Shiver

by Michael Prescott

Darkness.

  She dropped to her knees, then crawled blindly, seeking a place to hide. The darkness was total, absolute. Even her own hands, groping inches from her face, were invisible.

  The disembodied voices of the dead went on and on, still more eerie in the sudden unreal night.

  “... help me, somebody, please help, oh, God, please ...”

  “I’ll do anything you say, anything ...”

  “... want to live, that’s all, don’t you understand, I want to live!”

  She kept crawling. Her breath came in ragged bursts. Could he locate her by the sound of her breathing? Maybe he already had. He might be right behind her. At any second she might feel his hand on her neck. Her body shivered with ghost sensations of his touch. She glanced around wildly and saw nothing but impenetrable blackness on all sides.

  “I’ll get you, Wendy,” the Gryphon boomed from some indeterminate distance, not near, not far. “You can’t escape.”

  He was right. He could flick his lighter and find her, or hunt her in the dark if he preferred.

  She crawled faster, then collided with something—him—his legs—no, no, only the futon, that was all, keep calm now, try to stay in control.

  Her hands scurried along the edge of the futon and discovered a lumpy, shapeless object lying near it. The drawstring bag. There might be a weapon inside. She rummaged in the bag, feeling its contents. A square of metal the size and thinness of a credit card. A wire hook. A plastic cylinder, perhaps four inches long, which she couldn’t identify. She fumbled with it, and a beam snapped on, shining in her face, blinding her—a flashlight—some sort of lightweight, miniature flashlight—it was revealing her position—turn it off, turn it off!

  She twisted the top of the cylinder counterclockwise, and the beam winked out, and then three shots exploded, blue muzzle flashes cutting the darkness, and she was screaming.

  35

  Delgado jumped out of the helicopter even before it set down on the road. He sprinted toward the Falcon. A yard away he stopped, read the license plate, and almost smiled.

  Rood’s car.

  Drawing his Beretta, he approached the trailer. He wanted to make sure the door visible from this angle was the only exit before he went in. The two Air Support Unit officers would have to cover him. Like all flight officers, they were armed, and they would have been required to log time on street patrol.

  As Delgado drew nearer, he became aware of faint, muffled sounds from inside the trailer. Voices? Perhaps.

  A sudden loud pop, like a firecracker. Another. Another.

  Gunshots.

  A woman’s scream, abruptly cut off.

  Wendy’s scream. He knew it. Rood was killing her. Killing her right now.

  Then he was racing for the trailer door, his jacket flapping around him, shoes kicking up desert dust.

  * * *

  Rood knew exactly what had happened. Wendy had found his Tekna Micro-Lite in the canvas bag and turned it on without realizing what it was. That was why her face had appeared briefly in the gloom, a white circle lit by the beam. Then the light had vanished, and he’d aimed and fired three times in the direction of the blue image fast fading on his retinas.

  He was fairly sure he’d hit her. He’d heard her sudden cry, a cry of either pain or fear. She was silent now. Dead, perhaps, or unconscious. Or, just possibly, unhurt and hiding.

  He needed to see. Needed light. But how? He’d already checked his pockets and discovered that his cigarette lighter was missing. He must have put it down absent-mindedly on one of the tables. He couldn’t find it now.

  The door, then. Of course.

  He would open the door and let in the sun.

  Swiftly Rood moved toward the door, feeling his way. He hoped Wendy wasn’t dead. He hoped he’d only wounded her. He wanted to take more time with the killing, wanted her to suffer, wanted to watch her eyes grow huge as he pressed the hacksaw’s blade to her throat and began to stroke. That would be fun, such fun. Then, when she was dead, he would take her headless body and make it his. Yes, and take her head too. His manhood, swollen and empurpled, would slide into her screaming mouth and find release.

  Let her try to rob him of his power then. Rood chuckled. Just let her try.

  His questing hand slapped the door. He groped for the lever that controlled the dead bolt, found it, and retracted the bolt with a click. He turned the knob. The door swung open and daylight flooded in like water cascading through a burst dam, and a man was there.

