They Thirst Part 14

"Good G.o.d, how you've grown!" The priest stepped forward and shook Rico's hand in a firm, dry grasp. "The last time I saw you was.. . well, I hate to think how many years have pa.s.sed! But you're a man now, aren't you?" Rico smiled and shrugged. He thought, Father, if you only knew . . .

"So I've heard you've moved out of the barrio. You're living on Sunset Boulevard?"

"I've got an apartment on the Strip."

"I'm glad to hear that. Where are you working?"

"For myself," Rico said, and when Silvera's gaze sharpened, he added. "Doing this and that. I'm trying to start my own messenger service." Silvera nodded. Of course, he knew that Rico was probably selling drugs or pimping, possibly both. Rico's hands were too smooth, and he'd never had the education for a desk job, though as a child playing around this very church Rico had shown a healthy curiosity about life that Silvera hoped would blossom into a quest for real knowledge. A stab of sorrow and pity caught Silvera in the heart.

The waste, he thought, the terrible waste.

"I'm making out okay," Rico said. He'd sensed what was going on in the priest's head, behind those black, fathomless eyes.

Silvera motioned toward the front pew. "Please, sit down." Rico did, and Silvera sat beside him. "You look fine," he said, which was a lie because Rico looked as drained as an empty bottle and much thinner than he ought to be. He wondered what Rico was selling. Cocaine? Amphetamines? Angel dust? Surely not heroin.

Rico was too smart to get involved with junk, and he probably recalled how the addicts had screamed from their windows when they'd injected themselves with a hit cut with baby powder or sugar. "It's been too long," Silvera said.

"A long time since I've been inside here, yeah." Rico looked around the church, his gaze coming to rest on the window. "I'd almost forgotten what it looked like in here. What surprises me is that your window hasn't been broken yet."

"It's been tried. I've been having some trouble with the Homicides."

"They're a bunch of punks. You should call the cops on them."

"No. It's neighborhood business and nothing that I can't take care of. Your att.i.tude about the police seems to have changed since your were running with the Cripplers."

"You're wrong, Father. I still think the cops are good-for-nothing pigs, but you can't handle the Homicides by yourself. They'll cut your throat as fast as anybody else's. Maybe faster."

Silvera nodded thoughtfully, searching the younger man's eyes. A terrible bitterness seemed to be churning there, the look of a dog long deprived of food.

And there was something else, too, something that lay much deeper and closer to Rico's soul. Silvera saw just a quick flash of it, like dark, glimmering quicksilver, and recognized it as fear-an emotion he'd seen in his own mirror eyes a great deal recently. "You come to see me for a reason, Rico. Can I help you?"

"I don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no." He shrugged, looked at the stained-gla.s.s window, and seemed to have a hard time saying it. "Father, has Merida Santos come to see you in the last couple of days?"

"Merida? No."

"Oh, Jesus," Rico said softly. "I thought she might've . . . you know, come here to talk to you. I've . . . I've made her pregnant, and now she's gone. Even her crazy mother doesn't know where she is, and I can't sleep at night not knowing what's happened to her.

"Slow down," the priest said, and gripped Rico's shoulder. "Take it easy and tell me everything from the beginning."

Rico took a deep breath. "I picked her up at her building on Sat.u.r.day night..."

When Rico was finished, his hands were clasped tightly in his lap. "I called the cops this morning and talked to the missing persons guy. He said not to worry about it, that a lot of people disappeared for a couple of days at a time and then came back home. He said it's called running away from home, so I knew then that " "fjj he wasn't taking me too seriously, you know? He said that if her mother wasn't "Xn concerned, I shouldn't be either. Good-for-nothin' pig! I don't know what to do, Father! I think . . . maybe something bad's happened to her!"

Silvera's eyes were black and brooding. In this neighborhood, he knew, any of a dozen terrible things could've happened to Merida Santos-kidnapping, rape, murder. ... He refused to think about that. "Merida's a good girl. I can't imagine her running away from home. Still, if you say she's pregnant, she may be afraid to face her mother."

"Who wouldn't be? She tried to chop me up with a butcher knife. That was yesterday afternoon?" Rico nodded. "Then maybe Merida's come home since then?

Maybe she just stayed away from home overnight because she was afraid to tell her mother she was pregnant?"

"Maybe. I thought about calling the missing persons cops again and saying I was Merida's father or uncle, but you know what that b.a.s.t.a.r.do told me? He said they were too busy to hunt down every little girl who decided to run away from the barrio. Busy doin' what? Ain't that a load of s.h.i.t?" He stopped abruptly.

"Oh. Sorry, Father."

