Gary Brandner

by Doomstalker (v2. 0) (epub)

  Diaz wrapped his arms around her. She felt frail as a bird, but he knew there was a sturdiness he would not have suspected in the woman's slight body.

  "Just a sandwich, maybe, and a beer," he said. "I had a bite at the end of my shift."

  "Not one of those fast-food burritos, I hope. You know what those do to your stomach."

  "My stomach is fine. Anyway, who ever heard of a Mexican who can't eat burritos? How would you like me to spread it around that you can't handle chopsticks?"

  They laughed together. Both third-generation, thoroughly Americanized, they had heard every possible variation on the sushi-taco, Japanese-Mexican wisecrack. They bore them with good humor, and had a few private jokes of their own.

  "You going to do more overtime this week?" she asked.

  "This wasn't exactly overtime. I was checking out something personal for Brian."

  "Poor Brian. Do you think he and Mavis are really through?"

  "I think so. Brian wouldn't do something like this unless it was serious."

  "So he's moved out."

  "Looks like it. He rented some dump down near North Hollywood. "

  "How's he adjusting?"

  "To the split with Mavis? Not too badly, as far as I could see. He had that redheaded television newswoman from Channel Six at his place when I stopped by."

  "Professionally?"

  "It didn't look like it."

  Michi was thoughtful for a moment. Then she said, "I always had the feeling things weren't quite right between him and Mavis."

  "You never said anything to me."

  "Why should I? It wasn't any of my business. Not as though Mavis and I were close. You and Brian were the partners."

  "Yeah, well, he's got bigger problems now than a busted marriage."

  "You mean the suspension?"

  "That'll blow over. There's another problem. I'll fill you in later."

  Michi did not press him. When he fell silent she said, "Maybe we should have him over for dinner. I doubt that he's eating well."

  "I already asked him."

  "So, ask him again. Make it definite for tomorrow."

  "Okay. I've got to call him anyway." Diaz looked around. "Are the kids in bed?"

  In answer to his question two dark-eyed, grinning little boys tumbled into the room.

  "Papa's home!" the slightly larger one cried.

  "Did you blow away any Scuzzballs, Papa?" asked the smaller one.

  "Where did you get that kind of talk?" Diaz said. "You guys are watching too much TV." He knelt and took the squirming boys into his arms. "Why aren't you guys in bed, anyway?"

  "We were, but we waited for you to tell us good night. Mama said we could."

  "Okay, so good night," Diaz said with mock severity. "Now get in there and get to sleep or I'll have to exert some parental authority."

  Giggling, the boys raced back out toward their bedroom.

  Diaz looked at his wife and shook his head. "Scuzzballs. We've got to do something about their language."

  "Isn't that what you call the bad guys down at the station? "

  "I couldn't repeat what we call them," Diaz said, smiling. "You'd faint."

  "Hah! That'll be the day. Go clean up. I'll make your sandwich."

  Diaz went into the bedroom to use the extension phone. He dug out his notebook and dialed the number he'd copied off Kettering's phone. The line buzzed four times at the other end and there was an electronic click.

  "This is Kettering. I can't come to the phone right now. If you have a message, deliver it after the beep. If you're trying to sell me something, forget it."

  After several seconds of tape hiss, the beep signal sounded in Diaz's earpiece.

  "Bri, if you're there, pick-up ... Okay, then, give me a call when you can. I found out something today that could be important."

  He cradled the phone and sat looking at it a minute before he got up and went into the bathroom.

  When he came out of the shower Michi had a grilled-cheese sandwich with a kosher dill pickle and a cold Bohemia waiting for him in the little breakfast alcove. She sat quietly across from him as he ate in silence.

  "I guess it's nothing you want to tell me about," she said. "This business you're doing for Brian."

  "Not just yet," he said. "It has to do with his boy. There may be something more going on here than Brian knows about, but I don't want to make any wild claims before I'm sure. I'll tell you all about it when I can."

  "I know you will," she said.

