They Thirst Part 3

Benefield longed to follow, but the Voice was whispering softly to him now, making him feel warm and needed and protected, taking his headache away. He stood where he was for a moment, the wind whipping and shrilling all around him, then walked back to his car. Driving down the mountain, he turned the radio to a station playing religious songs and began to sing along, happy and confident that the Master's will would be done.

Sat.u.r.day, October 26

the restless

The sun came up over the San Gabriel Mountains like a reddish-orange explosion, turning the sky a steely gray that would slowly strengthen to bright blue as the morning progressed. Tendrils of yellowish smog hovered low to the ground, clinging like some huge octopus between the gla.s.s and steel skysc.r.a.pers, throbbing concrete-walled factories, and serpentine meanderings of half-a-dozen freeways already clogged with traffic. Chilly shadows, remnants of the night, scurried away before the marching sunlight like an army in retreat.

Andy Palatazin stood before the open closet in his bedroom and deliberated over which tie to choose. He was wearing dark blue slacks, slightly tight around the midsection, and a light blue shirt with a neatly ironed but fraying collar; he chose a green tie with little flecks of blue and red in it, then walked out into the hallway and leaned slightly over the stairway railing. He could hear Joanna down in the kitchen, and the mouth-watering aroma of frying sausages and potatoes drifted up to him. He called out, "Jo! Come look at this!"

She came in another moment, her graying hair pulled up into a tight bun. She was wearing a dark green robe and slippers. "Let's see it," she said. He held up the tie and raised his eyebrows.

"Iszonyu!" she said. "It's hideous with that shirt. Wear the dark blue tie today."

"That has a spot on it."

"Then the red-and-blue striped one."

"I don't like that tie."

"Because my brother gave it to you!" she muttered, and shook her head.

"What's wrong with this one?" He held out the green tie and made it wiggle like a snake.

"Nothing-if you want to look like a clown. Go on, wear it! Look like a clown!

But ... it ... does . . . not . . . go!" She sniffed the air. "The potatoes are burning! See what you've made me do!" She whirled toward the kitchen and disappeared.

"Your brother has nothing to do with it!" he called down to her; he could hear her mumbling but couldn't tell what she was saying, so he shrugged and stepped back into the bedroom. His gaze fell upon the rocking chair over by the window, and he stood looking at it for a moment. Then he walked over to it, placed a thick finger against one of the arms, and pushed. The chair creaked softly as it moved back and forth. Was that a dream I had last night, he asked himself, or did I really see a megjelenes, an apparition, sitting here in this chair? No, a dream, of course! Mama is dead and buried and at peace. Finally. He gave out a long sigh, looked down at the green tie in his hand, and stepped back to the closet. He hung it back on the rack and looked at the striped one Jo's brother, a lawyer who lived in Washington, D.C., had given him on St. Stephen's Day. Never! he thought stubbornly. He sighted a tie he hadn't worn in several months; it was bright red with big blue polka dots, and it was buried so deeply on the rack he thought that Jo must've surely hidden it on purpose. Someday, he thought grimly, she's going to burn them all up like she's been threatening! As he slipped it on, he looked up at the top shelf and saw a flat box half hidden under a couple of battered hats with small, sad feathers glued to their bands. He quickly looked away and closed the closet door.

In the small, cozy kitchen at the rear of the house, Jo was putting the breakfast plates on the little table that overlooked her backyard garden when her husband came in, smelling of Vitalis and Old Spice shaving lotion. She looked up, started to smile, and winced instead when she saw what was hanging around his neck. "Eat your sausages," she said. "You might have a hard day at the circus."

"Gladly. Ah, this looks delicious!" He sat down at the table and started to eat, taking in huge, sloppy mouthfuls of sausage and potatoes. Jo set a cup of hot black coffee beside him and took her seat on the other side of the table.

"It's good," he said with food in his mouth. "Very good."

"Slow down," Jo said. "You'll have an attack." He nodded and kept eating. When he stopped to drink some coffee, she said, "Andy, you should take a Sat.u.r.day off once in a while. You should relax, all this working and worrying isn't good for wu. Why don't you call and tell them you're staying home today? We can go for^lpice drive to the beach."

"I can't," he said, washing potatoes down his throat. "Maybe next Sat.u.r.day."

"You said that last week."

