But in this vision, unlike the actual event, the darkness of the desert coalesced into a shadow-figure, an incarnate of pure evil, who suddenly grabbed the child and vanished with him into the abyss without a sound. And Vida was helpless, mired in terror as though her feet were sunken into cement.
And that was why Vida had called her son last night, and that was why she now waited for a cab to take her to Midway Airport for a cheap flight to Virginia. It wasn’t merely time for a visit. It was time to warn her son: these visions were more than prophecies, they were warnings.
And that was why she kept tapping the tip of that baobab cane on that stone porch. Most of the time she wasn’t even aware she was doing it. The tapping was akin to a nervous tic or a habit, like biting one’s fingernails. But it was also possible there was more to it than mere nerves. Perhaps the tapping primed some deeper rhythm in Vida’s soul, perhaps it touched off some mystical reserve.
Regardless of the reasons, however, she was tapping like crazy now, and she would keep tapping that cane until she knew for sure that her son and his family were safe.
Click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-CLICK!
“Gimme a smile, you stupid piece of rat shit,” Big Ben Milambri uttered under his breath, boring his gaze like twin augers into Splet’s skull. The prison lounge undulated around them with milling bodies, the din of voices waxing and waning.
Splet frowned. He was confused. “I’m sorry…you want me to what?”
“Smile, you idiot.” Milambri glanced over his shoulder, then looked back at the photograph pasted inside the splayed cigarette carton like it was radioactive. “If you don’t smile in two seconds I’m gonna shove this carton down your goddamn throat, you goddamn faggot.”
Splet managed an awkward grin.
Milambri kept nodding at him with a weird, fake smile, his eyes as dead as buttons. “Now chuckle like we’re just sitting around the cracker-barrel sharing a dirty joke.”
Splet let out a dry chuckle.
Voices bounced off the painted cinderblock walls. It sounded like a monkey cage in there. The air reeked of old sweat and ammonia. Milambri cupped his hand over the photograph of Ulysses Grove and closed his fist. “Yeah, that’s a good one,” he said with a laugh, loud enough for the guard to register nothing out of the ordinary.
Splet looked down at the crumpled little photo. “Is there a problem?”
“Shut the hell up.”
“Did I say something wrong?”
“Shut your hole, dickhead,” Milambri growled, still displaying his yellow teeth in that bogus grin. “And lemme explain something to you.”
“I’m sorry if I—”
“You bring that shit in here when I’m looking at a goddamn nickel without possibility of parole?”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Shut up, faggot. And listen. And learn. I will erase your family…you bring that shit in here when I’m up for review in two weeks.”
Splet swallowed drily. “I’m sorry.”
“Shut your mouth,” Milambri said, his grin changing to more of a yellow rictus. He ripped the photo from the carton and shoved it back at Splet. “I don’t know where you got the idea the Outfit was some kinda drive-up window for faggots looking to wax some G-man…but lemme set you straight. Tagging somebody in the Bureau is like popping a priest. Comprende, dickhead? You follow me?”
Splet nodded, putting the picture in his shirt pocket. His voice softening. “Yes, I follow you, sir…absolutely, yes.”
“Get that shit outta here.”
“I’m sorry I—”
Milambri had already pushed himself away from the table, and had risen to his full six-foot-plus height, the carton of cigarettes under his massive tree trunk of an arm. He nodded at the guard. The guard came over, and the two men strode away without a word, without even glancing at Splet.
The animal sounds echoed. An obese woman cackled in one corner.
Splet let out a long, anguished sigh.
He left the building with the crumpled picture still in his pocket.
SEVEN
Around 5:30 that afternoon, Grove met his mother at Reagan International, and they hugged each other warmly, exchanging banalities. It felt good to see the old girl again, despite the rancid memories that she stirred in Grove, and he told her she was looking too skinny, and she should eat more of that kashishi stew she always used to foist on the neighborhood kids.
They walked out of the airport arm in arm. In the parking garage, Grove piled her things—her valise, her shopping bag of half-eaten sandwiches, trinkets, and empty water bottles—into the Blazer.
