.”

  “Affirmative, Red Leader.”

  “What’s the E-M Van?” Harod asked Kepler. “The Emergency-Medical Van. Colben brought it down from New York. It’s one reason this operation is costing two hundred thousand dollars a day.”

  Harod shook his head. “A hundred fe
deral cops. He li cop ter. Emergency vans. To corner two old people who don’t even have their own teeth anymore.”

  “Maybe not,” said Kepler as he put his feet up on Colben’s desk and made himself comfortable, “but at least one of them can still bite.”

  Harod and Maria Chen turned their chairs and sat back to watch the show.

  On Tuesday morning Colben called a conference to be held at nine A.M. at five thousand feet. Harod showed his disgust but boarded the he li cop ter. Kepler and Maria Chen smiled at each other, both still slightly flushed from their six-mile run through Chestnut Hill. Richard Haines sat in the copilot’s seat while Colben’s Neutral pilot remained expressionless behind his aviator glasses. Colben swiveled his jump seat around and faced the three on the rear bench as the helicopter followed a pattern south to the river and Fairmont Park, east to the expressway, and then north and west to Germantown again.

  “We still don’t know what that little gang fight was about last night,” said Colben, “with the coons shooting each other up. Maybe it’s something Willi or the old broad is involved in. But the mounting casualty rate around here must have helped Barent decide. He’s given us the go-ahead. The operation’s on.”

  “Great,” said Harod, “because I’m getting the fuck out of here by tonight.”

  “Negative,” said Colben. “We have forty-eight hours to flush your friend Willi out. Then we move on the Fuller bitch.”

  “You don’t even know Willi’s here,” said Harod. “I still think he’s dead.”

  Colben shook his head and leveled a finger at Harod. “No you don’t. You know as well as we do that that old son of a bitch is around here and up to something. We don’t know if the Fuller woman is working with him or not, but by Thursday morning it won’t matter.”

  “Why wait so long?” asked Kepler. “Harod’s here. Your people are in place.”

  Colben shrugged. “Barent wants to use the Jew. If Willi rises to the bait, we’ll move immediately. If not, we’ll terminate the Jew, finish the old woman, and see what develops.”

  “What Jew?” asked Tony Harod. “One of your friend Willi’s old catspaws,” said Colben. “Barent did one of his $29.95 conditioning jobs on him and wants to turn him loose on the old kraut.”

  “Quit calling him ‘my friend,’ ” snapped Harod. “Sure,” said Colben. “Does ‘your boss’ sound better?”

  “You two knock it off,” Kepler said emotionlessly. “Tell Harod what the plan is.”

  Colben leaned over and said something to the pilot. They hovered motionless five thousand feet above the gray-brown geometries of Germantown. “Thursday morning we’ll seal the entire area,” said Colben. “Nobody in, nobody out. We’ll have the Fuller woman located precisely. Most of the time she spends the night in that Grumblethorpe shack on Germantown Avenue. Haines will lead a tactical team in a forced entry. Agents will take care of the Bishop woman and the kid she’s been Using. That leaves Melanie Fuller. She’s all yours, Tony.”

  Harod folded his arms and looked down at the empty streets. “Then what?”

  “Then you terminate her.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that, Harod. Barent says that you can Use anybody you want. But you have to be the one to do it.”

  “Why me?”

  “Dues, Harod. Dues.”

  “I would think you’d want to interrogate her.”

  Kepler spoke. “We considered it, but Mr. Barent decided that it was more important to neutralize her. Our real goal is to bring the old man out of hiding.”

  Harod chewed on his thumbnail and looked down at rooftops. “And what if I don’t succeed in . . . terminating her?”

  Colben smiled. “Then we take her out and the Club still has a vacant seat. It’s not going to break anybody’s heart, Harod.”

  “But we still have the Jew to try,” said Kepler. “We don’t know what results that may bring.”

  “When does that go down?” asked Harod.

  Colben looked at his watch. “It’s already started,” he said. He motioned to the pilot to go lower. “Want to see what happens?”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Melanie

  We had a quiet weekend.

  On Sunday, Anne made a pleasant dinner for the three of us. The stuffed pork chops were quite good, but I felt that she had a tendency to overcook the vegetables. Vincent cleared the table while Anne and I sipped tea from her best china cups. I thought of my own Wedgwood gathering dust in Charleston and felt a twinge of loss and homesickness.

  I was too tired to send Vincent out that evening despite my curiosity about the photograph. Everything could wait. More important were the voices in the nursery. Every evening they became clearer, bordering on the understandable now. The previous night, after bathing Vincent and before going to sleep, I had been able to separate the whispers into discreet voices. There were at least three— a boy and two girls. It did not seem unlikely that children’s voices were to be heard in the two-century-old nursery.

