Black Oak 4, page 7
“Thanks,” he said grudgingly. “Wait for me. I’m not done yet.”
“Yes, sir,” the driver said. “When you’re ready to leave, just contact the bell captain and I’ll be waiting.”
Wharton grunted and went in.
Dumb shit, he thought; I hope he’s not expecting a tip.
The desk clerk was hopeless, and Granna quickly let her go after making an appointment to see her downtown tomorrow for an official statement.
She’s standing on the boardwalk getting some fresh air, someone taps her on the shoulder and says something with some kind of accent, she screams, turns around, and sees … Granna sighed, not moving from behind Baron’s desk. She sees a woman all wrapped up in a fancy hat and coat and scarf, with piercing—Sanburn’s word, not hers—piercing red eyes. Sanburn immediately knows, she just knows it’s the Ripper, and bolts for the hotel only fifty feet away. She looks back once, halfway there, and the woman is gone.
Yeah. Right.
A woman in a classy coat and hat, the only way she’s going to disappear that fast is by jumping over the railing down to the beach. A ten-foot drop. In a fancy coat and hat.
Cobb sees her, too. But—and Granna snapped her fingers— he sees her disappear into thin air.
“I want a vacation,” she muttered.
“So do I,” Baron said from the doorway.
She started, scowled at his smile, then smiled herself. “I’m sorry, Mr. Baron, but I think—”
“She’s been working long hours this week, Lieutenant,” he said, leaning against the frame. “She took a friend’s shift to make a little extra. I would guess by now she’s more than a bit punchy.”
Granna nodded. She understood that. She had done it herself often enough when she’d patrolled the streets in uniform. That was a long time ago. She rolled her shoulders and pushed to her feet. “I appreciate the use of your office.”
He backed away to give her room to leave. “And I’m sorry this was such a waste of your time.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’d be a lot more upset if there was a body.”
Baron cut off the smile instantly. “Yes. Yes, I suppose you would.”
A goodbye nod, and she crossed the lobby to Cobb, who sat with his hands between his legs, that furry hat on his head.
“Mr. Cobb.”
He looked up. “That young woman saw it, too, didn’t she?”
Granna touched his shoulder. “Mr. Cobb, that woman has been working extra time and hasn’t had any real sleep in two or three days. I wouldn’t trust her to identify her own mother the way she is now.”
“I’ve been sleeping.”
She sat beside him. The doors were closed, bright reflections of the lights and the fountain and the casino doors behind them shimmered in the glass as the wind tried to get in. She watched one of her men walk by, hailing someone she couldn’t see. He slipped through, and in and out of, the reflections.
Here one minute, over there the next.
“I know,” Cobb said when he saw what she did. “But I don’t make mistakes like that, Lieutenant. My eyes are old, but they got good vision still.”
“Mine aren’t so old,” she said, taking out her gloves, pulling them on. “But I wouldn’t rely on them to swear what you do when—” She nodded at the doors. “It could be a mistake, Mr. Cobb. You have to admit, it could be a mistake.”
“Sure,” he admitted as she stood, beckoned to Cox and signaled him to round up the others, send them home.
“Sure. But it isn’t.”
She barely heard him. Already she was home, slipping into bed beside her husband, listening to him snore, feeling his arm automatically drape over her hip to hold her close. This night was over.
“Get some sleep, Mr. Cobb,” she said as she headed for the back entrance. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“I saw what I saw,” he called after her.
And she heard his fingers make that snapping sound again.
Reno stepped into his apartment on the seventeenth floor, threw his keys onto the hall table, and strode into the living room with its panoramic view of the Atlantic. The scent of fresh flowers pleased him, but it was the silence that made him smile. No voices, no slots, no music, no … nothing.
The contrast was almost deafening.
“Greta?”
“Here,” she answered.
He turned as she stepped out of a bathroom large enough, in some small cities, to qualify as an apartment on its own.
