The Chalk Girl km-10

by Carol O'Connell

  ‘False alarm,’ said the banjo man, holding up his cell phone. ‘We thought the kid was lost, but then she hooked up with a tour group.’

  And the trumpet player said, ‘I gave them directions to the park zoo.’

  The cart rolled on, pedal to the floor.

  ‘Hold it!’ yelled Riker. They braked to a sudden stop as a gang of rats cut across the paving stones in front of them. ‘What the hell?’ Downtown in his SoHo neighborhood, the rodents were all dilettantes who never turned out until ten o’clock at night, and they avoided people. They were rarely seen except as shining eyes reflecting streetlights and watching from the dark of alleys and trashcans. Sometimes he would see one scurrying close to a wall, but he had never seen galloping rats, backs arching and elongating. No doubt these were people-eating escapees from Sheep Meadow. Most of the vermin had cleared the path when one brazen animal stopped in front of their vehicle. The lone rat reared up on his hind legs and faced them down – absolutely fearless – almost admirable.

  Mallory ran over him.

  Upon entering the zoo on foot, the detectives decided not to show the fairy photograph. Instead they worked off the simple description of a small redhead in a bloody T-shirt. Here, where civilians were sheltered from hysterical screamers and marauding vermin, there were no signs of panic. A tranquil visitor pointed them toward the exhibit at the heart of a plaza, a raised cement pool where sea lions lazed atop slabs of rock, dozing and baking under the noonday sun. And there was the little girl, standing on the steps that surrounded the enclosure. A zoo employee kept his distance from her while making a long reach to hand over the traditional ice-cream cone for the lost child.

  Mallory called out, ‘Coco!’

  The tiny girl dropped her cone and ran toward them, laughing and crying, her puny arms outstretched to beg an embrace. The desperation on her dirty little face saddened Riker. A hug might well be oxygen to her, the stuff of life itself. She needed this. Mrs Ortega was right – Coco had no survival instincts. The clueless child had picked his partner as a source of warmth and comfort.

  Coco wrapped her arms around the tall blond detective, who not only tolerated the embrace but smiled down upon this poor bloodstained baby – Mallory’s ticket to the street. No more desk duty. A lost child was found, and this had the makings of a great press release to lessen the damage to tourism done by bloodthirsty rats. The mayor would be so grateful.

  Redbrick walls, trees and flowers enclosed the courtyard of the zoo’s café. The luncheon crowd was terrorized by screaming gangs of toddlers and faster youngsters pursued by frazzled young women. Older women, veteran mommies, sat quietly, waiting for the children’s batteries to run down. And strolling pigeons were beggars at every outdoor table.

  Coco, a born storyteller, alternately chomped a hotdog and gave the detectives more details of her odyssey through Central Park. No question could have a simple answer without the embroidery of fantasy. In respect to the spots on her T-shirt, she said, ‘The blood comes from the same place the rats do.’ She pointed upward. ‘There are rats who live in the sky.’ She looked from Riker’s face to Mallory’s, correctly suspecting skepticism in their eyes. ‘Some do,’ she said with great dignity and authority. ‘Sometimes it rains rats, and sometimes it rains blood.’ She shrugged one thin shoulder to tell them that this weather phenomenon was a bit of a crapshoot.

  Mallory’s indulgence was wearing off. ‘You saw the rats with the woman who—’

  Riker put up one hand to forestall a grisly account of Mrs Lanyard’s demise. ‘So you saw all those rats in the meadow, huh?’

  ‘Yes. Then everyone ran away. Me, too.’ In the child’s version, a few dozen rats became a horde of thousands, and all of them were big as houses with teeth as long as her arms. ‘Rats are prolific breeders.’

  Riker wondered how many six-year-olds had prolific in their small store of words.

  ‘Whose blood is that?’ Mallory was not a great believer in sky rats and blood rain.

  ‘It’s God’s blood,’ said Coco.

  Riker stared at the red stains. The elongated shapes did suggest drops falling from above, but so much of the world was above the head of this child. ‘Where were you when the blood landed on your T-shirt?’

  ‘In the park. There are lots of rats in the park. Most people never see them. They’re usually nocturnal.’

