Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Call

by P. T. Dilloway

  He put a claw through the man’s neck to pacify him and then carved out the heart. The man had a cardboard box next to him for the Dragoon to drop the heart into. With this under his arm, he continued to sweep the docks for more pathetic fools. These vermin didn’t deserve to exist. They had served no purpose in their lives except to leech off their social betters. At least now they could be of some use to the world, to feed the master.

  The rendezvous was halfway across town, behind an Indian restaurant. The master was not at the rendezvous, nor did the Dragoon expect the master to be there. The master would come later to reap the harvest he had prepared.

  He left the box of hearts beside the dumpster where none would pay it any attention and then set out for home. There were many more hearts that could yet be harvested, but the master urged caution. At this stage of the game they couldn’t afford to be caught. Besides, once word of the massacre hit the airwaves, panic would grow in the city. That the massacre would be another pinned on Emma Earl—the Scarlet Knight—was another benefit to the operation.

  You have done well, the master said. Soon you will receive your reward.

  Yes, once the master had reached full strength, the Dragoon would receive his reward. That time would be soon.

  A pair of rats scurried away into the darkness ahead of the Dragoon. He fired a claw from his right hand to spear one of the rats through the midsection. More vermin eradicated.

  ***

  Emma sobbed in the bedroom closet as Pepe returned. From what she could understand of the rat’s plaintive squeaks and shrieks, Pepe’s companion had been killed by the Dragoon. The Dragoon was on his way back to the house, only a few minutes behind Pepe. She might still have time to flee the house before the Dragoon arrived.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Emma said. “You can go if you want.” She wasn’t certain how to translate this into ratspeak, but did her best to say, “Go.” Pepe seemed to catch the gist of this and decided that discretion was the better part of valor. He scurried from the closet to leave Emma alone in the bedroom—but not for long.

  The Dragoon stomped into the room moments later. Emma tightened her grip on the golden cape and waited for the Dragoon to spot her. The Dragoon’s red eyes swept the room and then he must have decided that the area was secure. He reached up to take off the helmet to reveal Becky’s sweaty face. The rest of the armor fell away so that Emma’s friend stood in the Dragoon’s place; her body inflated like a balloon to its normal proportions.

  The armor returned itself to its black case, which sat in the closet next to Emma. Through the closet door, she watched Becky sag onto the bed and instantly fall asleep. From what Emma had seen, she knew this was because Becky had already been asleep.

  She stepped out of the closet and went over to the bed. Other than the sweat on her face, Becky looked no different than before. She didn’t look like a monster. Emma shook Becky’s shoulder. “Becky, wake up.”

  Becky’s eyes shot open. These eyes went wide as she stared at Emma. “You! What are you doing here? I’m calling the police.”

  “You can’t do that. Not yet. You have to listen to me.”

  “I don’t want to listen to you. Get out of my house.”

  “Becky—”

  “Get out of my fucking house!”

  With two good hands and her weight advantage, Becky managed to shove Emma aside. Emma fell backwards against the wall while Becky reached for the phone. Before Becky could pick it up, Emma snatched the cord with one hand and yanked the cord out of the wall.

  “You bitch!” Becky shouted. “It’s not going to matter. I can use the one downstairs.”

  “Becky, stop. I didn’t kill those people. The Dragoon did.”

  “Yeah, right. You didn’t kill Steve either.”

  “I’m sorry about Steve. I wish I could have saved him—”

  “No you don’t! You were always jealous of Steve and I. You hated that I found love and you didn’t. I was always supposed to be your fat, lonely best friend there to lap up whatever crumbs of attention you decided to throw my way. That’s why you let him die.”

  “I didn’t.” Emma looked down at her feet in shame. “Maybe I was a little jealous of you and Steve. But I didn’t want him to die. I would never hurt you like that.”

  “You don’t care about me! As soon as you could, you abandoned me. You even skipped a couple of grades to do it sooner. Then when it was convenient for you, you came back.”

