They Thirst

by Robert R. McCammon

  The bedside telephone rang suddenly. Palatazin reached over and picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Captain Palatazin? This is Lieutenant Martin. Detectives Zeitvogel and Farris just called in with a positive ID on that plate you were tracing. It’s 285 Zero Tango Hotel, and it belongs to a guy named Walter Benefield, residence Number Seventeen Mecca Apartments, 6th and Coronado near MacArthur Park.”

  “They’re at the scene now?” His heart was beating so wildly he could hardly hear himself talk.

  “Yes sir. Shall I send a backup unit?”

  “No, not yet. I’m going over myself. Thanks for calling, Johnny.” He hung up and rose from the bed, taking another shirt from the closet and hurriedly putting it on.

  “What is it?” Jo said tensely. “Where do you have to go?”

  “Across town,” he said, reaching up on the closet shelf for his shoulder-holster. He strapped it on, then shrugged into his brown tweed coat. Jo was putting on her robe, and she followed him downstairs.

  “Is it something about the Roach?” she asked. “You will be careful, won’t you? You’re not as young as you used to be, Andy. You let the younger men take the risks. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.” But he wasn’t really listening—he was thinking that he could hear a distant voice, speaking urgently in his brain…

  “Be careful,” Jo said, buttoning his coat for him. “Remember…”

  …and the voice was telling him that after tonight things would never be the same in his life again because tonight he would take a step that would change the fate of a million people.

  “…let the younger men take the risks. Do you hear?”

  He nodded, kissed her, and walked out of the house into the still, cool night. At the car he turned back and said to her, “Remember to lock the door.” Then he slid behind the wheel, aware of the weight of the .38 beneath his left arm. He started the engine and drove away into the darkness.

  5

  * * *

  Tuesday, October 29

  THE DARK PRINCE

  ONE

  At twenty minutes after midnight Palatazin was sitting in his car at the curb of Coronado Street, two blocks from MacArthur Park. The sign MECCA ROOMS—DAY, WEEK, OR MONTH blinked in glaring blue neon in the middle of the block; the building itself was made of yellow brick with ornamental blue tiles that might have looked decorative twenty or more years ago. Now the whole thing looked cheap and tawdry; many of the tiles were cracked and blistered with spray-painted slogans in Spanish scrawled across the side of the building that faced a narrow service alley. Every so often a drunk would stagger out of the Club Feliz next door and barely make it into that alley before throwing up. Coronado Street caught some of the neon glitter from 6th Street and Wilshire Boulevard but was in itself essentially dark, its old buildings that dated from the twenties clustered together like a flock of black crows.

  Across the street a match flared inside a parked white Chevrolet. Palatazin could see Farris’s profile as he lit his cigarette. Farris was a big, bulky man whose favorite sport was professional wrestling; he had black, beetlelike eyes that could freeze a suspect a block away. Around Parker Center he was called The Wheel only half-jokingly because when he rolled over somebody, they didn’t get up for a very long time. Palatazin could see the dark outline of Zeitvogel’s head on the driver’s side; he thought he could feel Zeitvogel watching him instead of the Mecca, but he brushed off the notion as paranoia.

  When Palatazin had reached the scene from his house, Zeitvogel had briefed him on the situation: At around nine o’clock he and Farris had come to the Mecca to check the sixteenth name on their list. No one had answered Benefield’s door, but they’d run into the building’s manager downstairs. He’d taken one look at the composite picture and positively identified it as being the man who rented Apartment 17. So Zeitvogel then ran the name Walter Benefield through the Vehicle ID computers and gotten the tag number back on a ’73 gray Volkswagen Beetle. Then he’d called in to tell the night-watch officer, Lieutenant Martin.

  An hour before midnight, the manager, Mr. Pietro, fumbled with his keys in the narrow, dimly-lit corridor and finally slipped one into the door of No. 17. “I wouldn’t do this if I couldn’t tell it was important,” he said to the three policemen standing around him. “I mean, I know you cops wouldn’t want to invade anybody’s private property without good reason, huh?”

  “We have good reason,” Palatazin told him. “And we’re not invading, Mr. Pietro. We’re simply going to look around for a minute or two.”

