Fear the Night

by John Lutz

  The way Repetto thought.

  “I’ll talk to Lora,” he said.

  “Thanks, Vin. You’re gonna prevent a lotta blood being shed.” Repetto had never heard Melbourne sound more sincere. “I’m gonna hang up now before you change your mind.”

  And Melbourne was gone.

  Repetto killed his cell phone and sat for a moment staring at it. Blood ...

  He took his time with his coffee, reading the rest of the paper casually, until he got to page two of the front section and his name jumped out at him. Someone had leaked the reason why the Night Sniper had claimed his last two victims, and what he wanted. There it was in the Times, the paper of record.

  He wanted Repetto.

  6

  Repetto wanted a piece of cake. He hadn’t realized it had been so long since lunch, and he and Lora had cabbed to the Upper West Side where their daughter, Amelia, had an apartment that she subleased so cheap she didn’t mind taking the subway five or six days a week down to NYU, where she was a senior in prelaw.

  Amelia was a slender girl with her mother’s fine features, luminous smile, and thick blond hair. She was proud of her golden hair and wore it combed back and in a long braid that hung to her waist. Today she was twenty-one, and celebrating with her family and best friends. Besides Repetto and Lora, there were Mar, older and grayer than when she and her partner Mel had healed and raised a teenage Repetto; Dal; and a girl named Peggy that Amelia knew from college. A small group, but close.

  “We’re going to sing,” Dal said, after Lora had finished lighting the candles on a cake brought by Mar.

  Amelia shot her great smile and shook her head, but the singing had already begun.

  Repetto had a voice like a cracked foghorn, so he kept his volume down. He didn’t like the way Peggy was looking at Dal, who seemed to be paying no attention to her. Good. Maybe someday Dal and Amelia would see each other differently. Less like brother and sister. So Repetto and Lora hoped. But some things you couldn’t force. Repetto told himself to grow up at his late age. If Dal happened to prefer somebody like Peggy, who was a beautiful young brunette, then so be it. Some things were beyond a father’s control.

  “What are you thinking, Dad?”

  Repetto realized “Happy Birthday” was over. “Thinking you should make a wish.”

  Amelia did, closing her eyes briefly, then pursing her lips and emitting two gusts of breath before all twenty-one candles were extinguished. Lora and Repetto exchanged a look, knowing they were both making their own wish. Mar saw them, grinned, and shook her head. Dal didn’t notice. Peggy appeared momentarily mystified.

  “So what was the wish?” Dal asked.

  “That she’d make it through law school,” Peggy said, giving Amelia’s long braid a playful tug.

  While everyone was laughing, Mar made her way over to Repetto. She was in her eighties now, whipcord lean and wizened, but with carefully permed white hair and alert brown eyes. She looked like one of those people who might live forever. Repetto wished she could.

  “You okay, Vin?” she asked. “You look sort of pensive.”

  “A lot to think about, I guess.”

  “Yeah, you always did think too much to be completely happy.”

  “Is there such a thing as complete happiness?”

  “Naw.” She patted his arm and moved away.

  Dal came up to Repetto as the cake was being cut and drew him aside, until they were standing a few feet inside the kitchen.

  “I can’t believe Mar came all the way from Philadelphia by train for this, at her age,” Dal said. “She’s a helluva lady.”

  “You’ll never know.”

  “Michaels tells me I should test up for lieutenant,” Dal said. “I’d be doing Street Narcotics Enforcement.”

  “Running a unit?”

  “Before long.”

  “Not a bad career move.”

  “I want the shortest route to make detective, like you are.”

  “Were,” Repetto corrected.

  Dal grinned. “Word’s around you’re getting the call to go after the Night Sniper.”

  Repetto sighed. “The NYPD leaks like the Titanic. Got an underwater budget, too.”

  “You considering it?”

  “We’re opening gifts,” Lora called from the living room.

  “The beer’s not in the fridge, you two,” Amelia shouted. “It’s out here in a cooler.”

  Repetto and Dal laughed. “She’s got us figured,” Dal said.

