Fear the Night n-5

by John Lutz

  “Which they are sometimes.”

  “Which they are,” Meander agreed. “What you need, Bobby, you po homeless fucker?”

  “I need what you sell. A phone.”

  Meander looked surprised-for him. His eyelids raised to the three-quarter-open position, then dropped back to half. “Who the fuck you be callin’ on the phone, walkin’ bundle of rags like you?”

  “My broker?”

  “You broke, all right. You can’t afford no phone.”

  “I got ten dollars.”

  “That be different, but it still ain’t enough.”

  “It’s all I’ve got.”

  Meander remained slouched, but he crossed his arms over his bony chest. “It still ain’t enough.”

  “Look in your box and I bet you’ll find something in my price range. Do it as a favor.”

  “Mean you gonna owe me a favor?”

  “That’s the idea,” Bobby said. “How the world is greased.”

  “You ain’t a cop or nothin’, so what the fuck good’s a favor you owe? You jus’ a po fool like I used to be ’fore I became a businessman.”

  “I used to be a cop.”

  “Like I used to be police commissioner. ’Sides, you a cop once, you always a cop.”

  “Whatever. Let’s trade favors. I’ll owe you one in return for a ten-dollar phone.”

  “Ain’t no such thing as a ten-dollar phone, Bobby. Ain’t you kept pace with technology?”

  “I’m trying to gain ground. That’s why I wanna trade favors. Your favor’d be a discount on the phone, and mine’d be something you need in the future.”

  “Trade favors, my ass. Cops don’t do that kinda deal.”

  “Sure they do. Anyway, like you said, once a cop. .” Bobby glanced meaningfully at the incriminating box full of stolen wares.

  Meander straightened up from the wall, somehow still slouching. “You fuckin’ threatenin’ me?”

  “Just pointing out about how favors work between friends.” Bobby was threatening him and both men knew it. Bobby twisting an arm, working the street again. Bobby back on the Job. It felt good, throwing a scare into a booster like Meander. It felt right.

  “Now, that the kinda deal a cop makes,” Meander said. “Do the favor or fuckin’ else. That what you’re sayin’, Bobby, my man? That what I’m hearin’?”

  Bobby merely stared at him. Fixed him with the dead-eyed look that might mean anything, including explosive danger.

  “Maybe I got a spare phone at that,” Meander said, squinting slightly as if for the first time bringing Bobby into focus. “Be an Amickson clamshell, obtained yesterday.”

  “Never heard of an Amickson.”

  “It be a good brand, made in North or South some country or other.”

  “Does it work?”

  Meander appeared internally injured. “Do it work? Fuckin’-A right it work! Ain’t no Mo-torola or No-kia. Tha’s why it’s cheap, why we can do the deal. That an’ I got no way to charge up the motha.”

  “Huh? You wanna sell me a dead phone with no way to charge the battery?”

  “Dead? Ain’t dead, man. I say dead? Got some power left. Got a rabbit.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Battery indicator uses little rabbit icons. Five rabbits be fully charged. You got a whole rabbit left. Might last a few minutes, maybe an hour. Hell, you might be buyin’ half a dozen phone calls. Cheap at the price. Couldn’t sell it at such a discount, ‘cept it was dropped. I acquired it myself, an’ no sooner it hit the pavement, I put it right back together.”

  “You mean you dropped it when you were running away from whoever you stole it from.”

  Meander scratched his head. “That what I mean?”

  “Anything else I should know about this phone?”

  “Nothin’. Oh yeah, the six don’t work. Button don’t press no more.”

  Bobby summoned up the phone number he might have to call. “That’ll be okay. Just the six not working?”

  “Got my fuckin’ word. You a good customer, Bobby, so why’m I gonna piss you off?”

  “Amusement?”

  Meander chuckled. “Fuckin’ ’musement!” He turned and rummaged around in the box, then held up the phone for Bobby to see. Small, black, with blue buttons. It looked okay, though it wasn’t the clamshell flip type as Meander had said. Lying could become an addiction.

