Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  yes, officer, it was a big van, white or yellow, going east

  of Jack’s van to the cops. What if they...

  “STOP!” he shouted into the van.

  He was yelling at himself, but he instinctively took his foot off the gas and applied it to the brakes for a moment.

  You can’t let yourself go crazy, he told himself. Even if they did see him pull away, all they could’ve seen was a white van. Nothing too distinctive about that, right? “What kind of white van was it?” the cop asks the witness, but she just stands there dazed. “I don’t know what kind of van, officer. I came up on the scene, and I was so concerned about that poor policeman that I didn’t really pay that good of attention to the van as it drove away.” The obligatory tears as the cop comforts the innocent who discovered the grisly scene.

  There were dozens of white vans just in this area of Florida. And as soon as he could get across the border into Mississippi, the heat would be off of him, for a time at least. It would take the Florida State Police days to coordinate with the Mississippi authorities, and by then Jack Terrington would be well on his way back to California, where he could finally stop running.

  He glanced again into the side mirror. Nothing. Not a sign of a cop car or a helicopter. Maybe he should get off in a town for a while and relax? He could get lost in the local traffic and get some rest, which he sorely needed.

  pull over and rest and relax need to think

  No, best to keep moving.

  Cops were very regimental, and one of the things they stuck with the most in his experience was an organized search pattern. They would start at the crime scene and move outward in concentric circles, checking everything before moving on outward. No, best to put as much distance between him and those dead bodies back there.

  That had been close, though. Damn close. He could admit it, now that he was a little ways away and his heart had stopped pounding. Closer to getting caught than he had come in a long time. Of course they had no way of knowing this, but if the Florida State Police did manage to collar him, it would close the book on a great number of unsolved cases nationwide, including three of them near Florida State University. He was a wandering predator, taking what he wanted when he wanted it, and he didn’t apologize for it.

  But he wasn’t stupid, either.

  Take this van, he thought. Everything about it and his ownership of it was completely legal and above-board. The van was registered under an alias of his with the California DMV, registered there when he had come down from Seattle in 1987. He had bought the van years earlier in Ohio, paying cash for it that he had taken from his earlier victims. Taxes, too.

  Now, every March, he settled down in some little town for two or three weeks, long enough to establish a semi-address and mail off the registration card. He had a stack of these in his glove compartment. He simply mailed them one of the cards in with his $68 money order every year. This covered the yearly taxes on his van, also. He would get a simple job at some restaurant or something, washing dishes, and after a week or two, he would receive his new registration card and tax sticker. And then he left town, usually the next day.

  And he never killed in these towns.

  It sounded like a lot of trouble, but when you get pulled over in Oklahoma, you’d better bet you butt you have a valid license and registration, or you could end up in some dusty backroom jail somewhere and they would impound your car or van or whatever. Wouldn’t those deputies get a thrill when they went through Jack’s van?

  So the little process went every year. His driver’s licenses were all fakes: he had destroyed his real license years ago when he had discovered that the fake ones were just as good. He now carried a fake California driver’s license, mostly because nobody east of Vegas knew what a real one was supposed to look like.

  In his collection in one of the cabinets in back, he also had four other identities, one of which from New York State, for use when he was on the Pacific coast. $60 to a college kid in Ithaca, who had run a sideline of making fake ID’s, or at least he had done up until the point where he met Jack. The kid had made him a license, taking Jack’s picture, and then Jack had taken the license, the negatives, the extra, unused photos, and the kid’s life.

  No, Jack was definitely not stupid, not by a long shot. He had once heard a debate on TV about crime. It was carried out by several high-and-mighty stuffed shirts that thought they knew a lot about crime and the criminal mind, and all of those men had thought themselves intelligent and successful.

  None of them would have lasted a day in the back of Jack’s van.

  Anyway, the debate was about crime and punishment, and one of the guys asked another guy about criminals. The second guy had replied with an answer that sounded as simplistic as it appeared: “Well, criminals are, for the most part, stupid. They aren’t careful. Eventually, they will be caught.”