  They went to bed. Diaz lay next to the slim naked body of his wife, holding her close, feeling the tension of the day pull his muscles taut. Michi turned him over onto his stomach and began working on him with her strong, gentle hands. Gradually the worries that tugged at his consciousness were eased away.

  "You're good," he murmured into the pillow. "You ever think of doing this professionally?"

  "Not a bad idea," she said. "While you're out chasing crooks, I could make a few dollars."

  "Over my dead body."

  She finished the massage with a sharp smack across his buttocks.

  "Come here," he said, and rolled over onto his back to pull Michi on top of him.

  "What's that?" she said.

  "If you don't know after all these years - "

  "No, I heard something. Outside."

  Diaz eased her off of him and sat up. He tilted his head to listen.

  Night sounds.

  Crickets, tree frogs, a dog barking far away. Faint traffic noise from the freeway, half a mile distant.

  "I don't - " he began.

  "Ssshh. Listen."

  He listened.

  He heard it. A soft shuffle, thump that did not belong with the night sounds. Again, shuffle, thump.

  Diaz swung his legs out of the bed. He padded silently across the carpet to the window that looked out on the patch of lawn and laurel hedge between his house and George Nolan's next door. He eased aside the heavy curtain and peered out.

  A three-quarter moon threw a pale silvery light on the lawn in patches that were shot through with inky shadows. Nothing moved. Everything normal. He started to let the curtain drop back into place.

  No, wait ... a movement by the hedge. A chunk of shadow detached itself from the deeper darkness and stood apart. Big, something like a man. The shoulders were high, the arms long and loose. It was only a dark silhouette, but Al Diaz had a sense of hot red eyes staring into his soul.

  "Is something out there?" Michi said from the bed in a taut whisper.

  "I'm not sure."

  Moving carefully across the darkened room, Diaz found his robe on the peg inside the bathroom door. He pulled it on and gathered his short-barreled Chief's Special from the top dresser drawer.

  "Al, don't go out there."

  Diaz stopped and came back to the bed. Michi was sitting up with the sheet held to her chest. Her eyes glistened in the faint moonlight that sliced in through a crack in the curtains.

  "It's probably nothing," he said.

  "Please don't go out there."

  Never in all the years of their marriage had she ever questioned the kind of work he did or his decisions in family matters. She saw him off in the morning and welcomed him home at night just as though he had a normal job in an office or factory. Sure, she worried about him, all cops' wives do, but she'd never let him know it.

  Now fear showed clearly in her eyes.

  He said, "I've got to."

  "I have this feeling," she said. "You shouldn't go."

  "I'll be right back. You stay here and stay quiet."

  He touched the back of her neck, feeling the tightened cords there. Then he took his hand away and moved silently toward the door.

  He padded softly through the house to the kitchen, leaving the lights off. He stopped just inside the back door, holding his breath, listening. No sound came through the door that did not belong. He exhaled and stepped into the backyard.

  The grass was cool and wet under his bare feet. Part
of his mind registered the thought that he'd better get the mower out this weekend. Staying close to the wall, he moved around to the side of the house that the bedroom window was on. Cautiously he left the shelter of the house and crossed the lawn toward the laurel hedge. He held the Chief's Special pointed at the sky.

  Something was wrong out here. It took him a minute to detect what it was. The silence was too deep. The night sounds were gone. The crickets and tree frogs had chopped their serenade. The far-off dog had ceased his barking, and for the moment no car traveled the freeway. The absolute quiet was oppressive.

  Diaz concentrated on controlling his breathing. In, two, three, four ... out, two, three, four.

  Nothing moved out here, nothing made a sound. Yet he was not alone. He knew it. The smell, that was it. Mingled with the tang of grass and the lemon from Nolan's front-yard tree there was something else. Something foul from the grave, or worse.

  And it was cold. Al Diaz shuddered in the seventy-degree warmth of the California night. This one time maybe he should have listened to Michi's intuition. Maybe he should have stayed inside with her. Out here was something very, very wrong.