  ‘Nocturnal? That’s a long word for a little girl,’ said Riker. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I’m eight.’ She said this with pride. It might be true. She was smaller than other children that age, but her words were bigger.

  Mallory placed her own hotdog on Coco’s tray, and the child fell upon it as if she had not been fed for days. ‘You were in the park at night? That’s how you know rats are nocturnal?’

  ‘I read that in a book.’ The little girl demolished the second hotdog. ‘Granny used to give me book lessons every day. That was before I went to live with Uncle Red. But when it got dark, he had himself delivered to the park. I went to look for him, but he turned into a tree.’

  ‘So you were here all night?’ Now Riker was incredulous. ‘All by yourself?’

  ‘Yes. I listened to the tree all night long – every night. You know the way trees cry. They don’t have mouths, so it sounds like this.’ She covered her mouth with both hands and made a muffled plaintive sound.

  Riker felt a sudden chill with this hint of something true. He stared at the blood on the child’s T-shirt.

  Whose blood?

  Mallory used a napkin to gently wipe mustard from Coco’s chin, rewarding her with this little act of kindness – training her – like a puppy. ‘Let’s go find your Uncle Red.’

  It was the freelancer’s day off from the despair of never landing a full-time job, and all he had with him was a damn camera phone. Though he had seen it happen with his own eyes, no photo editor would ever believe that rat had fallen from the sky. He had snapped the picture seconds too late, only able to capture an image of a rodent riding the back of a woman. He had followed the screaming lady on a chase of many twisty paths before losing her.

  It was his first time in the Ramble, which had no helpful signs with cute names for these trails, and he had been traveling in circles for nearly an hour. As he walked, he looked down at the image displayed on his camera phone, looking for landmarks of the place where the rat-ridden woman had begun her mad dash. Finally he was on the right path again. Yes, this was where he had seen the rat come down from the sky. Looking upward at the overreaching branches, he conceded that the rodent had most likely fallen from a tree, though it was still a hell of a shot.

  But when did rats start climbing trees?

  He stared at the picture on the small screen of his cell phone, the photograph of a woman with a rat in her hair. In the background, there was a smaller figure – a red-haired child, her head tilted back – looking up at what? More tree rats? He stood on the exact spot where the curious little girl had been standing an hour ago. Staring up into the dense leaves, he detected something green but not leafy. A bulging bag was strung up on a high branch, and – holy shit! – it moved. A rat emerged from a tear in the bag, and now the creature was coming down through the leaves, dropping from one bough to land on a lower one. An acrobat rat? It paused on the lowest limb to have its picture taken. Click. Fat and ungainly, the rodent barely kept its balance with tiny vermin hands. A drunken rat? Its fur was slicked down, and the rat shook itself like a wet dog, splattering the freelancer’s white shirt – oh, crap – with drops of blood.

  Mallory led a short parade of vehicles. Behind the detectives rode two patrolmen, and the third cart was driven by a park ranger. The little girl sat on Riker’s lap, her head turning from side to side, looking for a dead bird, she said. They were traveling north, heading back toward the Ramble again, with only the child’s cryptic clue of water tied with a fat orange ribbon; and that would be the maintenance crew’s fence around a sliver of the lake, the same place where Mallory had tossed a teenag
er’s phone into the water. As the three carts rolled along West Drive, the detectives learned that the formal name of Coco’s granny was Grandmother. Uncle Red had no other designation.

  And this child had survived more than one night in the park.

  ‘Stop!’ When the carts pulled over to the curb, Coco jumped out to inspect another drinking fountain, the third one along this route. ‘This is it,’ she said, pointing to the eyeless dead bird in the basin. She recoiled from the buzzing flies that covered the tiny corpse, and she ran to the end of a curved stone wall, holding both hands over her ears.

  Mallory called the little girl back to the cart, and the search party headed into the Ramble, rolling on paths too narrow for larger vehicles. Coco could offer them no more guidance, but Mallory seemed to need no directions, and Riker had a fair idea of where she was going. She stopped the cart at the place where she had earlier paused for a closer look at something that passed for minor vandalism. Now she pointed to a small section of chicken-wire fence that had been forced down. ‘Coco, have you seen that before?’

