Shiver

by Michael Prescott

  With the flat of his hand, he wiped a long strip of grime from Sanchez’s chest. The same dirt that had protected his face from incineration should have protected the front portions of his clothes, as well. But his uniform was gone. Only a soiled undershirt remained.

  “Dragged ... and stripped.”

  Then Delgado’s radio was in his hand, his finger pressing the call button.

  “Eight William Twenty. I need to have Eight Lincoln Ninety meet me on a Tac frequency.”

  He waited, heart pounding, while the female dispatcher selected an available frequency and contacted 8L90, the watch commander at the Butler Avenue station.

  “Eight Lincoln Ninety”—the dispatcher’s voice crackled over the handset’s speaker—“meet Eight William Twenty on Tac six.”

  Delgado switched the handset to Tac 6 and keyed the mike. “Eight William Twenty to Eight L Ninety.”

  “Eight L Ninety, go,” said the gravelly voice of Lieutenant Nat Kurtz.

  “Nat?” Delgado fought to keep his own voice level. “I have some news here that won’t wait.”

  “Hey, so do we, Seb. We’ve got what you might call a situation. The unit dispatched to Cedars just called in. The civilian they were sent to pick up is gone. Hospital staff reports she left with another officer less than five minutes ago. The guy was in uniform, but he’s nobody we know. And here’s the worst part. One of the security guards got a look at the mystery cop’s nameplate.”

  Delgado closed his eyes. He barely heard the watch commander’s next words. He didn’t need to hear them.

  “The name on the tag was Sanchez.”

  23

  Wendy was gazing past the cop in the driver’s seat, watching the modest high rises that lined Santa Monica Boulevard sweep by, when suddenly it came to her, wordless and unsettling—an eerie sense of déjà vu.

  Blinking, she shifted her focus from the view framed in the windshield to the cop directly before her. She could see nothing of him but the top of his hatless head rising over the headrest. A few wisps of curly brown hair.

  She stiffened.

  The armchair in her living room. A glimpse of a stranger’s head as he ducked down.

  The same brown hair she saw now.

  No. Crazy. Impossible.

  She was turning paranoid, that was all. Probably half the male population in America had brown hair, for God’s sake.

  Calm down, Wendy. He’s a police officer. He has to be.

  But what if he weren’t?

  It occurred to her that a police car, even an unmarked car, ought to be equipped with a special radio, as well as a microphone clipped under the dash and other paraphernalia she remembered from Sanchez and Porter’s cruiser last night. As surreptitiously as possible she peered between the two front seats. She saw no microphone, no squawkbox, only what looked like a perfectly ordinary AM/FM radio and ... and a cassette player.

  No police car would have a tape deck in it. She was certain of that. Almost certain. But suppose this car had been confiscated in a drug bust or something. Then it would have come with all sorts of options already installed. Okay, that made sense—maybe—but it still didn’t explain the absence of a police radio. Unless the radios in unmarked cars were concealed in some way. That might be the answer.

  But she wasn’t convinced.

  She glanced around at the interior of the car, looking for a way out. Just in case, she told herself, just in case.

  There was no way out. She was trapped. Had the Dodge been a four-door model, she could have thrown open a rear door and jumped clear if necessary. But the car was a coupe, and from the backseat she couldn’t reach the door handles.

  She remembered lying on the floor and thinking of a coffin. Her coffin.

  Oh, come on, she told herself shakily. Take it easy, will you?

  But she couldn’t take it easy. She kept staring at the brown curls above the headrest, while she thought of Officer Sanchez, whose body, according to Delgado, hadn’t been found.

  Had she checked the nameplate on this man’s uniform? She knew she hadn’t.

  The car reached Sepulveda Boulevard. Abruptly the cop—if he was a cop—spun the steering wheel hard to the left, veering south.

  But the police station wasn’t south. It was west. Due west.

  Wendy was trembling now. Trembling all over.

  She cleared her throat and tried to act casual and unconcerned. “Hey, aren’t we, uh, heading the wrong way?”