  “Always has,” Repetto said. “We’ll finish this talk tomorrow morning.”

  Repetto hooked up with Dal Bricker the next morning where they often met, away from the apartment. Dal would leave the unmarked he was driving parked off Fourteenth Street, and they would stroll.

  It was a clear morning, with the sun glancing warm off the buildings. The kind of morning Repetto liked most in New York. Night had been chased away. The sights and smells and sounds were as newly created. Anything might happen. City of promise.

  “Lora told me about what Melbourne wants from you,” Dal said. He was a taller, heavier figure in the corner of Repetto’s vision. Walking next to someone larger was an unfamiliar sensation for Repetto.

  “I figured she would. No secrets. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s your call.”

  “What if it wasn’t just my call, Dal? What if I asked for your advice?”

  Bricker grinned as Repetto looked over at him: big, broad guy with curly black hair, looked like he should be a country-western star. Why can’t Amelia see a future with this man? Maybe they’ve been too close—more than friends, less than lovers—and can only think of themselves more as siblings than as a man and woman who might feel a mutual attraction.

  Sometimes it made Repetto ache when he thought how happy Dal and Amelia could be. Not that it mattered what he thought. It was just that people were so damned blind when it came to the future.

  “I’m usually the one asking for advice,” Dal said.

  “Not this time,” Repetto said.

  Bricker took a deep, noisy breath. “What I think you should do is what Melbourne is asking.”

  “You’ve given it some thought?”

  “Lots, since I talked with Lora. Bottom line is, I figure you’ve got an obligation. I didn’t tell Lora that, but I’ve thought so from the start.”

  “Well,” Repetto said, after a dozen more strides, “I asked you.”

  “Lora’s gonna come around to your way of thinking anyway,” Bricker said.

  “My way? You think I want to tag on to this nutcase killer?”

  “C’mon, Vin. You know damn well you do.”

  “Ordinarily I’d agree with you. But there comes a time in every marriage . . .”

  “Yeah. Like I said, it’s your call and yours only.” But that wasn’t the way Bricker was looking at Repetto. Damn kid always knew what was in his mind.

  As if they were blood.

  “I’ll talk again with Lora.”

  “That’d be best.”

  But Repetto knew he wouldn’t initiate the conversation. It would be better if she broached the subject, made the suggestion herself. He knew Lora, and Bricker knew both of them. There was no way Lora could hold Repetto to his word and watch him stay on the sidelines while the Night Sniper took more victims. That would, in a way, make her and Repetto responsible for the dead; they’d be the killer’s once-removed accomplices.

  Dal was right; it was Repetto’s call. But Repetto was patient, confident of the decision Lora would soon make. She was a good woman, a brave woman with a nagging conscience.

  “Got time to stop in at the deli?” Repetto asked. They’d gone around the block, and the unmarked Ford was visible beyond the corner deli. “I’m gonna pick up something for breakfast to take back to the apartment. You can join us.”

  Dal thought about it. “Sounds good, but I really got no time to stop. I’ll get some fruit, maybe. Eat while I drive.”

  They walke
d to the deli’s outside produce and flower stalls. Like the flowers, most of the fruit was flown in from sunnier climes where it thrived this time of year. Repetto preferred it in season, so he’d wait until Dal had chosen, then go inside with him to the register and buy something sweet and sinful in shrink-wrap to take back to the apartment.

  “Peaches look best,” Dal said.

  He braced his thighs against the wooden stall, leaning forward and stretching out his right arm so he could reach a large, ripe peach in the last row.

  Repetto saw the bullet slam into the back of Dal’s head and heard its impact a moment before the rolling crack! of the rifle.

  Bricker settled down on the peaches, his arm still extended, the fingers of his right hand straining forward. Repetto was aware of peaches forced over the edge of the stall, bouncing and rolling at his feet. Bricker’s head tilted to the side, as if he were trying to get more comfortable on his pillow of peaches, and the blood came. And came and came.

  Repetto backed away, unable to stop staring at Bricker, at the blood on the peaches, the blood now trickling from the stall onto the sidewalk.

