Cemetery Dance p-9

by Lincoln Child

  Reducing speed to thirty knots, he headed down the Bronx Kill — more an open sewer and garbage dump than a navigable waterway — the boat throwing up a brown wake, the smell of marsh gas and sewage rising like a miasma. A dark railroad trestle rose up ahead and he passed underneath it, the diesel jet engine echoing weirdly as it went through the brief tunnel. Night had enveloped the bleak landscape and Pendergast grasped the handle of the boat's spotlight, directing the beam at various obstacles ahead as the boat slalomed among half — sunken hulks of old barges, rotting pilings of long — vanished bridges, and the submerged skeletons of ancient subway cars.

  Quite suddenly the Bronx Kill widened again to a broad bay, opening into upper Hell Gate and the northern end of the East River. The vast prison complex of Rikers Island loomed directly ahead, the infamous X — shaped cement towers, bathed in pitiless sodium lights, rising up against a black sky.

  Pendergast increased speed and the boat quickly left Manhattan behind; the Midtown skyline receded as he pounded up the East River toward the opening to Long Island Sound. Now, passing between Stepping Stones Light and City Island, Pendergast arced into the Sound and opened the boat up full throttle. The wind roared past, spray flying behind, the little vessel smacking the chop, swaying from side to side as it rocketed up the Sound, the full moon flashing off the water. It was a quiet evening, with only a few boats out and about. The channel buoys glowed softly in the moonlight.

  Every minute counted. He might already be too late.

  When Sands Point Light hove into view, he angled the boat near shore, crossed the broad mouth of Glen Cove, and headed straight for the mainland on the far side, keeping his eyes on the shorefront estates as they passed by, one after the other. A long pier came into view along a wooded shore and he aimed for it. Beyond the pier lay a dark expanse of lawn, rising to the turrets and shingled gables of a large Gold Coast mansion.

  Pendergast brought the boat up to the pier at terrifying speed, reversing the engines at the last moment and spinning the boat so that it pointed back out into the Sound. Before the vessel had even stopped he jammed a boat fender between the edge of the wheel and the throttle, leapt from the bow onto the pier, and ran toward the dark, silent house. The uncaptained boat, throttle jammed in forward idle, chugged out from the pier and soon disappeared into the expanse of Long Island Sound, its red and green running lights gradually merging into darkness.

  Chapter 73

  Captain Laura Hayward stared balefully at the shattered doors that led into the dark maw of the Ville, heard the din of chaos within. The protest action had been expertly planned. Her fears had come true. This was no ragged, piecemeal gathering: this was a group that had planned well and meant business. Chislett had been hopelessly overwhelmed and overmastered, clearly out of his depth. For five crucial minutes while the mob coalesced out of nowhere, he'd been stunned, doing nothing but standing in impotent surprise. Precious minutes had been lost; minutes in which the police could have at least slowed the progress or run a flying wedge into the leading edge of the protesters. When Chislett finally roused himself, he began shouting out a series of conflicting orders that had merely sown greater confusion among his officers. She could see several police from the forward field positions now taking matters into their own hands and running with tear gas and crowd control equipment toward the front doors of the Ville. But it was too late: the protesters were already inside and, as such, presented an extremely difficult and complex tactical situation.

  Yet Hayward couldn't worry about that. Her thoughts were on the phone call she had received from Pendergast.

  His life might be in danger, he'd said. And Pendergast was not prone to exaggeration.

  Her face darkened. This wasn't the first time Vinnie's association with Pendergast had ended in disaster — for Vinnie, of course. Pendergast always seemed to escape unscathed — as he had this time, leaving Vinnie to his own devices.

  She shook away her anger. There would be time to confront Pendergast later. Right now, she had to act.

  She approached the Ville, seeking to bypass the confrontation taking place in the church. The main doorway gaped wide, lam — bent light flickering from it. As she approached she could see riot police entering, ugly — sticks and tasers in their hands. Her own weapon at the ready, she followed quickly behind them. Beyond the shattered doors lay an ancient, narrow alley, lined on both sides with sagging wooden structures. She followed the uniformed officers past darkened doorways and shuttered windows. From ahead came the din of a thousand voices.

  They rounded a bend and entered a stone plaza, beyond which lay the hulking fabric of the church itself. Here she was presented with a sight so bizarre it stopped her dead in her tracks. The plaza was a scene of desperate pandemonium, a Fellini — esque nightmare: men in brown robes were fleeing the church, some bleeding, others wailing or crying. Protesters, meanwhile, were trashing the place, racing about, breaking windows and smashing everything in sight. An indescribable din sounded from within the church walls. A profusion of animals — sheep, goats, chickens — raced about the square, tripping up the running figures and adding their own bleats and squeals to the general din. And among it all stood more riot police, milling around in disbelief, with no orders, no plan — uncertain and confused.

  This was no good. She had to find access to the cellars below, where Vinnie had gone looking for Nora Kelly.

