The Wolfen

by Whitley Strieber

  Above that’s the ambient light reading. You set the top knob so that it reads the same value. Here—” He held the camera out. Dick took it, put it up to his eyes. The image was blurred but the three numbers were clear. “Read off from the bottom up.”

  “The bottom number says two hundred. The middle one sixty-six, the top point-oh-six.”

  “Meaning you’ve got two hundred shots left, the ambient light level is sixty-six and you are pointing the camera at an object point-oh-six meters away. Now gimme.” He took it back. “You set the top knob at sixty-six and the bottom one at point-oh-six. Now look.”

  “What the hell is it?”

  “The top corner of the locker, dummy. It’s magnified so much you can’t tell what you’re seeing that close. Point the camera out the window.” Dick swung the camera around. The top two readings flickered and changed as he moved it, then the limbs of a tree down near street level leaped into view. He could see where ice adhered to the twigs and where the sun had made it drop away. Yablonski guided his hand to the thumb indentation. “Pull back on it.” There was a click. The little door had closed on the side of the camera and a red light had gone on above the three green numbers of the readout.

  “You get a light?”

  “Right.”

  “Ready to shoot. Push forward.” The camera made five shots in quick succession. The film indicator now read 195.

  “It always shoots in increments of five. Now press inward on the indentation.” The scene pulled back and revealed the sidewalk below. “You go down to fifty millimeters.

  Fifty to five hundred, that’s the lens. If you push forward and down at the same time the camera will take a series of shots while the lens is moving. No problem. Just remember to always close the control housing before you try to shoot.” Dick took the camera from his eyes. Yablonski was pointing at the control housing. “That activates the camera. And if you change position always check focus. In operation it doesn’t matter too much, but remember that the camera is at its sharpest focus when the object you are shooting is exactly as far away as that little indicator in there says. You want it to change, you’ve got to adjust it with the knob.”

  “That’s all? I remembered everything.”

  “Well, aren’t we wonderful. Just don’t bring it back to me in a shoebox, for Chrissake.

  And get the fucker back here before noon tomorrow or I’ll be on your ass.”

  “Oh, yes sir, Mr. Commissioner, just like you say.”

  “Come on, Dick, take it easy. How much film you want?”

  “Another couple of boxes. That stuffs really compact. You sure there are two hundred shots?”

  “Of course. You think the camera would lie?”

  Dick put the machine back in its case and hefted it. He left Yablonski staring after him.

  As soon as he was gone, Yablonski was on the phone. “Captain Lesser,” he said crisply,

  “you told me you wanted a call if Dick Neff came around here for anything. Well, he did.

  He checked out the Starlight camera.”

  Chapter 8

  The search teams kept coming back empty-handed. It looked as if the park wasn’t going to yield any worthwhile clues. A bench covered with a slick of red ice— human blood.

  Some tattered remnants that might have been the victim’s clothes. That was all. No body, no ID, no witnesses. And so far, no report of a missing person. The cops were waiting for orders to move them out. The precinct wasn’t going to spend much more time on this, it was just another one of those mysteries that the city tossed up. Obviously somebody had died here, but in the absence of anything except blood there wasn’t much that could be done to find the killer.

  “Maybe it’ll tell us something,” the Medical Examiner said as a patrolman handed him a clear plastic bag full of tattered cloth.

  Becky Neff said nothing. More vague evidence. Even Wilson’s experience last night was nothing but hearsay. Hell, maybe he got panicked by some dogs. The trouble was, you weren’t going to get headquarters to take a chance on the theory. The man who sanctioned an investigation of werewolves in this city was headed for early retirement if that investigation didn’t prove itself.

  “Do you believe me?” Wilson said into the silence in the car.

  “Yeah,” Becky replied, surprised at the question.

  “Not you, dummy. The genius. I want to know if he believes me.”

  “If it wasn’t delirium tremens, I’d say you saw what you saw.”