  “Christ!” he heard someone say. “Looka all the blood! Fuckin’ flood!”

  People were moving around Repetto. He could hear their soles shuffling on the pavement, see them like shadows at the corners of his vision. It was unreal. All so unreal.

  “. . . guy’s clock has stopped ... dead . . .dead . . .”

  “Get back. Please, you get back from him!” Kim’s voice. The deli’s owner. Kim knew Repetto and had come outside despite the possibility of another shot.

  “Don’t matter, man. He’s dead. Looka the fuckin’ blood!”

  Does there have to be so much blood?

  “Watch where you step . . .”

  “Get a cop!” a woman said.

  Blood.

  “Somebody inside’s calling the police.” Kim’s voice. “Somebody’s already calling.”

  “Get a cop!” the woman insisted, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Get a cop.”

  Repetto stood motionless except for his chest heaving with his rapid breathing. His face was pale stone. The people around him might have thought he was in shock, but he wasn’t. Not yet.

  “I am a cop,” he said.

  Well before sunrise, he awoke hot and heavily perspiring, lying on his back beside Lora. Repetto guessed she hadn’t been asleep, but had been crying since they’d gone to bed a few minutes past midnight.

  For a moment he wondered why she was quietly sobbing; then the realization of yesterday collapsed in on him. He reached out gently with his left arm and pulled Lora to him, and she nestled her head against the base of his neck and continued to sob. Neither of them spoke. What had happened to Dal, to them, was black and ineffable.

  After almost an hour, still welded together by grief, they fell asleep.

  When the bedroom was slashed with morning light from the parted blinds, Repetto awoke as exhausted as he’d been last night. He carefully disentangled himself from Lora, who was still asleep. He thought about kissing her forehead, then decided against chancing that he might wake her. Instead he studied her as if she were a precious puzzle, loving her, knowing they needed each other now as never before. As quietly as possible, he climbed out of bed and went into the bathroom to shower.

  With his left arm and hand he’d been gentle with Lora, but he became aware that the fingers of his right hand ached from having clutched the wadded sheet as he fell asleep, and perhaps as he slept.

  When he was finished toweling dry, he stared at the man in the bathroom mirror.

  Captain Vincent Albert Repetto stared back at him, the same as yesterday, yet unalterably changed.

  7

  Homicide Detective Meg Doyle steered the unmarked police car onto the exit ramp and watched for the turnoff for the service road. Beside her sat her partner, Bert (Birdy) Bellman. They’d left the city half an hour ago, after Meg had picked up Birdy at his house in Queens, and they’d had a quick breakfast of doughnuts and coffee as they drove. Cops eating doughnuts. Life imitating art, Meg thought. Blame it on Krispy Kreme.

  They were up early and on the road because Dal Bricker’s funeral was in New Jersey. His graveside service, anyway, for friends and family. He was already buried, after a full-dress NYPD funeral complete with dignitaries, bagpipes, and rifle salute. Today was the quieter, more private good-bye to Sergeant Dal Bricker. Immediately after the service, Meg and Birdy would be introduced to Repetto.

  Meg was looking forward to meeting Repetto. He was something of a legend in the NYPD, and she wasn’t surprised that the higher-ups would call on his expertise. That Repetto was also the Night Sniper’s choice simply made it unanimous. Stories still drifted around the department about Repetto, how he’d personally cornered the Midnight Leather Killer and traded shots with him before the suspect leaped to his death from forty stories up. About how two Mafia thugs had been sent around to intimidate Repetto and found themselves outmatched. Afterward, in their hospital beds, they’d been charged with assault, and their rights were read to them by Repetto.

  Meg found the cemetery road and turned onto it. She was a diminutive woman of thirty-nine who would have risen higher in the NYPD by now if she’d been able to control her tongue. Not that she had a temper; it was more that her words were out and doing harm before she could stop them. Since her divorce from Chip she tended to say what she thought, what she knew, what was the truth—a dangerous habit and hard to break. Her figure was trim, her eyes a dark brown, her features elfin. Her dark, short-cropped hair grew in a cowlick that made it stand on end in front in a way reminiscent of a rooster comb. When she’d been a uniformed cop she’d kept her cap on as much as possible. Now aerosol hair spray battled her cowlick, not always successfully.