  He had actually taken one backward step toward the door when he saw it. The thing moved out from the shelter of the hedge and came toward him. Seven feet tall, at least. Strangely shaped head. The arms reached for him. Thick, curving claws glinted at the end of twisted fingers. And the face ... oh, shit!

  "Hold it right there!" Diaz cried. He leveled his gun at the center of the intruder's chest. His voice came out flat, without resonance, as though spoken through a thick wall of cotton.

  The dark figure came on. Diaz could see the eyes now. Smoldering a dark, angry red, like barbecue coals at night.

  "Freeze," Diaz shouted.

  The thing came on. He could hear its breath now, a deep, ragged rumble. The hands reached for him.

  He squeezed the trigger. Even as the .38 slug exploded from the muzzle, he thought, What the hell am I doing? In these days where every expended bullet had to be accounted for with an accompanying report, you simply did not shoot unless you were damn sure of your target.

  The slug made impact right at the breast bone, or where the breast bone should have been. The hollow point should have flattened to the size of a quarter, distributing the shock throughout the body in sufficient force to knock a big man down, or stagger him at the very least. This one did not even flinch.

  Diaz got off three more rounds before the thing reached him.

  One hand with fingers like spring steel gripped his shoulder. The talon sliced through the terry-cloth robe, punctured the skin, sank through muscle and bone and tendon in a hellish unbreakable grip.

  The pain was like nothing Al Diaz had known. Once, as a rookie, he had taken a knife in the small of his back, perforating a kidney. That hurt bad enough to make the world flash red in his eyes, but it did not compare to the agony of his shoulder where the claws gripped him.

  The gun dropped from his numb fingers. He felt the creature's other hand clamp down on the top of his head like some murderous starfish. The grip tightened just enough for the talons to break the flesh and hold him immobile.

  Diaz worked his jaw, trying to bring up some sound. Nothing came out but a ragged hiss of air from his tortured lungs. He felt the red worms of blood slice down his face from the puncture wounds.

  Slowly, slowly, the thing began to turn his head to the right. The steel grip on his shoulder held Diaz's body immobile while the other hand slowly twisted his head.

  He could make a sound now - a thin piping squeal from his straining vocal cords as his head was forced to a ninety-degree angle from straight ahead. Then farther. And farther yet.

  The sternocleidomastoid muscle that stretched from behind the ear down to the collarbone was the first to tear. Then the platysma from the jaw to the shoulder. Thin gasps bubbled out of Diaz's throat as his air passage was twisted and crimped. The sounds he made were too soft to be heard over the grinding crackle of tendon and bones.

  Diaz's mouth gaped in a silent scream as his face was forced around backwards. Mercifully, Alberto Diaz's spinal cord separated then between the second and third cervical vertebrae and he lost all sense of feeling. A moist clicking sound came from his tortured throat, and his muscles jerked in a death dance.

  The body was allowed to fall to the grass chest forward, arms outflung. Diaz's unseeing eyes looked backwards, straight up into the night sky.

  Chapter 17

  It was three o'clock in the morning when Kettering dragged himself up the outside stairs to his one-room apartment. Three o'clock - the dark night of the soul.

  Kettering was discouraged and he was tired as death. Tired because flying always tired him; there was no way he could get comfortable in those cramped airline coach seats. Discouraged because the trip to Prescott had added essentially nothing to his small store of information, unless he could count the fact that Jessie's child had been called Dorcas. Crazy name. No help at all.

  Somehow, mysteriously, records had been lost or destroyed and people's memories clouded to leave no traceable record of the child or what became of him. Coincidence? Not very damn likely. Somebody ... something was orchestrating the disappearance of the kid.

  He keyed open the door off the third-floor landing and walked into his single room. It looked small and lonely and cold. It smelled of stale cigarette smoke. It was home.

  The tiny red eye of his answering machine blinked at him from the telephone table. Kettering decided it could wait. He grabbed a cold Coors from the fridge, popped it open and took deep, grateful swallows. Out of long habit he looked around for the friendly old recliner. Then he remembered he didn't have it anymore. It was part of another life.