  Bobby leaned closer and peered. The 6 looked like all the other buttons. The phone appeared not to have been dropped hard enough to damage the case or cause much interior damage. There were small red letters across the top. “Amickson,” Bobby read aloud. The script looked Gothic. The screen glowed and a small rabbit appeared in the upper left-hand corner. One of its ears appeared to be missing.

  Meander did a tight little dance. “You want it or not? Gotta get off the stool, man. No more negotiation. I’m doin’ business here an’ the shit I sell’s of the highest quality. Tell the truth, you ain’t shoppin’ Cadillac, ’cause you one po motha. You want a phone be an off-brand, got no spare battery that’ll fit it, got no charger an’ jus’ a little charge, no number six button-price be ten dollars. An’ it’s guaranteed. It don’t work, you can bring it back.” Meander grinned. “Ain’t about to git your money back, though.”

  Bobby fished the ten dollars-three crumpled bills and the rest in change-from his pocket and handed it over. “You’re all heart, Meander.”

  “All head’s what I be. All business. Anyways, what difference it make? What party a loser like you gonna call? What you up to, Bobby? You talkin’ to Mars? Or maybe Ur-anus?”

  “Maybe Mars,” Bobby said.

  “Well, here’s your space phone.” He stuffed the money from Bobby in his pocket before handing over the phone. “Be the special of the day, price you paid. Now git on. I don’t want no homeless motha hangin’ round, be bad for business. I’m done with charity for today.”

  “Charity? I thought you didn’t have a heart.”

  “Huh? I say that?”

  Bobby slipped the phone into the pocket that had carried the money to buy it, then nodded to Meander and moved away down the street.

  Considering what the ten dollars might have bought, the phone could be a bargain.

  If it worked when it was needed. If the rabbit didn’t die.

  Lora was perched on the window seat, her back to Bank Street. Her shoulders were hunched, helping to add ten years to her age in the failing light, and her gaze was solemn.

  She said, “This is driving me goddamned crazy, Vin.”

  “Both of us,” Repetto said, pacing.

  “Why don’t we go grab her by both arms and force her out of that apartment? That death trap?”

  “That’d be against the law.”

  “Then we break the fucking law!”

  Repetto stopped pacing to face his wife squarely. “She’d go back. She can do that. She would do that.”

  Lora lowered her gaze to the floor. “This is your decision, not mine.”

  “It’s Amelia’s decision,” Repetto said. “If it was mine, it’d be the same as yours.”

  After a long pause, Lora said, “You’re right.” She began shaking her head from side to side. “It’s just so damned hard to swallow.”

  Repetto began pacing again, wondering if she really had swallowed it. Beyond her hunched form framed by the window, he watched night begin to fall.

  Just from reading the papers it hadn’t been hard for Bobby to figure out the identity of the Sniper’s next intended victim. And to know from reading between the lines that Amelia Repetto might still be in town, refusing to be run off by fear.

  If true, she was one gutsy young lady. Not stupid, from everything Bobby had read about her, so it must be courage.

  Bobby had figured out her address easily from what they said about her neighborhood in the paper, and from the A. Repetto listed in the phone directory. Easy for him, easy for the Sniper. Bobby knew how the police would think, how they’d lay out their protec
tion. He was walking the neighborhood of Amelia’s apartment, not getting too close, prowling the perimeter and gradually working his way inward. The lowering evening was cool enough to be comfortable, moonlit and without much of a breeze. A shooter’s night.

  He touched the hard plastic of the cell phone in the pocket where he usually kept the handouts he’d garnered. He thought about the Sniper. And Amelia Repetto. So maybe this’ll be the night. Or maybe he’ll let her sweat awhile longer. Let everybody sweat.

  Or maybe she wasn’t sweating. At twenty-one, he’d thought nothing could kill him. Amelia Repetto might still feel she was immortal.

  All the more dangerous.

  Bobby had a feeling about tonight. His rusty instincts from when he was a cop in Philly were working well and governing his actions, his plan.

  He felt good tonight. Meander had been right with his “once a cop always one” remark. Even a dickhead like Meander had that one figured out.