  Birdy Bellman, on the other hand, was bald except for a few lank strands of hair plastered in a grid across his gleaming pate. His eyes were hooded and his face a series of vertical planes that made him always appear somber. He got tagged with the Birdy nickname because he often made silent pecking motions with his head when he was tense, which was almost always. Tense on the outside, anyway, while his brain was placidly and relentlessly working. Meg thought that if Birdy really was a bird he’d be a vulture. One that ate bad roadkill that had given him indigestion.

  Some part of Birdy was always moving, fingers tapping, a foot bouncing in frantic rhythm, a hand clenching and unclenching, releasing the frustration and excess energy that plagued him. Sometimes Meg thought Birdy should see a shrink.

  “There it is,” he said beside her, drumming his fingers on his knee.

  The car had reached the yawning iron gates to the cemetery. Meg slowed and made a left turn, noticing that the hinges on the gates were rusted over. The cemetery was an old one and encroached upon by commerce, the dead being crowded by the living.

  Because they’d been doing duty, neither Meg nor Birdy had been able to attend yesterday’s ceremony. Meg had never visited here. Glancing around, she thought it must have been a peaceful place before the highway was widened. The grounds were reasonably well kept, and tall poplar and maple trees lined the blacktop road that wound among pale tombstones and statuary.

  Meg saw a knot of mourners up ahead and slowed the car, then parked it at the end of a line of vehicles strung out behind a shiny black Cadillac. She got out of the dusty unmarked Chevy and slipped into her lightweight black raincoat that was in keeping with the event. Birdy had worn his dark suit with a maroon tie that had some kind of spiral pattern. He looked halfway presentable. Birdy’s wife had suffered a stroke two years ago and since then had been bedridden. Meg thought he’d done a pretty good job of dressing himself.

  The service was under way, so Meg and Birdy edged up to the fifty or so mourners and stood politely and silently. Assistant Chief Melbourne, in his full-dress uniform, noticed them and nodded.

  An extremely thin priest in dark vestments was standing beside the freshly filled grave and a simple tombstone bea
ring Dal Bricker’s name. He was reading a eulogy that Meg was too far away to understand. Not far from him was a huge array of floral displays that had been used in yesterday’s public ceremony. Not far from the flowers stood Vincent Repetto.

  Meg stared at him, fascinated. He was a big man, over six feet, with a boxer’s weighty shoulders and long arms. His hands were huge and rough looking beneath white cuffs that showed below the sleeves of his well-tailored dark suit. She thought his eyes were blue but couldn’t be sure. The wind ruffled his iron-gray hair and he looked incredibly sad.

  A blond woman next to Repetto moved closer to him and gripped his arm as if for support. Probably his wife. Not far from her stood a young woman, late teens or early twenties, with incredibly long, braided blond hair; she bore a resemblance to the blond woman. Meg knew Repetto had a daughter. Did this woman look something like him, too?

  Repetto must have sensed Meg staring at him, because he glanced up at her and the moment was electric. It wasn’t so much sadness she saw in his face now. It was the kind of set, placid immobility she’d seen on the faces of truly dangerous men just before they acted. They were still and silent before they exploded. They were already committed, so there was nothing left other than action. It was only a matter of when.

  Meg thought in that instant that the Night Sniper might have made a big mistake; then she looked away.

  Halfway up a hill on the other side of the highway, the Night Sniper sat on the cool, hard ground beneath a maple tree. He was concealed in a small copse of trees, with a clear view of the cemetery and Dal Bricker’s graveside service. At first he’d used his scope, which he’d brought with him in his backpack. Then he decided he was close enough to recognize people without it, and if he happened to be seen by someone while he was focused on the cemetery, it might attract suspicion. Cops almost always attended the funerals and memorial services of murder victims, the theory being that sometimes the killers were compelled to observe their handiwork and be among the mourners.