They Thirst Part 19

"Master!" he called out, and began to sob. "Master, help me! My life is yours!

My . . ."

"Get in!" Farris said, shoving Benefield into the backseat.. The cold slowly crept over Palatazin. Had the man said Master? Did he mean. G.o.d or ... something else? He looked through the window at Benefield, who had his face in his hands, as if ashamed. The prowl car backed along Palmero, turned, and then disappeared into the night, leaving Palatazin staring into the darkness. Slowly he turned and gazed up at the Hollywood Hills, a cold wind suddenly rushing past him like something huge and invisible. From far away he thought he could hear a dog howling forlornly.

"Captain? You going back to Parker Center?"

Palatazin looked over his shoulder at Zeitvogel. "No. Let them put Benefield on ice for a while, and I swear if anybody calls the press in on this thing before morning, I'll have him walking a beat on Selma Avenue!" He ran a hand across his forehead. "I'm going home to get some sleep." Zeitvogel nodded, started to walk away, and then stopped. "Do you think we've got the Roach?" he asked quietly.

"Your guess is as good as mine."

"I hope we do. If not, we sure busted our a.s.ses for nothing. See you at the office." Zeitvogel raised his hand in good-bye and walked away toward his now - battered car.

"See you," Palatazin said. He gazed back into the darkness, feeling as though he were being watched by a presence that was slowly gathering strength. Where was it hiding? What was its strategy? When was it going to strike? Could Benefield supply any of the answers to those questions? Palatazin paused a moment longer, feeling the hairs standing up at the back of his neck. Then he walked to his Ford and drove away.

NINE.

Mother of Mercy Hospital was an old ten-story chunk of brick and gla.s.s in Monterey Park about five minutes away from the San Bernardino Freeway. At five minutes after four A.M. the parking lot was quiet, and most of the building's windows were dark. The last real trouble in the Emergency Room had ended an hour ago, when the police had brought in eight or nine members of the Homicides and the Vipers who'd started swinging knives at each other at the Matador Drive-in.

Three of them were cut pretty badly and needed whole blood transfusions, but the rest were patched up with bandages and Mercurochrome and hauled off in a police van. It had been an easy night-a couple of traffic accident victims, one gunshot wound, a child who'd mistaken a jar of ant poison for honey, a.s.sorted broken bones and sprains, nothing really out of the ordinary. But tonight the emergency room staff wanted to stay busy so they wouldn't have time to think about the gossip they'd been hearing all night from a.s.sorted nurses and orderlies about those fifty-seven people lying in the isolation ward on the tenth floor. Nurse Lomax said that not one of them had a drop of blood in their bodies. Paco, an orderly on the ninth floor, had said he'd seen some of those bodies twist and writhe like mad things, yet they had neither heartbeat nor pulse. Hernando Valdez, an aged janitor and a renowned voice of wisdom in the hospital, said their skin was like marble, and you could see the trails of collapsed veins beneath it. He said they were maldito, cursed things, and it would be best not to be around when they awakened from trjeir evil sleep. Nurse Espositio said everything about them was dead except their brains-when electrode contacts were placed on their scalps, jagged spokes were displayed on the electroencephalograms.

The emergency room staff agreed-whatever was going on, it was muy misterioso. So none of them spoke when Dr. Miriam Delgado, her eyes still puffy from a brief and uneasy sleep, came through the emergency room entrance and stepped into the elevator without acknowledging any of them. The lighted numerals at the top of the door advanced to 10.

Dr. Delgado had received a telephone call about twenty minutes earlier from Mrs.

Browning, head nurse on the isolation ward. The woman sounded extremely puzzled. "Dr. Delgado, there's a change in several of the patients. We're getting increased EEG readings." Delgado was thankful to return to the hospital; in her sleep she'd dreamed of those terrible eyes staring at her through transparent, milky lids like the eyes of sleeping reptiles. They seemed to be surrounding her, spinning in a mad circle like the baleful lamps of some out-of-control carnival ride. When she awakened, she was shaking and could not seem to stop.

HIM...

