“I’m not a terrorist, I—”
He silences him by holding up an index finger and pointing at himself. “Still talking here, which means you don’t talk too. You close your mouth and listen instead, you read me?” Dignon nods. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”
“Yes sir,” Dignon says quietly, “I read you.”
“Outstanding. Now, in these uncertain times we don’t take kindly to suspicious individuals hanging around outside places like this. Sends up all sorts of red flags, makes everybody real nervous, jumpy, irritable. See, because the thing is, decent folks who aren’t doing anything wrong, they’re all either in bed right now, or they’re working a nightshift. Know what they’re not doing? Standing here talking to me.”
“I didn’t mean to cause any trouble, officer. I’ll go straight home, OK?”
“Not tonight you won’t.” He takes Dignon’s elbow and turns him toward the police car. “We’re gonna go for a little ride, me and you.”
Dignon looks around frantically. No one else is on the street, no one sees him getting into the cruiser. “But I thought you said I wasn’t under arrest.”
“You’re not.” The cop places him in the backseat. “Watch your head.” He slams the door shut, slides into the front seat and again quickly says something into the transmitter on his shoulder. After a moment, he pulls away, driving unnecessarily fast through the dark, empty streets.
Dignon struggles forward, closer to the metal grate separating them. “Sir?”
“Just be quiet, we’ll be there soon.”
“This is all a misunderstanding, I was only—”
“You know, I could’ve sworn I just told you to be quiet.”
“Where the hell are you taking me?”
“Keep talking and I’ll pull over and taser your ass six-ways-to-Sunday.”
The streets become darker still as the cruiser turns into a residential area.
Dignon looks out the window, tries to get his bearings. He knows every corridor of this city. Bad, it’s a bad area of town with rundown tenements and several vacant and condemned buildings. And then it dawns on him. He knows where they are.
The cruiser pulls up in front of an old tenement. Dignon has been here before. He and Jackie Shine delivered here once. There were children here, and the two older men who had ordered video equipment. He’d reported the people here. The police never did anything about it.
Other than a lone window on the first floor filled with yellow light, the building is empty and appears abandoned.
“Bet you know where you are now,” the cop says.
“What’s going on?”
The cop gets out, closes his door then opens Dignon’s and yanks him out. “Come on,” he says, pushing him toward the building. “Let’s go, move it.”
Reluctantly, Dignon climbs the steps to the front door, the policeman behind him and holding him by his cuffed hands. “What’s happening? I don’t want any trouble, please don’t do this, I—”
“Shut up, you fucking pussy.” The cop opens the door and they step into a dark foyer. A small amount of light seeps from beneath a door to their left, and Dignon can hear muffled voices beyond it. A few feet away, something small moves quickly then shuffles off, but the darkness is too thick for him to make out what it is.
The apartment door opens. Additional light tumbles into the foyer. An older man greets them. Well into his sixties, he exudes an air of superiority and is well groomed, dressed in an expensive suit and tie beneath an open smoking jacket. “Well, look what we have here,” he says with an accent somewhere between British and Old Boston. “Isn’t this a nice surprise?”
Dignon recognizes the man immediately. He’s the same one who answered the door when he and Jackie Shine delivered the video equipment here. He’s the same man who tipped them and hurried them out once they’d seen the children.
“I figured you’d remember this one,” the cop says proudly.
“But of course.” The man beams, flashing unnaturally large white dentures masquerading as teeth. “How could I ever forget the little weasel that dropped a dime on us?”
“Look, I—I don’t know who you guys are,” Dignon stammers, “but you have me confused with somebody else, I—”
“Caught him snooping into more shit that’s none of his business down at the processing planet, you believe this tool? He’s all yours.” The cop removes the handcuffs, slaps Dignon forcefully on the back then walks back out into the night without another word.
Dignon rubs his wrists and contemplates running for the front door, but he cannot be sure the policeman isn’t standing out there waiting for him. He turns back to the man in the suit. “This is all a mistake.”
“There are no mistakes. Come in, Dignon, join us.”
Fear rises. “How do you know my name?”