  “Thanks.” Since relating his story Wilson had fallen into a silence. Becky didn’t know whether he was thinking something out or simply sinking into depression. If possible he seemed to be getting more morose.

  When Wilson turned to stare again out of the car window, Evans raised his eyebrows.

  “Listen,” he said to Wilson’s back, “if it makes any difference I really do believe you. I just wish to God I could do more for you than that.”

  “Every little bit helps,” Becky said acidly.

  “I’m sure. It must be hell.”

  “Yeah,” Wilson said, “it’s that.”

  Suddenly there was a flurry of activity. A couple of park cops jumped on scooters; guys from the 20th Precinct piled into squad cars. Becky flipped on the radio to catch the activity. “—thirteen, repeat, thirteen to Bethesda Fountain.”

  “Jesus—” Becky started the car and followed the others into the park. They slurried in the new snow, heading for the emergency. A signal-13 was the most serious call a policeman could put out: it meant that an officer was in distress. It would cause immediate response from all nearby units—and often some from farther away. It was the call that cops hated most to hear and wanted most to answer.

  The area around Bethesda Fountain was once elegant. Once, during summer, there was an open-air restaurant where you could drink wine and watch the fountain. Then the sixties had come, and drugs, and Bethesda Fountain had become an open-air drug bazaar.

  The restaurant had closed. The fountain had become choked with filth. Graffiti had appeared. Murders had taken place. Now the once-bustling spot was the same in summer as in winter: empty, abandoned, destroyed. And crumpled on the esplanade overlooking the fountain was a blue uniform, its occupant bent over almost with his forehead touching the snow. The scooter cops were the first to get to him. “Shot,” one of them shouted. An ambulance could already be heard screaming over from Roosevelt Hospital.

  Becky pulled the Pontiac up behind the scooters and the three of them jumped out.

  “I’m a doctor,” Evans shouted pointlessly. There wasn’t a person in the NYPD who didn’t know that the Medical Examiner was a doctor. Evans reached the wounded man, followed closely by Becky. He was a middle-aged cop, one of the guys who had been out beating the bushes for evidence, one of the searchers. “Fuckin’ dog,” he said almost laughing,

  “fuckin’ dog bit a hole in my side.” The voice was anguished and confused. “Fuckin’ dog!”

  “Holy shit,” Evans said.

  “Is it bad, Doc?” the man said through gathering tears.

  Evans looked away. “I’m not movin’ you till the stretcher gets here, buddy. You aren’t losing any blood out of it, however bad it is.”

  “Oh, fuck, it hurts!” he shouted. Then his eyes rolled and his head slumped to his chest.

  “Get some pressure on it, he’s passed out,” Evans said. Two of the man’s friends applied a pressure bandage to the gash in his overcoat. “Where’s that friggin’

  meatwagon!” Evans rasped. “This man’s not gonna make it if they don’t hurry.”

  Just then it pulled up and the medics piled out with their equipment. They cut the coat away and for the first time the wound was visible.

  It was devastating. You could see the blue-black bulge of the man’s intestine pulsing in the blood. Becky started to sob, stifling it as it came. They had done this! Just now, just minutes ago. They were right around here! She put a trembling hand on the M. E.’s shoulder.


  “Leave me alone.” He was examining the wound. “Move him out,” he murmured to the orderlies. He looked up at Becky. “He ain’t gonna live,” he said simply.

  They got the man on the stretcher and took him to the ambulance, heading for the emergency room as fast as they could go. There was an M.D. on the wagon so Evans returned to Becky’s car.

  The other cops were still standing in a little clump, staring at the blood-smeared thrash marks in the snow. For a moment nobody spoke. What could you say? A man had just had his intestines laid open— and he claimed it had been done by a dog. The Precinct Captain came up puffing hard. For some reason he hadn’t made it into a car. “What the fuck— what the fuck happened?”

  “Baker got hit.”

  “What by? Hit and run?”

  “Something took about nine inches of hide off his gut. Laid him open.”

  “What the fuck—”

  “You said that, sir. He says it was a dog.” Becky felt Wilson’s hand grasp her shoulder.