The elevator doors slid open on the tenth floor. Dr. Delgado stepped out and walked along the gjeen-walled corridor toward the nurse's station. Her brain was still buzzing from her dream as well as from all the heated conferences she'd been involved in yesterday with everyone from Dr. Steiner to Dr. Ramez, the head of the hospital. The theories had flown hot and fast; diagnoses were formulated and then just as quickly discarded. The press had been nosing around, but the hospital's public relations man had been able to keep them at bay, for the time being at least. .!U Which was a relief to Dr. Delgado, for she needed time to find out just what they were dealing with here. A virus? A contaminant in the water pipes? Some element in the building's paint? In the air?

One of the nurses had found precisely s.p.a.ced puncture wounds on three of the victims, but not all in the same place. Two of them were wounded in the throat, a third at the crook of the elbow. The others were bruised and some had ragged cuts on their faces or at the backs of their necks just beneath the hairline. The nurse had offered a valid speculation-snakebite. But so far none of the victims had reacted to any antivenom serum.

Dr. Delgado reached the station, halfway between the elevator and the white door with the sign that said ISOLATION-NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT WHITE BADGE. The first thing she saw were case files scattered across the floor. A blue coffee cup had fallen from the desk and cracked into several pieces. On the desk itself there were coffee-stained papers, and a pencil holder had spilled over. d.a.m.n it! she thought angrily, staring at the mess. What's going on here? How could these night nurses be so incredibly sloppy? She tapped the little bell on the desk and waited, but no one came along the hallway to answer it.

"Ridiculous!" she said aloud, and walked on past the station through the white door. The isolation ward consisted of a series of large rooms cut by a central corridor; there were large plate-gla.s.s windows through which Dr. Delgado could see the mystery disease victims lying side by side, hooked up to IV tubes and blood bags and as many electroencephalographs as Dr. Delgado's staff had been able to beg, borrow, or steal. She watched the green spikes jump and realized with a surge of excitement that most of them were showing almost double the amount of brainwave activity as they had when she'd left the hospital last night. Were they finally reacting to the IVs and the blood transfusions? Was it possible they were beginning to come out of their odd comalike state? She walked to the door marked ISOLATION I and took a green surgical mask in a cellophane packet from a stainless steel tray. She tied the mask in place and then walked through into the ward.

The room hummed with electric circuitry and the chittering of the EEG monitors.

Dr. Delgado stopped at each bed to watch the spikes gathering strength, though she was still unable to find pulses when she felt for them. Those eyes, like the forming eyes of embryos, seemed to be staring right at her through the closed lids.

And at the far side of the ward, she saw that five of the beds were empty. She hurried over to them, her heartbeat racing, and saw the tangled mess of torn tubes and wires that had been ripped out of arms and scalps. A few blood bags, totally dry, lay scattered on the floor.

"Madre de Dios!" she whispered, and was startled by the sound of her own voice.

"What's going on here?"

She was answered by the rising noise of the EEGs, their thunderous chattering like a din of crickets, swelling to a hideous crescendo. She whirled around, somehow imagining she'd seen a furtive movement out of the corner of her eye. But the bodies in their white-sheeted beds lay motionless, the electroencephalograph noise now like the eager communication between them. It was maddeningly loud, as if the bodies were shouting at one another. She clapped her hands to her ears and hurried for the door.

She had almost reached it when one of the bodies-a middle-aged Chicano man with a pendulous belly and rattlesnake eyes-sat up in his bed, ripping the electrode contacts from his scalp and the IV tube from his arm. He grabbed for her, yanking her backward by her coattail as she screamed in dazed horror. Across the room another body stirred and sat up. Then another, stretching as if waking up from a long siesta. A woman with gray-streaked hair plucked her blood bag from its hanger and bit greedily into it, spraying blood in a thick arc. As the thing pulled Dr. Delgado toward the bed, she saw the pale-lipped mouth open, and in that dark cavern were gleaming fangs wet with hideous fluids. She almost fainted in shock, but she knew that if she did she'd never wake up again. She wrenched free, ripping one arm of her coat loose, and ran for the door. The things came after her, leaping out of their beds, their white hospital shifts flying around them.