  Late Sunday night, after nine, Anne and Vincent returned to Grumblethorpe with me. Sirens wailed nearby. After securing the doors and shutters, I left Anne in the parlor and Vincent in the kitchen and went upstairs. It was a cold night. I crawled under the covers and watched the heater filaments glow in the shadowy room. The eyes of the life-size boy reflected the light and his few remaining tufts of hair glowed orange.

  The voices were very clear.

  On Monday I sent Vincent out.

  I did not like to let him go out in the daytime; it was a bad neighborhood. But I needed to know about the photograph.

  Vincent carried his knife and the revolver I had borrowed from the Atlanta cabdriver. He squatted in the torn-out backseat of an abandoned car for several hours, watching colored teenagers pass. Once a stubble-cheeked drunk thrust his face in the rear window and yelled something, but Vincent opened his mouth and hissed and the drunk quickly disappeared.

  Finally Vincent saw someone we recognized. It was the third boy, the young one who had run away on Saturday night. He was walking with a heavyset teenager and an older boy. Vincent let them get a block ahead and followed.

  They passed by Anne’s house and continued south to where the commuter train line created an artificial canyon. A narrow street ran east and west and the three boys entered an abandoned apartment building there. The structure was a strange caricature of an antebellum mansion; four disproportionate columns falling from a flat overhang, tall windows with rotting lintels, and the remnants of a wrought-iron fence demarcating a plot of frozen weeds and rusted tin cans. The windows on the ground floor were boarded up and the main door chained, but the boys went to a basement window where bars had been bent, the pane broken out, and slipped in there.

  Vincent jogged the four blocks back to Anne’s house. I had him take the large feather pillow on Anne’s bed, stuff it in his oversize rucksack, and jog back to the apartment building. It was a gray, tired day. Snow fell in desultory flurries from a low sky. The air smelled of exhaust fumes and old cigars. There was little traffic. A train roared by as Vincent stuffed the backpack in ahead of himself and slipped through the shattered window.

  The boys were on the third floor, crouched in a tight circle among shards of fallen plaster and pools of icy water. Windows had been broken and there were glimpses of gray sky through the rotted ceiling. Graffiti covered every inch of the walls. All three of the boys were on their knees, as if worshiping the white powder that bubbled in spoons held over a single can of sterno. Their left arms were bare; rubber cords were bound tightly around their biceps. Syringes were set out on dirty rags before them. I looked through Vincent’s eyes and realized that this was a sacrament— the holiest sacrament in the urban Negro’s modern Church of Despair.

  Two of the boys looked up and saw Vincent just as he stepped out of hiding, holding the pillow in front of him like a shield. The young boy— the one we had let get away on Saturday night— started to shout something just as Vincent shot
him through his open mouth. Feathers fluttered like snow and there was the smell of the scorched pillowcase. The older boy pivoted and tried to run away on his knees, scrabbling over chunks of plaster. Vincent fired twice more, the first shot slapping the youth onto his stomach, the second one missing. The boy rolled over, clutching his stomach and writhing like some sea creature thrown up on an inhospitable shore. Vincent set the pillow firmly over the Negro’s terrified face, pressed the pistol deep, and fired again. The writhing ceased after one more violent kick.

  Vincent lifted the revolver and turned to the third boy. It was the heavyset one. He continued to kneel where he had been, syringe still poised above his left arm, eyes wide. There was a look approaching religious awe and reverence on his fat, black face.

  Vincent dropped the pistol into his jacket pocket and flipped open his long knife. The boy began to move— slowly—every movement as exaggerated as if he were underwater. Vincent kicked him in the forehead, toppling him over backward and kneeling on his chest. The syringe spun away on the filthy floor. Vince inserted the point of the blade under the skin of the boy’s throat, just to the right of the Adam’s apple.

  It was here that I realized I had a problem. Much of my energy at that moment went toward restraining Vincent. I needed this boy to tell me about the photograph; who brought it to Philadelphia, how this colored riffraff received it, and what they were using it for. But Vincent could not ask the questions. I had vaguely considered Using the boy directly, but this now seemed unlikely. It is possible to Use someone you have not seen firsthand— difficult, but possible. I have done it on several occasions where I have used a conditioned catspaw as the instrument of making contact. The difficulty here was twofold: first, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to interrogate someone while Using them. Although there is a glimmer of the surface of their thoughts, especially at the second of contact, the very act of suppressing their will so necessary to Using them also has the effect of inhibiting or eliminating rational thought processes in the subject. I could no more read the subtleties of this fat Negro’s mind than he could read mine. Using him would be like sitting in a repugnant but necessary vehicle for a short drive; it would take me to my destination but could not answer my questions. Second, if I shifted my focus sufficiently to Use the boy— perhaps to return him to Anne’s house— I was not sure that my conditioning of Vincent was sufficient to keep him from following his own impulses and cutting the Negro’s throat.