  A sharp pang of fear ran through her. “Listen, kid,” he said in an unnaturally calm tone,

  “stroll real easy-like over to those two scooters.” He breathed it into her ear. “You can ride a scooter?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Good, because you gotta. Just go real easy.”

  “What about our car?”

  “Stay the hell away from our car! And when you get on that scooter, move.”

  She didn’t ask questions even though she didn’t quite understand why he wanted to do this. You get to trust a good partner, and Becky trusted Wilson more than enough to just do what he said without asking why. He’d do the same for her. Hell, he had often enough.

  As she walked she noticed that he was meandering in the same direction, getting closer and closer to the scooters without making it particularly obvious. “Now, Becky!”

  They leaped, the scooters coughed to life, they skidded onto the snowy pavement, Becky swayed, righted herself and headed straight down the Mall, which stretched to Park East Drive and the safety of the streets. She heard a shout behind, an incredulous shout from one of the scooter cops who saw the two detectives suddenly hijack his transportation. Then something else was there, a gray shape moving like the wind, a furious pulsing mass of hair and muscle. And she knew what had happened. “Oh God God God,” she said softly as she rode. She turned the gas all the way up and the scooter darted through the snow, bouncing and shaking, threatening from instant to instant to go into a skid. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. Was the thing dropping back? She risked a glance. God, it was right there. Its teeth were bared, and its face, something unbelievable, twisted with hate and fury and effort—animal, man, something. She choked out a sob and just held on. The thing’s breathing was clearly audible for a moment, then it fell back, fell back making little sharp noises, sounds of pure anger! It was gone and the scooters bounded off the Mall, crashed through ripping naked shrubs, shot into the roadway and tore down toward the park entrance at Fifth Avenue. Ahead the Plaza Hotel and the General Motors Building.

  General Sherman with his permanent toupee of pigeon droppings. Horse-drawn carriages waiting in rows, the breath of the horses steaming. Then stopping, bringing the scooters to a halt at the bustling entrance to the hotel. “We’re at the Plaza,” Wilson was growling into the scooter’s radio, “come get us.”

  A squad car appeared. “What’s the problem, Lieutenant?” the driver said. “You just got reported for stealing two scooters.”

  “Fuck that. We were under orders. We thought we saw a suspect.”

  “Yeah. So get in. We’ll drive you up to the Twentieth.”

  They left the scooters for the men from the park precinct who were approaching in another car. Wilson and Neff were silent as they rode toward the precinct, Wilson because he had nothing to say, Becky because she couldn’t have talked if she had wanted to. It felt funny to her to be alive right now, like she had just broken through a wall into a time she was never intended to see. “I was supposed to die back there,” she thought. She looked at her partner. He had figured it out just in time—a trap. God, what a clever trap! And they had slipped out just as it had been sprung.

  “You know what happened,” Wilson asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded, silent for a few minutes. The squad car wheeled up Central Park West.

  Wilson touched the door lock; the windows were closed. “They’re very smart,” he said.

  “We knew that”

  “But that was a very neat trap. Wounding that guy… knowing that we would respond…

  setting an ambush. All very smart.”

  “How did you figure it out? I’ve gotta confess I was completely taken in.”

  “You oughta start thinking defensively. They wounded that guy, didn’t kill him. That’s what tipped me off. Why wound, when killing is easier? It had to be the same reason a hunter wounds. To lure. When I figured that out, I decided we ought to go for the scooters. Frankly I’m surprised we made it.”

  The squad car pulled up to the precinct house. After a long look up and down the street the two detectives got out and hurried up the steps. The desk sergeant looked up.

  “Captain’s waiting for you,” he said.

  “Must be antsy as hell,” Wilson muttered as they walked into the Captain’s office.

  He was a trim, neatly turned out man with steel-gray hair and a deeply wrinkled face.

