The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2)

by Vin Suprynowicz

  And he smiled then, and nodded. And the video ended.

  * * *

  A decrepit 1942 facility that had once been known for drawing the lowest attendance in the International League, Pawtucket’s McCoy Stadium had been renovated in 1998 and was now known to draw as many as 10,000 fans to some of the Triple-A Paw Sox games, although they weren’t going to do that well this afternoon against the Lehigh Valley IronPigs — the summer crowds preferred the cooler, twilight outings.

  But it was a handy spot for Sergeant Phil Robichaux — his muscle shirt showing off the new tattoo on his left biceps, the skull and crossbones and the two spent bullet casings bearing the dates of his two kills — to meet his bag man.

  One of the glorified meter maids had already given him trouble for showing it off at the station house, but the union had come to his defense once again. The contract was very clear — tats were fine, they were the officer’s personal business, as long as they were “normally covered by the uniform.”

  The bag man had season tickets in the next row. Robichaux had actually inherited the arrangement from his Providence P.D. predecessor, who’d inherited it from his. Given how long the “War on Drugs” had been going on, nobody really knew for how many decades the police officers of the West Providence Area Command had had their livelihoods subsidized by those who distributed marijuana and the standard range of narcotics in their neighborhoods, but everyone agreed it kept things under control and relatively violence free.

  Nobody needed a bunch of homicides to crop up in some wildcat turf war — that would look bad for everybody. This way sergeants who would otherwise struggle to send their kids to college on a paltry $70,000 a year got a helpful additional tax-free subsidy, and the known operators, supervised by the boys on the Hill to make sure everything ran regular, didn’t have to spend a lot of time and money bailing their couriers and flagmen and dealers out of the lockup all the time. They understood they were supposed to deal mostly to the Schwartzes and the Puerto Ricans, keep the stuff away from the good kids on the football team, it all worked out pretty good.

  Only tonight Phil Robichaux had more on this mind than just the cool new tattoo and picking up his regular pouch of twenty-dollar bills. He gave the signal to meet his man in line for a bratwurst up at the refreshment concourse.

  “Hey, we no sooner get some good pitching then they get called up to Fenway, and we’re back to Rootie Kazootie,” Lucky groused to let Phil know he was behind him.

  “I know it,” Robichaux agreed. “Where’d they get this kid tonight, some carnival?”

  “A problem, my man?”

  They dropped their voices now, Phil pretending to look up the new pitcher’s two-digit ERA in his program, the two men not even looking at each other, a couple of strangers waiting in line for a hot dog and some spicy brown mustard.

  “Yeah, I got a problem, which could soon be your problem.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “We got a new area commander, been workin’ his way up as a ‘community policing’ hand-holder down at headquarters, groomin’ him for somethin’ bigger so he’s got to get his ticket punched in the Naked City, and we’re the ones got lucky.”

  “I heard.”

  “So he’s got all these computer printouts and he says we’re doin’ fine on small-time busts but the numbers don’t jive, with that much dope movin’ around there’s somethin’ wrong, he’s askin’ why we never make any big scores. You know I hate to hurt any of your guys, things been goin’ along real smooth. This guy won’t last long, but for now I gotta throw him some fish.”

  “I understand, Phil. This can be taken care of.”

  “Easy to say.”

  “No, listen. We got a problem of our own. This black college kid has moved into the area. Played some ball up in Boston, but now he dropped out to move in with his knocked-up girlfriend, and he’s paying the rent by selling dope that he gets from his contact up north.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Plays havoc with the distribution chain, and he’s underselling our guys. We’ve tried talking to him, but he thinks he’s a tough guy.”

  “I’m surprised he hasn’t gone for a moonlight swim.”

  “It’s been discussed, but you know we try not to play things that way if it can be avoided. It’s the modern era, Phil.”

  “Don’t I know it. Nothin’s simple anymore. So you’re sayin’ …”

  “Give me a few days. We’ll set you up to make a few buys from Joe College. You mention in your warrant request that your sources say he’s movin’ up to heavier quantities, heavier stuff. We’ll plant enough stuff in this jigaboo’s crib to make some nice pictures on the evenin’ news, your new commander will be happy, and the word goes out that you don’t set up freelance in our part of town.”

  “OK, that works for me. But it’s gotta be soon.”

  “You can ask your boss for buy money and a wire in maybe two days. This kid’s a moron, thinks he’s Mister Personality.”

  “What’s the lucky ballplayer’s name?”

  “Big defensive lineman, but gentle as a lamb. They call him Big Tiny Little.”

  “Big Tiny Little, I like that. Yeah, gimme two of the brats. Those well-done ones over there, not these ones you just put on.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Cory’s here,” Chantal said, her expression conveying modest concern or uncertainty.

  Matthew had repaired to his office, pricing books, working through the backlog. Rarely trusting his memory — values could change too quickly — he started by looking up each one, as well as he could, online or in the reference books. But in the end it was partly intuitive. Was there a likely buyer, or would it have to sit on the shelf for years to attract the right party? Pricier books could be started anywhere from 60 to 75 percent of market; you wanted a knowledgeable buyer to be confident he or she was getting a bargain; you didn’t want them to find the same book somewhere else for less money tomorrow. Over time, if they didn’t move, Marian would mark those down, as many as four times. Books worth less than thirty or forty dollars the staff was supposed to deal with, and oddly enough you had to price those even lower, in terms of market value, because it simply wasn’t worth the time to go find them on the shelf and knock them down by 15 percent once or twice a year.