  “No, Becky, that’s not true. I missed you terribly all those years at school. I would have given anything to come back here.”

  “Why didn’t you then?”

  “I couldn’t. I needed to get away from the pain for a little while.”

  “So you left me and your aunt. You left her in that old folk’s home to rot.”

  “No—”

  “You weren’t even there when she died. You were out playing hero.”

  “Becky, please, stop it.”

  “You aren’t fit to wear that armor of yours. You’re not a hero. You’re a selfish bitch. You think because your parents died that you have it tough. You don’t know anything about pain. Your mother never locked you in a closet for an entire night. Your mother never hit you or cut you or let her boyfriends screw you!”

  Emma didn’t know what to say to this. She had always known Becky’s mother was physically abusive, but she had never heard of the sexual abuse. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You never came to my house. Your mother wouldn’t allow it. Your aunt either. My family wasn’t good enough for precious little Emma.”

  “I’m sorry,” Emma said again. Her stomach turned to ice against Becky’s onslaught. All these years she had never suspected the anger and resentment Becky held towards her, but now it had all come out. Years of anguish and pain gushed out like an old wound reopened.

  “I spent all those years in your shadow, hearing how great you were, how smart and talented. No one ever said those things to me! It never mattered how smart or talented I was, you would always be better. The best I could ever be was second.”

  “You are smart and talented, Becky. You do things I could never do.”

  “What, like sex? Poor little virgin Emma. Maybe if you got your nose out of the air you could find someone good enough to fuck you.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant the way you confront life head-on. You’re not afraid to speak your mind. You’re not scared like I am.” She looked Becky in the eye. “And don’t you see that because you’ve managed to become what you are in spite of your mother and me makes you even more remarkable? You are a remarkable person, Becky.”

  Becky had tears in her eyes. She leaned forward to wrap Emma in an embrace. She patted Emma on the back; one hand worked its way up until it reached Emma’s head. Then Becky took a handful of hair and yanked Emma’s head back. With a grin on her face, Becky said, “I should have let Jimmy Gates kill you back in third grade. But I guess the silver lining is now I get to do it.”

  She pushed Emma onto the bed; Emma cried out in pain as she landed on her injured shoulder. Emma lay on the bed so she wouldn’t have to look up at her former best friend to see the hate in Becky’s eyes. “I’m not going to do it now. Not for a while. I’m going to make you suffer first, like you’ve made me suffer.”

  “Becky, please—”

  Emma didn’t try to fight back as Becky dragged her from the bed. The power of Becky’s anger and hatred had left her numb. She deserved whatever fate Becky chose for her.

  “Come on, hero, get up.”

  Emma continued to lie on the floor, even as she heard the closet door open. Would Becky find the black armor in there? That might snap Becky out of this madness, but then Emma remembered how Ian MacGregor had killed himself when he’d realized what he’d done as the Black Dragoon. “Becky, don’t—”

  She stopped and heard a muffled squeak by her face. When she opened her eyes, she saw Pepe. He had brought along a half-dozen
of his comrades from the sewers. The rats charged forward to claw and bite at Becky. She screamed in terror and swatted at the rodents. Pepe remained behind; his beady eyes seemed to plead with Emma. She didn’t need to understand ratspeak to understand he had come back to rescue her.

  Emma pushed herself up with her good hand. The rats continued to come at Becky so she couldn’t don the Black Dragoon’s armor. Emma used this distraction to run from the room. Blinded by tears she nearly fell down the stairs, but managed to grab the guardrail in time. As she staggered through the front door, she heard Becky’s bellow of rage.

  She assumed Pepe would take her back into the sewers, but they made a stop first in an alley behind an Indian restaurant. Emma barely had time to hide behind a fallen trashcan before she saw someone else enter the alley. It was too dark at first to see the figure’s face. Then the figure crossed into the dim light of a distant streetlamp to reveal Isis.