"Oh. Well, I meant it, but..." He lifted his gaze to hers. "You know why I have to go in. Someone might turn up something."

"They'll call you if they do." She watched him, her eyes bright and blue and alert. She was also worried about the dark hollows that had now appeared beneath Andy's eyes, about the new lines that had begun to snake across his face. He didn't sleep so well lately either, and she wondered if even in his dreams he thought of stalking that awful killer through the dark canyons of the city. She reached out and touched his rough bear's paw of a hand.

"Please," she said softly. "I'll make a picnic lunch for us today."

"They expect me to be there," he said, and patted her hand. "Next Sat.u.r.day we'll have a nice picnic. Okay?"

"No, it's not okay. They're working you to death! You leave early in the morning and don't come home until late at night. You work Sat.u.r.days and most Sundays, too! How long is it going to go on?"

He wiped his mouth with a napkin and dug his fork into a mound of potatoes.

"Until we find him," he said quietly.

"That may be never. He may be out of the city now, out of the country even. So why are you the one who has to work like a dog and answer all the questions and be on the front page of all the newspapers? I don't like what some people are saying about you."

He raised his eyebrows. "What are they saying?"

"You know. That you don't know what you're doing, that you don't really care about finding that man, that you're not a good policeman even."

"Oh, those things." He nodded and drank down the rest of his coffee.

"You should tell them all to go to the devil!" she said fiercely, her eyes shining. "What do those people know about how hard you've been working, day and night like a Trojan! They should give you a medal! You've spilled coffee on your tie." She leaned forward with her napkin and dabbed at it. "If you keep your coat b.u.t.toned, it won't show."

"All right," Palatazin said. "I'll try to." He pushed his plate away and put a hand on his expanded stomach. "I've got to go in a few minutes. That Clarke girl from the Tattler is coming to the office this morning." Jo made a disgusted face. "What-to write more slime? Why do you even talk to that woman?"

"I do my job, she does her job. Sometimes she gets carried away, but she's harmless."

"Harmless? Ha! It's stories like hers that make people so afraid. Describing what that awful gyilkos did to those poor girls in such terrible detail, and then making out that you don't have enough sense to find him and stop him! She makes me sick!" Jo stood up and took his plate over to the sink; she was shaking inwardly and trying to control it, trying not to let her husband see. Her blood, the Hungarian gypsy blood of a hundred generations, was singing with anger.

"People know what that newspaper is," Palatazin said, licking a forefinger and rubbing the coffee stain. Defeated, he let the tie drop. "They don't believe those stories."

Jo grunted but did not turn from the sink. A new mental picture was forming in her brain, something that had gradually grown there over the past few weeks: Andy, armed with a gun, moving through the dark corridors of some unknown building, seeking the Roach all alone; and then huge grasping hands reaching for him from behind, clamping around his throat, and squeezing until the eyeb.a.l.l.s popped out and the face turned purplish blue. She shook her head to rid herself of the nagging thought and said softly, "G.o.d have mercy!"

"What?"

"Nothing," she said. "I'm thinking out loud." She turned back to him and saw that his face was not purplish blue, nor were his eyeb.a.l.l.s popping out. His face, on the contrary, reminded her of that dog in the Hush Puppies ads, all jowls and sad eyes under bushy, gray-flecked brows. She said, "You're not going to do anything dangerous today, are you?"

"Of course not." He thought, Am I? How can I know? This was a question she asked him every morning and an answer he gave in kind. He wondered how many wives of policemen asked that question, how many cops replied as he had, and how many ended up dead from the burglar's or the rapist's or the junkie's gun. Far too many, he was sure. He wondered how George Greene had answered that question on a July sixth morning over twelve years ago. Greene had been Palatazin's first partner, and on that terrible day he was shot four times in the face while Palatazin watched it all through the window of a pizza parlor, buying a twelve-inch mushroom and black olive to carry back across the street to the car.

They'd been staking out a suspect in the robbery-murder of a black heroin dealer, and much later, after the shooting was all over and Palatazin had vomited the last stink of gunpowder from his nostrils, he realized that the man must've figured out he was being watched and panicked, shoving his stolen .45 right through the pa.s.senger window into George's face. Palatazin had chased him over five blocks, and finally, on a tenement stairway, the man had turned to make his stand. Palatazin had blasted him away with a pizza-smeared trigger finger.

