Headhunter

by Michael Slade

  Now it is entirely possible that there was another Sycamore Maple tree within the Lower Mainland.

  It is also possible that even if the sand in the bucket was from here it was carted to some other place.

  But when you've been a cop as long as I have, you learn to trust your instinct. And my gut told me the Headhunter had been inside this structure. I broke out in a sweat.

  For, you see, I had spent my whole life living in fear of this moment. Sure I had become a cop to confront my psychological dread of blood. But the night we caught the squeal on the John The Baptist killing, where an old man in a derelict rooming house had murdered his best friend, cut off his head, put it on a plate and knocked on his landlady's door, I stayed in the squad room and let Leggatt take to the wheels. Sure, I may have confronted those pictures, blowing them up in size. But a photograph is one thing. Butchered human flesh another.

  I wanted to cut and run. Instead my right eye started twitching.

  "Don't be afraid of fear, son. We all have to conquer it someday—one way or another."

  And I knew my day had come.

  I moored the boat to the bunker pier and climbed the rickety stairs. Halfway up I removed my .38 from the holster clipped to my belt.

  From the rear the Quonset hut didn't look much different than it did from the front. Same streaked metal. No windows. Only a single door secured with a new combination lock. I knocked on the door and stood off to one side just in case some shots came through. When nothing happened, I waited. Then I knocked again. Once more. Once again. And decided no one was home.

  That was when I noticed the smell that was coming from inside the hut. It was like the stench of rotting meat combined with the stench of rotting fish. I knew for certain then that I did not want to enter this place, just as I knew for certain that I would. I'd have to go back to that hardware store to obtain the necessary tools. So I climbed back down the rickety stairs and cast off in the boat.

  It was as I inched off to the left of the pier to make for the open slough that I saw the gap between the back of the dock and the concrete wall of the bunker. The wall was shadowed by the ladder down to the pier but in the murk I could still discern some sort of opening. I secured the boat again to a piling and stepped into the water. Knee-deep in sludge I waded up onto the sandy, leaf-strewn shore.

  The space behind the dock was no more than three feet wide. It was a day of cold clear weather and sunlight stabbed deep into the shadows through cracks in the plank-joins above. Where there was protection from the rain I saw a mass of tangled spiders' webs and the oozy trails of summer slugs.

  The opening was a square wooden door, more a hatch, set into the concrete wall just over five feet up from the ground. The high tide mark was a foot below it. This door was secured with a padlock that it took me ten minutes to pick. In my job the tools for this sort of work are constantly on your person.

  The hinges squealed as I eased open the hatch.

  I removed the police flashlight from my back left pocket and shone the torch inside. The beam illuminated a concrete passage about three feet square. The tunnel sloped down at an angle, then straightened out again so I couldn't see its end. Taking a deep breath, I used the pier supports to hoist myself up so that I could wriggle in through the opening. Working my feet and using my hands I inched my way down the narrow passage—until I got stuck.

  Have you ever had claustrophobic fear slip inside your skull and begin eating small chunks of your brain? Well there I was, halfway down this incline, the slope of it making blood rush to my head, my body stuck, my arms confined. I thought my mind would snap if I couldn't move my arms. I'd be stuck like this until what? I starved to death?

  Details began to flood into my senses. A smell within this tunnel, the smell of burnt human flesh. Two red eyes of a water rat just up ahead and sniffing at my fingers. Green slime on the roof, shaded a glistening black where the torchlight died away. The squish of rat shit in small lumps on the floor beneath my face. And then into the realm of my misery intruded this germ of an idea.

  Pulling with my fingers, pushing with my toes, then reversing direction I began twisting and turning my body, trying desperately to coat both my skin and clothes with the foul-smelling ooze. Rat shit and slime: that might just get me moving.

  And it worked.

  Soon I was once more advancing, centimeter by centimeter down this mushy incline. I reached the bend in the tunnel where the passage opened wider only to find myself confronting yet another barrier—this one a crosshatch of iron bars with a padlock on the other side.