  He stood in the doorway, his tall figure outlined in an aureole of sun. Rood took a step back, staring at his face, at the jet-black hair swept back from his high forehead, at the sharp, hawklike nose, at the angry mouth bracketed by chiseled grooves.

  He knew that face. He’d studied it in newspaper photos and on television newscasts. He’d memorized every detail.

  “You,” Rood said, his voice hushed.

  Detective Sebastián Delgado nodded once. “Me.”

  * * *

  Delgado had been poised to shoot off the locks securing the trailer door when suddenly the door opened from inside and he found himself facing a man in a police officer’s uniform—a man with a gun held loosely in his hand, pointing down—a man who was, of course, Franklin Rood.

  Shock held Rood paralyzed. He muttered one word, signifying recognition, and Delgado answered, confirming it, and then before Rood could react, before he had time to raise the gun hanging uselessly at his side, Delgado struck.

  He lashed out with his pistol and whickered it across Rood’s face, breaking off one stem of his glasses, then seized Rood’s gun hand and twisted hard. Rood’s fingers splayed, and the Beretta dropped from his grasp. Delgado spun him around, put him in a choke hold, and hauled him out of the trailer onto the landing of the iron staircase. Rood drove his elbow into Delgado’s abdomen. Delgado took the blow without flinching, then shoved Rood headfirst down the stairs. He hit the ground on his side and tried to rise, but already Delgado was on top of him, slamming his face into the dirt again and again, then yanking Rood’s hands roughly behind his back and pinning them there.

  He fished a pair of handcuffs from his jacket pocket, snapped them on, and rolled Rood onto his back, hands manacled behind him. Rood gazed up at him, breathing hard. His eyes, half-concealed behind the glasses askew on his face, were small and gray and lifeless. They caught the sunlight, glittering colorlessly like flecks of pond scum.

  A moment passed while the two men studied each other. Then slowly Rood smiled.

  “The Gryphon claimed another victim, Detective,” he whispered. “The loveliest one of all.”

  Delgado stiffened.

  “Go in and see.” It was the same taunting voice he’d heard on the tapes, the voice that had defied him to catch the Gryphon. “Go on.”

  Delgado raised his service pistol and tried to remind himself of all the reasons why he couldn’t pull the trigger.

  Then the Air Support Unit officers ran up, their weapons drawn.

  “Cover him,” Delgado snapped.

  He turned and rushed up the stairs.

  The voices he’d heard faintly from outside greeted him as he entered the trailer. He recognized them now. The voices of Julia Stern and Rebecca Morris and Elizabeth Osborn, which had spoken to him so many times, first on tape, then in the depths of dreams.

  The interior of the trailer was a long narrow space, dimly illuminated by the sun through the doorway. There was no other light. Delgado scanned the room and saw four round objects on the floor perhaps twenty feet from where he stood. Sudden fear clutched his stomach as he realized what they were.

  Heads.

  But Rood couldn’t have taken Wendy’s head, not if he’d shot her just moments ago. Unless he hadn’t been shooting at her. The shots might have signified something else entirely.

  There was only one way to know.

  Tensely Delgado moved closer. He identified the heads one by one. Julia Stern, Rebecca Morris, Elizabeth Osborn. The fourth was t
urned facedown, her hair blondish in the uncertain light.

  With the toe of his shoe he turned the head over, then relaxed slightly. The face was one he didn’t recognize. Jennifer Kutzlow’s face, perhaps.

  “Wendy?” he called.

  No answer.

  He crept past the cabinet, avoiding the heads haloed in chemical puddles. On a small folding table, he saw three cassette players, their red diodes glowing to indicate that the power was on. He switched them off, and the voices fell silent. All but one, whimpering softly.

  That voice was not on tape.

  “Wendy?” he said again, hope and apprehension mingled in the word.

  The sound was coming from the rear of the trailer, far from the sun. He moved through the deepening gloom, squinting. Then he saw her.

  She was huddled behind a bookcase. She must have pulled it away from the wall to make a hiding place. Curled up in a tight fetal ball, her arms locked around her knees, she was shivering and crying. She didn’t seem to know he was there.