  The woman stopped behind the dumpster and bent down to inspect a box. From this she took out a human heart. Emma put a hand to her mouth so she wouldn’t throw up as she watched Isis’s jaws expand to stuff the heart in all at once. A dozen more followed after this; Isis consumed them as quickly as a competitive eater. Once she had finished the last one, she threw the box to the ground. Her eyes glowed red for a second as she wiped the back of her mouth. Then she walked out of the alley, into the night.

  Emma sat up from behind the trashcan and put a hand to her head. She cursed herself for not realizing it sooner. She was the terrible evil Marlin and the witches had sensed, and the one behind the Heartbreaker Killings. And she shared a house with Dan.

  Emma’s fists clenched. When she stood up, she no longer felt any pain in her shoulder. This woman who had stolen Dan, turned Becky, and framed Emma had to be stopped. No matter what it took, Emma would stop her.

  She started out of the alley, but Pepe shrieked to get her attention. He led her over to where his comrade remained pinned to the wall by one of the Dragoon’s claws. Emma pried the claw from the wall to let Pepe’s friend drop to the ground. She held up the claw and studied it. “Don’t worry,” she told Pepe. “He didn’t die in vain.”

  Chapter 21

  The phone rang all day, to the point where Lieutenant Donovan ripped the cord from the wall. She sent an officer out to fetch her a sandwich so she could avoid the mob of reporters outside. They had descended from the entire world and all of them demanded an update on the Heartbreaker Killings. Mixed in among them in the mob around the station and on the phone were relatives of the victims and just plain panicked citizens who wanted to know when the terror would end. She didn’t have anything to tell them.

  Lieutenant Donovan hadn’t made any progress on capturing Emma Earl. Despite that the woman’s picture was being shown on every television screen and newspaper and nailed up to numerous telephone poles and bulletin boards, only one reliable tip had come in. That came from Earl’s best friend, Becky Beech. She had called a day earlier to say Earl had been at her house, in her closet. Before Beech could call the police, Earl took off.

  “Do you know where she went?” the lieutenant asked.

  “I think she’s been hiding in the sewers.”

  At the moment Lieutenant Donovan had teams of cops and city engineers in the catacombs beneath the city; that was one aspect of the investigation she didn’t want to handle personally. A search of the sewers could take years, by which time Earl would certainly have escaped.

  In all her career, Lieutenant Donovan had never felt so helpless. Her best friend was dead and the killer remained tantalizingly close and yet always out of reach. Meanwhile, the city cried out for her to do something about the problem.

  An officer appeared in front of her desk. It wasn’t the one she had dispatched for a sandwich. This one held a cardboard tube, the kind used to ship posters. “What’s that, a pipe bomb?” Lieutenant Donovan asked.

  “I’m not sure, sir. It came in by courier.”

  “Any idea who sent it?”

  “It says it’s from Emma Earl.”

  “What?” She snatched the tube from the officer to see it was in fact addressed from Dr. Emma Earl, care of the Plaine Museum. There was no way Earl would be stupid enough to mail a bomb to the police station with her name on it, was there?

  Lieutenant Donovan pried open one end of the tube. She felt something hard and cold inside, a piece of metal. She couldn’t feel any wires attached to it. With a deep breath, she dumped the contents of the tube onto her desk with a metallic thud.

  It was a black metal spike stained red at the end with blood. “Get me a pair of gloves,” Lieutenant Donovan snapped at the officer who’d brought the package. He returned a minute later with a pair of latex gloves, which she used to pick up the spike. It was only then Lieutenant Donovan saw a piece of paper underneath the spike. The paper was an old fish sandwich wrapper, on which had been written: “This killed your friend.”

  Lieutenant Donovan set the spike down to rifle through the papers on her desk for the photos taken of Lois Early’s corpse. She studied the close-ups of the wound to Lois’s chest, a slash wound identical in size and shape to the spike she held in her hand. A spike that did not match the golden sword used by the Scarlet Knight.

  “My God,” the lieutenant said. “She didn’t do it.”

  “Who, sir?” the officer asked.