  “Oh, sure, sure.” The lock clicked open. Pietro switched on the lights, and the men stepped inside. The room was claustrophobic, and instantly Palatazin was aware of a bitter aroma that might have been burnt almonds. Clothes were piled on a chair and scattered on the floor, and the bed was unmade. Palatazin saw the pictures of weightlifters taped up around the headboard. He had started toward that corner of the room when he sensed a scurrying motion from a battered old card table. He stopped and stared at three wire-mesh cages filled with huge, black roaches, tumbling and roiling over each other; he drew his breath in sharply. “Look at that,” he told the others.

  “Jeez!” Mr. Pietro said incredulously. “What’s he doing with all those…things in here? Listen, I run a clean place…”

  “Yeah,” Farris said and peered into one of the cages. “Ugly little suckers, aren’t they?”

  Palatazin stepped away from the table and looked at the pictures on the wall, then back at Pietro, who looked thoroughly revolted. “Where does Benefield work, Mr. Pietro?”

  “Out in West L.A. He works for one of those bug-spray companies, you know, exterminators.”

  “Do you know the name of the company?”

  “Nope. Sorry.” He glanced at the roaches again and shivered. “Jeez, do you think Benefield’s bringin’ his work home with him or somethin’?”

  “I doubt it.” Palatazin looked over to where Farris was going through a chest of drawers. “Take it easy with that, Farris, we don’t want to tear the man’s furniture apart. Mr. Pietro, what time is Benefield usually at home?”

  “All hours, in and out.” Pietro shrugged. “Some nights he comes in, stays a little while, and then leaves again. I’ve gotten to where I can recognize all the tenants’ footsteps now, you see. My ears are real good. Anyway, he don’t keep no regular hours.”

  “What sort of person is he? Do you talk with him very much?”

  “No, he keeps to himself. Seems okay, though.” Pietro grinned, showing a gold tooth. “He pays his rent on time, which is more than you can say for a lot of them. No, Benefield doesn’t talk too much. Oh, one time when I couldn’t sleep and was listenin’ to my radio, Benefield knocks on the door—I guess it was about two in the morning, couple of weeks ago—and he seemed to want to talk, so I let him in. He was real excited about somethin’, said…I don’t know, it was crazy…that he’d been out looking for his old lady, and he thought he’d seen her. Two o’clock in the mornin’.” Pietro abruptly shrugged and turned to watch Zeitvogel rummaging under the bed.

  “Old lady? Do you mean girlfriend?”

  “No. His mom. His old lady.”

  Zeitvogel said, “Here’s something,” and pulled out a box of magazines from under the bed. It was an odd mixture of comic books, muscle magazines, and porno. Zeitvogel held up a couple of publications devoted to bondage, and Palatazin frowned with distaste. Lying on the bed were a pair of black handgrips used for strengthening hand and wrist muscles. Palatazin picked up one of them and tried to squeeze it, finding the resistance quite powerful. He made the connection between them and the crushing hands that had killed four young women and laid the grip back down where it had been. He checked the bathroom, finding a tub with a couple of inches of standing water in it. In the medicine cabinet there were bottles of Bufferin, Excedrin, Tylenol. It seemed that Benefield was plagued with headaches.

  “Captain,” Zeitvogel said, offering him a y
ellowing Kodak snapshot as he came out of the bathroom. The picture showed a blond, slightly rotund woman sitting with her arm around a young boy on a sofa. The boy wore thick glasses and had a crew cut, and he was smiling vacantly into the camera; the woman’s legs were crossed, one fleshy thigh over the other, a crooked grin on her face. Palatazin studied the photograph for a moment, catching what he thought was a strange, glassy look in the woman’s eyes, as if she’d been drinking too much. “Have you ever seen Benefield’s mother, Mr. Pietro?” he asked.

  “Nope. Never.”

  Farris was probing around the stove and sink. He bent down, opened a cupboard, and brought out a bottle half-filled brownish liquid. He unscrewed the cap and sniffed it, and in the next instant dark motes were spinning in front of his eyes. He jerked his head away and said, “Shit! What’s this stuff?” He quickly capped it and coughed violently a couple of times, having the sensation of oil clinging to his lungs. His nostrils seemed to be on fire. Palatazin took the bottle from him and sniffed around the cap. “Mr. Pietro, do you know what this is?”