His mother had cried for a long time when he'd told her that he thought he'd felt a bullet hiss past his head. She'd said she was going to the commissioner to have him given safer duty, but of course that didn't happen. The next day she'd forgotten everything he'd told her, and she was talking about how beautiful the summer flowers must be along the streets of Budapest. Now Palatazin found himself staring at the hand that had held the gun that July 6. Anya, he thought: the Magyar word for mother. I saw my mother's ghost last night. He looked up into Jo's eyes. "I had a strange dream last night," he said, and smiled slightly. "I thought I saw Mama sitting in her rocking chair in our bedroom. I haven't dreamed about her for a long time. That's strange, isn't it?"

"What happened?"

"Nothing. She . . . motioned with her hand. Pointed, I think. I'm not sure."

"Pointed? At what?"

He shrugged, "Who knows? I can't read dreams." He stood up from the table and looked at his wrist.w.a.tch; it was time to go. "I have an idea," he said, putting his arms around his wife's waist. "I'll come home early and take you to The Budapest for dinner. Would you like that?"

"I'd like for you to stay home today, that's what I'd like." She thrust out her lower lip for a moment and then reached up to brush the half-halo of gray hair at the crest of his head. "But The Budapest would be nice, I think."

"Good. And music! Fine ciganyzene! Yes?"

She smiled. "Yes."

"We have a date then." He patted her rear affectionately and then pinched it. She made a mock clucking noise with her tongue and followed him out to the living room, where from a closet he took his dark blue coat and a black hat that had seen its day years before. She held his coat for him while he strapped on a black leather shoulder-holster, all the time staring distastefully at the .38 Police Special it held. Struggling into the coat and crowning himself with the ragged-looking hat, he was ready to go. "Have a good day," he said on the front porch steps, and kissed her cheek.

"Be careful!" Jo called to him as he walked to the old white Ford Falcon at the curb. "I love you!"

He raised a hand and slid into the car. In another moment it was rattling away down Romaine Street. A brown mongrel darted out from a hedge to chase it until it was out of sight.

Jo closed the door and locked it. The Roach! she thought, and felt like spitting because even the sound of that terrible word made her sick. She moved back into the kitchen, intent on washing the dishes, sweeping and mopping the floor, then doing some weeding in the garden. But she was bothered by something beyond the Roach, and it took her a few minutes to find it lurking within herself. Andy's dream about his mother. Her gypsy instincts were keen and curious. Why was Andy thinking about her, dreaming about her again? Of course, the old woman had been insane, and of course it was better now that she was dead and not wasting away day by day as she had been in that bed in the Golden Garden Home for the aged.

"I don't read dreams," Andy had said. But perhaps, Jo thought, I should ask someone who does? It might be an omen of the future.

She turned on the hot water tap and for the moment closed the mental cupboard on the age-old art of dream reading.

TWO.

Jack Kidd's black Chevrolet van, a darkroom on wheels airbrushed with swordwielding barbarians and half-naked damsels a la Frank Frazetta, stopped at the gates of Hollywood Memorial Cemetery. The gates were wide open, and Jack could see a light burning in the watchman's station, though it was now almost eight-thirty and the sun was glaringly bright across the rolling green cemetery lawn. Jack, a Canon hanging around his neck, hit the horn a couple of times, but no watchman came out to greet them. On the seat beside him Gayle yawned and said, "No one's home. Let's drive on through."

"I need to talk to this guy first." He pounded the horn again. "Maybe he's curled up somewhere, sleeping off whatever makes him see old Clifton roaming around out here, huh?" He gave her a quick smile and opened his door, stepping out onto the pavement. "Back in a minute," he said, and walked across to the little white concrete watchman's station with the red-tiled roof. He could look through the window that faced the cemetery gates and see the whole interior at a glance. A lamp was burning on a blotter-topped desk, the chair pulled back slightly as if someone had just stood up. Atop the desk there was an open Sports Ill.u.s.trated, a half-full coffee cup, and an ashtray littered with cigarette b.u.t.ts.

Jack tried the door. It opened easily. He stepped inside, checked a small bathroom, and found it empty, the walked back out to his van. "He's not there,"

he said, climbing up to his seat and starting the engine. "That's a h.e.l.l of a note! The guy knew I was coming out this morning. How am I supposed to find old Clifton's grave?"