  The first guy had pondered that for a moment and then opened his mouth and asked a question that had stuck in Jack’s head ever since: “Yeah, but what about if the criminal isn’t stupid? Would he ever get caught?”

  No, Jack didn’t think so. As long as Jack understood the methods and madness behind what he was doing, and as long as he carefully concealed his tracks and gave no hints of suspicion, Jack was confident that he could go on killing for as long as he wanted.

  No, he would never get caught. Over the years, he had developed a dark talent that helped him from getting caught. His was an instinct, able to lift his nose and sniff at the proverbial winds, spotting trouble even before it approached. He never got caught, never even come close to getting caught. He was just too good.

  Oh, sure, he’d been in some tight spots before, like tonight. But situations like tonight only served to keep him sharp as a knife, testing him and practicing him in the skills and methods of avoiding capture. If these types of situations didn’t come along occasionally, Jack would be in danger of becoming lazy, greedy, soft. They wouldn’t catch him, just as long as he stayed hard, honed and sharp as a knife.

  But he had only been sure of getting caught once. He had never been truly frightened, truly scared, not since...

  The name of the little town was Liberty, and he would never forget it. It had been over 18 years ago, but he could still vividly remember what it had felt like to be chased, to be hunted. Beaumont and his deputies had tracked him, pursued him. He could remember almost everything about that night: the soft sounds of the winds, moving easily through the trees, the cop cars sitting up there on the pavement at odd angles, their lights spinning dizzily, nauseating. He could remember walking up the hill, feeling like a god. He could easily remember that thrill of triumph as he stood over the body of the fallen Sheriff, laughing with tears of joy and happiness as he saw the way out of the situation that he had been sure would end his life.

  Beaumont, laying there in a pool of his own blood, moaning. Jack walking up. Jack killing him. Jack looking at him in the rear-view mirror of the stolen cop car, a car that he had driven for less than an hour before using the lights to pull someone else over. He had killed them and taken their car, leaving the patrol car by the side of the road.

  He reached over and grabbed the gun, holding it up to the light. LIBERTY POLICE DEPARTMENT, it read, the letters faded, pitted from use. The images and memories in Jack’s head seemed gauzy and dreamlike, but this hard hunk of cold steel in his hand proved that it was all true. He glanced down at the gold shield he’d taken off that cop only hours ago.

  Yeah. Beaumont had been a clever SOB, but he hadn’t been clever enough. He’d paid the price of crossing Jack. But in all those years since, on the road, Jack had never faced an opponent as crafty, as clever as Beaumont. The sheriff had somehow gotten inside Jack’s head and figured out how Jack thought, and that was when Jack knew that the Sheriff would have to die.

  Or maybe it was because Jack had just been starting out. He had only been on the road for a couple of years, and his career as a predator was in its infancy. He had been green,
predictable, and Beaumont had seen through it. Jack hadn’t known what he was doing, he was just a kid.

  If Beaumont and he could face off today, Jack was very sure of the outcome.

  Yeah, Jack had lucked out back there in Liberty, getting out of that one alive. Coincidence, timing, pure dumb luck. They had all played a part in the exciting and thrilling conclusion of that movie known as “Jack Escapes from the Dogs.” Sometimes, late at night, Jack would ponder over it, what he could remember, and try to figure out what he had done wrong. Yet another learning experience.

  Had Jack been lucky? Had Beaumont been smarter? It was hard to say. What would happen if they could actually face off today? Well, Jack knew that he would win, but WHY would he win? He had gotten smarter, and Beaumont was in a hole in the ground, so the comparison really wasn’t fair.

  Lucky, his mind told him.

  you just got lucky

  You ran like a scared little kid, ran and fell down in the rain, but falling down saved your bacon, and you know it. Or if the dogs and the deputies hadn’t been so obvious, making all that noise and letting on what they were doing. You wouldn’t have figured it out until it was too late, and then you would’ve been caught. You just got lucky.

  you weren’t very smart then, or now

  Jack signaled and changed lanes to pass the car he had quickly come up on. He was about halfway around the car when he noticed the blue and red bubble of lights, dim, on top.