  Bobby was back even though he’d never really been away.

  Tonight, every night, he was a cop.

  “I know I shouldn’t call and tie up her line,” Lora said. “I’ll call her cell phone.”

  She was on the cell phone now. With Repetto. He was in an unmarked vehicle half a block down from his house, where Lora was inside and on the phone, but she didn’t know that. A radio car would arrive soon to take his place. Lora had to have police protection, too. In case the Sniper’s stated intention to try for Amelia was a feint. Repetto and Lora hadn’t discussed that possibility, but he knew she must be aware of it.

  But Repetto didn’t think the threat to Amelia was a feint. That wasn’t the way the Sniper would play the game. Not this stage of the game, anyway.

  “I want to go to her, Vin.” Lora said. “Every fiber of me wants to.”

  “That’s the last thing you should do. Maybe the thing the Sniper wants most.”

  “I tried again to talk her into leaving the city, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  “I tried too. She’s-”

  “Bullheaded, like you.”

  Repetto didn’t argue with her.

  “All right,” Lora said with a sigh, after ten or fifteen seconds of his silence. “I’ll get off the phone. But I want to know what’s going on.”

  “You will know,” Repetto said. “I promise.”

  “Our daughter-”

  “Only daughter,” Repetto said. “She has guts.”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit, Vin. I want her to stay alive. Dal had guts and look what happened.”

  Repetto really, really didn’t want to get into this. He felt his grip tighten on the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” Lora said, as if she were right there in the car with him and had seen the effect of her words.

  “That’s okay,” Repetto said. “It’ll all be okay if we let the police do their job.”

  He sounded as if he really believed it.

  The Night Sniper sat at the antique oak table in his gun room and worked the ramrod that was reaming the barrel of the Webb-Blakesmith competition rifle that was from his collection. This rifle didn’t disassemble down to caseable components for travel like a lot of the custom-made weapons in the collection, and wouldn’t fit in his backpack; but he wanted to use this particular weapon for its accuracy, and because it was one of his favorites. For such an important shot, there could be no other choice.

  As he usually did with rifles that wouldn’t break down and fit into his backpack, he would wear his long, lightweight raincoat to conceal the weapon. It could be carried in a sling beneath the tattered coat. That was easy to do, with the stock tucked in his armpit, and the sling’s hook run through the trigger guard behind the trigger. He could hold the rifle tight against his side beneath the coat and walk with the defeated shuffle of the homeless. He didn’t mind using the concealed sling, because he had no illusions about tonight. It would be best to keep the rifle handy in case he had to shoot his way out of an unfortunate situation. The odds were with him because he planned carefully, but still there was always the unexpected challenge.

  In the bright lamplight, he admired the cleanly designed and constructed steel mechanism of the rifle, the precision firing pin and gas ejection breech, the lightly sprung trigger and long, blued barrel with its matte black sights that reflected no light that might disrupt aim. Wonderful! Man had devised few mechanisms as precise and reliable as the firearm.

  Drawing the ramrod from the barrel, he sat back for better light. He examined the square of white cotton on the end of the ramrod and saw no dark markings. The rifle was clean. Ready and reliable. Still, he fitted a new square of cloth over the end of the ramrod and reinserted it in the barrel.

  For a long time he sat at the table in the lamplight, working the ramrod back and forth in the long, grooved barrel, thinking about tonight.

  About Amelia Repetto.

  Rapunzel.

  54

  Amelia was having a migraine this evening, which Meg understood. The young woman’s head should be splitting open with fear. Right now she was lying down in the dim bedroom with a cold compress over both eyes. The drapes were closed, the bedroom lights turned low, and the windows locked. Amelia was protected not only by the NYPD personnel in the neighborhood, but by locked doors and steel-barred windows, and by Meg.

  Meg was confident and relaxed. That was partly because her charge, Amelia, was cooperative and at least temporarily safe from harm, and partly because Meg had, at Amelia’s insistence, sipped half a glass of what was left of last night’s cheap red wine with Amelia, while Amelia had three glasses in a futile attempt to fend off her developing headache. Probably, Meg thought, it had made the headache worse.