"Listen, can you wrap this up in a hurry and get me over to Parker's Center?" She tapped the crystal of her wrist.w.a.tch impatiently.

"Okay, but first I'm going to drive through and try to find the guy. It'll just take a few minutes. Three shots of a headstone, that's all I need." He drove into the cemetery, pa.s.sing beneath towering Washingtonia palms. Marble gravestones, mausoleums, and angelic statues were scattered on each side of the winding main road, all surrounded by huge oak trees, palms, and decorative clumps of palmetto; the bright green gra.s.s sparkled with early morning dew, and a thin sheen of haze clung low to the ground. Gayle could see the stout white buildings of Paramount Studios over on the far side of the cemetery, so close that any strung-out, bleary-eyed, hopeless kid who'd just flunked a screen test could just stumble on over and fall into a grave. It was odd, she thought, that most of the major studios in Hollywood overlooked a cemetery. Which reminded her of a rumor she'd heard around the Tattler offices a few days before. "You know what some people believe about Walt Disney?" she said, glancing over at Jack. "That his ashes aren't really in Forest Lawn, that his body's being preserved in liquid nitrogen so he might be revived someday. Trace wants to do a story on it."

"That figures."

"It is a little strange, though. Disney's plaque is the only marker in the whole cemetery that doesn't have any dates on it."

"What have you been doing-your cemetery-history homework?"

"No, but that story beats this bulls.h.i.t about Clifton Webb, doesn't it?" She looked over at Jack in time to see his eyes widen. "Christ!" he said, and hit the brakes so hard the van's tires burned rubber. "What is that?" He stared directly ahead.

Gayle looked and drew in her breath with a shudder.

Lying in the road was a skeleton wearing a long pastel-green dress. Clumps of brownish hair still clung to the shattered skull; both legs and an arm were broken off like thin white pieces of gnarled driftwood. The remaining hand clawed toward the sky. On both sides of the road, scattered across neatly trimmed gra.s.s and decorative clumps of sharp-tipped palmetto, were the fragments of more skeletons. Skulls and arms and legs, spines and hipbones littered the cemetery. A boneyard, Gayle thought suddenly, a pulse pounding at her temples.

She could not tear her gaze away from the obscene and casual lay of those skeletons. There were whole skeletons dressed in grave suits and dresses, lying atop each other as if they'd been dancing at the stroke of midnight and had collapsed with the brutal coming of dawn. There were also worse things-new corpses that weren't quite all bone yet, covered with black flies. Gayle could see that dozens of headstones had been thrown over and the graves dug up, mounds of dirt standing over ragged, empty holes.

"JeeeeSUS!" Jack said, catching a bit of the breeze that carried with it the green smell of rot. "Somebody's torn the h.e.l.l out of this place!" He popped the lens cap off his Canon and climbed down from the van.

"Jack!" Gayle called after him. She felt cold and clammy, like an old wet rag. There was something lying in the shadow of a tree, perhaps ten feet to her right, that she couldn't bear to look at. She thought she heard the high buzzing of interested flies. "Where the h.e.l.l are you going?" Jack was already snapping pictures. "Trace is going to want some shots of this!"

he said; his voice sounded electric with excitement, but his face had gone as pale as paste and his finger was trembling on the shutter. "How many graves would you say are open? Twenty? Thirty?" She didn't answer. The shutter clicked, clicked, clicked. Since he'd signed on with the Tattler, a little more than two years ago, he'd taken pictures of freeway wrecks, suicides, gunshot victims, once even a whole family of Chicanos who'd been fried to black crisps in a gas-leak explosion. Trace had printed the pictures because he was true to the Tattler's motto: We print it as we see it. Jack had gotten used to those things because he was a professional and he needed the money for his doc.u.mentary film work. The Tattler was one of the last of the "bucket of blood" tabloids, and sometimes what Jack was required to photograph was pretty d.a.m.ned grisly indeed, but he'd learned to grit his teeth and shoot on muscle reflex. "If it's part of the human condition," Trace always said, "there's a place for it in the Tattler." But this was different, Jack thought as he took a couple of pictures of the green-clad skeleton lady, what had been done here was just pure, plain old evil. No, check that. It was Evil, about as d.a.m.ned black as you could get. A shiver went through him. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

When Gayle came up beside him and touched his arm, he jumped so violently that he took a picture of clouds. "What happened?" she said. "What ... did this?"