For much of the ten-mile hop back to Alexandria, they rode in awkward silence. Along the way, Grove would catch a glimpse every few moments of Vida in his peripheral vision, her proud Nubian visage raised against the overcast daylight, her long, wattled neck as brown as tobacco leaves. She looked as though she were summoning some kind of celestial energy from the clouds as she chain-smoked her filterless Camels, the ashes flecking and tossing in the wind.
Grove had seen that look on her face before. It usually meant trouble. That defiant gaze aimed up at the heavens, eyes narrowed, brow furrowed and crinkled with loose skin. Those looks usually preceded some kind of metaphysical proclamation about the crops failing or locusts coming or rivers running red. Grove had fought those old superstitions for most of his life. He’d been embarrassed by them as a child, and rebelled against them as a young man. But nowadays he was a different person. He was a believer. Vida had saved his life on more than one occasion with her mysterious juju.
In fact, for years now, Grove had been formulating a new unified theory of his work as a profiler, his efforts to confront evil, his place in the cosmos. He had become more and more interested in his African heritage, and had started collecting spiritual ephemera, charms, talismans. He had secretly become obsessed with the notions of black magic, dark forces in the universe, and hell. Especially hell. Not the Hollywood version, but the intricate, protean territory first depicted by Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy, and later by Milton in Paradise Lost. He had begun to believe in the existence of a literal hell. Perhaps it was located in invisible regions, perhaps merely in the convolutions of the human mind, but he was more and more certain it existed. And all the requisite denizens—the fallen angels, the demonic entities—were as palpable as the ragged souls he hunted. And somehow, in some inchoate way, his mother served as connective tissue to all these unseen realms.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
The old woman turned, the wind from the open window tossing her tiny kente braids. She proffered a dignified smile. “Nothing’s wrong. Why do you ask such a thing?”
Grove drove for a while. “I heard it in your voice last night. Something’s bothering you.”
She shook her gray head emphatically. “Nothing is bothering me, Uly. This is all in your mind.”
“Then why the surprise visit?”
“Uly!” She shot him a look. “I did not teach my son such bad manners.”
A ragged sigh from Grove. “Okay, okay…play it your way. Everything’s peachy.”
“That’s right.”
Grove looked at her. “And you just came down here on a moment’s notice with the heat and with your arthritis and your sciatica because you wanted to burp your grandson and play another round of gin rummy with me and Maura.”
Vida looked out the window with an implacable little smile on her ashy lips. “I could not have said it better myself,” she mumbled.
“Alright. Fine. Whatever. It’s good to have you, Mom.” Grove searched the hazy distance for his exit. “There’s a lot of burping to be done.”
Vida smiled and said nothing…just kept staring out the window at the afternoon’s lengthening shadows.
Far to the west, the rains rolled into the Mississippi River valley. Gray sheets billowed across the metro St. Louis area, flooding back alleys and low-lying gullies along the river.
Steam oozed from the cracked thoroughfares and pocked asphalt. Lightning veined the heavens and volleys of thunder crashed over the Gateway Arch like an aerial dog-fight.
Henry Splet witnessed most of the storm through the narrow windows of his equipment room at WJID, sitting at the coffee-stained editing bay, angrily burning copies of a public service announcement for the station manager. He seethed with anger as he sat there twisting knobs and poking buttons, staring at the cathode ray screen, not really seeing anything, and whenever an assistant came in to help, Splet would snap at them to get the hell out.
It went on like this for most of the day, the passage of time losing all context for Splet. He felt as though he were floating above his body, buoyant with hate and contempt. It all just seemed so unfair. All he wanted to do was hire somebody to kill a Fed. You would think he asked Milambri to hit the Pope. What was the big deal?
By six o’clock that night, Splet needed to feed the furnace inside him—the one in his brain—the smoldering embers inside his mind-space. He needed to answer the compulsion. But this time, he dispensed with the watching ritual. Instead he called Helen and told her he had to put in an all-nighter at the studio, then he went down to the warehouse district along the river and waited for a prostitute to approach.