He leans closer. “I listen, very carefully.”
“But no one said my name.”
“I’m always listening, Dignon.” Despite looking like a dapper elder statesmen in a Graham Greene novel, with his silver hair neatly styled and combed back, his pencil-thin mustache and silk smoking jacket, there is something sick and diseased about this man, something perverse and unholy. “Always.” Behind the man, in the apartment, a handful of people in dark clothing mill about, drinks in their hands, their voices hushed. “We all are.”
Lightheaded, Dignon leans against the doorframe. “I just want to go home.”
A young girl steps from the darkness, startling him. Has he seen her before? Was she one of the children he and Jackie Shine had seen here that night so long ago? She leans against the man’s thigh and rests her head against his waist. She is no more than eight or nine and wearing a pair of shorts and a tank top T-shirt completely inappropriate for the time of year. Her hair is dark and cut short, her face and bare feet dirty, and her eyes glassy, vacant.
“We listen, and we wait. That’s what we do here.”
“Here?”
“Tell me, Dignon,” the man says, slinking an arm around the child’s shoulders and down onto her chest, “where do you think people like me go when they die?”
It is then that Dignon notices the little girl’s arms. Her hands have been crudely removed, hacked off with some hideous instrument of torture and death, reduced now to bloody stumps, nubs of bone protruding where fingers should be.
“We’re listening while you sleep, while you dream. We’re in your room right now. Can’t you feel us listening from the shadows?”
* * *
Dignon awakens, not with a scream or by bolting upright, but slowly, quietly, uneventfully. The veil of sleep recedes like a wisp of smoke and tails off gradually, leaving him flat on his back in bed, tucked beneath sheet and blankets, his head resting on familiar pillows. He feels more uncomfortable, unsettled than afraid, but as always, the fear is there too. The bedroom is dark, there is little moonlight. Mr. Tibbs is snuggled up against him but is also awake. The cat’s eyes glisten and reflect the sparse light from beyond the windows. He stares at them intently, as if something unusual lies beyond them, perhaps on the street.
The apartment creaks as Dignon hears what sounds like a low growl. But he is still half-asleep and groggily realizes it is the winter wind blowing through town he’s hearing, nothing more. He imagines himself and Mr. Tibbs in a tent in the arctic, rather than the supposed safety of his bed, a furious storm raging all around them, and for a moment this fantasy entertains and occupies his hazy mind. But then he realizes Mr. Tibbs is not staring at the windows.
He’s staring at the shadows beneath them.
“What is it, Tibbs?” he asks, his voice a slurred mumble.
The cat turns to him. His eyes blink slowly, as if to say, “I don’t know.”
Dignon struggles into a sitting position. Pain shoots from the base of his neck up into the back of his head and out across his temples. He feels sick to his stomach and vaguely remembers finishing numerous beers before he staggered off to bed. He coughs, and his mouth i
nstantly fills with an acidic taste, which only leads to further coughing.
Once the fit passes, he throws the blankets off and swings his legs around onto the floor. It’s chilly in here. He waits a moment, listens for the furnace down in the cellar. It’s on, he can hear it rumbling. Apparently no longer spooked, Mr. Tibbs opts to remain in bed and pushes himself farther beneath the covers.
The nightmare disturbed him, but Dignon is too drunk, hung-over, or whatever this state he’s in is called, to be as frightened as is warranted. Just the same, he knows sleep is out of the question for a while.
On wobbly legs, Dignon walks to the window. Fat snowflakes fall from the sky. The street and buildings—everything—is covered in a fresh sheet of snow. Despite its beauty, he cannot shake the image of the hideously mutilated little girl. She has followed him from there to here, and though he doesn’t want to fear her, he does. Why were her hands missing? Why her hands specifically?
A vision of her reaching for him strobes across his mind then vanishes. In the vision, her hands are intact, giving him something to grab hold of while pulling her free from the hell in which she is trapped. But he offers no rescue.
“I’m sorry,” Dignon says softly. “I tried, I…”
Help me, Dig. Help me.
