"And the dead one . . ."
"I don't have the information I need to make the call on that, General. Do whatever you think best, but let's keep the risks to a minimum. We're playing for stakes we can't afford to lose."
"Yes, sir."
The connection broke.
And that left Philips holding the bag.
The radar report was next.
Something had left New York-and not at any measly six hundred miles per hour this time; it was moving so fast that the radar had lost it almost immediately.
It had been heading south, though.
"Was it all of them?" Philips asked.
"No," came the reply-surprisingly unequivocal, for once. "No, most of 'em are still in New York."
Holding the city hostage, Philips thought.
Maybe two could play at that game. Maybe he could find something to trade, something to give them in exchange for New York.
The aliens had never wanted to communicate, and there'd never been any way to force the issue, but maybe, just maybe, that had changed. There might be something out there in the jungle those bastards wanted enough that they'd talk in order to get it.
And if he could get them to talk, maybe he could get them to lay off New York, stay out of American cities. Maybe he could barter for some of their gadgets.
This might be a disaster, they might just torch everything in retaliation-or it might be the greatest opportunity humanity had ever had.
"Get a squad ready," he barked. "Choppers loaded. We've got a pickup to make." He smiled grimly and reached for another cigar.
"Maybe two," he added as he lit the cigar.
Then he reached for the microphone to give Decoy-Niner his new instructions.
* * *
20
After a day back in the city, doing nothing but worrying about Shari and the boys, Rasche decided he couldn't stand to stay home any longer.
There weren't any calls on the answering machine at the house; a call to the department told him he hadn't had any calls there, either.
So there was no word from Schaefer.
He did call Shari's mother-from a pay phone, just in case-and she reported that everything was fine, Shari and the boys were there in Elmira, safe and well.
Rasche talked to his wife, and the sound of her voice was a relief. He reassured her that he was fine, too.
But he couldn't talk to her forever-his supply of change wouldn't hold-out, and he didn't want to use a calling card, since that would leave a record.
He went home, and after a day he couldn't stand it anymore; he phoned in to say he'd cut his vacation short and would be in the next day.
McComb grumbled; it was obvious he'd just as soon never see Rasche again, but he could hardly argue.
Then Rasche went down to Police Plaza and picked up a portable police radio and spent the evening installing it in the rental van, just in case.
That first morning back at work was dismal-the paperwork had piled up during his absence, but he couldn't concentrate on it. He kept thinking about Shari, out there in Elmira, hours away, and he kept remembering those swaying flayed corpses on the fifth floor on Beekman Street and in the basement on Twentieth, and he kept having nightmare visions of Shari hanging upside down with her skin peeled off, dripping blood in slow circles on the floor of her mother's front hall.
He couldn't even imagine where Schaefer might be, or what might have happened to him.
Some kind of hunter, Schaefer's brother had said but what did that mean? How was that different from any ordinary hit man? Why did this hunter skin his victims?
Did he always skin his victims?
And how many had there actually been? Did Rasche know about all of them, or were there some the feds had managed to keep quiet?
It was on the way back from lunch that Officer Brownlow caught him in the hallway.
"'Scuse me, sir," he said as he brushed Rasche's sleeve. "You're Detective Rasche?"
Rasche admitted it. He'd been taking a cup of coffee back to his desk, and he sipped it, then asked, "And who're you, the Easter Bunny?"
Brownlow introduced himself.
"I understand you're Detective Schaefer's partner? The one who got thrown out at Twentieth Street?"
"It was the scene at Beekman where he got thrown out," Rasche corrected. "At Twentieth Street they just politely asked us to go away"
Brownlow nodded. "Right," he said. "Well, I thought you might be interested in a couple of recent cases, sir. Nothing special, you understand, nothing that would interest the feds, but I thought you might want to take a look."
Rasche stared at him over the rim of the coffee cup.
"Oh? What sort of cases?"
"It'd be easier to show you the files, sir." He held up a thick sheaf of manila folders.
Rasche figured he wasn't going to get anything more important done anyway; he nodded, and the two men returned to Rasche's office.
Brownlow wouldn't tell him anything more; he left the folders on the desk and departed.
Rasche sighed and opened the first folder.
He spent the afternoon going over the cases that Officer Brownlow and others like him in the NYPD had decided wouldn't interest the feds.
Brownlow was right, though; the cases definitely interested Rasche. And they answered the question he'd wondered about earlier.
No, Rasche saw, it seemed that the hunter-hit man didn't always skin his victims-not if that was really who was responsible for these killings.
But when he didn't skin them, he took their heads and spines-he didn't just detach them, he took them. None of the heads had been found anywhere.
And, Rasche realized, they'd never found any of the skin from the other victims. It was just gone.
Heads . . . that wasn't unheard of. Killers had done that often enough. From ancient conquerors to sex killers, lots of people had cut off heads and taken them as trophies.
But spines?
Or skins?
This guy-if it was just one guy, which Rasche was beginning to doubt, despite what Schaefer thought-was very weird indeed. He remembered what Schaefer had said about the fight on Beekman-that his opponent hadn't been human.