"That's all right. I agree. It is a load of s.h.i.t. But why don't we go see Mrs. Santos together? Maybe Merida's come home by now, or Mrs. Santos might talk to me more freely than she would you."

Silvera rose to his feet.

"I love her, Father," Rico said as he stood up. "I want you to know that."

"That may be, Rico. But I don't think you love her enough, do you?" Rico felt speared with guilt. Silvera's eyes were like hard bits of black gla.s.s, reflecting the secrets of Rico's soul back at him. He was shamed to silence.

"All right," Silvera said, and clapped Rico softly on the shoulder. "Let's go."

SIX.

"Here's what we got," Sully Reece said as he laid a thick sheaf of white bluelined computer printout paper amid the general disarray on Palatazin's desk.

"The people down in Vehicle I.D. are going crazy, but they're sending their computers back through the whole list of plate numbers again just in case it missed any the first time, which Taylor says is highly unlikely. As you can see, there are quite a few people in L.A. who drive a gray, white, or light blue Volks bearing a two, a seven, and a 'T' in some numerical combination."

"My G.o.d," Palatazin said as he unfolded the list. "I never knew there were so many Volkswagens in the whole state!"

"That's every combination the computers could come up with." Palatazin bit down on his pipe. "Of course, he could be driving with a stolen license plate."

"Don't even think it, please. If that's the case, then you can just about triple the number of plates listed on that printout. And if that chick was wrong about even one digit, then the whole thing's screwed."

"Well, let's hope she wasn't." He glanced down the list, which contained a few hundred names and addresses. "These are grouped by area?"

"Yes, sir. Taylor thought the computers were going to blow up, but he programmed them to give us our information on the basis of twenty major areas. The first twenty-five or so addresses, for instance, are located in a grid from Fairfax Avenue to Alvarado Street."

"Fine. That makes it a little easier for the officers." Palatazin counted down twenty-eight names and tore them off the list. "Split whoever's available up into teams, Sully, and hand out as many of those names as you can. You and I will be taking these."

"Yes, sir. Oh, have you seen this?" He held up the morning edition of the Times.

There on the front page in a black-bordered box under a headline that read "Do You Know This Man?" was the composite of the face they were seeking. "That should do some good."

Palatazin took the paper and laid it out on his desk. "I hope so. It's flashed through my mind that this man might be an insurance agent from Glendale-a wife, two children, and a cat-who likes a bit of action on the side. If that's the case, then we're back at square one." He looked up suddenly, as if he'd heard something, and stared intensely past Reece into the corner.

"Captain?" Reece asked after a few seconds. He glanced over his shouldernothing there, of course. But nevertheless he felt a chill ripple between his shoulder blades, as if he sensed someone standing right behind him. Palatazin blinked and looked away, forcing himself to stare down at the list of names and addresses. Garvin, Kelly, Vaughan ... he thought he'd seen something begin to stir in that corner . . . Mehta, Salvatore, Ho ... where the apparition of his mother had stood yesterday afternoon . . . Emiliana, Lopez, Carlyle . . .

but before he could focus on it, the faint movement like the sluggish motion of ripples through muddy water had ceased. He glanced quickly up at Reece.

"What...

uh ... about that other thing I asked you to look into?"

"Not much luck there. There's nothing you can buy over the counter that would cause the effect we're looking for. One of the pharmacists I talked to said airplane glue might smell like that and make you pretty drunk if you were to inhale)% a concentrated dose of it, but it wouldn't put you under right off. The same with some of the ant and roach sprays on the market. Even hair spray."

"No, I don't think that's what we want. Maybe our friend knows a druggistHlt 4, who's making him something special?" He dared to glance into that corner again.

Nothing there, nothing at all.

"Possibly. Another guy told me there used to be a salve you could buy that had a chloroform base. A couple of good whiffs and you were on your a.s.s. But it's not sold anymore."

Palatazin frowned. "We could be ... what's the saying? Singing in the dark."

"Whistling in the dark," Reece corrected him. He took the rest of the printout and went to the door. "I'll get these distributed. You eating lunch today?"

"From home." He motioned toward a paper sack half buried in file folders on his desk.

"Well, it's about that time. Bon appet.i.t!"

"Thank you." Palatazin looked down the rest of his list. He was certain many of these addresses would no longer be accurate. Some of these people would be impossible to find, some would probably have sold their cars. Regardless, the task (it) had to be done, he had nothing else to go on. He put the list aside for the moment, reaching for his lunch and the Times Sully had left. Jo had made a ham salad sandwich for him today; there was a dill pickle, a nice red apple, and a can of V-8 juice. He knew his stomach would be roaring an hour after he finished eating, but he'd promised Jo he'd try to stick to his diet for a while. Last week he'd found himself slipping, sending out for chocolate-cream doughnuts in the middle of the afternoon.