"Vandals. Maybe bikers or a devil cult or something. Tore the h.e.l.l out of the place, whoever they were. I've seen cemetery vandalism before-you know, headstones kicked over and that sort of s.h.i.t-but never anything like this!

Christ, look at that!" He made a wide detour around a couple of broken skeletons and reached a ma.s.sive, ornately carved stone vault. Its entire top had been torn off. He peered in and saw nothing but a little dust and some sc.r.a.ps of dark cloth down there at the bottom. A mossy odor, as if from an empty well, came floating up to him. Whose vault was this? he wondered. Whoever it had been was just a handful of gray dust now. He stepped back to take a picture, almost tripping over a grinning skeleton in a dark suit at his feet.

A few yards away, Gayle stood staring down into an open grave. In ornate script the headstone read, MARY CONKLIN. Scattered in the dirt at the grave's bottom were yellow bones held together by cobwebs of wispy lace. "Jack," Gayle said quietly, "I don't think this is just vandalism."

"Huh? What did you say?"

She looked over at him, only vaguely aware of birds singing in the high treetops around her, oblivious to mortal concerns. "The coffins," she said.

"Where are they?"

Jack paused, lowering his camera. He stared at the heavy concrete plate that had been shifted-how many hundreds of pounds did that thing weigh?-from the vault where Old Dusty lay. No coffin in there either. "Coffins?" he said, a trickle of sweat like ice water running down his side.

"There aren't any. I think . . . these remains were dumped out, the coffins stolen."

"That's crazy," he replied softly.

"Then look in these empty graves, d.a.m.n it!" Gayle was almost shouting now, nausea roiling in her stomach. "Find me a coffin in any one of them! Go on, look!"

Jack didn't have to. He gazed across the green, sundappled landscape; the place looked like an ancient battlefield, all the soldiers left to rot where they'd fallen, left for the vultures and the scavenger dogs. No coffins? He let the Canon dangle down around his neck; it felt heavy with the evidence of some hideous, awful Evil. No coffins? "I think . . . we'd better call the cops," he heard himself say and, backing away from that violated tomb, he stepped on a disembodied skull that cracked with a noise like a tortured shriek.

THREE.

"Do you mind?" Palatazin asked the young blond girl with the glittery eyeshadow who sat on the other side of his desk. He held up what had once been a perfectly white meerschaum pipe, now a scarred lump of coal.

"Huh? Oh no, man, that's okay." She spoke with a reedy Midwestern accent. He nodded, struck a match, and touched the bowl with the flame. The pipe had been a gift from Jo on their first wedding anniversary, almost ten years ago. It was carved in the likeness of a Magyar prince, one of the wild hors.e.m.e.n-warriors who'd swept bloodily down into Hungary in the ninth century. Most of the nose and one eyebrow were chipped away, and now the face more closely resembled a Nigerian prizefighter. He made sure he blew the smoke away from the girl. "All right, Miss Hulsett," he said, and glanced quickly down at the notepad before him; he'd had to clear away an armload of newspaper clippings and yellow folders to make room for it. "This friend of yours was walking to work Tuesday evening on Hollywood Boulevard, and a car pulled to the curb. Then what?"

"There was a guy in the car. A strange-looking dude," she said. The girl smiled nervously at him, fidgeting with a small purple suede purse that she'd positioned in her lap. Her fingernails were chewed down to the quick. Across the office in a chair near the door, Detective Sullivan Reece, as chunky as a fireplug and dark as the ebony Magyar pipe,'sat with his arms crossed and watched the girl, occasionally glancing over at Palatazin.

"How old did this man appear to be, Miss Hulsett?" She shrugged. "I don't know. Not as old as you. She said she couldn't really tell because, you know, the lights are so bright and weird on the boulevard at night. You can't tell anything about people until they're right up in your face."

He nodded. "Black, white, Chicano?"

"White. He was wearing real thick gla.s.ses, and they made his eyes look huge and funny. He was ... my friend Sheila said ... a chunky guy, not real tall or anything, but just. . . thick-looking. He had black or dark brown hair, cut almost to a stubble. He looked like he needed a shave, too."