But the little girl is gone. It’s Willie begging him, needing to be saved, and then his father’s hateful voice is back, escaped from the darkness he has tried his entire adult life to banish it to. It’s your fault. You did this to me. You did this to him. You did this to all of us.
Head pounding, he escapes into the kitchen. With only the small stove light to guide him, he finds the ravaged remnants of the frozen pizza Mr. Tibbs had for dinner still scattered across the table. He drops it into the trash receptacle, noticing a mountain of empty beer bottles in the nearby sink.
He should eat something, but his stomach is too upset and he’s slightly nauseous. Wearily, he shuffles over to his chair in the other room and leans against it.
The night is deathly quiet, but for the steadily droning wind, which cries in a manner he has never before heard. Strange, he thinks, it sounded like a growl when he first awakened from his nightmare but is now eerily melodic.
He needs a distraction, something to relax him. Normally he’d read, but he’s too bleary-eyed and his headache has gotten no better. He rarely watches television but resignedly finds the remote, collapses into his chair and turns on the modest set. There must be something on even at this hour.
He’s never been able to afford cable, but when he worked at Tech Metropolis he used his employee discount to purchase a discontinued Panasonic nineteen-inch television and a decent set of rabbit ears. Still, he only gets a few channels, and none with superior reception. There’s a commercial on featuring some obnoxiously loud bearded guy prancing around some sort of food processor type thing. Dignon clicks. A dramatic series featuring actors who look to be in their early thirties playing rich Californian high school students appears. Apparently they’re all obsessing about an upcoming school dance and someone named Mandy. Click. A Spanish channel pops up next, showing a Mexican soap opera full of large breasted, heavily made-up women and dashing dark-haired men with perfect hair.
He turns the TV off and sits in the dark instead.
The refrigerator hums. The wind croons. Downstairs in Mrs. Rogo’s apartment, he hears a door close. She must be going to or from the bathroom, he assumes. After a moment her toilet flushes. Odd, does she close the bathroom door even though she’s alone in the apartment with her dog Schnitzel? He pictures the wiener dog staring at her as she sits on the toilet, and for some reason finds this humorous. He laughs quietly, but it is nervous laughter, whistling past a graveyard.
It is only when he thinks of Bree Harper, when he remembers her face, that he begins to feel a reassuring calmness wash over him. He imagines her asleep in her apartment across town. Or maybe she’s awake too. The memory of her sweeps away the nightmare, his childhood horrors, and even the strange hallucinations of Nikki and her bloody laundry.
The rest is gone.
There is only Bree, sweet, beautiful, magnificent Bree, the ethereal song of a winter wind, and the wondrous snowflakes cascading through darkness on the other side of the window.
EIGHT
The madness of his earlier nightmares replaced with dreams more pleasurable, Dignon spends the remainder of the wee hours wrapped in mysteriously idealistic visions of Bree Harper walking with him across sandy dunes. Snow tumbles from the night sky, the Atlantic slams the shoreline and a winter wind blows harsh and loud. Yet neither takes particular notice of the elements. Bree is speaking, telling him something that seems important, but her lips move in silence, the sound of her voice drowned out by the crashing surf. Her hair flies about like a separate living entity, wild and beautiful and free of restraint. As they climb a particularly steep dune, she rests her head against his shoulder. Dignon puts an arm around her and pulls her close, holding her tight as they struggle through the thick sand together. He doesn’t understand any of it—even while dreaming it—but he knows one thing for certain. He’s happy, truly, helplessly, shamelessly happy. And so is she.
A strange, barely audible electronic pulsing sound echoes across the ocean.
The apartment slowly emerges from darkness, blends gradually into focus. The sound follows him from the dream, continues to buzz in his ears. He rubs his eyes, realizes there’s a symmetrical cadence to it. The phone, it’s the telephone. He struggles out of the chair, his back and legs sore from having spent several hours asleep in that position. Sleepily, he snatches the phone from its cradle on the kitchen wall.
“Dignon?”
He attempts to answer but his throat is dry and raspy. He clears it, coughs a bit then says, “Yes.”