He looked again to the corner-nothing there, of course ... if there ever had been. He turned and opened his blinds, then began to eat his sandwich while he paged through the paper. It took him about fifteen minutes to reach page eleven, and when he did, the headline "Vandals. .h.i.t Highland Park Cemetery" jumped out at him. He read through the story twice, his heart beginning to beat like a blacksmith's hammer. Then he rummaged through a drawer for a pair of scissors and carefully cut out the article. In the middle of scissoring he remembered his mother holding a pair of scissors, too, going through the Times and the Herald-Examiner and the National Enquirer, the Tattler and the Star and Fate magazine and a dozen others, searching for articles she would clip and put away in a little metal box that now sat on the top shelf of his bedroom closet. He had brought it back to the house from Golden Garden after his mother had died. He read the story over once more, folded it, and put it in his shirt pocket. His temples ached with dull thunder; his stomach turned over when he glanced at his half-eaten lunch.

Because now he knew that they were here. Hiding in a city of over eight million, half the globe and many worlds away from Krajeck, Hungary. Lurking in the darkness, walking the streets and boulevards of Los Angeles in human shape, ripping through the city's cemeteries in search of-My G.o.d, he thought, a shiver almost splitting him in two. What is to be done?

Who would believe before it was too late? Because one of their greatest strengths, the strength that had kept them existing in a world that had come from ox cart to Cadillac and from slingshot to laser beam, was lack of belief in their existence. "Rational" thought was their shield of invisibility, because they stalked the land of nightmare fears.

What is to be done? Palatazin asked himself, panic bubbling like a cauldron's brew in the pit of his stomach.

There was a knock at his door, and Lieutenant Reece looked in. "Captain? The teams are organized. We're ready to move."

"Huh? Oh, yes. Of course." He stood up, shrugged into his coat, and took the list of addresses from his desk.

"Captain, are you all right?" Reece asked.

Palatazin nodded brusquely. "I'm fine." What is to be done? When he looked up into the other man's face, he saw that Recce's eyes looked concerned. Now he thinks I'm cracking, too, Palatazin thought, and then he heard the dark answer in his brain, Well? Aren't you? Reece turned away, and Palatazin followed him out.

SEVEN.

The building cast a deep shadow along Dos Terros Street. In front of it, half up the curb, was a rust-eaten old Ford standing on two flat shoes and two cement blocks. Overhead lines of clothes, stirred by a dusty breeze, hung from windows.

As Father Silvera stepped out of Rico Esteban's car, he saw a shirt break loose from one of these clotheslines and flutter to the earth, arms waving in eerie futility.

On the front steps a thin brown mongrel dog was sleeping, head resting on its paws. Rico stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the building. Several of the windows were open, but no faces peered down from them. "Mrs. Santos lives on the fifth floor, doesn't she?" Silvera asked as he went up the steps. "Right. Fifth floor, Apartment D. Hey . . ." Silvera, halfway up the steps, turned toward him.

"What is it?" Rico stared at the building. "I ... don't know. Something's funny." "Come on." Silvera took another step, and the dog's head instantly rose.

Its eyes flared like bits of burning topaz. Rico said, "Father . . ." The dog stood up, turned to face the men, and bared its teeth with a low, throaty growl.

Silvera froze.

"Kick that d.a.m.ned mutt," Rico said, coming up to stand beside the priest. When Silvera didn't move, he kicked out toward the dog's side, but the mongrel simply dodged him, then stood its ground, the growl deeper and full of menace.

"Get out of here!" he said. "Get away!"

"Whose dog is this?" Silvera asked. Rico shrugged. When the priest moved forward again, the dog crouched down in front of the door, ready to leap.

"Whoever he belongs to, he doesn't want us to go inside, does he? I think I'd rather try another door than risk having my leg chewed off."

"Ah, you s.h.i.t!" Rico muttered to the dog, and spat at it. The dog didn't move. Silvera was already at the alley beside the building, and Rico gave up after another moment to follow him.

They found a locked door that led down into the bas.e.m.e.nt. Silvera was about to go around to the rear when Rico kicked at the bas.e.m.e.nt door, splitting the rotten wood. The door sagged on its hinges. Silvera gave him a grave stare, but Rico shrugged and said, "Here's our way in, Father." He stepped into the musty, low-ceilinged bas.e.m.e.nt.