  No one had called or knocked on the door since Knickerbocker-Mr. Chicken-had delivered the nightly takeout meal, most of which was now in the refrigerator. Meg was tired but had no desire to go to bed like Amelia. Instead she sat on the sofa and found herself staring at the phone.

  Found herself thinking about Alex.

  It couldn’t have been the few ounces of wine she’d sipped to pacify Amelia, not even enough, to Meg’s way of thinking, to constitute drinking while on duty. So maybe it was the situation, the tension. Whatever the reason, she couldn’t stop thinking about Alex and had to fight an almost overwhelming desire to go to the phone and call him.

  If she could simply hear his voice, it might help. She might be able to chase him from her thoughts.

  It would be so easy to pick up the phone and call.

  Insane to think this way.

  But it would be so easy.

  Then she realized the apartment’s phone line might be tapped, in case the Sniper called. Not his MO thus far, but as he’d warned in his note, the game had changed. And he seemed to be the maker of the rules.

  Of course, Meg could always contact Alex with her cell phone. That call wouldn’t be picked up with a wiretap. Amelia was probably asleep, but even if she weren’t, she was unlikely to come out of the bedroom for quite a while. No one would know if Meg made a brief phone call. What was there to lose?

  She got up from the sofa and moved to a wing chair farther from the door, where her call was less likely to be overheard.

  Meg hesitated, knowing the possible consequences, but she had no real choice. Her heart was in control.

  She watched her hand, like someone else’s hand, peck out Alex’s number on her cell phone.

  He picked up on the second ring.

  Meg didn’t say anything after he’d identified herself. Then she said quickly, before he might hang up, “It’s Meg-Officer Doyle.”

  “More questions, Meg?” Alex sounded unsurprised to hear from her, even faintly amused. At the same time, she was sure she picked up pleasure in his voice, knowing she’d called him.

  “Yes. I had a few spare minutes and thought-”

  “You’d spend them with me.”

  This is hopeless. I’m hopeless. “All right, yes. That’s exactly what I thought. Spend them with you o
n the phone, I mean.” Why am I always so flustered around this man?

  “Good. So how’s the Night Sniper investigation going?”

  Now he wanted to talk business. “We’re progressing.”

  “That’s the sort of thing you tell the media.”

  “Or a-”

  “Suspect,” he finished for her. “Only you don’t really take me seriously as a suspect, do you?”

  “I phoned you,” Meg said. She heard his low laughter.

  “There’s an oblique answer. Looks to me like Repetto’s daughter might be the Sniper’s next target. I hope she went somewhere safe.”

  “She didn’t-listen, that’s not why I called.”

  “Wait a minute. You mean the daughter-what’s her name? — is hiding out someplace in New York City?”

  “I didn’t say that and didn’t mean it.”

  “Where are you calling from, Meg?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “I can guess. Jesus! Doesn’t Repetto have enough sense to-”

  “That isn’t what I called about, Alex.”

  He sighed. “Okay, I’m sorry. I hope you called just to hear my voice, and so I could hear yours.”

  Which was true, but Meg didn’t want to admit it. “I think we need to be realistic. I admit I’m attracted to you.”

  “Then why don’t we-”

  “Because I’m a cop working an open homicide case. A lot of open homicide cases.”

  “And I’m a suspect?”

  “Back to that again, are we? I’m not worried about you being a suspect.”

  “Then you’re worried about what would happen to your career if someone found out about us.”

  “No. Well, yes. But that’s not all. It simply isn’t right. We’re goddamn adults, Alex. We can wait until this investigation is closed.”

  “You called me, Meg.”

  “Because sometimes I’m stupid.”

  “I don’t think so. But what if the investigation’s never closed? I’ve been a cop, Meg. I know how many unsolved homicides there are out there. How many nutcase killers are never caught. This sicko might stop killing people; then the news about him would taper off, something else newsworthy would happen, and that’d be that.”

  “He isn’t going to stop. He can’t.”