  Twenty-five minutes it took me to do a job on this one. I had to work my fingers with the pick through a couple of the crosshatch holes, moving the flashlight with my chin to get the right illumination. If the pick dropped from my sweaty fingers there would go the ball game. But I finally did it and pushed the bar-door open. Wiggling through I dropped head first six feet down to the floor.

  Thank God the flashlight survived the tumble. I picked it up and shone it around.

  Mr. Albert Stone's fallout shelter was something to behold. The walls were of concrete, no doubt many feet thick, surrounding a room ten feet by twelve. The floor was of concrete. The roof was of concrete. And there was a concrete slab off to one side of the tunnel I had just come through, positioned so that it could be slid across as a radiation barricade. A second slab of concrete stood to the right of some stairs, and these I immediately climbed.

  The stairs ended abruptly at yet another doorblocking my progress. This door was of steel sealed by a combination lockset right into the metal. So much for that. I had no doubt that this threshold led to the Quonset hut.

  As I began to descend the stairs I heard twigs crunching underfoot. When I shone the light down I saw that I was treading on hundreds of little rat bones. Then as I reentered the fallout shelter I was met by another uneasing thought. With the door at the top of the stairs locked, the only way out of here was back the way that I had come. And I was not yet ready for that.

  Stalling, I began to examine the details of the room. Before long I had reached the conclusion that I would rather fry in a nuclear war than spend a couple of years in here.

  There were stacks of canned goods and rows of glass bottles scattered around the floor, one wall nothing but shelves of tins, their labels long since disintegrated, piled up to the ceiling. Here was a rusted first-aid medical kit; there a coal-oil hurricane lamp. There were several boxes of 350 paperbacks, all of them science fiction. There was a. . . .

  There was a water rat with beady eyes watching me intently from a breach in one of the walls. I hadn't noticed the opening before.

  I crossed over to this alcove door and shone my torch inside. Instantly I was horrified, shocked almost numb by what met my eyes.

  The chamber was approximately ten feet by ten. Once again it was constructed entirely of concrete. Against the wall to my left there was an old-fashioned full-length mirror. In front of me, raised up from the floor, was this square slab of cement that looked much like an altar. On top of it were two candlesticks and a very large silver box. The surface of the slab was stained and streaked by puddles and rivulets of dried and clotted blood. Fingers of blood ran down its sides and across the floor. In a semicircle behind this altar were seven sharpened poles. And rammed down on each pole, the sticks bursting through the bone at the top of the cranium, were seven grinning skulls.

  It was at that moment that the rat bit me on the ankle (rabies!)and I dropped the flashlight.

  This time it broke and the room went black.

  Oh God! I cursed myself. Why did I give up smoking?

  But on fumbling in my pockets I found I still had a box of matches. I lit one and put it to the wick of one of the candles. Then I approached the silver metal box.

  As I touched the lid my palms were sweating, and as I began to lift the cover, hackles rose on my neck. I was so sure—so certain—that inside I was going to Find a severed head.

  When I peered in
side what I saw was even worse than that. There were eight of them, plus the other object. And then it all came together, at last.

  Tzantza

  Thursday, December 23rd, 7:10 p.m.

  Genevieve DeClercq closed the notebook and then sat very still. She was curled up in an easy chair and she was wearing a formal dress, the green velvet low-cut and tight-waisted, its shade the color of a glade in late spring. Her hair was combed up at the sides of her head, there held by two mother-of-pearl clips before tumbling back down to her shoulders. She had kicked off her shoes and had tucked up her feet into the folds of the skirt. Now she was playing with a strand of her hair and asking herself quite seriously: Do I believe him?

  She was afraid of the answer.

  Across the living room of his apartment Al Flood stood at the large front window and stared down four floors to Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Beyond Genevieve's reflection in the glass he could see the stream of Causeway traffic streaking through the night. Everyone rushing,he thought to himself, with nowhere important to go.

