From a Whisper to a Scream

by Charles de Lint

  “She was in the crowd every night,” he said.

  Meg nodded. “But that doesn’t mean there’s a connection. She could just live in the area.”

  “Could.”

  “Or maybe she was working.”

  “She doesn’t dress like a hooker.”

  “Night off?” Meg tried.

  “You think a pimp’d give one of his girls a Friday night off?”

  “Maybe with the Slasher …”

  Jim shook his head. “Pimps don’t have compassion.”

  He pushed the photos around on the table, thinking. He hadn’t worked the night of the first killing. Grant had caught that call and gone out himself when he couldn’t raise one of the other photographers. But Jim had been there for every one since.

  The first killing only made the local page, section three. But the next week it hit the front page. Jim couldn’t remember who started up calling the killer the Friday Slasher, but the name had stuck. After the second killing, every photographer and reporter stayed close to their police scanners on Friday nights. Jim thought of the rolls of film he’d shot on those various nights, but couldn’t recall the girl being in any frame.

  “Maybe your first guess was right,” he said.

  “Which was?”

  “Maybe Niki lives in the area.”

  He paused, realizing what he’d said. Meg just shook her head.

  “Niki’ now, is it?” she said.

  He shrugged. “It’s just the graffiti … .”

  “That’s okay. We might as well call her something and that’s as good as anything else.”

  “Right. Anyway, maybe she lives in the area, but while the Slasher has always hit in the Combat Zone, so far not one of the killings has taken place closer than a few blocks from another.”

  “And tonight there were cops crawling all over the Zone—I know. I was out prowling myself.”

  “Jesus, Meg. This guy could’ve killed you.”

  “He didn’t. But it makes you wonder. I wasn’t expecting him to strike tonight. It just seemed too risky.”

  Jim nodded. He still didn’t like the idea of Meg wandering the Zone’s streets at night. And it wasn’t just the fact that she might run into the Slasher that bothered him. Every lowlife in Newford gravitated to the Zone—especially on Friday and Saturday night. But while he worried, he knew it was pointless to argue about it with her. They’d been through this before. He worried, and she just said, “I’ve got to make a living.”

  “If you’re this sure of yourself, you should take what you’ve got to the cops,” Meg said now. “They’ve been ‘on the verge of solving the case’ ever since it started.”

  Which, as they both knew, meant that the police had absolutely no leads.

  “I’m not that sure,” Jim said. “I’ve just got a feeling about it, but it’s nothing I can prove.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Try to track down the girl and talk to her.”

  Meg shook her head. “And you think I’m crazy. How long do you think that’ll take? And who’s even going to talk to you down there? They’ll just figure you for a cop.”

  “I’ll make up some story. I’ll tell them I’m shooting photos for a show on street people.”

  Which was close to the truth. He was putting together a show using the photographs of graffiti that he’d been taking over the years. He had more material than he’d ever need. The trouble was he just didn’t have a focus for it; there was nothing to link the material together beyond the obvious, which was not what he wanted to do with this show.

  “Like hookers and pimps and petty criminals really want their portraits taken,” Meg said.

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Meg thought for a moment, then nodded. “Maybe not. Unless they’re specifically wanted for something, they seem to like the idea of a bit of fame.”

  She was thinking, Jim knew, of the article on the homeless she’d illustrated in the spring for The Daily Journal’s Sunday section. The squats in the Tombs had as many petty criminals hiding out in them as they did honest people down on their luck.

  “But I still don’t know,” she said. “If she is involved, you could end up over your head awfully fast.”

  “As soon as I’ve got anything concrete, I’ll go to the cops.”

  Meg nodded, but it was obvious that she didn’t like the idea of what he was going to do any more than he liked her prowling around in the Zone on her own. Jim shuffled the photos together with the full-face shot of Niki on top.

  “Can I keep these?” he asked, indicating the prints Meg had taken that also had the girl in them.

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks.”

  He put them in the folder with his own and stowed it away in his knapsack.

  “So how’s Jack?” he asked.

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “No, I’m not. You just haven’t been talking about him lately.”

  “He didn’t like my hours—or rather, he didn’t like how little time I spent with him, which is about the same thing.”

  “Tell me about it,” Jim said.

  That had been one of the main things he and Susan had argued about before they finally broke up. The bitch of it was, he’d gone from freelancing to working on staff at the paper for her. He’d been clearing eighty thousand dollars a year, but also putting in sixteenhour days, seven days a week. The paper paid him forty-five thousand dollars, including perks like providing him with cameras, a car, insurance and health benefits, and he only had to put in thirty-seven-and-a-half hours a week.

  After the first period of adjustment, he found he could live with it. In fact, he liked the extra time off. The trouble was, those extra hours of free time that he had to spend with Susan ended up showing both of them how little they had in common. Nights when he used to be out earning money, cruising the streets in his old Honda, following leads on his police scanner to various accidents and the like, were instead taken up with arguments that there just hadn’t been time for before.

  He hadn’t been on staff for more than three months before their relationship died in one massive, final blowup.

  “So what’re you doing now?” Jim asked.

  Meg sighed. “Working.”