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ said the little girl. And Riker had to smile, for this was his partner’s trademark line. Coco climbed down from his lap to stand on the path. ‘We’re here.’

  The park ranger left his own vehicle. ‘The kid should get back in the cart. We’ve got a rat swarm in the Ramble. That’s why you don’t see any people here. They swarmed, too.’

  ‘We’re half a mile from Sheep Meadow,’ said Mallory. ‘Aren’t rats territorial?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, but these aren’t the same rats.’ The ranger pointed east. ‘Our new exterminator flushed another swarm out of a building on the other side of the Ramble. He was supposed to kill them, but he just got them stoned on chemicals.’

  ‘He fumigated rats . . . in a park.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said the ranger, his face deadpan, his voice without affect. ‘And now they’re all so wonderfully uninhibited.’

  ‘Well, that explains a lot.’ Riker settled the child on the passenger seat of the park ranger’s cart. ‘Okay, honey, you stay here and talk rats with the funny man.’

  When the detective had joined his partner by the downed section of fence, the ranger called to them, ‘Watch out! The rats are more aggressive now, and they bite. If you see one, don’t run. That only encourages them. I think they like it when you run.’

  Mallory pointed to the ground where deep twin ruts were overlapped by shallow ones. ‘A tire-tread pattern for two wheels. That fits with something small, like a hand truck.’

  ‘A delivery guy’s dolly. Coco said her uncle was delivered to the park.’ Riker’s shoes left no footprints on the dry dirt. ‘So the dolly came through here after the rain, when the ground was soft.’

  ‘But it hasn’t rained for days.’ Mallory bent low to examine the exposed earth and sparse weeds trampled by the wheels. ‘The dolly’s load was heavy going in and a lot lighter coming back out.’

  Light by one body? And might that body belong to Coco’s missing uncle?

  Mallory, a born-again believer in sky rats and blood rain, was looking upward as she entered the thick of the trees. It was Riker who saw the patches of human flesh between the leaves of foliage on the ground – then the profile of a face – and now the fronds of a fern were pulled away to expose a naked man lying on his side. Wrists and ankles tied by rope, the body was bent backwards like an archer’s bow. Riker reached down to touch the flesh. Cold and rigid. Late-stage rigor mortis? The one visible eye was sunk deep in its socket, and the bluish skin was mottled.

  ‘Textbook dead.’ Riker called out to the ranger on babysitting detail. ‘Get the kid outta here!’

  As the ranger’s cart drove off with Coco, Mallory shouted at the two uniformed officers, ‘Nobody gets past you! Got that?’

  The patrolmen stood guard by the fallen fence while the detectives made a closer inspection of the nude corpse. ‘Dark brown hair,’ said Riker. ‘I’m guessing this isn’t the kid’s Uncle Red. Maybe we still got another body to find.’

  He heard the rats before he saw them, quick scrabbling through the underbrush, then twitching into view, dozens of them. The first one to jump the dead man sniffed out the soft delicacies of the eyes. Riker, a man with a fully loaded gun, not a shy or retiring type, was scared witless, but he would not run. Like Mallory, he stood his ground while rats ran around their shoes to get at the body. ‘Hey!’ he yelled, waving his arms. That should have scattered them, but the critters seemed not to notice. All the rules of rodents were suspended today, and all that he could count on was the fact that vermin carried ticks and fleas and plagues from the Middle Ages. And their teeth were so terribly sharp.

  His partner picked up a rock and nailed one rat with an all-star pitch. Oh, bless Lou Markowitz for teaching his kid the all-American game of baseball – and trust Mallory to pervert it this way. Calm and composed, she snapped on a Latex glove, then picked up the bloodied rat by the tail and dangled it. The rest of them lifted their snouts to sniff the air. She swung the limp rat wide of the corpse, and it sailed past the startled patrolmen to land on the path by the carts.

  Setting an example for the other rats? No, not quite.

  The vermin swarmed toward the smell of fresh, flowing blood and gnawed on their not-quite-dead brother rat. The carnage on the path was a frenzy of ripping teeth, blood fly and whipping tails. Mallory’s early childhood on the streets had outfitted her with all the ugliest shortcuts for pest control.