The first one came off the stroll like a clerk in a fresh produce department—a heavyset black woman that didn’t quite fit the profile.
Henry shooed her away.
Finally, around 9:30, a lanky young white girl accosted Henry, and he gave her a courteous nod, then led her around behind the Pillsbury building where he drove a screwdriver through the base of her neck with one easy thrust, sending her into paralytic shock against the side of the building like a dying moth. Then he dragged her around behind a Dumpster and removed her eyeballs, using a surgical instrument that resembled a baby spoon. The entire procedure took less than three minutes.
From there, Henry drove out to the storage facility with the souvenirs next to him.
The eyeballs floated in olive jars filled with saline, each jar nestled in a newspaper-lined Chinese carryout box. Henry felt anxious and jittery knowing he was about to visit his secret place, his place of dark wonders. But that was okay because he needed to think, he needed to strategize, he needed to figure out how to eliminate this dapper fed…this Agent Grove. Special Agent Ulysses Grove. He would find somebody to do it.
Somebody.
That much was certain.
That night, Grove couldn’t sleep. While his mother, wife, and child slumbered in the shadows of the little colonial, he paced his kitchen, and squeezed his rubber stress ball, and waited for Cedric Gliane to call from the Bureau lab. The DNA tests were taking longer than expected, and Grove felt like a walking fuse, his nerves sizzling, flaring, and sparking. He had tried calling Los Angeles repeatedly but each time he had gotten Gliane’s voice mail.
Now he had a terrible feeling something was wrong. The calm around him—the ebb and flow of the air conditioner, the hum of the refrigerator—had started to mock him, taunt him, call out to him: Be careful, Old Hoss…them is Injuns out yonder in the dark.
Of course, Grove didn’t know it yet, but his intuition was correct. There was something gathering out there in the night, far to the west.
But it was not even remotely like anything he would have expected.
EIGHT
The U-Store-It mini-warehouse was located out on Old Six Mile Road, north of the pine barrens along Pickman Creek. The area was a ramshackle wasteland of landfills, fallow fields, dilapidated barns, and abandoned cement foundries. As far as the eye could see, the rolling hills lay scabrous and strewn with discarded car chassis and refrigerator boxes. Shreds of truck tires littered the skeletal woods. In the wee hours, the distant horizon glittered with broken glass.
Henry Splet drove down the access road to the east, then pulled into U-Store-It’s gravel lot. The crunch of the SUV’s tires pierced the silence.
Headlight beams fell on an automatic gate, which was shrouded in fog, the dull gleam of concertina wire curling along the pinnacles. The rusty guard shack, now boarded and empty, flanked the left side of the gate. Henry slammed the SUV into park, left it running, and climbed out.
Glancing over his shoulder, making sure he was alone, he strode over to the magnetic reader. He snapped his card through the slot, and a tiny green light winked. The gate began to rattle open.
Henry pulled the SUV into the labyrinth of narrow blacktop paths that ran between the low-slung tin buildings.
If most self-storage complexes were like honeycombs of low-rent neighborhoods, U-Store-It was like a rotting Calcutta slum compressed by a great garbage compactor. The corrugated roofs were buckled and dented and pocked with bird shit. The pavement was cracked and ulcerated and whiskered with weeds, and the endless rows of garage-style doors were all slathered with graffiti. In the dark it virtually glowed with methane and filth. Henry’s unit was in the last building.
He parked near the access door, turned off the SUV, and got out. Then he carried his souvenirs—still packed in their white carryout boxes—through the rusted door and into the darkness of the building.
He found the light switch, turned the timer dial to sixty minutes, then watched the fluorescent lights sputter on—most of the ancient tubes nearing the end of their lives, flickering and stuttering and sending nickelodeon shadows down the long narrow corridor of vertical accordion doors.
Henry walked the length of the corridor until he reached unit 213. One more glance over his shoulder. Something rattled in the distance, a muffled thump somewhere hundreds of yards away. There were others somewhere on the property. Henry would have to be careful. He fiddled with the padlock, and finally got the vertical door to rise.