  “The Scarlet Knight. She didn’t kill Lois. Shit.” Lieutenant Donovan let the photos drop to the desktop. “Get me the photos of those homeless guys on the docks.”

  The officer returned a few minutes later with the images taken of the victims from the docks. As Lieutenant Donovan suspected, the wounds on those men were exactly like the one to Lois Early. “Shit. We’re looking for the wrong person.”

  “Sir?”

  “Call off the teams down in the sewers.”

  While the officer carried out his orders, Lieutenant Donovan studied the black spike again. She thought back to what she had seen and heard that night. “Black,” Lois had said. At the time Lieutenant Donovan had assumed this meant her friend’s world was going dark, but maybe she had tried to identify her killer.

  As she turned the spike around in her hand, Lieutenant Donovan had a strong feeling of déjà vu. Where had she seen a weapon like this before? A spike. A black spike. “Oh shit.” She jumped up from behind her desk and raced into the file room. She opened drawers at random as she searched for the file she sought. Finally she pulled out a folder and then ran back to her desk.

  From the folder she took out photographs of victims killed in Robinson Park five years earlier. She laid these next to the ones from the docks and Lois’s murder. “Jesus Christ.” They were all the same. There was little doubt in Lieutenant Donovan’s mind they all used the same weapon she held in her hand.

  The Black Dragoon. That’s who had killed hundreds of gangbangers in Robinson Park, among others. But according to the Scarlet Knight, the Dragoon had died five years ago. No one had seen or heard of him since. Now he was back and up to his old ways. Though one thing was different: last time the Dragoon had not cut out the hearts of his victims. This pointed to either a copycat killer or the same killer with some new bad habits. Either way they were in trouble.

  Lieutenant Donovan pushed back from her desk. The worst part was while she had what seemed like the evidence to clear the Scarlet Knight, she couldn’t tell anyone yet. She couldn’t go on television to say a black monster with metal claws was killing people, not unless she wanted to end up in a padded cell. Nor did this new information clear Emma Earl. Earl might be the Black Dragoon; she might have sent the murder weapon in to taunt the police. The only way to make sure would be to find this Dragoon and get a look at who was underneath that armor.

  ***

  The door to Captain Kramer’s office was closed and the lights were turned off. For a moment Lieutenant Donovan assumed the captain had gone for the day, but then she heard him mumble something. She tapped lightly at the door, which prompted th
e mumbling to stop. She didn’t bother to wait for him to ask her in.

  She half-expected him to be engaged in some disgusting act, but he merely sat at his desk with the phone receiver in hand. He set this back on its cradle as she shut the door. “This had better be good,” Kramer said.

  “Captain, I have reason to believe we’ve got the wrong person for the Heartbreaker Killings and Officer Early’s murder.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Some new evidence has come to light.” She went on to explain about the spike received from someone who claimed to be Emma Earl and how this weapon matched those in the photos of the victims not only at the docks and Lois but the gangbangers killed in Robinson Park five years earlier. “We’re dealing with the same thing as back then.”

  “This Black Dragoon?” Captain Kramer rubbed his jaw. “Why do we get all the freaks around here?”

  “Sir, we’ve seen this thing before at Robinson Tower.”

  “I remember that. You sucker punched me when I tried to apprehend her. I’m not sure why they didn’t take your badge for that.”

  “Just lucky, I guess.” Lieutenant Donovan cleared her throat. “We need to call off the search for the Scarlet Knight and try to find this lunatic.”

  “Have you run any of this by forensics?”

  “Not yet, sir, but it’s obvious—”

  “We’re not in the business of snap judgments around here, Lieutenant. I’m not going to ask my men to go around chasing some phantom.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”

  “No. We’re chasing Dr. Emma Earl, who runs around in some crazy getup and calls herself the Scarlet Knight. Even if what you’ve said is true, none of it clears her.”

  “I know, sir, but if we find this Dragoon and find out who’s inside it—”

  “You want this Dragoon, why don’t you hire the Ghostbusters? This department is going to continue pursuing Dr. Earl until we’ve found her. Is that clear?”