Dr. Delgado reached the door and felt a clawlike hand grasp at her shoulder. She screamed and struggled away, feeling her flesh tear. Spinning around, she slammed the door behind her, but one of them crashed through the plate-gla.s.s window in a silver shower of fragments. Another followed that one through, and they stalked her as she whirled and ran along the corridor. Before she could reach the white door, another of them-a young girl with blood splattered across the front of her shift-came through the doorway, blocking her path. The girl grinned and came shambling forward, her eyes as black as evil itself. There was a closed door to Dr. Delgado's left, bearing the word Storeroom. She burst into the dark room and braced her body against the door as one of the vampires-yes, she thought, vampires!-struck it from the other side, trying to break through. A fist hammered against it; the door began to bulge inward. The doctor whined in terror, keeping her shoulder pressed against the wood but knowing it would be only a moment or so before they got it. She reached out, feeling for the wall switch; the lights came on, and the first thing she saw was Mrs. Browning's open-eyed corpse-or was it truly a corpse?-lying at her feet, its face a shade somewhere between white and yellow. On the wall above Mrs. Browning's head was a square of metal with a handle on it. Dr. Delgado's heart pounded. It was the laundry chute, a metal tube leading down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. She'd opened that chute a hundred times before, and now she prayed that it was wide enough for her. It would have to be.

The door was struck by a tremendous blow. She was knocked backward, her shoulder blazing with pain, and then the things swarmed in. She only had time to scratch at the eyes of one of them then she threw open the chute and tried to squeeze her shoulders in. "Please G.o.d!" she heard herself scream, echoed by the tube's metal walls. "Please . . .!"

But cold hands gripped her ankles and calves and prevented her from getting,t down the chute. She kicked and flailed, still screaming, but as they pulled her back, she realized with maddening certainty that she could not escape. The vampires fell upon her, clawing and fighting among themselves over who would draw the first draught of blood. When they were finished with her, they cast her aside like an empty bottle and scurried off for more. There were many rooms between them and the street, and many patients in Mercy Hospital who would never again awaken as humans.

Daybreak, cold blue shadows running from the sun.

Gayle Clarke tossed uneasily in the bed of her studio apartment on Sunset Strip. Two sleeping pills and a long swig of Smirnoff vodka would keep her knocked out until after noon, but they couldn't entirely erase the h.e.l.lish memory of a Jack Kidd who looked like leering Death, chasing after her across that apartment courtyard.

In her Laurel Canyon bedroom darkened by heavy drapes, Estelle Gideon sat up suddenly and said, "Mitch?" There was no answer. Father Ramon Silvera drew cold, rusty water into the sink of his room in East L.A., cupped his hands beneath the spigot, and splashed a few drops in his face.

Murky sunlight streamed in through a single window that faced an alley wall of gray bricks. Silvera walked to that window and opened it, inhaling a lungful of air tainted with dust and smog. Down toward the mouth of the alley, he could see the words scrawled in black spray paint in the spiky capital letters favored by the street gangs: FOLLOW THE MASTER. Silvera stared in silence, recalling the b.l.o.o.d.y graffiti on the walls of the Dos Terros apartment building. He remembered the expression on that policeman's face, the abject terror in his eyes, and the chilling urgency of his voice. "Don't let them out on the streets" the man had said. "Burn them while you can." Silvera abruptly closed the window and locked it. that was happening in this city? The feeling he had now-and had had ever since he's stepped into that tenement-was one of dread, impending doom, Evil rapidly gaining strength like a cancer running unchecked through a human body.

He felt afraid-not of dying because that was a certainty and he had learned long ago to accept the will of G.o.d-but of being helpless in a situation where G.o.d might call on him to act.

Evil was on the march, an advancing army of the night; Silvera was more positive of that now than he had ever been in his life. And who could stand in its path?

With these thoughts weighing heavily upon him, he dressed and went out to face the new day.

Wes Richer lifted his head and saw Solange sitting naked before the window, staring out onto Charing Cross Road. He said huskily, "Solange?" She didn't answer. "Solange? What is it?" She didn't move, didn't even acknowledge him. Christ! he thought, drawing the sheets around him. She can really be weird sometimes! As he closed his eyes again, he recalled the dream he'd had: A little girl standing in the snow beneath his window, beckoning him to come out and play. It had been a good dream, one in which he'd been tempted to step through the window as if it were Alice's looking gla.s.s, into a childhood world where he could skate and slide and be a kid forever, and not worry about things like tax shelters and house payments and ... grown-up stuff. He returned to sleep, hoping he'd find that little girl again. This time he'd go out.