  He abandoned her image on the windowpane and turned back into the room. "Would you like another brandy?" he asked quietly.

  Genevieve nodded her head. "Please," was all she said.

  Flood walked over to the small bar set beside the window. He selected a bottle of Remy Martin which he carried across the room to pour two fingers in her glass. The woman held out the snifter. She drank a third of the refill in a single gulp. Flood watched her wince and thought, I love you even more.

  "How do you feel," he asked her, "about what I wrote in the book?"

  "Flattered," she said. "Skeptical. Sorry. And somewhat afraid."

  "Not afraid of me, I hope." And he struggled to give her a smile.

  "Afraid for you, Al, if what you wrote is from your imagination."

  "Do you believe me?" he asked.

  Genevieve took another sip and then looked him in the eye. "Before I reply to that will you answer a couple of questions?"

  "Sure."

  "What did you do after you opened the box?"

  "Took off my jacket and placed the contents inside. I added the unlit candlestick, then carried both my satchel and the burning candle over to the hole in the wall." He paused. "I put the light down on the floor and piled up some boxes as a ladder. Then pushing the sack in front of me I crawled back out the way I had come. It was easier without the thickness of my overcoat."

  "Why the candlestick?" she asked.

  "Fingerprints," he said. "I took the boat back to the hardware store"—he laughed—"and you should have seen the look on the owner's face when I came in covered in shit. Then I stopped at a doctor's for a rabies shot and came back here to clean up. That's when I called you."

  "Why?" Genevieve asked.

  Flood's eyes wavered from hers as he said: "You're the wife of Robert DeClercq. Besides, didn't we make a compact, that day that we had brunch? What was it you said?"

  Her face took on the hint of a frown. "I told you that I was desperate and asked for your discretion as a friend. I said that my husband was . . . well having problems and that I had to help him somehow. I had stayed up all night reading those files and I didn't know where to start. Then about five in the morning I came upon your name listed as the Squad liaison officer with the Vancouver Police. I recognized you as the fellow auditing one of my seminars and ..." Her eyes wavered.

  "And what?"

  "And I knew that you were in love with me and would do anything to help. So I suppose I used you, didn't I?"

  "I don't mind," Flood said.

  "It's just that I had nowhere else to turn. I couldn't go to the RCMP and say that Robert was . . . was cracking up. He was senior officer, with everyone else below him Beside, there was so much public pressure they'd have pulled him in a minute. So I came to you and asked for secrecy I made you promise to tell me first anything you found out. I hoped your

  feeling for me would both make you want to help me and also keep you quiet. God, I sound awful, don't I?"

  "No, it was good for both of us. If you hadn't motivated me I'd never have seen it through. But to answer the question why did I call you first?— it's both to keep our pact, and also to now use you. I need access to DeClercq. You can give me that."

  "Why did you start the diary?" Genevieve asked, changing the subject abruptly.

  "My life was getting out of control, what with the Head-hunter crimes playing on my neurosis. I had to set things down to get them in perspective. Catharsis, I guess."

  "So John Lincoln Hardy was framed?"

  "Yes."

  "And all those things in that mountain shack—they were all planted there?"

  "Everything but the masks and the cocaine."

  "But who would do that?" Genevieve asked.

  "A cop," Flood replied. "Only a cop could be in position to manipulate the frame."

  "Why?" the woman asked.

  "I can only guess. Maybe the Headhunter felt like I did, that things were out of control and a little too hot to handle. Maybe the killer's psychosis—and I'm sure we're talking psychosis after what I found in that box—was slipping into recession. Who knows? Maybe the hope of promotion that might come from solving the thing. You understand a mad person's mind far better than I do."

  For a moment there was silence, then Flood asked a question: "Tonight you've got the Red Serge Ball to attend, so why did you come when I called?"

  "Because you sounded desperate. Because you were my friend when I needed help so bad. And because I like you."

  Then she surprised him. Leaning forward, she took his face gently in one hand and kissed him lightly on the lips.