Maybe Schaefer was right.
Hours after his shift ended, Rasche was still at his desk, but he was no longer even pretending to work. He just couldn't bring himself to leave the office.
After all, where would he go? Home, to an empty house? Shari and the kids were upstate; going home would just be depressing. It was too early to go to bed; the sun hadn't even set yet; it was one of those long summer afternoon that seems to go on forever.
And there wasn't anything to do at home but sleep-assuming he could sleep, knowing that that killer was out there somewhere roaming the city, ripping people apart and taking pieces as souvenirs.
And if Schaefer called, he'd probably call the office-at least Rasche thought so, but he could never be sure. Even after six years he didn't understand how Schaefer's mind worked. Sometimes Schaefer was smart and sharp and right on top of everything, and sometimes he'd be off in the twilight zone somewhere.
And right now he was off in Central America or Colombia or some goddamned place, and he hadn't bothered to call in.
Unless he'd tried calling the house while Rasche was here at the office.
But if he couldn't reach Rasche there, he'd have tried the office.
So he hadn't tried. He was still playing it solo. Rasche hated that; he was supposed to be Schaef's partner.
Not that he was about to fly off to Central America; he was too old and out of shape to go slogging through the jungle with Schaefer looking for monsters.
And Dutch had been Schaefer's brother, not his; Rasche had never met him. He wouldn't know what he was looking for, following Dutch's trail.
And Schaefer was the one who'd been Special Forces; Rasche's military career had consisted of a couple of years at Fort Bragg picking up cigarette butts. If it came down to some kind of pitched battl
e, Rasche wouldn't be much help.
But Schaefer still should have called.
So Rasche sat in his office, ignoring the stack of unfinished reports and the case files on three dozen unsolved murders, and stared at the screen of his -battered old portable TV
The TV was supposed to be there in case there was some breaking news story that concerned police, but mostly it was there so Rasche could watch WWOR when he didn't feel like pushing any more papers and there wasn't anything for him to do on the streets and he didn't want to think any more about the killings he was supposed to be investigating-or, in the present case, killings he was supposed to be ignoring.
And right now WWOR wasn't coming in, no matter how much Rasche fooled with the rabbit ears.
Reception had been lousy for the last two weeks even by New York standards, bad enough that the local stations had done news reports in which scientists from Columbia and NYU made wild-ass guesses about sunspots and radioactive pollutants trapped by the temperature inversion, but today the interference was worse than ever.
Rasche slapped the set in frustration, and Mr. Ed vanished in a blur of snow.
"Shit," he said. He got up and stared around the tiny room in frustration.
Maybe there was something in one of the desk drawers that he could distract himself with for a little while; he pulled one open at random.
He gaze fell on a bundle stuffed into the drawer-his jacket, wrapped around that helmet-mask thing that Schaefer had given him for safekeeping, the thing Schaefer had pulled off the killer's face just before being thrown out of the fifth floor of that empty building.
He had forgotten it was there; he had been too busy with other matters, like getting Schaefer to the hospital, and then to the airport, and then getting Shari out of town. He'd dumped it in there that morning when he and Schaefer had come in and McComb had called Schaefer in his office, the morning Schaefer had left for Central America.
Neither of them had ever really looked at the thing.
Maybe it was time somebody did.
Rasche didn't expect much; it was probably just a fancy hard hat, nothing but a chunk of inert metal, but it wouldn't hurt to look.
He unwrapped it.
The thing looked as if it was meant to cover a face and the top of a head, but the shapes and proportions were wrong-nobody had a face angled like that, and it was bigger than it needed to be.
It was smooth gray metal, with a dull finish but with no scratches or scars that Rasche could see. The eyeholes weren't just holes-they were lenses, dark glass, maybe red, Rasche couldn't really be sure.
He turned the mask over.
The inside was lined with something he couldn't identify, something slightly spongy, slightly leathery. There were metal insets that looked as if they might be decoration, or might be something electronic. There were little tubes on either side that looked as if they were meant to connect up to something, but they weren't quite right for any of the standard plugs or connectors Rasche had ever seen.
And something was glowing faintly beside the left eyepiece, a small yellow shape he couldn't identify.
Rasche frowned.
This wasn't just a mask, it was a gadget of some kind. But what did it do?
He held it up to the light from the window and peered through those eyeholes.
Then he blinked. He lowered the mask.
He saw the street, the sky awash in the orange fire of a spectacular sunset, the windows gleaming golden, the towers above the rooftops across the street shadow-black to the east, midday bright to the south and west.
And that was all he saw.
He turned back to his office-the desk, the TV, the bookshelves. He raised the mask and saw them all, eerily changed, but still recognizable-the desk, the TV, the bookshelves, masses of strange color that almost seemed to vibrate.
The mask changed what he saw, somehow-like those night-vision scopes the military used. Infrared, was. it?
Whatever it was, he was still seeing what was really there, it wasn't some sort of computer simulation. He held the mask up to his face-he couldn't put it on, his head wasn't big enough, wasn't the right shape, but he could hold it so that he saw out the eyeholes.