It was almost totally dark inside, but in the murky light from the open doorway Silvera saw vague shapes-a tattered sofa lying on its side like a gutted hog, a couple of chair frames without cushions or backs, the sh.e.l.l of a television set, mounds of papers, and what looked like some rolled-up rugs and shower curtains.

Cigarette b.u.t.ts and beer cans littered the floor. Rico and Silvera climbed a rickety wooden stairway to another door, opened it, and found themselves in the building's entrance hall. They could still see the dog crouched on the steps, but the closed door stood between them. Now the dog seemed to be sleeping again.

They left the first floor and began climbing up, their shoes making the frail stairs whine. They had pa.s.sed the second floor landing when Rico realized what was making the flesh on the back of his neck crawl-the place was as silent as a tomb.

"It's quiet in here," the priest said at almost the same instant. His voice echoed along the corridor. "How many people live in this building?"

"I don't know. Maybe fifty or sixty. Christ, just yesterday there was so much noise in here you couldn't think straight! Babies cryin', radios, people fighting . . ." He looked at the stairs that lay ahead. "Christ, where is everybody?"

In the third floor corridor Silvera knocked at a door that had "Diego" scrawled across it in green spray paint. The unlocked door creaked open a few inches, and Silvera peered inside. "Diego?" Silvera called out. "You home, man?" A table had been thrown over, and on the wooden floor flies crawled over the food that spilled from plates and gla.s.ses. Silvera felt his heart pound.

"Wait a minute," he said to Rico, stepping into the apartment. Newspapers had been jammed in around the windowsills and stretched over the gla.s.s; the sunlight was cut to a hazy murk. There was an unmade bed and a door leading to a bathroom. Silvera peered in and found himself staring at the shower curtain rod.

It was bent, and several of the hooks lay scattered on the floor. The curtain itself was gone. When Silvera turned, Rico was standing right behind him.

"The apartment across the hall's open, too," Rico said. "There's n.o.body inside."

Silvera stepped past Rico and looked at the overturned table. "Diego was here, last night at least. That looks like what he must've been eating for dinner." He glanced at the newspaper-covered windows. "This place is already dark enough.

Why did he try to cut the light?" He went out into the corridor and tried a few more doors; all of them were unlocked, the apartments empty but showing signs of recent life-cigarettes and cigars in ashtrays, dishes in sinks or on the tables, clothes hanging in closets. A few doors had been broken open, the wood splintered around the locks. Several of them had scratches imbedded deep in the wood, as if made by an animal's claws.

"Anybody here?" Rico shouted at the stairway. His voice rolled on through the building and was unanswered. He stared at the priest, his face paled by fear.

"We go up," Silvera said, and started climbing the stairs again. The fourth floor hallway was as quiet as all the others. Rico could see doors standing open, and in the dim light he could make out the same deep scratches that they had seen downstairs.

Just above the fourth floor landing, Silvera stopped, his eyes wide, staring at the walls. New graffiti covered the old-HOTSHOT WAS HERE. VIPERS ARE KINGS. ZEKE SUX (HA HA). ALL FOR THE MASTER, BURN BABY BURN. Silvera reached out and touched the brown letters. "My G.o.d," he heard himself say, his voice hollow, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a well. "That's blood!" He continued upward, his senses coiled like a culebra de cascabel. For now his nerves were vibrating with the presence of something he'd felt a thousand times before-in a jail cell where two heroin addicts cut each other to pieces with razor blades; in a suffocatingly hot room where a drunken father had just beaten his three-year-old son to death with a baseball bat; in the smoldering, corpse-strewn ruins of a tenement razed by the arsonist's match; in the greedy eyes of Cicero, the dealer of demonic dreams. That presence was Evil, and now Silvera felt it as he never had before, so strong it was a tangible thing that clung to the walls, holding the odor of blood and brimstone. His heart was pumping hard, and before he reached the fifth floor he could feel the twitching-fibrillations, the doctors called them-begin deep in his hands. The fifth floor corridor stretched out before them. Rico looked in through one of the open doors. The place was a wreck, and bits of a shattered mirror glittered on the floor like dusty diamonds. Silvera moved on ahead of him toward the Santos apartment and was about to push open the door-scratches, he thought, there are scratches in this wood-when something crashed violently behind a closed door on the opposite side of the hallway.

"What the s.h.i.t was that?" Rico said, twisting around. Silvera crossed the hall and put his hand on the doork.n.o.b. He paused for a moment, listening. From the apartment he could hear a m.u.f.fled thump, thump that was unlike anything he could identify. Then there was silence. "Who's there?"

Silvera called out. But there was no answer. He started to push the door open.