  “Well, yes, I guess you could say so,” he answered laconically as auto-body shops and health spas ticked past. “Thing is, I believe we’ve got one of those TV news vans on our tail. So I’m taking a little detour to shake him loose.”

  Which made sense—sure, it did—except that when she glanced out the rear window, she saw no van. She saw only a wide, empty street.

  Again the steering wheel blurred under his hands. The Dodge swung left onto Missouri Avenue, then immediately hooked right, nosing into an alley.

  Wendy’s heart was beating fast, very fast.

  Gravel crackled under the tires. The alley was narrow, bracketed by fences and cement walls scarred with black spidery graffiti. Utility poles marched down its length, their power lines cutting the blue sky like cracks in a mirror.

  Halfway down the alley, the Dodge eased to a stop behind a parked car. An ancient Ford, dressed in white paint and polished chrome.

  Wendy swallowed. Pounding pressure filled her head. She wanted to ask him why he’d stopped, but her mouth was dry and she couldn’t seem to form the words. Anyway, it didn’t matter. She knew the answer already. She knew. She knew. She knew.

  Slowly the man in the driver’s seat turned to face her. In his right hand there was a gun, the blue-black Beretta 9mm from his holster. She heard a click as he thumbed down the hammer.

  He smiled. His teeth shone white and looked cold, like chips of ice, below the black ovals of the sunglasses shielding his eyes.

  “Hello, Wendy.”

  He whispered the words, and for the first time she recognized his voice.

  She stared at the Gryphon, numbness spreading through her like an injection of painkiller.

  “Now,” he said softly, with the ominous politeness she remembered, “here’s what we’re going to do, you and I. First, we’re getting out of this car. And you won’t give me any trouble when we do that. Right?”

  She didn’t answer. Couldn’t speak.

  He nodded, apparently interpreting her silence as acquiescence. “Fine.”

  The door creaked open. He climbed out, then lowered the driver’s seat so she could follow.

  She hesitated, her mind racing as she considered what few options she might have. She could lunge forward, plant her fist on the horn, honk for help. No, hopeless; he would shoot her long before help came, if it ever did. All right, then. Grab the gun, wrestle it from his grasp. Dammit, that wouldn’t work either; he was too strong for her.

  “I’m waiting, my dear.”

  Nothing. There was nothing she could do.

  She left her seat and stepped out of the car, looking around at the alley. On one side, a wire-mesh fence screened off an empty parking lot. On the other side rose a crumbling cement wall, and beyond it, a house with boarded-up windows.

  The area was deserted. She could scream for help, but her cry would echo down this stone corridor unheard.

  The Gryphon jammed the gun in her side. “Now I’d like you to start walking. Please.”

  Her shoes crunched dead weeds and broken glass as he guided her to the passenger side of the Ford. The door was unlocked. He pulled it open.

  “Inside.”

  If she got in the car, she was dead. He could drive her anywhere, kill her at his convenience. To live, to have any chance of survival, she had to do something, and she had to do it now.

  She took a step toward the car, then spun sideways, away from the gun in her ribs, and pistoned out both arms, shoving the Gryphon off balance. He fell against the open door with a grun
t of surprise. Then she was running down the alley toward the distant street, expecting at any second to feel a bullet in her back.

  Behind her, the clatter of footsteps. Panting breath, hot and hoarse and close. Too close.

  A hand closed over her arm and spun her around. She staggered, twirling in the killer’s grasp like a drunken dancer. He jerked her toward him. Her face, twinned and miniaturized, stared back at her from the lenses of his sunglasses. She drove a knee into his gut. He released his grip, wheezing. She whirled. Started to run. He kicked her feet out from under her. The gravel-strewn pavement came up fast. Bright glassy pain burst in her hip as she hit the ground on her side.

  She twisted around to a sitting position and looked up. A shadow slid over her. His looming figure eclipsed the sun. She heard his low breathing, like the grunting rasp of an animal. She breathed the sour stench of his sweat. Her stomach fluttered.