  THREE

  Mickey Flynn owned the Combat Zone.

  Not the buildings themselves; he just got a cut of any action going down in the area—it didn’t matter who was running it. He’d outmaneuvered and outlasted the Italians and had the muscle to put the pressure on anybody trying to move in on what he considered his turf. You wanted to work those streets, you gave Mickey a cut; you didn’t ante up, you were out. Or you were dead. He still had connections to the Rosses, where he first got his start in the business, but the Zone was where the real money lay, and Mickey liked money even more than he did food or a good fuck.

  He had been born forty years ago to a third-generation Irish family living in the shanty Irish tenements of the Rosses. Before him, none of his family had criminal connections. They might contribute to the IRA—they’d even harbored a couple of provos in the sixties—but that was a political thing. Mickey’s father, two uncles, and older brother all worked on the docks, spent their wages on rent, food, and clothing for their families, and at the pub—though not necessarily in that order—and would never consider setting foot in the Kelly Street Social Club, which at the time was the principal headquarters of Pat McKenna’s men—the ones that the papers liked to refer to as the Irish mob.

  But Mickey had more respect for gangsters like McKenna, with their easy money and cheap women, than he could ever muster for the men in his own family. All the Flynns had were dead-end lives. Mickey wanted more.

  After years of running with the neighborhood street gangs, when he was seventeen he became a bagman for one of McKenna’s lieutenants. By the time he turned twenty, he’d killed six men and risen up the ranks into shylocking, extortion, and armed robbery. At the ripe old age of twenty-five, he
had ousted McKenna and taken over all of his former boss’s rackets.

  Once he’d consolidated his holdings in the Rosses, he moved his base of operations out of there—an area which, with the sudden influx of Vietnamese and Caribbean immigrants, had degenerated, so far as he was concerned, into nothing more than a ghetto—to the downtown core. He survived a handful of indictments and two grand juries and watched with amusement as his Italian counterparts went down one by one, while he continued to prosper.

  These days his principal competitors were all, as he could so eloquently put it, “Just a bunch of fucking foreigners.” He could deal with the Japanese yakuza and the Chinese tongs, because they kept mostly to their own parts of town and knew well enough what to leave alone. But the city was also riddled with Vietnamese, Colombian, black, Hispanic, and Caribbean crews, all jostling for a piece of the action.

  Mickey stayed on top, but it was getting harder and harder every year to stay there. He spent most of his time in his Lakeside Drive penthouse, which took up the top two floors of the Harbour Ritz, a hotel that he owned through the convenient distancing of a holding company in Barbados, and let his lieutenants do the legwork.

  He indulged himself with rich foods and his drug of choice, Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey, until his body had acquired elephantine proportions and his face was redder than his hair had once been. But it made no difference to the men who worked for him, or the showgirls that he bedded, that he was an obese alcoholic. Mickey Flynn was as ruthless today as he had been when he fought his way to the top; crossing him was a risk that few would willingly take. For all the modern accoutrements that his criminal activities had acquired, his power remained rooted in violence and fear. Other mob bosses might defer the dealing of retribution to their underlings, but Mickey was still known to pull the trigger himself on occasion.

  On the night that the Friday Slasher claimed his fourth victim, Mickey was sitting in the plush main suite of his penthouse. A highball glass half-filled with whiskey stood on the glass table beside him. He had his feet up on a leather ottoman and the television on, the sound coming from four speakers strategically placed about the large room to give the optimum sound without necessarily being intrusive. He was alone except for one of his lieutenants.

  “This is bullshit,” he said as they watched a videotape of WOKY’s eleven o’clock news broadcast for the third time. “They had over thirty cops tracking up and down the Zone tonight and they still let the fucker put it to them.”

  Billy Ryan lit a cigarette and made no reply. He was a tall man, with a rangy build and short, curly red hair, who had just turned twenty-seven in July. His cherubic features were more those of an altar boy than a gangster. The word inside the Flynn mob was that Mickey had taken to him because Ryan reminded him of himself at the same age. He was certainly as ruthless. Unspoken was the question of how long it would be before he repeated Mickey’s own treacherous history and took over the business, as Mickey had taken it from Pat McKenna.

  “It’s doing shit for business,” Mickey added.

  “But no one’s getting busted,” Ryan said. “All the cops’re interested in is taking down the Slasher.”

  Mickey turned to him. “Fercrissakes, will you wake up? No one’s getting busted, sure, but business is down. We had half the customers in the clubs tonight than we did on a bad night before all this Slasher crap started.”

  “So what are you saying, Mickey? You want me to get a few boys and play hero running this guy down?”

  “What do you take me for? Some bleeding heart? I could give a shit about this Slasher except he’s hurting business.” He frowned, then added, “You know, I wouldn’t put it past Papa Jo-el to be behind this.”

  Papa Jo-el was a self-proclaimed Creole juju man who mixed dealing crack and running prostitutes with the worship of his loa, the voodoo gods who live in a drumbeat. His men had been sliding around the edges of the Zone for the past few months, trying to expand their operations into the more lucrative territories claimed by Mickey Flynn. There were others that tried from time to time, gangs and individuals, but Papa Jo-el just couldn’t seem to get the message.