Desk, TV, bookshelves, chair, door, lamp, the TV antenna like blue lines of light, the TV itself hot pink; he could even read his own name backward on the glass of the door, purple-blue on green-blue.
Then he turned and looked out the window again.
And he saw the ships, cruising over the city-gigantic and alien, huge red-gold shapes against a deep-red sky.
Rasche wasn't stupid. He could recognize the incredible when his nose was rubbed in it.
Spaceships. Invisible spaceships that he could see only through this alien helmet..
Schaefer had been right all along. The killer wasn't human at all.
No, not "the killer." "Killers," plural. He could see three ships just from this one window.
And he could guess now why TV reception sucked.
"Sunspots, my ass," he said softly.
* * *
21
When dawn broke, the guide wanted to see the thing, to be sure it was really dead. He insisted on leading the mules to the edge of the cliff, and then climbing down for a good close look at the monster's remains.
Schaefer had no problem with that; he wasn't much for bragging, but he didn't mind showing off his handiwork if the other guy asked.
Just for the hell of it, he climbed down the cliff to look at the body, too.
The creature was still lying there, still dead; the pool of yellow-green blood on its chest, the smear on the branch that had impaled it, and the trickle that had spilled down one side had all faded to a greener, less luminescent hue.
Schaefer was interested to note that none of the local wildlife had made any visible attempt to feast on this particular gift; there were no flies, no ants, no beetles crawling on the corpse.
He was no scientist, but he could guess what that meant-this thing wasn't anything that had ever lived on Earth, and its chemistry was sufficiently different that the local fauna didn't recognize it as food.
Maybe it wasn't food; its flesh might well be as toxic as its attitude.
For the first time Schaefer was able to get a really good look at it, at the black mesh covering, the cannon thing, the metal-bound braids-if they were braids; now that he saw them, he wasn't sure. They looked almost solid, as if they weren't hairs plaited together, but some sort of thick tendrils.
That might have just been some sort of oily covering, though. He wasn't curious enough to remove the metal bands and see what happened.
The metal mask, the leathery guards at wrist and ankle with their intricate gadgetry, looked very high tech, but barbaric at the same time. The string of skulls it wore slung over one shoulder-mostly animal skulls, but with a human one at the end of the string-was just barbaric, without any tech. Schaefer noticed that there were a lot of blades and sharp edges involved in its various equipment.
This character had obviously considered itself a real badass.
Schaefer had run into people a few times before who thought that way. Most of them were wrong. This son of a bitch had at least had some justification for considering itself serious bad news.
"My God," the guide said, staring at it. "You really killed it."
Schaefer glanced at him. "You say that as if it were a bad thing," he remarked.
"You weren't supposed to kill it," the guide told him. "You weren't . . . We didn't think you could kill it. You and your damned brother. Do you have any idea what this means?" He knelt by the body, carefully not touching it, as if he were afraid it would burn him, or pollute him somehow.
Maybe it would, Schaefer thought. Maybe he'd caught some weird alien disease by fighting the thing.
Or maybe the guide was just a wuss.
"Yeah, sure I know what it means," Schaefer said. He grinned. "It means it's Miller time."
"Oh, laugh it up," the guide said bitterly.
He pulled something from his pocket, a gadget of some kind that Schaefer didn't recognize, and set it down by the dead creature. "Jesus, Schaefer, this isn't professional wrestling, these guys play for keeps!"
"So do I," Schaefer said, his smile fading. "You think I'm going to apologize for not dying? Get real." He turned away, disgusted, and started climbing back up the cliff, using the vines as ropes.
"This whole business was a setup from the minute I left New York, wasn't it?" Schaefer asked as he hauled himself up. "The reports I got that took me to Riosucio, you showing up, the way you led me right here-it was all an act. `Native guide;' huh? That's cute-what are you really? CIA? DEA?"
"Neither," the guide said, gasping slightly with the effort of climbing as he followed Schaefer up the cliff. "You never heard of us."
"Don't be too sure of that."
"Oh, we're sure," the guide said. "I don't suppose it matters anymore, so I might as well tell you, we're new, formed after your brother met one of those things. He killed his, too-but he lost his entire squad doing it, and it died more slowly, slowly enough to use a self-destruct that made that crater you saw."
"Lost his squad?" Schaefer turned as he reached the top and looked back down at the guide. Here was confirmation of what he had suspected. "That thing killed all of them? Blain, Hawkins, all of them?"
"All of them," the guide confirmed:
"And Dutch? Did it get him?"
Schaefer knew Dutch had survived the first encounter-had killed it, the guide said.
But that meant that there was more than one, that the one Schaefer had just killed was not the one that took out Dutch's men.
So had it gotten Dutch? Had it been after revenge for its dead buddy?
"Dutch got out alive," the guide said, "but that's all I can tell you."
That wasn't necessarily so, Schaefer realized; it just meant that the guide's people didn't know whether the second one had got Dutch.
Watt-Evans, Lawrence - Predator 01 Page 13