  “Looks like old piss to me.”

  Farris caught his breath and looked under the sink again, bringing out a few dry rags. “Don’t know what that is, captain, but it’s wicked. The smell of it down here’ll knock you out.”

  “Zeitvogel,” Palatazin said quietly, “go down to your car and call in on our friend, will you? Let’s see if he’s got a rap sheet.”

  Zeitvogel was back in fifteen minutes. “Bingo, captain,” he said. “Benefield’s got a long record of assaults, a couple of molestation charges, a Peeping Tom, and an attempted rape. He spent eight years in and out of mental wards and did a stretch at Rathmore Hospital.”

  Palatazin nodded, staring at the cages full of scrabbling roaches. He put the bottle back where it had been and closed the cupboard. He wanted to shout, “YES, WE’VE GOT HIM,” but he knew that wasn’t the case. There was a long way to go yet in proving that Benefield had anything to do with the four murders. “We’ll wait for him to come home,” Palatazin said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Mr. Pietro, we’re going to be outside in our cars. I think the best thing for you to do is simply stay in your room. All right? If you hear Benefield come in, don’t leave your room to be friendly.”

  “You going to arrest him? What’s he done?”

  “We just want to ask him a few questions. Thank you for showing us his room, Mr. Pietro. We’ll take care of the rest.”

  And now Palatazin sat in his car, waiting. Several times he thought he saw a Volkswagen approaching down Coronado, but it never was. The bitter, almondy odor of that liquid in the bottle stayed with him. In a rag, pressed up tightly against the nostrils, that stuff would probably act like a kind of chloroform; it was evidently some substance or mix of solutions that Benefield used at work. If he was the Roach—and those caged roaches indicated more than anything that he was—he had found a darker kind of work. But if he was the Roach, why had he changed his M.O.? He hoped that if Benefield was given enough rope, he might hang himself with it, or at least trip himself up.

  The minutes crept into hours. Soon there were no more cars moving along Coronado, and the only movement at all was the quick flicker of a match as Farris lit another cigarette. I can wait, Palatazin said mentally. You’ll have to come home sometime. And when you do, Mr. Benefield, I’ll be right here…

  TWO

  Wes Richer woke up in the darkness, his head buzzing with Chablis and his stomach full of Scandia’s Danish sole. At once he knew that Solange wasn’t lying beside him, and when he looked up, he could see her figure outlined in moonlight, naked and chocolate brown, holding a curtain aside as she looked out of the window onto Charing Cross Road.

  He watched her sleepily, the events of the night happily jumbling together in his head—the calls and congratulations from the ABC brass over “Sheer Luck”; a call from his father in Winter Hill, North Dakota, telling him how proud his mother would have been if only she were alive; Jimmy Kline calling to tell him that Arista was biting on the record contract hook and that the “Tonight Show” people were inquiring to see if Wes might guest-host after the first of November; a congratulatory call from Cher, whom Wes had met at a party for Gene Simmons; and then the dinner that evening with Jimmy, Mel Brooks, and Brooks’s screenwriter, Al Kaplan. The part was being rewritten for him with a couple of added scenes to spotlight some of that “goyem klutz,” as Brooks called it, that he showed in “Sheer Luck.” At the end of the evening, Brooks had squeezed his cheek and said, “I love that face!” Which meant for Wes, as far as Quattlebaum’s was concerned, money in the bank.

  He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and said huskily, “Solange? What is it?”

  She didn’t move from the window. Her head was cocked to one side, a black statue, listening. Wes let his gaze roam appreciatively down her back, along the smooth curving spine, to the firm roundness of the buttocks and the swelling of her upper thighs. He’d been between those thighs less than an hour before; the sheets were still bunched at the bottom of the bed, the room filled with the peppery scent of desire. He could feel himself responding again, and he sat up, supporting his head on one arm. “Solange?” he said. “Come back to bed.”

  When she turned toward him, he saw her eyes—they were hollow pits in her fine skull. “I heard a scream, Wes,” she whispered. “From across the street.”