  "Do you love me enough," she whispered, "that you could just be my friend? Believe me, inside I'm old-fashioned. I really am a one-man woman. And Robert is the man."

  Al Flood shook his head. "I love you that much," he said.

  "Good, then I'll love you too."

  "Even enough to believe the things that I wrote in that book?"

  "Even enough for that. What did you find in the box?"

  "Tzantas," Flood said.

  The detective held out his hand and helped Genevieve out of her chair. He led her toward his bedroom and motioned her inside. Then he turned on the light—and the woman audibly gasped.

  For each of the heads, except for the nun, had long black flowing hair. The eyes of each had been sewn shut and so had each pair of lips. Each head had skin that was shriveled and cracked and was now almost pure white. Each head was no larger than the size of a navel orange.

  "Mother of God!" Genevieve said as one hand involuntarily rose to touch her open mouth.

  But it wasn't the sight of the eight shrunken heads that filled her with shock.

  It was the dull black gleaming object lying in front of them on the bed.

  PART THREE

  DEATH RATTLE

  As I was going up the stair

  I met a man who wasn't there! He wasn't there again to-day!. I wish, I wish he'd stay away!

  —Hughes Mearns

  Ambush

  6:15 p.m.

  "They're gone! My God, they're gone!"

  "Easy, Sparky. Easy."

  "Somebody knows! Can't you see I'm fucked?"

  "And I said take it easy. Panic never helps."

  "Ah God, Mommy. This is it. I'm finished!"

  "Cut the bullshit, Sparky. Let's think this through."

  "Daddy, where are you? Help me, Daddy! Please!"

  Back and forth, back and forth, Sparky paced the room. Leaning against one concrete wall was an antique full-length mirror. Candlelit, the mirror reflected Sparky pacing in distortion. The figure that appeared, then disappeared, then reappeared on the glass surface was wearing the tattered Scarlet Tunic of an RCMP Corporal.

  Crunchh! There was the sound of plastic cracking underfoot.

  "What was that?"

  "I've no idea."

  '"Well, go on. Take a look."

  Sparky picked up the candlestick and
bent down toward the floor. Broken plastic shards winked back at the flame.

  In ever wider arcs, Sparky swept the candlestick back and forth across the concrete.

  Then something blinked. Another reflection, over against the wall.

  Extending the light in that direction Sparky saw the broken flashlight lying in the comer. Sparky set down the candlestick and picked up the electric torch.

  "Well, what is it?"

  "A flashlight. I guess I stepped on it and broke it."

  "But we don't use a flashlight. You stroke my hair by candlelight. That's what we've always done."

  "I know."

  "Whoever took my heads away also dropped that thing".

  "I know."

  "Cut the bullshit babble, Sparky. Think, Sparky. Who?"

  "I don't have to think, Mother. I already know!"

  It had been a sudden thought, an off-the-wall connection, but now the tension screwed up another notch. Sparky looked at the words stamped into the plastic handle: VANCOUVER POLICE DEPARTMENT.

  "Oh, God," Sparky whimpered, slumping down to the floor. "Now I'm really fucked. Everyone will know."

  "So that's our thief? That city bull? The one asking all the questions?''

  "Yes," Sparky nodded. "It's all gone down the drain."

  "Maybe. Maybe not. Just do what must be done."

  'Mother, don't you see, there's nothing we can do. They're gone!"

  "Oh shut up, child. What the hell do you mean, nothing we can do? My heads are out there somewhere in some stranger's filthy hands. My hair, my beautiful long black hair is under some alien touch. I want my heads back. And I want them back tonight!"

  "But how. Mother? How?"

  "Our cop will have a list of all the bulls on the Headhunter Squad. Names, addresses, telephone numbers: our cop will still have that. The city bull was part of the Squad—VPD liaison. Now take that bloody rag off and put on your own red serge. We've got work to do. I don't know why you insist on wearing your father's uniform. It makes me seething mad. He's dead, Sparky. He's gone."