ELEVEN.

"I want you to look at some pictures, Benefield," Sully Reece said, taking four black and white prints from a manila envelope. "Examine these very carefully and tell me if you recognize any of them." He dealt them out one at a time onto the table in front of Walter Benefield, then arranged them in a neat row. Reece could see the corpses reflected in the man's thick gla.s.ses. Benefield looked at each one in turn, his expression not varying a fraction. He was still wearing the vapid half-smile he'd had on his face since he was brought into the interrogation room. "Well?" Reece asked, sitting down beside the man. "What about it?"

Benefield said, "I'm sorry, sir. I don't know why I'm looking at these pictures." "You don't? Well, I'll tell you then. These are on-scene photographs of young women who were strangled to death and then s.e.xually abused, Benefield. Four women in a period of two weeks. If you look very carefully, you can see the bruises on that one's neck. See? Right there at the edge of the shadow. I wonder if your fingers would make marks like that. Do you think they would?"

"Lieutenant," the gray-haired man in the dark slacks and light blue sport coat said from his chair in the corner; he was a public defender named Murphy, and there was nothing he relished less than having to play watchdog as the cops grilled a suspect.

"I'm talking to Mr. Benefield," Reece barked. "I'm asking him a question. We're not in court now. This is my ballpark, right?"

"You don't have to answer any leading questions like that, Mr. Benefield," Murphy said emphatically "Okay." Benefield smiled. "I won't." Across the room Zeitvogel muttered, "Bulls.h.i.t!" and then he remembered the ca.s.sette tape recorder turning on the table several feet away from Benefield.

"We could do that, you know," Reece said. "We could see if your fingers fit those marks."

"Stop picking on me," Benefield whined, his smile finally breaking a bit.

"When can I go home?"

"Picking on you? Man, I haven't even begun! You've been arrested for a.s.saulting a young woman named Vicki Harris, Benefield. She's about the same age as those other women in the pictures. She even looks a lot like that one, doesn't she?"

"I guess she does, yeah."

"Where were you taking her? What were you going to do to her?" He shrugged. "I was ... I was going to park right there at the end of Palmero Street. She's a bad girl, you know that. I was going to ... pay her to . .

"Were these bad girls?" Reece motioned to the photographs. Benefield stared at them for a few seconds and then smiled again. "If you say they were."

"Do you think this is funny? Do you think what you were about to do to Vicki Harris was funny? How often do you cruise Hollywood Boulevard?"

"Once in a while."

"Looking for bad girls?"

Benefield glanced over at the attorney and shifted uneasily in his seat.

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Have you ever heard of the Roach, Benefield?"

He shook his head.

"It's been in all the newspapers. Don't you read the papers?" No.

"But you know how to read, don't you? And you know how to write?" "Yeah." Reece nodded and reached for a smaller manila envelope at the edge of the table. He opened it and took out photostats of the Roach letters, placing them over the pictures in front of Benefield. "Have you ever seen those before?"

"No, sir."

"That surprises me. You remember how you wrote you name for us, once with the right hand and once with the left? Well, handwriting doesn't lie even when you try to distort it. You know what a graphologist is, Benefield? Two of them say you wrote these letters with your left hand."

"They're lying," he said quietly.

"Are they? They're experts on handwriting, Benefield. The judge isn't going to think they're lying. Neither is the jury."

"Leave me alone!" Benefield whined. "I never saw those letters before!"

"We talked to Mr. Pietro at your apartment house," Reece continued. "He told us that sometimes he hears you come in late at night and then you leave again. Where do you go?"

"Just . . . out. Places."

"What places? Hollywood Boulevard? Where else?"

"Just around. I like to drive."

"What about your mother? Do you go see her?"

Benefield's head snapped up. "My . . . mother? You leave her out of this, you black b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" He was almost screaming.