  But his movements, his posture, belonged to a younger man. He had just taken off his overcoat and sat down at his desk. Now he looked up, raising his eyebrows. “I’m Captain Walker,” he said. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “We saw a suspect—”

  “Can that bullshit. Everybody saw those dogs come out from under your car and chase you halfway to Grand Army Plaza. What the hell was that all about?”

  “Dogs?” Wilson was no actor. The fact that he was hiding something was perfectly clear to Becky. But maybe she underestimated him.

  “Yes, dogs. I saw them. We all did. And Baker said it was dogs that laid him open.”

  Wilson shook his head. “Beats the hell out of me.”

  “Look, I don’t know quite what’s going on here— I mean you two are some kind of special team, that’s OK by me—but I got a guy hurt bad down at Roosevelt and he says a dog did it. I saw you two light out like you were runnin’ from death itself. And you were chased by two dogs. Now I’d like to know what the fuck’s goin’ on.” His phone rang. A few muttered words, a curse, then he hung up. “And so would the New York Post. They got a photographer and a reporter waiting out front to see me right now. What do I tell them?”

  Becky stepped in. Wilson had tucked his chin into his neck, squared his shoulders, and was about to blow it. “Tell them what’s probably true. Your man was wounded in an unknown manner. I mean if somebody’s colon is lying on the sidewalk they might get a little delirious. He passed out right after his statement, didn’t he? And as for dogs chasing us, it might have happened, but it was a complete coincidence.”

  The man stared at them. “You’re bullshitting. I don’t know why but I’m not gonna push it. Just get one thing straight: I don’t owe you two a Goddamn thing. Now take off.

  Go wherever you go.”

  “What about the reporter?” Becky asked. That was important. You couldn’t leak this to the press, not unless the problem could be solved.

  “So I’ll tell the reporters what Baker said. And I’ll tell them that he was delirious. Is that sufficient?”

  “What do you mean, sufficient? How should we know?”

  “You’re the people keeping this thing under wraps, aren’t you? You’re the ones who go around and make sure no shaggy dog stories get into the paper, aren’t you?”

  Wilson closed his eyes and shook his head. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “We got better things to do.”

  They left the precinct and hailed a cab. Obviously there was no point in asking the precinct for transportation back to Bethesda F
ountain where their car was waiting. As they approached the car Wilson craned his neck out of the cab window to make sure nothing was under it. But he needn’t have bothered. The car wasn’t going anywhere.

  The doors were open. The interior of the car was ripped to shreds. And it was full of bloody pulp. “Jesus,” the cabdriver blurted, “this your car?”

  “Yeah. It was.”

  “We gotta get a cop.” He gunned the motor. “Who’s in there? What a fuckin’ mess!”

  “We are the police.” Becky held her shield against the bulletproof glass separating the passenger seat from the driver’s compartment. The driver nodded and headed for the Central Park precinct house on Seventy-ninth Street. A few moments later they pulled to a stop in front. Neff, Wilson and the driver got out and approached the desk sergeant through the worn double-doors of the building. “Yeah,” he said looking up. “You two. I hear you’re a couple of mean motherfuckers on a scooter.”

  “Get your guys back over to the Fountain,” Wilson rasped. “The Chief Medical Examiner just got himself killed.”

  Becky felt the blood drain out of her face. Of course, that must be who was in the car.

  It had to be. Poor Evans, he was a hell of a good man! “Goddamn it,” Becky said.

  “We were stupid,” Wilson said softly. “We should have warned him in advance.” He laughed, a bitter little noise. “They missed out on the main event. So they went for the consolation prize. Let’s get Underwood on the phone.”

  Wilson took on Underwood. Becky watched him, annoyed that her usual role was being usurped. “Look,” Wilson said into the phone, “you got problems. You got a cop on critical at Roosevelt with his guts laid open. Says dogs did it. You got that? Dogs. Plus you got a reporter from the Post on it, and more to follow. So listen, dummy. You got one Chief Medical Examiner just murdered out by Bethesda Fountain. And you’re gonna find it was done by claws and teeth. And if you want this one wrapped up real good—”