by Hunter Shea
Her mother sat on the edge of the bed, stroking her hair. “Don’t get mad. It’s part of being a mother. You’ll know all about it some day.” She kissed the side of Kelly’s head. “You get some sleep. I’ll check on you later. You let me know if you need anything.”
A ball of fire worked its way into Kelly’s stomach. She held her breath for a moment, waiting for it to pass, which it did after a few seconds. On the one hand, she wanted to be a little kid again and throw herself into her mother’s arms. On the other, she knew she was well past that and would have to go through it herself, especially if she wanted to see Joey later.
“Thanks, Mom,” she said.
“I love you, honey.”
“Love you, too.”
Her mother quietly closed the door. Kelly shut her eyes, praying she’d wake up feeling like a human being again.
Benny Franks woke up to the worst smell of his life. At first, he’d hoped it was a phantom odor from a bad dream. He’d had plenty of them through the night, thanks to the fever and stomach cramps.
As he shifted in bed, he realized it was no dream.
He pulled up the sheet and peered down, lifting his hip to the right.
“You did not crap yourself in your sleep,” he sighed.
His head throbbed and his tongue felt like cardboard. He was so tired, so weak, he was actually contemplating staying in his own waste and trying to get a few more hours’ sleep. The chills he’d had were gone, replaced by hot flashes. He closed his eyes. Just put it out of your mind. You’ve been lying in it for who knows how long. A couple more hours couldn’t hurt.
Try as he might, the stench refused to let him sleep. Grimacing, he rolled over, plopping one leg over the side of the bed and onto the floor. Standing on shaky legs, he inspected the damage.
There was no saving the sheets. Or the mattress, for that matter.
“Thanks, Summer. Your pork turned me back into a damn baby.”
He grabbed a pillow and shuffled into the living room, shutting the bedroom door behind him. Maybe Summer would clean it up if he sounded pathetic enough when he called her later. Pathetic wouldn’t be a stretch.
Man, it was hot.
He staggered to the bathroom, chucked off his clothes and cleaned himself up as best he could with a soapy washcloth. Grabbing a bottle of Gatorade, he fell onto the couch stark naked. The remote for the air conditioner was on the coffee table, within arm’s reach.
The cool air felt amazing on his skin. His stomach was on fire, but at least the cramps were gone.
Benny turned on the TV and caught a live feed from the beach. He watched the news for a few minutes, which only conjured up images of the bodies. Black tarps had been placed over the parts as the reporter droned on about the viciousness of the attack. The victims had yet to be identified but sources speculated it was a man and a woman. You knew it was bad when the cops had to speculate on the sex of the bodies.
He thought back to the feel of the blob of flesh he’d been compelled to touch.
Disgusted, he changed the channel to an infomercial about bras without underwire and passed out.
CHAPTER 7
Gray Dalton woke up at four p.m. as hungry as he’d ever been. He hadn’t eaten anything in over sixteen hours and had passed starvation some time in his sleep. Normally, he went to the gym before eating breakfast, but after last night, normal had been thrown out the window.
He made a five-egg omelet, sprinkling in some green onion and cheese, wolfing it down with several slices of wheat toast while standing over the sink. His mother called as he was loading the dishes in the dishwasher.
“Did you see it?” she asked without preamble. Muriel Dalton was high-strung and nervous on the calmest of days. When he’d told her he wanted to be a cop, she’d actually fainted, visions of his demise overwhelming her senses.
At the time, joining law enforcement had been a no-brainer. Three weeks after graduating Saint Francis Academy, his best friend Sal Mottola, “Wiggy” to everyone who knew him because his hair was too perfect to be real, was gunned down in a botched robbery at a convenience store. Poor Wiggy had gone to pick up some milk and bread for his mother. It was a heartbreaking case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His mother had told Gray at the funeral that she’d asked him to go to the store so she could make him French toast the next morning. As far as she was concerned, no one was to blame more than her and there wasn’t a soul who could convince her otherwise. They cried in each other’s arms until his chest ached.
The shooter was never caught. Wiggy’s mother overdosed on sleeping pills a month later.
Gray’s passing interest in criminology, an elective he took in his senior year, kicked into overdrive and he submitted his application a week after her funeral. A typical high school kid previously with little direction, he knew then exactly what he wanted to do for the rest of his life—catch bastards like that gunman and save lives, not just potential victims, but the ones they left behind in tatters.
His mother didn’t see his vision, though his father was proud as hell of his decision. She slept little during his time at the academy, waiting to get the news that he would be sent to one of the many war zones in the five boroughs.
Getting the gig out by the hoity-toity Hamptons helped to ease her fears, but like the great mother she was, she still worried every day.
“Hi, Ma, nice to talk to you,” he said, smiling, absentmindedly brushing his fingers over his scar.
“I saw what happened on the news. Please tell me you weren’t involved.”
“You’re talking to the first man on the scene. Well, aside from the anonymous tipster who called it in.” He heard her partially cover the phone, then her muffled voice called out, “John, he said he was there. I told you.”