She wore the sable coat he’d given her for Christmas. Underneath, she was naked. Spectacularly naked.
“I’m cold, Reno.” She pouted, one hand drifting over her breasts. “That cop didn’t believe me, and I’m cold.”
Reno smiled. “At your service, my dear. You’ll be warm in no time.”
Wharton left the Sands just as the limousine pulled up. The driver opened the door, he got in, and began laughing.
Incredible; absolutely incredible. Another grand, for God’s sake; he’d won another grand. Proof that faggot manager ran a bum casino.
“The Taj,” he ordered. “Drive me up to the Taj. I think I’ll take some of Trump’s money tonight.”
The limousine pulled smoothly away from the curb, rocking slightly in the wind, and he couldn’t help thinking of a huge black shark trolling for a meal. All the other cars were like minnows. Tiny. Vulnerable. Meals on wheels. He laughed again.
“Changed my mind,” he said loudly. “Let’s go to the inlet. I want to go to Harrah’s.”
The driver didn’t respond.
“Hey, you jerk, I’m talking to you. You hear me? We’re going to Harrah’s.”
The driver nodded slowly, and Wharton frowned. He leaned forward so he could see better, and the frown deepened.
“Hey,” he said. “You the same guy? That son of a bitch pull a switch on me?”
The limousine pulled off Pacific, into a dark side street with no lighting at all.
“Hey,” Wharton said, but it didn’t come out very loudly.
The limousine slowed.
“Now, hold on, jerk, don’t try no shit on me. I’m—”
The vehicle braked suddenly, and he was thrown off the seat onto his knees. “Jesus H, you goddamn—”
The driver turned around.
Wharton’s eyes widened. “Holy shit, you’re—”
“Dead,” the driver said in a low husky voice. “The word you want, Mr. Wharton, is dead.”
NINE
18 February
Proctor pulled the living room’s oak door shut behind him and passed a hand over a metal plate in the wall. Some fifteen feet down on his left, a doorway filled with light. He walked slowly toward it, massaging the back of his neck, first with one hand, then the other. When he reached the door he glanced into his bedroom, changed his mind, and walked on. He wasn’t that tired. And even if he was, he knew he wouldn’t sleep.
His eyes would close, and he would once again be wandering somewhere, on that vast obsidian plain.
The next door on the left was closed and locked. He passed a hand over a silver plate in the jamb. The bolt clicked back softly, and the door swung slowly open. A ceiling lamp flickered on.
You shouldn’t be doing this, he told himself as he went in; you need to think, not brood.
“Shut up,” he said to the empty room, and laughed aloud.
At the central nurses’ station in Saddle Hills Recovery Center, a nurse glanced over the bank of monitors on her left: one for each room in the facility. But the only ones in operation were for those whose patients required constant vigilance. Only four screens were lit. All the patients were asleep. Although she was careful to check them all, her particular interest was the football player in 5. One of the handsomest men she’d ever seen in her life. It was unprofessional, she knew it, but she didn’t think anyone would really care if she spent a little time watching him sleep, and daydreaming.
In 16, Ellen Proctor stirred.
The nurse watched her roll onto her side, freeze, and roll onto her back again, arms outside her covers, flat against her sides. Twenty minutes later she rolled onto her side again, and the nurse wondered, then dismissed it. People moved in their sleep all the time, and Dr. Browning only wanted her to note if something unusual happened. In this case, she figured that meant if Mrs. Proctor actually sat up, or stood up, or spoke. Something she had never done in all the time she’d been here.
In 9, an old woman moaned in her sleep.
In 11, a young girl with a huge cast on her left leg cried out in a dream, mumbled, and fell still.
In 5, the football player tossed off his covers and snored.
The nurse smiled to herself.
In 16, Ellen Proctor rolled onto her side again and clasped her hands under her chin.
Bored, the nurse thought as she returned to the nightly report. If it wasn’t for that football player, she’d be bored out of her mind.