  Images races through his mind. Cop looks over. Sees the white van. Realizes the van in passing him, exceeding the speed limit. Remembers what came over the radio just ten minutes ago. Something clicks inside his dull mind: WHITE VAN.

  Jack backed off and slid back into the space behind the cop car, mostly out of reflex.

  Stupid, stupid! That only attracts attention! Now the cop is thinking: hmmm, why didn’t he just pass me? He was already half way around, wasn’t he?

  Jack knew that it seemed suspicious, but he couldn’t pass the cop, not out here in the middle of nowhere. He had gotten just a glimpse of the cop and his partner, and killing again tonight was pretty much out of the question. No way he could leave a trail of dead cops all over northern Florida and not get caught - one dead cop was enough for tonight. But he couldn’t just pass them, and then get pulled over. It would feel too much like what happened earlier tonight.

  He could easily imagine looking in the side mirror and seeing this cop fire up his lights and pull him over for speeding and passing in a no passing zone.

  Looking in the side mirror and seeing that other cop pulling him over to give him some damn fool breathalyzer test.

  Looking in the rear-view mirror and seeing Beaumont laying there in a spreading pool of his own blood as Jack drove away in Beaumont’s car, the lights going.

  Beaumont, Beaumont, Beaumont! If he hadn’t been so busy thinking about that stupid sheriff who had beaten Jack so many years ago, he wouldn’t have been so distracted and tried to pass this cop car...

  Jack slowed off on the gas and allowed the cop car to pull away slowly, but not enough to really attract any attention.

  He remembered what he had been thinking. But had Beaumont really beaten Jack? Like a demon risen up from a dark and lonely graveyard, the face of Beaumont floated in and out of Jack’s awareness, calling to him like he had in that field behind the supermarket, calling out to him from the grave. The driver of the white van with the jars and bottles pondered on Beaumont, on the cop he had killed earlier in the evening, on the cop car that slowly pulled away from him and disappeared. He thought about these things for a long time, and when the interchange came up, the one with the exits that led west into Mississippi and north into Georgia, Jack was too busy thinking to really notice he had turned north until much later, and then the decision seemed like a good one.

  Liberty, Virginia was this way.

  Dead but somehow ever alive, ever active in Jack’s mind, so was Beaumont.

  Tropical Storm Mandy churned slowly across the Atlantic Ocean, heading for the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Bahamas beyond.

  Until 2:00 A.M. on Sunday morning the circular collection of wind and clouds had been known simply as Tropical Depression 24, but when the winds had picked up and strengthened, the U.S. National Weather Service had upgraded it to an official Tropical Storm, the 13th in a year of relatively mild tropical weather.

  The tempestuous currents and wind patterns of the southern Atlantic had only spawned four serious hurricanes during the seven months of the official hurricane season, and scientists and meteorologists were writing papers and commenting on the particular and peculiar mildness of the season. In fact, it was the first year in a long time when a major hurricane had not caused property damage or any fatalities in the continental United States.

  Some people saw that as a good thing, but others, like Tracker Randy Kovacs, felt that it was only a harbinger of things to come. He had spent many years studying and tracking hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons, essentially the same type of tropical storm, and he had grown to feel that the storms came and went in cycles. A slow cycle now only meant that things would be as bad or even worse in the future. Maybe not this year, but next season or maybe the season after that would be a bad one - it all evened out.

  As with many scientists, Randy had a way of personifying the subjects he studied, and he felt deep in his heart that if they escaped this year with no serious storms, next year’s hurricane season would be that much worse.

  Mandy was the 13th tropical depression of the year that had grown in strength enough to be a threat to the eastern United States, and therefore it was named and categorized and planes in Miami and San Juan and Nassau were being readied for flight. Tropical depressions were numbered, and named only if they became actual tropical storms.