  “Wendy, it’s all right now. We’ve got him.”

  She gave no reply.

  He knelt by her and looked her over. He saw no blood, no sign that she’d been knifed or shot. If Rood had fired at her, he’d missed.

  “Wendy. Talk to me.”

  Blinking, she looked up at him through a skein of hair. He saw that her blouse was open and her breasts had been badly bruised.

  “Hello, Detective,” she said with a note of surprise.

  “Call me Sebastián.”

  “Yes. Yes, I’ll do that.”

  She became aware of the tears streaking her face and wiped them away self-consciously.

  “I was strong,” she told him, as if in explanation or apology. “Really. Right up to the end. But I guess I ... I just don’t like the dark.”

  Delgado smiled. “Well, you’re out of the dark now. Out of it for good.”

  36

  “Franklin. Hey, Franklin. You ever fuck your mama?”

  “Yeah, she suck you off, weirdo?”

  “Bet you fucked her like you fucked them dead girls.”

  “Your mama ain’t here to help you now, asshole.”

  “Nobody’s here to help you, Griff.”

  “You’re gonna have yourself a serious accident.”

  “Gonna die. Franklin. Baby-killer gonna die.”

  “Baby-killer gonna die!”

  “Baby-killer gonna die!”

  Scum. Rabble. Filth.

  Rood sat on the cot in his cell, staring straight ahead, trying not to hear the voices of the caged animals around him, the chattering monkeys in this human zoo. He’d always despised the gutter garbage of humanity, the street trash, and now he was penned up with them, surrounded by their foul smells and coarse jokes and ugly, evil threats.

  At first he couldn’t understand why he’d been chosen as the focus of their collective hatred. Then gradually he’d come to realize that there was a kind of social hierarchy among prisoners. Rapists were very low on the scale, but lower still were murderers of women. And lowest of all, at the very bottom, were killers of pregnant women.

  Mrs. Julia Stern had been pregnant.

  “Franklin ... oh, Franklin …”

  The big black convict in the adjacent cell always called him by his first name, pronouncing it in a girlish falsetto that contrasted sharply with the deep baritone of his normal speaking voice. It had taken Rood several days to realize that by saying the word in this way, the man was insinuating that Rood was a homosexual.

  “You got yourself a real pretty set of choppers there, Franklin. But I figure to do a little dental work on you.”

  “Es dentista!” screeched one of the Hispanics farther down the row, laughing wildly.

  “Gonna knock out all your damn teeth,” the man went on, his voice slowing, deepening, as thick and dark as river mud. “So you ain’t got nothing but gums. See?”

  “Ningunos dientes!”

  “And you know why, Franklin? I say, you know why, motherfucker?” He paused for dramatic effect. “ ’Cause I like my pussy ... smooth.”

  Rood gripped the edge of his bunk with both hands and tried not to be here. Not to know how close those animals were to him, and how powerless he felt, and how dirty this place was, how disgustingly unclean.

  He had never really believed he would be imprisoned. Oh, he’d known that it was a possibility, but the thought had always seemed unreal and faintly absurd. And even if he had believed it, he never could have imagined that jail would be so much like ... like school. Yet here he was, reliving the horrible nightmare of his childhood. Once again he was weak and helpless, abused by bullies and thugs, laughed at and insulted and scorned, his manhood questioned, his safety threatened. It was like being back in the locker room. His life had come full circle, a snake swallowing itself, and he’d returned to his beginnings, having accomplished nothing. Nothing.

  Don’t think like that, he told himself. You’re the Gryphon. You’ve got power. You’ve traveled a great distance, and you have much farther yet to go.

  Brave words. Brave, empty words.

  Rood stared morosely at the bars of his private cell, the same bars he’d been studying for eleven days, ever since his incarceration on B row, the section of the Los Angeles County Jail reserved for the most dangerous or notorious offenders.

  At first he found it terribly unjust that he would be held prisoner. It was a violation of his Constitutional rights, he’d been sure. After all, there had been no trial yet, not even a preliminary hearing—only an arraignment where he’d been summarily denied bail. He’d had no chance to defend himself, to tell his side of the story. It was all so outrageously unfair.