  “A scream? You were probably dreaming.”

  “No,” she said, her voice like velvet and steel. “I wasn’t dreaming. I heard a scream. Who lives across the street?”

  Wes struggled up out of bed and stood beside her, peering out into the night and feeling pretty stupid about going along with her even this far. “Uh…I think Dick Clark lives over there…no, wait a minute. It’s Dick Marx. He produced the Sea Wolf remake with Richard Gere last year. I think.” He couldn’t really see the house, just the tops of trees and a chimney perched over a high brick wall. “I don’t hear anything,” he said after another moment.

  “I think we should call the police.”

  “The police? Why? Listen, Dick Marx has a reputation for…you know…a little S&M thrills? Maybe he just got carried away with his latest girl friend. Calling the cops would be a faux pas, right?”

  “I don’t agree. What I heard was not a scream of pleasure. Will you call the police or shall I?”

  “Okay, okay. Christ, when you get something on your mind, you hang onto it until Hell freezes, don’t you?” He stepped over to the phone beside the bed and dialed 911. When the operator answered, he said simply, “Somebody screamed in Bel Air,” then he gave the address, and hung up. “There,” he said to Solange. “Did I do my duty?”

  “Come here, Wes,” Solange said. “Hurry!”

  He did. She gripped his arm. “I saw someone crawl over the wall. Look! Did you see that?”

  “I don’t see a thing.”

  “Someone’s in our yard, Wes!” she said, her voice rising as she gripped his arm tighter. “Call back. Tell the police to hurry!”

  “Oh, shit! I’m not calling them again!” He leaned closer to the glass and tried to make out a figure moving, but it was pitch black; the arms of trees waved in the wind. “There’s nobody outside. Come on back to bed…”

  He was about to turn away from the window when he heard it. At first he thought it was the high wailing of wind, but then the sound became higher and stronger, the wail of a human voice—a little girl’s voice—that ended in a cascade of silvery laughter like water bubbling in a fountain. “I seeeeeeee youuuuuuuu,” the voice said. “There at the winnnnnndowwwwwww.” More childlike laughter, and now Wes thought he could see a figure standing down there on the neatly manicured lawn beside a thin pine tree. He was almost sure he saw a white gown being whipped by the wind, a long mane of reddish-blond hair, a grinning moon-face staring up at him. But he heard the voice again, and it seemed to be coming from a different glace entirely. “Come outside!” it called sweetly. “Won’t you come out and be my playmate?�
��

  Wes narrowed his eyes. He was only marginally aware that Solange’s fingernails were digging into his arm. Something moved beside that pine tree, and now Wes was sure he could see a little girl down there. She was barefoot and carrying what looked like a Raggedy Ann doll. “Mister!” she called out. “Please come outside and play with me!”

  There was something in her voice that made Wes want to go to that little girl. That voice was so sweet, so compelling, so innocent. It rang in his head like Christmas bells in the church at Winter Hill, and suddenly there were six inches of new snow on the ground, and he was ten-year-old Wesley Richer, stuck in his room with a head cold the day after Christmas while all the other kids were playing in the snow with their new sleds. He could see the bundled figures of the big kids way out on the frozen, milky surface of Massey Pond; they picked on him because he was sickly and skinny, but he’d memorized a lot of jokes from a couple of books at the library, and now even Brad Orr was beginning to laugh at them and call him Funnyman. From his window he could see them skating around the pond, turning slow circles and figure eights like people from those Currier and Ives pictures Mom liked. And the sleds had already left a hundred runner trails on Frosty Slope; ice glittered there in the weak, gray sunlight like the dust of crushed diamonds, and a distant figure raised a mittened hand to wave at him.

  There was a pretty girl he didn’t know, standing underneath his window. “Come outside!” she called, grinning up at him. “Let’s play!”

  “Can’t!” he called back. “Mom says no. I gotta cold!”

  “I can make you all better!” the little girl said. “Come on! You can jump right through the window!”

  Wes smiled. “Aww, you’re foolin’!” She was barefoot in the snow, and maybe she was so pale because she was really cold.

  “No, I’m not! Your friends are waiting for you.” She gestured vaguely in the direction of Massey Pond. “I can take you to them.”