  Kovacs sat at his Power Mac terminal in the National Hurricane Center (NHC), an underground concrete bunker operated by the National Weather Service (NWS) in Coral Gables, Florida, just north of Miami. He was studying the latest satellite photos from GEOSat 4. It was the newest of the GEOSat satellites and it gave the clearest, most accurate views of the southern Atlantic, and careful study of these satellite images, along with reams of atmospheric data compiled by released weather balloons and the high-flying Maverick and Cessna planes, would help Randy and other hurricane experts try and determine where Mandy would go.

  A secure landline also connected the NWS computers in the station with other computers at the National Climatic Data Center in Houston, a huge complex of buildings full of scientists and meteorologists who compiled data on weather patterns all over the world. But Randy was only interested in wind and rain patterns in the Caribbean right now.

  It was funny how these storms got personified, Randy thought. When it was a number, no one really cared, but as soon a name was tacked onto it, the tropical storm or hurricane seemed to truly take on a life of its own. Randy and the other Trackers, as they were called because they were the best in the business at trying to guess where (and when) the storms would go, invariably spoke about their hurricanes like they were actual people, and sometimes the storms would ‘think’, or ‘walk’, or ‘sprint’, depending on what else was going on around them. “She’s thinking about heading over Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico, I tell you,” or something like that. And really, even with all the information and numbers and hard data that the computers digested and processed, all that Randy and the other Trackers on staff at the NHC could do was give an educated guess as to what the storms were ‘thinking’.

  But then, sometimes the storms actually did have a personality of their own, and often they resembled other storms from the past. Hurricane Enid in 1993 had refused to come ashore, despite all the best models and guesses that showed the storm should make landfall near Charleston, South Carolina. She'd coasted along, a hundred miles offshore, and finally sputtered out of existence somewhere up by Greenland.

  And other storms were ferocious, spiteful and angry. Hurricane Max three years ago (th
e concept of alternating male and female name instituted back in 1987 was still viewed with grudging acceptance - most of the scientists and Trackers were men, and it was easier to think about the storms in feminine terms, feisty and unpredictable) had roared into Miami, far outpacing what the scientists had said was its top possible speed over the open stretch of water between Florida and Cuba. He had hit land a full 12 hours early, and the NWS had been grilled for its lack of warning to the populace.

  They had learned their lesson, too - now warnings were offered for the next 48 hours instead of the next 24, as was the case previously, even though the accuracy of such long-range predictions were iffy at best. But so many cities and towns along the Florida coast had grown in size, it now took longer than 24 hours just to evacuate all the inhabitants inland, and so the big heads at NWS in D.C. had decreed that the 48-hour warnings go out, even though they were on the mark less than half the time.

  Max had torn the place up pretty badly, flattening a couple of big warehouses in Miami and causing extensive property damage up and down the coast. Max had ended up with a death toll of something like 63, and of those 24 were killed in Vero Beach when a bingo parlor ceiling collapsed on a group of senior citizens seeking shelter from the storm.

  To Kovacs, Tropical Storm Mandy looked harmless, a collection of false-color images swirling on his computer screen. The different colors denoted different wind speeds and precipitation amounts, all moving around the dark blue of the calm eye, and the swirling pattern of clouds didn’t look like it was coalescing quickly enough to be dangerous, at least not in the next 12 hours.

  Of course, you never knew for sure. It was pretty big for a late-season storm, her arms extending out for a couple hundred miles, judging by the little scale laid over the image in the lower right hand corner.

  It was easily the largest storm they’d seen in months, but it would probably coalesce and reduce size before it made land.

  Kovacs wrote up a little note on a Post-It - the entire Center was fueled by those little yellow slips of paper - and stuck it on the picture before throwing it in his bosses’ inbox. Randy’s night shift was almost over and if anything happened with the storm, he would be back for the next evening shift at 4 p.m., anyway.