  For several days he mused ruefully that it had been bad luck to call himself the Gryphon. That beast appeared in Alice in Wonderland; and now he seemed to have fallen down a rabbit hole himself, into some topsy-turvy world where the legal system functioned in accordance with the Queen of Hearts’ nonsensical pronouncement: “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”

  Gradually he came to understand that his anger and indignation were wasted. It didn’t matter when the preliminary hearing and trial were held. They would be only formalities in this case. The verdict was a certainty. There was no way out for him this time.

  That was when he dismissed the court-appointed attorney. No lawyer could blow a smokescreen dense enough to cover the evidence in his trailer or the testimony of the bitch.

  The bitch. Yes. That was what she was, and that was all she was. He no longer thought of her as Wendy, let alone as Miss Alden. She was the bitch. Period.

  He still wanted her to die. He yearned for the chance to kill her, to erase her from existence. He dreamed of her death, fantasized it, obsessed on it. Nothing else mattered to him, not food, not freedom, not even his life. If he could kill her, he would redeem himself. He would not have failed after all. He would have won the game.

  After what he’d heard this morning on the radio, he craved revenge more than ever.

  Many of the cells on the row, although not Rood’s, had radios. Rap, heavy metal, and mariachi competed with one another all day long like blasts of gunfire. Rood hated all that noise. How he longed for the pleasant pop music he used to play in his car.

  Occasional news updates interrupted the barrage of unmelodious sounds. Many of the reports were about him; the Gryphon, he sometimes thought with a nostalgic touch of pride, was still the city’s major story.

  A few hours earlier he overheard one such report on a radio in an adjacent cell. The announcer recited some meaningless lines about the preliminary hearing tomorrow and about Detective Delgado’s continuing work on the case, then added, “Delgado is rumored to have become romantically involved with Wendy Alden, the alleged serial killer’s last intended victim.”

  Rood had felt hot, then cold, then hot again.

  Romantically involved.

  He was fucking her. That smug, smiling bastard. Fucking the bitch.

  He pic
tured the two of them in bed together, gasping after the orgasm they’d shared. He saw the bitch comparing Detective Sebastián Delgado’s mighty cock with Franklin Rood’s puny, shriveled manhood. Heard her whispering that Rood had been unable to achieve even the beginnings of an erection with her. Heard them laughing, laughing at his impotence.

  He had to stop that laughter. Had to. Had to.

  But how?

  “I love you. Franklin. You got such nice soft tits. I’m gonna marry you in the showers, man. We’re gonna have a real nice wedding. And an even better honeymoon.”

  “Luna del miel!”

  “You’re gonna like that, ain’t you, queerbait?”

  Rood took off his glasses and wearily rubbed his eyes. The glasses had been badly damaged when Detective Delgado smacked him in the face. Fortunately both lenses, though scratched, were still intact; but the hinge that had attached the right temple to the front of the frame had broken off. Before Rood posed for his mug shots, the photographer inexpertly secured the temple with adhesive tape; but since then, the tape had kept coming loose.

  “Yo, faggot! Answer the man!”

  “What’s the matter with you, Franklin? You deaf or something?”

  “Shit, I don’t think he even hears us.”

  At least. Rood thought, the temple itself hadn’t cracked. It struck him as odd that the thin plastic would hold up better than the metal hinge.

  “He’s a nutcase, all right.”

  “Dead meat, what he is.”

  Mildly curious, he raised the glasses to the light. The black plastic, backlit, became translucent.

  Suddenly his heart was beating fast. His old sense of power, of control, had returned.

  “Look at that sucker. He’s smiling, man! Like he’s got a frigging hard-on or something!”

  “Bet you he’s thinking about them women he wasted.”

  “Nah, he’s thinking about that little baby he snuffed.”

  “Too bad the baby-killer gonna die.”

  “Baby-killer gonna die!”

  “Baby-killer gonna die!”

  The chant continued. It was far away. Unimportant now.

  Rood slipped his glasses back on.