  But of course, he was always getting interrupted.

  “Cory your … Navy electronics buddy?”

  “Right.”

  “I expected him to ship that thing back to us. There’s some problem?”

  “I don’t know. Can you talk to him?”

  “Sure. Both of us, right?”

  “OK.”

  Chantal ushered the guy into Matthew’s little office. Matthew cleared the chair but no one else sat down. Cory was out of uniform in an open-collared sports shirt, though the neatly creased beige slacks came close. Come to think of it, Chantal might have mentioned he was no longer on active duty. Handsome guy, a little bit of that Kevin Costner look, short sandy hair. He carried the “homing beacon” thing, which still looked like a heavy and over-engineered two-gallon paint can, in a pasteboard box.

  “Hi, Cory, nice to meet you. Appreciate your looking that thing over for us. So, is it safe to plug into our system? No Trojan horses?”

  “Do you know what this thing is?”

  “It’s a long-wave homing beacon.”

  The lieutenant seemed surprised. “That’s right. If you don’t mind my asking, why do you need a long-wave homing beacon?”

  “I don’t need one. I’ve got one.”

  “Do you know the main use for transmissions on these low frequencies?”

  “Communication with submarines, for one thing.”

  “I can’t either confirm or deny that.”

  “You just did. Come on, lieutenant, that hasn’t been a secret for thirty years. What are you telling me, if we turn this on you’re afraid one of your boomers is going to come charging up the bay and run aground off Quonset Point, looking for its mommy?�
��

  “Where was this device made?”

  “I have no idea. Do you?”

  “It wasn’t made in this country.”

  “Hardly anything is made in this country any more, except fried chicken and jail cells.”

  “For that matter, none of the components were made in any of the countries that manufacture our components.”

  “Now that’s a little more interesting. But it’s not a bomb, right? All it does is what it’s supposed to do?”

  “That’s right. Mr. Hunter, I’ve been asked if I could have your permission to take this thing apart, analyze and photograph the components.”

  “Which is a pretty amusing request, given that I’m sure you and the boys at the Navy lab have already done all those things, plus whatever metallurgical tests you thought you could pull off without melting it down into a doorstop. So what’s this all about? It’s too small, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “If you’re not concerned about what it does, then you’re concerned about how it does it. It’s too small, it shouldn’t be able to send out that kind of signal using nothing but house current, right?”

  “OK, Mr. Hunter. I’m sorry if I treated you like a dummy. But you put this thing in our hands. You must have known we’d want to know more. Is there a price for this information, to put us in touch with whoever built this?”

  “Lieutenant, Chantal trusts you, so you must not be a dangerous halfwit. The information you think I’m willing to sell I don’t have yet, myself. A contact of mine sent me this and urged me to plug it into our computer system, he said it could be of some future use to me. That’s it. Truthfully, I just asked Chantal, who foolishly spent a couple of her younger years traveling to exotic places and helping Uncle Sam blow things up, if she knew someone who could check to make sure it wasn’t going to erase our entire database, or send it all to Mongolia or something.”

  “Mongolia?”

  “A figure of speech, lieutenant. What I’m going to do now, unless you’ve got a fire team hiding in the bushes outside, is to plug this thing in. If you want to monitor the frequency — which I’m sure you’ve determined — to make sure we’re not sending the secret recipe for Mrs. Field’s chocolate chip cookies to some Russian U-boat lurking off Block Island, feel free. I suspect over time we’ll be hearing more from the person who sent me this. Make sure Chantal knows how to get hold of you; if anything develops that looks like it’s going to threaten national security, giant bugs from outer space, anything like that, I’ll be sure and let you know.”

  Lieutenant Cory — he surely still carried himself like a lieutenant — may not have been entirely happy, but he turned over the giant coffee can to Matthew and let Chantal show him out. Presumably they’d share e-mail addresses, trade secret handshakes, whatever.

  There was an auxiliary outlet in the back of one of the front-desk computers. Matthew plugged in the coffee can and set it on the floor under the desk, where no one would trip over it. He couldn’t find an on-off switch, so he assumed he didn’t need to do anything else. If he was expecting it to do anything audible, he was disappointed. The floor might be vibrating just a little, like when a truck went by outside, but he finally decided that was just his imagination.

  No rest for the wicked, though. Chantal now advised him Marquita was here.

  “Browsing, or asking to see me?”

  “To see you. She’s a little agitated.”

  “Bring her into the office,” he sighed. “But you can stay with us, right?”

  Matthew asked her how Gilbert was doing out West with the grandmother, she said fine, et cetera, but the small talk didn’t seem to relax her.

  “What is it, Marquita? What’s wrong?”

  She looked at Chantal.

  “I can leave, if you like,” Chantal offered.