“I’m fine. There’s nothing to worry about. It was just a couple of bodies. I didn’t stumble into Hannibal Lecter. Whoever or whatever did it was long gone.”
“You sure you’re all right, Gray? Seeing a couple of dead people must have been awful.”
There was no way he was going to tell her just how awful.
“It’s part of the job. Remember last year when I told you I had to break into that house where the owner had died a week earlier?”
She gasped. “That’s right, you did.”
“So this wasn’t my first rodeo. And the smell was much better, seeing as it was out in the open on the beach. There’s nothing to worry about.” Truth be told, the smell wasn’t better but it was much different than the fruiting old man who had melded with his couch.
“Does anyone have an idea who did it?”
“No, not yet.” More like what did it, he thought.
“I want you to call me when your shift is over.”
“I will, Ma.”
“Promise?”
“I swear on Dad’s Civil War collection.”
They both laughed.
“You be careful. Knowing you, you’ll throw yourself right in the middle of things. You’re not invincible, kiddo.”
“I’m not?”
“Don’t be cute.”
“I’m always careful. I’ll call you tomorrow when I get off my shift.”
Dalton placed his cell phone on the kitchen counter and spied the map he’d left on the table. He fumbled through his junk drawer, extracting a pair of scissors. Sitting down, he cut the Post-it notes in half so the strips resembled little flags.
He turned his iPod on with a remote. It sat charging in its docking station on the living room side table. He had to scroll through several dozen playlists until he found some music to concentrate by. A live club performance by Sam Cooke played softly in the background. No one his age even knew who Sam Cooke was. Dalton was a sucker for soul music. He got that from his father.
Studying the map, he thought about the time he’d taken his niece out to lunch when his sister was visiting. She was eight and grabbed every brochure and map that was on display in the front of the diner. When she opened th
e map, she pointed at the drawing of the eastern end of Long Island and said, giggling, “It looks like a chicken finger!”
He’d thought of Long Island as a chicken finger ever since. Montauk itself was the last stop before the Atlantic Ocean. It boasted everyone from the rich and famous to the poor and nameless. Sprawling mansions could be found less than a mile from fishermen’s shacks. There were a good number of artists out this way, and more mom-and-pop motels than you could count.
When he first patrolled Montauk, he was shocked by how relatively small it was. He’d thought of it as this sprawling vacation mecca. It was actually pretty narrow, surrounded on one side by the ocean and the other by the Long Island Sound. The waves crashed and convulsed on the ocean side, where they lapped feebly along the beaches of the sound. It was like living between two worlds separated by a slender spit of land. Whatever was out there didn’t have many places to hide.
Flipping open his pocket notebook, he checked the time that the murder scene was called in, wrote it down on the half Post-it and stuck it to the beach at Shadmoor State Park.
12:37 A.M.: 2 bodies on beach
Aside from the two animal disturbance calls he’d followed up on, there were two other reports that no one had the time to get to. He’d written them down as they came in, just in case.
He scribbled the time and incident for each and tacked them on to each street.
1:25 A.M.: Wild dog chased cat on roof
1:48 A.M.: Animals knocked over 5 garbage pails
2:31 A.M.: Garbage knocked over, man approached by 2 large dogs
3:18 A.M.: Animal tried to paw through screen window, ran away
Dalton looked at the pastel flags and exhaled. “I’ll be damned.”
All of the calls last night had happened on the southeast end of the island. It looked like everyone in the area was either a light sleeper, or something (or things) was on the prowl with no concern about keeping a low profile.
The timeline followed a very specific path. Whatever had torn into that couple on the beach had then made its way slightly north and west from the beach while keeping to a relatively tight cluster of houses.
The last two calls bothered him the most. Animals went through garbage, chased cats and fought all the time. Whatever was out there wasn’t afraid of people and wanted in. Even more disconcerting was the possibility that there was more than one.
Were they working together? How would that even be possible?
He folded the map and put on some sweats and a PAL T-shirt. Maybe a jog would help him think. He grabbed his iPod, headphones and keys. The moment he closed the door, he turned around and went back inside. He found the small can of pepper spray he’d stuffed in his dresser drawer.
If some fearless, man-eating animal was lurking around, he wasn’t about to run around defenseless.
Can Man rooted through the garbage outside Nicky’s Cafe. A family of tourists passed by, crinkling their noses at him. He paused to smile, show there was nothing to be afraid of. He was dressed in his trademark Bermuda shorts and hideous Hawaiian shirt with a fresh pair of sandals that had been given to him by Annie, the owner of the thrift shop. His hair was long but he kept it clean. It was more gray than brown, as was his beard, which ended in the center of his chest. If he hadn’t been rooting through the garbage, they would have most likely thought he was just another old hippie.
The wife looked at him with a flash of pity before taking her husband’s hand and disappearing around the block.
Probably going back to get in their bathing suits to spend what was left of the day at the beach. This time of year, Montauk’s endless motels, both large and small, were packed to the gills with summer folk. The town was happy to take their money, offering beautiful beaches, whale-watching tours, fishing and golfing. For Can Man, whose real name was Paul Landon in a time and place too far removed to recall, Montauk in the summer meant sleeping under the stars with the rolling of the surf to lull him into dreamland. During the cold months, he spent his time on the streets in Queens.
