Creepers

by David Morrell

  Static crackled from his walkie-talkie, Ronnie taunting him again. No doubt, Ronnie hoped to hear a response and use it as a target. But Balenger was too far away now.

  He kept counting. Twenty-five. Twenty-six.

  He pressed the pulse button on his walkie-talkie. Ronnie would hear a similar buzz of static, Balenger knew.

  “So you’re still alive,” the voice said. Although Balenger’s walkie-talkie was at minimum volume, the stairwell’s echo amplified the words. “I wondered if I’d hit you.”

  The light from his headlamp turning dizzily on the spiral staircase, Balenger reached the third level and continued to wave the hammer into the shadows before him.

  Static.

  Balenger pressed the transmit button and put the walkie-talkie directly against his mouth, cupping a hand around his lips, working to shut out the stairwell’s echo. “Carlisle had agoraphobia. I kept asking myself why a man terrified of the outdoors would leave the hotel and shoot himself on the beach.”

  Forty-seven. Forty-eight.

  “It didn’t make sense. But now I understand. Something else terrified him more.”

  Balenger was certain the count was past fifty. Vinnie, for God’s sake, do what I told you!

  “I didn’t hurt him,” the voice said.

  “You weren’t a good son.”

  “Your voice sounds different.”

  Balenger imagined Vinnie following directions, turning up the volume on his walkie-talkie, and setting it on the floor. He imagined Ronnie peering up toward Balenger’s suddenly amplified voice. Abruptly, he heard a shotgun blast from his walkie-talkie. He listened fiercely for the distant sound of a handgun firing in response. But thunder rumbled through the hotel, vibrating through the stairwell, and he heard nothing else, not even static from his walkie-talkie.

  Breath froze in his chest as his hammer probed the air and felt resistance. He knelt, saw blood on the stairs, and scanned his headlamp. There it was—the tautly strung wire. The dark blood on it made it almost indistinguishable from the shadows.

  He sank onto his back and squirmed under the wire. Straightening, he heard another burst of static from his walkie-talkie, but he ignored it and waved the hammer in front of him, searching for more wire while descending toward the darkness at the bottom of the stairs.

  Now he allowed himself to consider a thought he’d been avoiding. What if Ronnie took more than the walkie-talkie? What if he also took the night-vision goggles so that no one else could use them? Then we don’t have many options left, he thought. Hell, we might not have any.

  Leave, a part of his mind told him. While Vinnie distracts Ronnie, try to find a way out.

  Abandon them?

  Not exactly. Find a way out and go for help.

  There isn’t a way out. The only way to end this is to kill him.

  Even if I could get out, what would I do? On foot? In the middle of the night? In a thunderstorm? A deserted part of the city? It’d take me forever to reach the police station. Vinnie and Amanda could be dead by then.

  This is your chance.

  Bullshit. I won’t leave them.

  He reached the bottom, where the limited space made the smell of death even more pronounced. His single beam of light revealed two corpses, Mack and JD surrounded by blood, their throats slit, their legs almost severed. Balenger saw footprints in the blood. Ronnie had evidently approached them, finished them with a knife, and taken the walkie-talkie. The footprints seemed to come and go through a wall. Presumably, it had one of the secret doors Balenger was sure existed, although how the door could be opened he didn’t know.

  He crouched, studying the gloom-enshrouded bodies. Each corpse did indeed wear night-vision goggles. He reached, then remembered booby-trapped corpses in Iraq and paused, taking a closer look at the bodies. Something was stuck under Mack’s left side.

  JD, too, had something under him. Not obvious. Not unless you’d been seasoned in the hell of Iraq and you knew not to trust anything at any time. Explosives of some sort. The pressure of the bodies armed the detonators. If Balenger moved the bodies, the triggers would be released and the bombs would explode.

  He shifted around to their heads, knelt in blood, and reached under Mack’s skull, guiding his fingers toward the strap on Mack’s goggles. Do it gently, he warned himself.