  “No, no, that’s not it. Bucky’s been gone two nights, that’s all. It’s not like him. My friends roll their eyes like he’s out cattin’ around, but that’s not what it is. I would know if it was something like that. He and his friend Alvin both been gone, now. You know Alvin?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Little white guy, you probably seen him. He was one of those Derlethians. Now he says it was all a big misunderstanding so he’s back in the church, but Bucky and I think Windsor went way too easy on those guys. Anyway, they both work for Worthy, now, so I call for Worthy, and I can’t reach him, either. Oh, they’re real nice at the Annesley house, they take messages for him and Bucky, but they won’t tell me nothin’. Turns out nobody’s seen Worthy for about a week. I think they went away someplace with Worthy, which is fine. Sometimes he has to do that, that’s his work now. Worthy pays him pretty good. Pretty well. But it’s not like Bucky not to tell me he’d be gone, or not to get in touch. I think he’s hurt or in some kind of trouble.”

  “I think you’re right,” Matthew said.

  That seemed to surprise both Marquita and Chantal. Everyone seemed to expect the standard “Don’t worry, go home and bake cookies, I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

  “How well do you know Worthy Annesley?” Matthew asked.

  “What do you mean?

  “Does he manipulate people? Like, would he ask Bucky to do something dangerous, something he wouldn’t be able to talk to you about?”

  “They all talk about Worthy like he’s this violent man who’s gonna take the church to war, but it’s not true.” Marquita was suddenly less tongue-tied. Whether it was deserved or not, the Annesleys inspired that kind of loyalty. “If the way he talks sounds angry it’s because he cares. He cares about these people whose lives are ruined by the drug war, like Bucky’s boy. Everybody else just flap their arms like a chicken and say, ‘Gee, too bad, nothing we can do,’ while people get sent away for twenty, thirty years for possession, for driving the truck, nothing violent at all. The buzz-heads just decide if it’s more than a pound, you must be a ‘dealer.’ But except for Bucky, Worthy is one of the most caring people I ever met. He was just about the only person who ever showed any interest in my photography.”

  “Your photography.”

  “Never mind.”

  “No, I’m interested, Marquita. This could be important.”

  “Nobody’s interested. Forget I said that.”

  “You photograph things that no one else can see.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you? And when you’ve tried to show them to people, they laugh, they tell you it’s lens flare or dirt on your lens, they won’t even look.”

  “You got my house bugged or something? You some kind of cop?”

  “Marquita, I would never talk to anyone about the books you buy, that’s your business. But now I hope you’ll talk to me and Chantal, who’s my partner in these things. Because I think it might be important. You buy books about unexplained phenomena.”

  “Yeah. Is that a problem?”

  “Crop circles, reincarnation.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “I’m not being critical, Marquita. We wouldn’t sell those books if I thought there was any problem with them. But this could be important. You buy books about orbs.”

  “Yes, OK. I do.”

  “And did Worthy find out you were interested in orbs? Did he talk to you about them?”

  Marquita said nothing.

  “Marquita, I’ve crossed the horizon and looked back, OK? Emilio was my first road man.”

  “You’ve visited the other world?”

  “Many times. No one here is going to laugh at you. I know something about the pain of speaking the truth and not having anyone listen. But you said Worthy did listen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was interested in what your camera was capturing. Seriously interested.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which was what?”

  “The orbs. But how did you know that?”

  “Worthy said he started to find evidence that the kind of things Lovecraft wrote about in one of his short stories ar
e real, that there are things all around us that we can’t normally see, but now people are starting to see them, in pictures taken with electronic cameras. Do you take pictures of the orbs that way, Marquita?”

  “I don’t talk about that anymore.”

  “Because people made fun of you, told you they were fakes, or something.”

  “All the time. They look at you like you’re crazy. They say your camera must be broken, you’ve got dust on your lens, you’ve got water droplets on your lens. I even have them say maybe I need eye surgery, if I’m seeing these things, go to the hospital. You show them three pictures taken a minute apart, less than that, all in the same place. First one, no orbs. Second one, the sky’s full of orbs, all different colors. Third picture, they’re almost all gone, you can even see the tracks where some are moving off. If it was water on my lens, where’d the water go? They just laugh.”

  “But Worthy didn’t laugh.”

  “No, he wanted to see more. He had all kinds of questions. Do the same ones come back on different nights, how fast can they move, what seems to attract them, stuff like that.”

  “He didn’t think you were crazy.”

  “No way. He kept saying the orbs came ‘from beyond.’”

  “Did he? Could he have been saying they reminded him of a story called ‘From Beyond’?”

  “Yeah. That sounds right. You really think this has something to do with what’s happened to Bucky?”

  “Yes, I do. Not like you’ve done anything wrong. But Worthy had us find a book for him, and I think he used the book to find a machine, and the machine is to help him see the orbs, and lots of other things. See them, find out where they come from, how they move back and forth, find out a lot of things. I hate to impose on you, Marquita, but if we’re going to help you find Bucky, I believe this is very important.”

  “You think Bucky is dead?”

  “No, Marquita. I think we can find him. At least, I’m going to assume we can, and we’re going to try. But Chantal and I would like to see your photographs.”