  Reaching behind her, she groped in the trash lining the alley for something to fight him with. Her bandaged hands sifted through a scatter of broken glass, the shards too small to be of use as weapons. Near the glass lay a mound of rain-soaked newspapers. A record album broken in two pieces. A Styrofoam fast-food container. Somebody’s shoe.

  She picked up the shoe and pitched it at him, a final, desperate, meaningless gesture. He brushed it aside with a cough of laughter.

  After that, she was finished; her pitiful last stand was over. She lowered her head and waited for him to do what he would. She hoped he would shoot her. A bullet would be quick.

  Then softly he spoke to her, and strangely his voice was gentle, almost kind.

  “Don’t be afraid, Wendy. I’m not going to hurt you. Not this time.”

  Slowly she lifted her gaze and stared up at him through the webwork of hair plastered to her face.

  “Oh, I admit I wanted to hurt you very badly last night. I wanted to do terrible things to you. But then I saw that I was wrong. That I’d missed the significance of what had gone on between us. That I’d failed to appreciate you properly. I saw that only a most exceptional woman could play the game so well.”

  “The ...” Her voice cracked. “The game?”

  “I saw,” he went on, unhearing, the words dripping in a slow metronomic cadence, “that it could not have been an accident that I selected you. Out of all the lesser women I might have chosen, I had been led to the only one on earth who made a worthy adversary. Such things are never the product of chance. No, it was destiny that brought us together.”

  He chuckled, embarrassed by his own eloquence.

  “That sounds so cornball, doesn’t it? Like something in a Hallmark card. But I’m serious. I believe in destiny, in fate. I believe in a deeper meaning that transcends the ordinariness of life. And with that same faith, by the light of that same understanding, I believe we were meant for each other.”

  He gazed down at her fondly. He was smiling. A shy, almost boyish smile.

  “What I’m trying to say is ... I love you.”

  As Wendy watched, unable to move or speak or think, the Gryphon reached into the pocket of his coat and handed her a small clay statuette.

  24

  Wendy accepted the statue with numb fingers. She stared at it, turning it slowly in her hand.

  “See the detail,” the Gryphon breathed. “The delicacy of the carving.”

  “Very pretty,” she said quietly.

  “Like you.”

  She went on studying the figurine between her fingertips. Her body was a huddle of shock. Her mind was empty. She felt as if that hammer of his, the one he’d used to smash the car window last night, had slammed down on her brain and made it into mush.

  “You ... you said you love me,” she whispered at last.

  “Yes.”

  “But...” She almost choked on the words, on the idea of having this conversation with this man. “But that’s impossible. That’s ...”

  Crazy, she wanted to say, but didn’t.

  “Of course it’s impossible, Wendy. Every great thing is impossible. That’s precisely what makes it great. That’s what greatness is: the act of overcoming. Overcoming the possible, the normal, the mundane.”

  She swallowed, barely hearing him, her mind occupied with a new question. “Is this the statue you were going to give me last night?”

  “Yes. But now it holds a very different significance.”

  “Does it?”

  “Yes, it does. Then it was a marker of death. Now it is a token of my love to you. You must believe that, Wendy.”

  He kept saying her name, as if he took pleasure in pronouncing it. Her first name only; she wasn’t Miss Alden to him anymore. The obscene familiarity implied in his choice of words revolted her.

  She drew a sharp breath. “Look. If you’re serious about ... about what you said ... then let me go. Let me just walk out of here.”

  “No.”

  “But if you”—say it, go on, say it—“if you love me ...”

  “I do love you. Honestly, I do. But I can’t release you, because you don’t understand what’s happened between us. Not yet, anyway.”

  He knelt before her, tapping the pistol lightly against one knee. His sunglasses gazed blankly at her like insect eyes.

  “I don’t blame you. I don’t question your lack of faith in me.” He sighed heavily, a melodramatic, grandiloquent sigh. “This world is so choked with ugliness and pettiness and commonness. Sometimes it seems hard to believe that any genuine beauty or spirituality could exist here. But look, Wendy.”

  His hand closed lightly over her wrist, lifting the figurine closer to her face.