But every year, when summer came around, he cleaned himself up at a shelter, scrounged up enough money to take the Hampton Jitney bus out to the end of the island and became a kind of tourist himself. He couldn’t think of a better place to be homeless in the summer. At least not somewhere that was a short and cheap bus ride away.
Collecting cans was his game. It kept him fed. Most locals and even some of the businesses intentionally left empty cans and bottles within reach when they saw him. He wasn’t crazy or an alcoholic or drug addict. He’d simply fallen on hard times many moons ago and decided he preferred living free to going back to an office and a family, complete with stress, deadlines, bills to pay and expectations that could never be met.
A pair of teenage boys rode by on their bikes. “Hey, Can Man!” one of them shouted, waving. He waved back, smiling. The boy who hadn’t greeted him made a half turn, putting on the brakes just in front of him.
He reached into the big pocket of his shorts and pulled out an empty cola can. “Here you go,” the boy said.
“Thank you,” Can Man said. “You boys do anything fun today?”
Both had crew cut hair and white sleeveless shirts. They could have been twins. It was the official summer look of most boys their age.
“Nah, just rode around a lot. My game system broke and my father said I had to get some sun and air.”
“Your father’s a smart man. You play those video games too much and you’ll get cross-eyed and fat. It’ll get dark soon, so don’t ride too far from home.” Can Man didn’t want to tell them about the bodies that had been found at the beach the night before. It was the hushed talk of all the adults today. The locals were on edge, the tourists were intrigued. He hoped the boys were still young enough to avoid the news and live in their own special and fleeting world.
The boys turned around, pointing toward the eastern end of Main Street. “We won’t.”
He watched them go, envying their youth. Hefting the plastic bag with its dozen or so cans, he whistled an intricate tune as he walked toward the beach.
Dalton started his shift at exactly midnight. He’d arrived at the station earlier than usual to see if there had been any progress made with yesterday’s grisly discovery.
“Nada,” Meredith Hernandez said from her desk. In her early thirties, Meredith had become a permanent desk jockey the night her squad car had been steamrolled by a stolen garbage truck. A couple of out-of-towners had gotten stinking drunk and thought it would be fun to nick a truck and take it out for a boisterous joyride. They never even hit the brakes when they rammed her patrol car. Three back surgeries later, she still found it hard to walk. She used a cane with a forearm cuff to get around.
“How about animal disturbance calls. Any come in yet?”
She wrinkled her nose. “What the heck does one have to do with the other?”
He pursed his lips. “Probably nothing. I spent last night looking at body parts and following up on stray-dog crap. I’m hoping for a little more variety tonight.”
“How about no variety and no problems?” She stapled a stack of papers with a hard smack.
“That I wouldn’t mind, either. What are you even doing here this late?”
She sat back against the large cushion strapped to her chair. “It’s either this or stare at the walls in my house.”
“You need to get out more,” he joked.
Meredith narrowed her eyes and grinned. “Oh yeah, and do what?”
Dalton shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Go out to a nice dinner, maybe catch a movie.”
“Women just love eating and going to movies alone. No, thank you.”
“Did I say ‘alone’?” He sat on the edge of her desk and leaned in to her. “I’d be more than happy to share a nice steak and see some chick flick.”
Meredith blushed. She was so pretty—medium height, olive skin and long dark hair, with gray-green eyes that had the ability to hypnotize him if she
so desired. Guys couldn’t get past the cane or the way she walked, as if they were models of perfection. Dalton could care less. If he had to be honest, there was something about her slight disability that made him like her even more. Maybe it was the compulsion to protect everyone he met that made him want to wrap her in his arms.
“That’s very sweet of you, but you’re young enough to be my little brother. In fact, even he’s older than you.”
“Shouldn’t charm make up for any difference in age?”
She locked gazes with him and sighed. “You’re just going to keep on trying until I crack, aren’t you?”
He got up and squared his hat on his head. “That’s for me to know, and you to find out.” She tapped him in the back of his leg with her cane.
“Be careful tonight, all right?” she called out.
He left the station with a growing tension in his stomach. Why was everyone telling him that? It was like a football game where the announcer says so-and-so has never missed a field goal under thirty yards. A nanosecond after the words are spoken, the ball will inevitably clang off the post, caroming to the sideline. Dalton walked over to the wood picnic table out back by the squad cars and gave it a hard knock, just in case.
Doc 452-1002
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY—Listening Station Omega 19/47
RE: Call Intercepts—Montauk, NY
In light of your request to focus efforts on eastern Long Island re: PI, following transcripts provided that may be of concern. Suspicious level of activity in tandem with communication loss with PI and unidentifiable double homicide. Will continue close monitoring and provide up-to-minute details as they arrive.
CHAPTER 8
Insomnia was nothing new for Margie Salvatore. She hadn’t slept a whole night through since she’d given birth to Michael, and that was over thirty-five years ago. She’d fallen asleep on the love seat around nine, woke up at eleven and now wasn’t the least bit tired.