Reece smiled and nodded. He leaned back in his chair, watching Benefield's eyes.

"We've got the evidence, Benefield. We've got witnesses who've seen you cruising Hollywood. We know everything we need to know. Why don't you tell us about those four young women?"

"No ... no ..." He shook his head, his face reddening.

"Four women." Recce's gaze sharpened. "Strangled and raped, thrown away like garbage. And that thing with the roaches, that was real cute. Whoever did that is a very sick man, wouldn't you agree?"

"Leave me . . . leave me . . . alone . . ."

"Whoever did that was warped and belongs in a hospital. I've seen your record, Benefield. I know about Rathmore . . ."

Benefield's face went scarlet, his eyes bulging. He grabbed for Reece, snarling like an animal, and Zeitvogel was up in an instant reaching for him. Benefield got one hand clamped on Recce's throat. The three men struggled for a few seconds, then Zeitvogel got the man's arms pinned behind him and snapped cuffs on his wrists. "You ... filth!" Benefield shrieked. "You dirty n.i.g.g.e.r filth! I'm not going back there! You're not gonna send me back!" Reece stood up, his knees shaking. His throat felt bruised and contaminated.

"I am going out for a cup of coffee," he breathed. "When I get back, you'd better be ready to talk to me, or I'll make it d.a.m.n hard on you. Understand?" He stared at Benefield for a few seconds, then glanced over at Murphy. The attorney was sitting bolt upright, his eyes slightly glazed. Reece turned and stalked out of the interrogation room.

Palatazin was waiting outside, patiently going through the contents of another file. When he looked up, Reece could see the deep blue circles under his eyes.

"How is he?" Palatazin asked.

Reece shrugged and rubbed his throat. "He's pretty worked up. I tried the line about his mother that you suggested and got a real rise out of him. How'd you know?"

"There's something strange going on. According to this"-Palatazin waved the folder-"Beverly Teresa Benefield died in a fall down a tenement stairway in 1964. She was carrying a suitcase with her, evidently about to abandon her fifteen-year-old son, Walter. It was the middle of the night, the neighbors heard some shouting, but the coroner ruled the death accidental. Anyway, Benefield made a reference to" "', his mother to Mr. Pietro not long ago. I figured we could probe that to good effect. Also . . ." He took his notepad from his shirt pocket. "He used a cloth soaked in a combination of chemical bug-spray on Miss Harris. The lab says breathing it like that in the close confines of a car would be just short of lethal. And an interesting point-they think Benefield had built up a resistance to the fumes, just like real roaches do. But now my question is-why go to the trouble of keeping them alive? If he is our man, why did he change his M.O.?"

"Because he's a nut," Reece said.

"Possibly, but even nuts stick to some kind of pattern. Well, I suppose it's my turn now. Let me borrow your cigarettes and matches." Reece reached in his shirt pocket and handed him a pack of Kents and a lighter. "Good luck," he said as Palatazin entered the interrogation room. Benefield was sitting with his chin slumped forward on his chest. Palatazin sat down beside him, pushing away the letters and photographs. He closed the M.E.'s file on the death of Beverly Benefield and laid it on the table.

"Would you like a cigarette, Walter?" he asked.

Benefield nodded. Palatazin lit it for him and put it into his mouth. "When can I go home?" Benefield asked.

"Not just yet, Walter. First there are some things we have to talk about." Benefield's eyes narrowed. "I know you. You're the cop who shot at me."

"I fired a warning shot, yes. I was trying to protect you from the others. They might've killed you."

"Oh."

"Take the cuffs off," Palatazin told Zeitvogel. The detective started to protest, then he shrugged, took the cuff key from his pocket, came over, and unsnapped them. Benefield drew deeply on his cigarette and watched Zeitvogel carefully as the man took his seat again. "Are you comfortable now?" Palatazin asked.

"I'm okay, I guess."

"Good. I know Lieutenant Reece can be a bit too hard sometimes. Pretty overbearing. My name's Andy. Is it all right if I call you Walter?"

"I don't mind. Listen, I told that n.i.g.g.e.r a thing or two. He won't be bothering me anymore."

"I hope not. I imagine he came in here and talked about the Roach, didn't he?"