  One of the patrolmen called out, his voice young and hopeful, ‘Can we shoot ’em?’

  Without a direct order from a superior, these patrolmen would be sent to NYPD Hell if they discharged their service weapons – even for the just cause of protecting a crime scene.

  Riker gave them a thumbs-up, and the two officers whiled away their time picking off rats with bullets. Bang! went the guns, Bang! Bang! All around them, screaming birds took flight. The rats that were still alive remained. Still hungry.

  The detectives knelt down beside the naked victim. Riker guessed that rigor mortis had set in hours ago. The bound corpse was frozen in his hog-tied pose.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Ligature marks on wrists and ankles were crusted with old blood from a struggle to get free, and that had probably attracted the rats, though the abrasions showed signs of early healing. How long had this body been lying here? A piece of duct tape dangled from the dead man’s chin. Another piece clung to the side of the face, and rough threads from a burlap weave were caught between the lips.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Mallory looked up, and Riker followed the line of her gaze. His eyes were not so young, and he had to squint to make out the slack shape of green material hanging from a high bough of the tree, and there was a gaping hole at the bottom of this empty bag. Giving up the only vanity of his middle age, he donned a pair of bifocals to see twigs and branches bent and broken where they had slowed the progress of a falling body.

  His partner leaned over the rigid corpse at their feet. With one gloved hand, she lightly touched straight lines of sticky residue where the tape had once covered the eyes and mouth. Here the skin was raw. ‘He rubbed his face against the burlap to get the tape off.’

  And patches of dried-out skin had come off with it. How long had this poor bastard gone without food and water?

  ‘Okay, we got a real sick game here,’ said Riker. ‘Look at this.’ He pointed to a wad of wax that plugged an ear cavity. ‘Our freak’s into sensory deprivation. No sight, no hearing, just starvation and slow death.’

  The detectives heard the buzz before they saw the insects that always came to lay their eggs in decomposing flesh. The first fly landed to crawl upon the dead man’s eyeball.

  The corpse blinked – and then it screamed.

  FOUR

  Before they can grab me, I warn them that I have superpowers. I can run like a rabbit, shiver like a whippet, and I can scream like a little girl. The three of them look at me like �
� what the hell? This buys me a few seconds, and I jump into the slipstream of a passing teacher. At lunchtime, they come along every few minutes like taxicabs.

  —Ernest Nadler

  The victim had lost consciousness again as he lay at the foot of the hanging tree.

  A tube connected the naked man to a bag of fluid held high by a paramedic, who used his free hand to swat bugs. His patient hovered between the status of a corpse and a live carry. ‘Starvation ain’t the problem,’ he said to Detective Mallory, ‘and those rat bites won’t kill him, but dehydration’s a bitch.’

  ‘Best guess,’ she said. ‘How long has he gone without water?’

  The paramedic shrugged. ‘I’d say three days at the outside. Any longer than that and he’d be dead.’

  Though the victim had been freed of bindings, his body was still frozen in the captive posture when he was lifted onto a stretcher and carried through the woods to a waiting ambulance.

  Two patrolmen strung yellow crime-scene tape from tree to tree in a crude circle. One of them stopped to shout at a taxpayer, ‘We’re not selling tickets! Get lost!’

  And the civilian yelled, ‘I’m from the Times!’ which made him a reporter and thus a legal kill in the codebook of the NYPD.

  Mallory turned her eyes up to the high branches of the hanging tree and the remnants of the empty sack that had gone unnoticed by paramedics. She had no interest in what happened to the reporter as long as the carnage stayed on the other side of the yellow tape. Except for the Times interloper, panic had emptied the Ramble of people, and she still had hopes of keeping secret the detail of the burlap bag.

  But then the man from the Times yelled, ‘You gotta come with me! There’s a bag in a tree – rats running in and out of it – bloody rats!’

  ‘Rats are climbing trees now?’ The patrolmen laughed.

  The detectives did not. Together they walked toward the path, and Riker said, ‘Check out the bloodstains on the guy’s shirt.’