Taped on the back wall of Proctor’s private office was a series of sketches he had drawn—a forbidding black castle, a rough approximation of a dragon, a line of guards standing at attention, dressed in black, no faces. A tree without leaves, its branches twisted. A winged creature without form. A plain without features, a plain whose horizon was dotted with leafless trees.
He was the first to admit he could barely draw a straight line with a ruler, and didn’t care that the sketches were almost childlike in their execution. He needed them. Not to remember what he saw in his dreams, that was unforgettable, but to help him figure out where the plain was.
He knew, as one knows when traveling through a dream not really a dream, that this place didn’t fade when he woke up. It was a real place. He had never been there, but it was real nonetheless.
He dropped into a high-back leather chair with castors on its lions’ paw feet and pushed himself back and forth, away and toward the wall. A lot of things had happened to him on that plain, from tumbling into a chasm when an earthquake struck, to falling into a black river when he reached the edge of an unseen cliff. He had never died, though.
He just found himself someplace else, still on that plain.
But he had always been alone.
In England, in the dream, he had heard the same voice he’d heard the other night.
you’re not alone
No sex, no age, just a voice.
you’re not alone
“Good,” he said to the sketches. “So tell me the hell where I am.”
No answer, and he stuck his tongue out at them, spun the chair around, and pushed over to a low row of double-steel filing cabinets bolted to the floor. At the fourth one from the door, he touched a finger to a central lock and listened to the locks of each of the six drawers open one by one. He pulled out the second from the bottom, took out a thick file, and opened it on his lap.
A picture of his mother and father on top, the one they used in the newspapers after the accident.
They were smiling, gazing lovingly at each other. He knew it had been taken on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, one of the last times they would be together before …
“Mom,” he said quietly, “what’s going on?”
He didn’t speak to his father. He had already done that a while ago, in the middle of a snowstorm, in the middle of the backyard. His father had been dead for several years, but Proctor spoke to him anyway, never once questioning his sanity or the reality of what he was doing.
He spoke, but his father hadn’t answered, just given him a slow melancholy smile before the snowflakes and the wind took him away.
He stared at the photograph for almost twenty minutes before reluctantly putting the file away, and coasting himself to the other side of the room to a long desk with trestle legs. No computers or typewriters here. Everything he wrote, he wrote by hand. Another folder lay in the center of the deep-grain wood, and he flipped it open, flipped over a few pages until he found what he wanted: a list of events.
It wasn’t very long.
An incident in Kentucky, a cult in Kansas; a ghost in England was the last notation. In the margin he had scribbled Celeste Blaine’s name. Somewhere else he had printed “amber globe” with a large question mark beside it.
Then he turned another page and stared at a report Doc had given him.
Strange, he thought; very strange.
Standing by the sea, a silent figure dressed warmly, a hood, a scarf, fur-trimmed boots. The waves hiss across the wet apron of sand, curl around the boots and retreat. The voice of the ocean is loud and constant, a series of thunderous explosions that blend into a single sound much like a roar. Spray hangs in the air, a wind-cast mist. Light from the hotels doesn’t quite reach this far, and the figure stands in a strip of darkness that has nothing to do with the night.
Its gloved hand moves to hold the coat closed at its throat.
It has traveled a long way to be here, and it still isn’t sure it has done the right thing. If it were a believer in anything but itself, it would look for a sign, an omen, something to grant a modicum of reassurance.
The killing certainly hasn’t done that.
All that’s done is put the scent of fresh blood on the wind.
The figure turns toward the boardwalk, a gust pushes the hood slightly back, and for a moment before a hand drags the hood back in place, there are eyes, and rich eyebrows, a smooth brow, a gentle nose.
Below the hood, in the dark, the face of a woman.
Proctor read the report again, just in case he missed something the first two hundred times.