  “If something as special as this can be shaped out of mud, out of dirt, then so can the love that is our destiny.” He shrugged. “But until you see the truth in what I’m saying, until you’re willing to accept it, I’m afraid I simply can’t let you out of my sight.”

  His grip on her wrist tightened. He stood up and pulled her to her feet. Her legs felt weak and wobbly. There was a frightening tilt to the ground that hadn’t been there before.

  “Now, come along,” he said as if to a hesitant child. He gave her arm a little tug. “Come on.”

  She let him lead her back to the white Ford, its door still hanging open. He released her hand, and she sagged against the car, her knees buckling. She had no idea what he would do next. She almost didn’t care. Fear had drained out of her, leaving her hollow.

  “Now, please ... get in.”

  She obeyed. As she was settling into the passenger seat, he leaned in and tapped her arm. “Behind the wheel, if you don’t mind.”

  She realized he wanted her to drive. He’d made her enter on the passenger side only to ensure that she would never be out of his reach.

  With difficulty she climbed into the driver’s seat. Sliding in beside her, he shut the door and handed her a set of keys. She stashed the clay statue in the pocket of her blouse, then turned the ignition key in the slot. The engine growled.

  “Excellent,” he said pleasantly. “I don’t know about you, but I feel that this whole thing really is working out quite well.”

  His grating cheerfulness only made things worse. If things could be worse. If anything could be worse than this.

  “Where are we going?” she asked flatly.

  “I’ll tell you in a second. But first, listen to me. Listen good.”

  She stared straight ahead, rigid in her seat.

  “Look at me when I talk to you.”

  Reluctantly she turned toward him. For the first time she looked, really looked, at his face. She saw brown hair, curly and close-cropped. A high forehead. Thick brows. A fleshy nose, humorless mouth, square clean-shaven chin.

  It was not the face of a monster, not a face that belonged in a lineup or a mug shot or a chamber of horrors. It was a face she could pass on any street, a face so ordinary it almost didn’t exist.

  Then, with a small, distant shock, Wendy realized she knew that face from somewhere. But she had no strength to think a
bout it now.

  “I know you still want to get away,” the Gryphon was saying quietly. “And you’ll think of all kinds of clever ways to do it. Send the car into a skid, drive off the road into a ditch—things like that. You’re most resourceful, as I’ve already learned, much to my chagrin.” His voice dropped lower, till it was nearly inaudible. “But there’s one small detail you ought to be apprised of, Wendy dearest. Even though I’ve come to care for you very deeply, even though I cut you a good deal of slack just now, even with all that, my patience is not unlimited. To put it quite plainly, if you do attempt to pull off any of those clever schemes you’re known for ... I’ll have no choice but to kill you.”

  The gun jerked forward, the muzzle biting the skin beneath her jaw like a hungry animal.

  “I’ll blow your fucking head off!” he snarled.

  With his free hand, he whipped the sunglasses from his face, and suddenly she was staring into his eyes, gray eyes, small and flat and dull, like nailheads.

  “Do you hear me, Wendy? Do you? Do you?”

  She tried to nod, but the gun in the hollow of her jaw made it impossible. “I hear you.”

  “Good.” He smiled, withdrawing the gun a few inches. His features smoothed out, and his voice was calm again, but hardly reassuring; she thought of the dangerous, unreal composure of an executioner. “I apologize for swearing. I wouldn’t get so upset if I weren’t genuinely concerned about your welfare. The thought of losing you after all I’ve gone through to make you mine ... Well, it makes me a little crazy, I guess.”

  “I guess,” Wendy echoed.

  Her fear was back now. And with it came the knowledge that she still wanted to live. Despite everything that had happened or soon would, she wasn’t ready to fold up and die. The thought astonished her and, in an odd way, made her proud.

  “Now for those directions I promised,” the Gryphon said matter-of-factly. “Go north on Sepulveda, over the hill, into the Valley. We could take the freeway, but I’d prefer not to travel that fast. Just in case I have to shoot you and seize control of the car. That could be dangerous at high speed.”