The odor of ammonia and quicklime greeted him. He squeezed into the pitch-dark cell and lowered the door behind him for privacy. He pulled a string that dangled by his face. A bare incandescent bulb shone down from the low ceiling, illuminating the battered road cases containing his cameras, his beloved surgical instruments, a tattered Barcalounger armchair, canisters of film, unopened bottles of chemicals, boxes of pornography, and his vast collection of old yellowed Polaroids.
The pictures lined the walls, showing countless pairs of terrified human eyes in extreme close-ups, horrorstricken, forced open by makeshift retractors.
He went over to the miniature refrigerator in the corner, knelt down, and opened it. He put the human eyeballs on the bottom shelf, right next to the Mason jar filled with other eyeballs floating in formaldehyde. There were other souvenirs in there as well: some eyelids in a Tupperware container, one of them still sporting its long fake lashes, and a tiny gray tendril of tissue that Henry believed was an optic nerve.
The pièce de résistance was a gray, egg-shaped organ extracted from a victim’s skull, lovingly sealed in a pickle jar, suspended in mineral oil. Henry was convinced the organ was the occipital lobe, the part of the brain that records, calibrates, and interprets visual information. The human camera. This little piece of neurological anatomy fascinated Henry so profoundly it was almost erotic.
In fact, at this very moment, Henry felt the urge to look at the thing…so he pushed aside the other souvenirs and carefully pulled the pickle jar from the back of the shelf. He held it up to the light, and he shoved his free hand down the front of his pants.
He was just beginning to masturbate when he heard the noise out in the corridor.
It came from far away, through the walls, from the depths of the building, a familiar squeak and maybe a yelp. The telltale sounds of other doors opening. It made Henry jump slightly. He wrestled his erection back into his pants, then put the jar back in the fridge.
Henry cautiously raised his door—the rusty pulleys screaming—and he peered around the corner of his unit. In either direction, beyond the fluorescent tubes, the corridor stretched into shadows. Henry looked around. To his left was the entrance. Nothing moving there. But to his right, maybe fifty yards or so
away, at the far end of the hall, glowed a dull orange light. It reflected off a spray-paint-ravaged door, where the corridor made a ninety-degree turn.
Somebody was in the adjacent wing.
Swallowing his panic, Henry stepped into the hall, carefully lowering and locking the door to his unit. He took a deep breath and started toward the light.
As he approached the bend, he heard other noises. Some he recognized. Some he didn’t. There came a low, intermittent buzzing noise drifting through the silence, and the low, distant drone of voices. Henry turned the corner and saw the slum section stretching as far as he could see. The slum section had earned its moniker for obvious reasons, but most tenants preferred to simply call it the wing.
Henry stopped and gaped.
He had seen this corridor before, in all its ragged, squalid pathos—the trash drifting against the walls, and the endless rows of discount storage units with their cheap particleboard doors resembling some hellish dormitory—but he had never seen it this crowded.
Crowding every other doorway, it seemed, was a silhouette of a nodding junkie, or a zoned-out prostitute, or some poor obese welfare mother with her barefoot urchins scurrying around her. Times were tough. People needed shelter. An electric bug zapper crackled fifty feet away, and somewhere a transistor radio sizzled with Mexican music. The stench of urine and scat and scorched plastic—the smell of discarded crack pipes—hung in the air. Somewhere an unseen woman sobbed.
Henry strode down the hall, throwing furtive glances into each open unit as he passed. He recognized many of these poor lost souls: the Circus Lady, Mister Klister, Arturo the Graffiti Artist. Some of them were asleep. Some might be dead, for all Henry could tell.
In one unit cowered a waiflike young boy of no more than seventeen, his long oily locks dangling across his face as he crouched in the corner of a squalid little hovel brimming with old magazines, candy wrappers, and paperbacks. Garbed in a tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans with more holes in them than a slice of Swiss cheese, he trembled as he crouched there in the dark. His name was Angel. Henry had always felt sorry for the kid, but never probed any deeper than hello.
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