  He carried the beer over to the telephone table, cycled the answering machine to PLAYBACK MESSAGES, and rewound the tape. The machine gave him a chipmunk chatter of speeded-up, backward voices and beeps.

  There had been a time when Kettering hated these machines. Whenever he encountered the self-conscious greeting: "Hi, I'm not home right now, but you can leave your name ..." and then the annoying electronic beep, he was tempted to tell the disembodied voice to go fuck itself and slam down the receiver. Usually he withheld comment and simply hung up. It took a long time before he felt comfortable talking to a machine.

  When Mavis started to spend more time away from home, he was persuaded, reluctantly, that the family needed one. Before long, as with most of the high-tech gadgets he resisted at first, Kettering wondered how he ever got along without it.

  Now he listened to the playback of a couple of hang ups. That would be the salesmen and wrong numbers and people who had nothing to say. No loss there.

  He sat forward at the sound of Charity Moline's voice.

  "Hi, big fella. It's eight o'clock. I'm sitting here alone trying to read some stupid book about why women love men who don't love them back. I'd lots rather be with you. I miss you, dam it. If you feel like it, give me a call when you get in. Don't worry about waking me up. Anyway, I'm eager to know what you found out in Prescott. Besides, I miss you. Whoa, I already said that, didn't I? Mustn't get you overconfident. Talk to you later. Bye."

  Kettering smiled. He started to shut off the machine and call her, but decided he might as well hear the rest of his messages, if any.

  Another hang up, then Al Diaz's voice.

  "Bri, if you're there, pick up ..." A pause. "Okay, then, give me a call when you can. I found out something today that could be important."

  Kettering stopped smiling. Something in his partner's tone snapped him wide awake. He rewound the tape and played Diaz's message again.

  Something important. Diaz wouldn't screw around. If he said important, you could bet your ass it was. Kettering checked his watch again. Three-fifteen. He forgot all about calling Charity Moline. That could wait. If Diaz had something, it was worth waking him up for. He dialed his partner's number.

  "Hello." A voice Kettering did not recognize.r />
  "Who's this?" A dumb question, he realized as soon as he said it.

  "Who are you calling?" Decidedly unfriendly.

  "Is this 555-0226?"

  "That's right. Who is this?"

  "I'm calling Al Diaz."

  "He's unavailable. Who's calling?"

  In the background Kettering could hear a faint keening sound. A cold hand clamped his throat as he recognized the sounds of crisis on the other end of the line.

  "This is Detective Sergeant Brian Kettering, badge number 256. What's going on?"

  The voice on the other end relaxed. "Oh, hello, Sergeant. This is Jim Orkney. We've got some bad business here."

  Kettering recognized the name of the young officer. "What happened?"

  "Somebody did Al Diaz."

  "How bad?"

  "Real bad."

  "He's dead?"

  "'Fraid so."

  "How?"

  A pause. "Looks like a broken neck."

  "Jesus. Not an accident?"

  "No way."

  "Anybody in custody?"

  "Not so far."

  "Witnesses?"

  "Negative."

  "Wife and kids?"

  "They're okay."

  "Who's in charge there?"

  "Sergeant Youngman. Lieutenant Ivory's on his way over."

  "Tell Youngman I'm coming," Kettering said.

  He dropped the phone into the cradle, left the half-finished beer beside it, and ran out the door.

  ***

  The drive from Kettering's new apartment to Al Diaz's house on the east end of the Valley would take about twenty minutes in normal daytime traffic. With nobody else on the road it was possible in ten. Kettering made it in five.

  The scene was garishly lit with floodlights and the rotating red and blue flashers on the roofs of two West Valley Police cars. Also on the scene was the coroner's ambulance and one of the department's unmarked Plymouths. He was relieved to see no reporters or television paraphernalia. Apparently, news that broke at three A.M. would have to get by without live media coverage.

  Kettering jammed the Camaro to a stop behind the coroner's van and jumped out. He flashed his shield at the uniformed officer who approached him.

  "You Orkney?"