  Turning away from the scene of bedlam, she left the plaza and ran down another dark cobbled alley, trying doors as she went. Many were locked, but one opened into a workshop of some kind, a tannery or primitive haberdashery. She looked around quickly but found no belowground access. Returning to the street, she continued on, trying doors as she went. Another heavy wooden door a few buildings farther yielded and she hurried in, closing it behind her. The yelling and caterwauling abruptly grew fainter.

  This building, too, was deserted. It appeared to be a butcher shop. Walking past a row of glass cases into a back room, she spied a set of stairs leading down into a basement. Pulling a small flash — light from her jacket pocket and snapping it on, she descended. At the bottom was a chilly room lined with ancient panels of zinc: a larder. Hams, ribs, fat sausages, and half carcasses hung from the ceiling, curing. She moved carefully among them, sending one or two swinging gently, letting the beam of her light lick over the floor and the walls. At the back of the larder was a door leading to another staircase, lined with stone and apparently far older, descending into darkness. An unpleasant smell yawned up from the depths. Hayward hesitated, remembering the other thing Pendergast had said: a creature that was once a man, now transformed into something extremely dangerous. I repeat: Vincent needs help. His life might be in danger.

  His life might be in danger…

  Without further hesitation, Hayward probed the stairwell with her light and — gun in hand — began to descend farther into blackness.

  Chapter 74

  Alexander Esteban turned from Pond Road, through the automatic gates, and onto the immaculate gravel driveway that wound among the thick — trunked oaks forming the approach to his estate. He drove slowly, savoring the feeling of returning home. Next to him, on the seat, lay a simple, two — page vellum document, signed, sealed, attested, and legally bulletproof.

  A document that would, after a bit of a struggle no doubt, make him one of the richest men in the world.

  It was late, almost nine o'clock, but there was no more rush. No more planning, directing, producing, executing. It had consumed practically his every waking moment for more months than he cared to count. But that was all behind him. The show had gone off perfectly to a standing ovation, and now there was just one little loose end to tie up. One last curtain call, as it were: a final bow.

  As the car eased to a stop before the barn, Esteban felt his Black — Berry begin to vibrate. With a hiss of irritation he checked it: the rear kitchen door was registering an alarm. His spine stiffened. Surely it was a false alarm — they were a frequent oc
currence on his large estate, one of the drawbacks of having such an extensive security system. Still, he had to be sure. He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out his favored handgun, a Browning Hi — Power 9mm parabellum with tangent sights. He checked the magazine and found it with its full complement of thirteen ball — point rounds. Slipping it into his pocket, he rose from the car and stepped out into the fragrant night. He checked the freshly raked gravel of the driveway — no sign of a car. Strolling across the broad expanse of lawn, he glanced down at the deserted pier, at the twinkling lights across the Sound, and found all in order. Gun in hand, he passed the greenhouse, entered a walled garden, and approached the back door of the kitchen, the one that had registered the alarm, moving noiselessly. He came to the door, tried the handle. It was closed and locked. The old brass keyhole showed no signs of being forced, no scratches in the old verdigris, no broken panes, nothing to indicate a disturbance.

  False alarm.

  He straightened up, checked his watch. He was almost looking forward to what was to come. A perverse pleasure, to be sure, but an ancient one. A pleasure encoded in the very genes: the pleasure of killing. He had done it before and found it a curiously cathartic experience. Perhaps, if he hadn't been a movie director, he might have made an excellent serial killer.

  Chuckling to himself at this private little sally, he took out his key, opened the kitchen door, and punched in his code, turning off the alarm system in the house. But as he walked through the kitchen toward the door leading to the basement, he found himself hesitating. Why a false alarm now? They usually happened during thunderstorms or high winds. It was a calm, clear night, without the breath of wind. Was it a short circuit, a random static discharge? He felt uneasy, and that was a feeling he had learned never to ignore.

  Instead of heading down to the basement, he turned and walked quietly through the darkened halls until he came to his study. He woke up his Mac, entered the password, and logged onto the Web site that handled his security cams. If someone had come in through the kitchen door, he would have had to cross the lawn behind the old greenhouse, where a cam would have picked him up. There was virtually no way to get into the house without being seen — coverage was more than one hundred percent — but if you were going to try, the kitchen side of the house, with its walled garden and ruined greenhouse, was perhaps the weakest point of the entire system. He tapped in the second password, and the live — cam image popped onto the screen. Checking his BlackBerry, he saw the alarm had registered at eight forty — one pm. He punched "8:36" into the digital timestamp field, selected the camera to monitor, and began to watch.

  It was well past sundown, and the image was dark — the night vision hadn't kicked in. He fiddled with the controls, enhancing the view as much as possible. He wondered at his own paranoia; he was, as usual, micromanaging. He thought, with a smile of irony, that it was both his worst, and his best, quality. And yet the uneasy feeling remained…

  And that was when he saw a flash of black cross the corner of the screen.

  Esteban stopped the action, backed it up, and moved it forward in slow motion. There it was again: a figure in black, flying through the very edge of the camera's field. He felt ice along his spine. Very, very clever; if he were to try to slip into the house, that's how he would have done it himself.

  He stopped it and backed up again, frame by frame. The running man was only visible in six frames, less than a fifth of a second, but the high — def camera had caught him well; and in the middle frame he had a clear glimpse of the man's pale face and hands.