In Kansas, at the end of a case that had nearly killed him and Vivian, he had retrieved shards of amber he had first thought might be crystal.
He was right.
A team of researchers in Princeton, friends of Doc, had done tests. A lot of tests. They agreed that the pieces were part of a larger amber-colored globe. They agreed that the pieces were indeed a form of crystal. What they couldn’t agree on was whether the globe had been hollow or solid; what they couldn’t agree on was where the crystal itself had been formed.
There was, they insisted, nothing like it on this planet, and only Doc’s smooth talk and fat wallet had insured their silence.
Proctor knew, however, that the silence wouldn’t last. These men were scientists, and their curiosity, if they were any part human at all, would soon have them asking questions again, making demands, making threats—tell us or we’ll tell the world.
Proctor sighed and closed the folder, leaned back, and stretched his arms over his head, pushing until he felt his shoulders ready to pop.
He tried to think, tried to speculate, and gave up in a few minutes. Lana and the others were right—his mind was indeed that definition of confusion: he jumped on his horse and rode off in all directions.
A yawn, another stretch.
Damn, he hated it when they were right, but it was clear that a weekend in Atlantic City might be exactly what he needed. Diversion; simple diversion.
He grinned as he rose.
And a little Jack the Ripper thrown in for good measure.
What the hell else could a man ask for?
TEN
19 February
Proctor sat on the mermaid bench, his back deliberately to the casino doors. It wasn’t an attempt to keep temptation at bay; he wasn’t tempted. Not yet. What he wanted was a little peace without having to go to his room. The bars were no good because two were on the casino’s periphery, up on the Gallery, and the others played music loud enough to wake the newly dead; he, Taz, and Doc had already eaten, so the restaurants and snack bar were out; and the shops were already closed, so wandering the aisles was no longer an option.
He couldn’t go outside because the storm had arrived.
But the lobby, of all places, had proven surprisingly peaceful. The indirect lighting had been dialed down enough to leave its upper reaches in comfortable twilight. Nothing glared off the marble and tiles. The fountain’s trickling water was oddly soothing, just arrhythmic enough not to be monotonous. The few guests who wanted something at the front desk kept their voices low. There were no children running around, and no taped music to insult his memory of some fine old tunes.
The voice of the casino itself was muted. With small effort he could still hear the clatter of quarters into their trays, the electronic bells and whistles and snippets of sprightly melodies, the explosions of horns and fanfares and gongs when a winner was pronounced… and with equal small effort he could tune it all out. Shift it from irritation to bearable background noise.
The boardwalk, for now, was out of the question.
The storm had hit shortly after they’d arrived, gusty winds became a sustained gale force, and silver pellets of rain cracked against the walls and windows, reaching under the rippling awning to the doors.
There were printed notices in their rooms assuring all guests that in the unlikely event of a power failure, the Lighthouse had multiple backup systems that would insure all necessary operations would continue without interruption.
“Right,” Taz had said from the doorway of Proctor’s room. “What do you bet the first thing back will be the slots.”
Doc had shaken his head slowly. “Such cynicism in the young. I’m hungry. May we eat?”
And in the restaurant on the Gallery level, Proctor was more than a little amused as Taz turned on the charm and soon had the hostess and waitresses practically licking his palms. It was from them that Proctor had learned of the early morning murder, the second Lighthouse victim in the Ripper’s string, four if you counted the near misses.
Once the meals were served, Proctor noticed the others looking at him strangely. “What?” he demanded. “Hey, this isn’t my fault. The storm, this killer—don’t you dare try to blame it on me.”
“We’re not,” Doc said blandly. “We just don’t want you to get involved.”
He had said nothing more while they ate, and passed on a preliminary excursion to the tables. Instead, he strolled the North and South promenades, hands in his pockets, looking around. Just looking around. Once in the lobby, he settled on the padded bench and watched the storm, the hotel’s lights barely reaching the steel railing only sixty feet away.