“Hey, it’s Bree Harper.”
He knew who it was the moment he heard her voice but pretends to be pleasantly surprised. “Hi.”
“Did I wake you? Is it too early to call, I—”
“No, it’s OK. It’s fine.” He paws at his eyes and does his best to sound alert. “You didn’t wake me, I—I’m up. I just didn’t sleep too well last night.”
“I hate it when that happens,” she says sweetly. “I had a night like that a couple weeks ago, you know, where you just stare at the ceiling for hours?”
“Yeah,” he says, and leans against the refrigerator. And then something occurs to him. “How did you get my number?”
“You’re in the book.”
“I didn’t think I ever gave you my last name.”
“When you first called me and introduced yourself you did. Remember?”
His exhausted mind comes up empty, but he takes her word for it. “I forgot.”
“I hope it’s OK I called. I mean, I know it’s kind of presumptuous but I just wanted to talk to you and I didn’t think you’d mind.” Her tone changes from effervescent to guarded, perhaps even a bit hurt. “Listen, honestly, if I’m intruding—”
“No, it’s OK, really. I didn’t mean it like that.” A sudden rush of adrenaline fires through him. “Sorry, I’m kind of out of it this morning.”
A long pause follows, but he can hear her breathing.
“I just wanted to apologize again for last night,” she finally says. “I had no idea Kyle would do something like that and you didn’t deserve to be dragged into that nonsense.”
“Don’t worry about it, things happen.”
“I got home last night and realized after all that I’d forgotten to get my book from you.” She laughs.
“Yeah, I know, go figure, huh?” He rubs the back of his neck, tries to weaken some of the tension. “I still have it, if…”
“I was thinking if you’re not doing anything later, would you like to have lunch with me?”
Stunned, Dignon stares at the floor.
“Hello?”
Answer her, you damn fool. “You mean today?”
“Sure, if you can make it.”
“You don
’t have to work?”
“It’s Saturday.”
“Oh. Yeah, right, of course.”
“So, would you like to have lunch?”
“OK.”
“I hope you don’t think I’m being too forward or weird or whatever. I know we don’t really know each other, but after the drama last night I wanted to do something nice. Here you are kind enough to go to all the trouble of returning my book and you get stuck in the middle of that mess for your trouble.”
“It’s really OK,” he assures her. “It’s not a big deal.”
“How about we just start again?”
“Works for me.”
“Tell you what, you bring your appetite and the book, and I’ll take care of lunch. Fair enough? And no psychotic ex-boyfriends this time, I promise.”
“That’d be good.”
“Do you have a pen handy?”
“A pen?”
“So you can write down my address. I thought I’d make us something and we could just eat here, if that’s OK.”
His heart nearly stops. “Yeah, it’s…fine.”
Her tone again shifts to uncertainty. “We can go out if you’d rather, it’s—”
“No, it’s all right, I—I have a pen.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” he lies. “Go ahead.”
Bree recites her address. “What time’s good for you? Say twelve-thirty?”
“OK.”
“Cool. See you then. Bye-bye.”
The line clicks, and she’s gone. Hesitantly, Dignon hangs up the phone, wondering if any of this can truly be real, or if it’s all just an extension of some heartless dream, ready at any moment to dissolve into fantasy and snatch away the feelings of hope coursing through him. He feels guilty for having lied to her again, but there seemed no alternative. How would she react if she knew he hadn’t innocently found her book on a park bench, or if she knew he was already well aware of where she lived, and had even at one point stood just outside her apartment building? Still, he wonders, could she really want him, or is he misreading her? After all, lunch to romantic interest is quite a leap of faith. It’s entirely possible, if not likely, she doesn’t have any ulterior motives and he’s reading more into this than is warranted. Couldn’t she just be what she seems to be, a sweet and genuinely nice woman reaching out to him, perhaps wanting to be friends? Then again, having a man to lunch at your home you’ve met once and don’t know from Adam is a strange and rather bold move. Presumptuous, isn’t that the word she used?
Blood In Electric Blue Page 9