  Esteban rose abruptly, knocking over his chair. It was that FBI agent, the one who had first visited him one week before. A momentary rush of panic threatened to overwhelm him, a suffocating tightness gripping his chest. Everything had gone perfectly so far — and now this. How did he know?How did he know?

  With a great force of will, he exhaled the panic. Thinking under pressure was one of his strengths, something he had learned in the movie business. When things went wrong on the set, in the middle of a shoot, and everyone was standing around at a thousand dollars a minute waiting for him to figure things out, he had to make split — second, accurate decisions.

  Pendergast. That was the FBI agent's name. He was alone. He'd left that beefy sidekick of his behind, the one with the Italian name. Why? It meant he was there on a hunch, freelancing as it were. If the man had hard evidence, he would have come in with a SWAT team, guns blazing. That was point one.

  Point two was Pendergast didn't know he'd been smoked out. Perhaps he'd seen Esteban arrive by car or suspected he would come. But he didn't know Estebanknew he was there. That gave Esteban a distinct advantage.

  Point three: Pendergast didn't know the layout of the estate, especially the extensive and confusing basements. Esteban knew them with his eyes closed.

  He remained at his desk, thinking furiously. Pendergast would be headed for the basement — of that he was sure. He was looking for the woman. He'd have probably gone down via the back kitchen stairs, very close to the door through which he'd entered. And that's undoubtedly where he was right now: under the house, poking around among the old movie props, working his way through the south cellars. It would take him at least fifteen minutes to find his way through all that junk to the tunnel that ran to the barn.

  Fortunately, the girl was in the barn cellar. Unfortunately, there was that tunnel connecting the house basements to the barn basements.

  Abruptly, Esteban made a decision. He slid the gun into his waistband and rose, walking briskly out the front door and across the lawn to the barn. As he crossed the drive, a small smile broke out on his face as a plan took shape. The poor bastard had no idea what he was getting himself into. This little drama was going to have a charming finish — very charming. Not unlike his last movie,Breakout Sing Sing. Pity he couldn't film it.

  Chapter 75

  Rich Plock stood in the chaotic dark, the cries and shouts of the congregants and protesters mingling with the screams of animals, the hiss of rattles and beating of drums. After the initial thrust into the church, the congregants had rallied for only a brief period and now they were falling back again, many fleeing through side doors into the narrow winding alleys and the maze of buildings that constituted the Ville.

  For Plock, it was an unexpected turn and even a bit of an anti — climax. They had successfully liberated the animals — but now he realized there was no place to herd them, nowhere to keep them, and they were running wild, most already having disappeared out the shattered doors and into the courtyard. He hadn't thought ahead about that, and now he felt at a loss for what to do about the vanishing people. His plan had been to drive the residents out of the Ville, but he hadn't quite taken into account what a huge, confusing, rambling place it was; nor had he anticipated that the residents would break for cover so suddenly, fleeing into the depths of the Ville instead of putting up a longer fight during which they could be driven out. They were like Indians of old, melting away from direct confrontation.

  He would have to rout them out.

  And while routing them, they could also look for the kidnapped woman. Because Plock was beginning to realize that if they didn't save the woman as a way of justifying their foray into the Ville, they might — no, theywould — find themselves in the deep end of the pool when it was all over. They would go through the Ville, purge it, sweep it clean, rout out the butchers, show them there was no place to run, no place to hide — and save the woman's life in the process. If they accomplished that, public opinion would be solidly on their side. And there would be a legal justification, of sorts. If not…

  The protesters were still streaming in the shattered front doors of the church, filling up the space, while the last of the Ville residents disappeared. The only one remaining was the leader, Bossong, who stood like a statue, immovable, still bleeding from the forehead, watching the unfolding scene with baleful eyes.

  As the last of the protesters packed into the church,
Plock mounted the raised platform. "People!" he cried, raising his hands.

  A hush fell on the multitude. He tried to ignore Bossong, standing in the corner, staring, projecting his malevolent presence throughout the room.

  "We need to stay together!" Plock cried. "The torturers have gone to ground — we need to find them, flush them out! And above all, we must save the woman!"

  Suddenly, from the corner, Bossong spoke. "This is our home."

  Plock turned to him, his face contorting with fury. "Your home! This place of torture? You don't deserve a home!"

  "This is our home," he repeated, his voice low. "And this is how we worship our gods."

  Plock felt filled with rage. "How you worship your gods? By cutting the throats of helpless animals? By kidnapping and killing people?"

  "Leave now. Leave while you can."

  "Oooh, I'm scared now. So where's the woman? Where've you got her locked up?"

  The crowd seethed with angry agreement.

  "We honor the animals by sacrificing them for the nourishment of — our protector. With the blessings of our gods, we—"

  "Spare us that crap!" Plock quivered with indignation as he shouted at the robed man. "You tell your people they're finished, that they'd better move on. Otherwise we're driving them out! You got that? Go somewhere else with your deviant religion!"

  Bossong raised a finger and pointed it at Plock. "I fear it is already too late for you," he said quietly.