  The way Mickey saw it, Papa Jo-el just might be working some kind of phony voodoo shit, seeing as how his crew closed down the voodoo boys the last time they tried to work the Zone without coughing up Mickey’s cut. Closed them down hard.

  “I’ll have a talk with him,” Ryan said.

  “I don’t give a fuck what you do,” Mickey told him. “Just get rid of the cops. I want business as usual and I want it yesterday.”

  “You’ve got it,” Ryan said.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and rose to his feet, wondering, as he headed for the door, how the hell he was going to make good on his word. Behind him, Mickey shut off the VCR with his remote and frowned as the black-and-white film that WOKY was running as its late movie appeared on the screen.

  “What’s this shit?” he demanded. “I thought they’d colored all these old flicks.”

  Ryan paused at the door. “You want me to send up one of the girls?”

  “Sure. Make it the blonde with the big bazooms that I had up here last weekend. I need something soft to take my mind off of all this crap.”

  Ryan nodded and left the suite. That at least he could do. But this Slasher business … He shook his head. He wasn’t exactly the biggest supporter of the NPD, but if the cops couldn’t get a line on the sucker, where the hell was he supposed to start?

  Well, the cops had to have something. A witness, maybe. He’d get his man in Vice to do a little extracurricular rooting through the files of whoever was heading up the case.

  The elevator took him down to the hotel’s sixteenth floor. He got out and walked down the carpeted hall, counting off the doors. A Do Not Disturb sign hung from the knob.

  Gimme a break, he thought.

  He took out a master key, which would open any room in the hotel, and walked in.

  “Okay, Dixie,” he said, moving toward the bed. “Time to make the old man happy.”

  Janet Dixon’s disheveled blonde head protruded from below the covers. She sat up as he turned on the room’s overhead light. Beside her, a male figure stirred, then sat up as well, staring angrily at Ryan.

  “Who the—” he began, but the blonde put a hand on his arm.

  “Take it easy, Tiger,” she said, then turned to Ryan. “Mickey wants me now?”

  “He’s having a bad night.”

  “Shit.”

  Ignoring her nudity, she stepped from the bed and went to the closet, where she took down a silk evening grown

  “What do you think?” she asked Ryan, holding it up.

  He shrugged. “You’re only wearing it down the hall and up the elevator.”

  “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on here?” the man in the bed demanded.

  “Business,” Ryan told him.

  “What kind of business is conducted at—”

  “Where the hell you pick him up?” Ryan asked Dixie, ignoring the man.

  She had slipped on the evening gown, brushed out her hair and was now hastily applying some makeup in front of the dresser’s mirror.

  “There’s some kind of computer convention going on in the hotel,” she said, not turning from the mirror.

  Ryan grinned. “Sounds like fun.”

  “He was. Don’t give him a hard time.”

  She stood up from the mirror and stepped into a pair of heels. She crossed over to the bed and gave the man a kiss on the brow.

  “I’m sorry about this, Tiger. Give me a call the next time you’re in town and I’ll make it up to you.”

  “I … I …”

  “Jesus,” Ryan said as they stepped out into the hallway. “Where do you find them?”

  Dixie closed the door behind them. “I thought he was kind of cute. You won’t tell Mickey?”

  “Like he could care.”

  All she had to do was be there when Mickey wanted her. What she wanted to do on her
own time was her business. It was a little like being a dog on a leash, Ryan thought. He wondered how it felt until he caught the look in Dixie’s eyes as they were waiting for the elevator.

  You and me, it said. We’re no different.

  And she was right. What they did for the old man wasn’t the same, but Mickey had him on a leash that was just as tight as the one he had her on.

  Maybe it was time to start seeing about some changes, Ryan thought.

  FOUR

  It had been a mistake to come back to the city. She knew that now. Something had drawn her back—a kind of gnawing at her mind—so she’d hitchhiked halfway across the country to return to the streets of this city where she’d spent the first few years of her life. She’d thought that what had drawn her back was having been born here; she’d thought it was safe because the newspapers and TV reports had all said he was dead. But they’d all been lies.

  He wasn’t dead. She should have realized it wouldn’t be that easy.

  She’d thought she could finally make a new start here—maybe even go back to school—but there wasn’t a chance of that now. Not after he’d tricked her into coming back. That gnawing feeling in her head had been him, summoning her. And she could feel him still, worrying away at the shadows that lay in the dark streets outside the abandoned tenement in which she’d claimed a squat.

  He wanted her. He wanted to pay her back for telling what he made her do to him when he came into her room late at night.

  Her mother had taken her away—first from him, then, when he wouldn’t leave them alone, away from the city itself. But her mother was drawn to a certain kind of a man, and when she turned thirteen, her stepfather started coming to her room when her mother was working a night shift, wanting the same things her real father had. When she ran away this time, she went by herself.

  Five years of living on the street followed. She was wild when she first ran away. She’d do anything, so long as it gave her a buzz—drugs, rip-offs, lying about her age so that she could dance in strip clubs, prostitution—but unlike the other kids she ran with, she woke up one day and found herself just staring into the emptiness that lay at the heart of her life.