  Static buzzed from his walkie-talkie.

  Balenger eased the strap over Mack’s skull, the shaved head providing no resistance. He lifted the goggles from Mack’s sightless eyes and attached them to his equipment belt. Then he took a breath, leaning toward JD and the strap on his goggles.

  In the distance, he thought he heard a shotgun blast. He removed JD’s goggles and put them on. He shut off his headlamp.

  In place of the shadows that fought his headlamp, he now saw a green twilight that made everything faintly visible. His breathlessness and the sound of the storm created the feeling he was underwater. With increased vision, he saw a long dark object. The crowbar. He picked it up.

  He whirled toward the stairs, desperate to hurry back to the penthouse. But he hesitated and faced the narrow corridor. Despite his apprehension, he entered it. The enhanced light that the goggles provided made it possible to see all the way to the end.

  All the way to what Tod had described finding: the corpse of a fully clothed woman seated against the back wall. Shrunken like a mummy. Despite the green of the goggles, it was obvious she had blond hair. She held a purse in her lap and seemed to be waiting patiently to go on a journey. Balenger hated to imagine the terror she must have endured. Her old-style clothes told him that she wasn’t Diane, but that knowledge didn’t console him. He now took for granted that his beloved wife was dead, and yet he longed to be with her, even if she was lifeless. Amid a sea of green, he stooped and tried to determine how the woman had died.

  No signs of violence. Wrong, he thought, focusing on her neck. The larynx and windpipe projected inward, the bones broken. She’d been strangled. He felt paralyzed until static from the walkie-talkie jabbed him into motion. About to hurry back to Amanda and Vinnie, he nevertheless set down the crowbar and reached for the corpse’s purse. Its fabric was grimy and dust-covered. He set down the walkie-talkie, using both hands now to open the purse and take out a wallet.

  There was a driver’s license inside. A shudder swept through him when he saw the name on it. The name told him almost everything.

  Need to get back. His thoughts were frenzied. Need to look in Vinnie’s knapsack.

  He shoved the license in a Windbreaker pocket, then grabbed the crowbar and the walkie-talkie. As thunder rumbled, he raced toward the staircase.

  Watch out for the razor wire.

  Poking with the crowbar, he found it. He squirmed under and rushed higher. His arm ached from the crowbar’s weight as he thrust it up and down ahead of him in case Ronnie had managed to follow him and rig another trap. He thought he heard a distant shotgun blast and then a pistol. Third level. Fourth.

  At the fifth, he halted again, unable to restrain himself from peering into the secret corridor. He remembered thinking he’d seen an object propped against a wall in there. Now his night-vision goggles revealed that he was right. Another corpse of a woman. Blond. Fully clothed, this time in slacks, a turtleneck, and a blazer.

  No, Balenger thought.

  The clothes were familiar to him.

  No.

  He stumbled toward her. When a rat appeared on her shoulder, he swung the crowbar, smashing it against a wall. Overcome with emotion, he sank to his knees. The woman wasn’t as shrunken as the corpse on the bottom level. Her eyes were gone. Chunks had been chewed from her, but the face was nonetheless impossible not to recognize.

  Diane.

  Grief cramped his chest. It took away his breath. Tears burned like acid on his cheeks. Wracked with sobs, he raised a hand, caressing her leathery face. Her blond hair hung below her shoulders, longer than she preferred it—because it had continued growing after her death. Her expression
was a grimace of terror. Like the corpse on the bottom level, her neck bones were cracked inward from having been strangled. His Diane. His wonderful Diane.

  He knelt, worshiping her, mourning her. Diane. Eleven years together. She never gave up on him, never tired of taking care of him after he came back sick from his first time in Iraq. He had tried to make it up to her, tried to make her realize how much he loved her. Kind, selfless Diane. Beautiful Diane with holes chewed in her face.

  A gunshot brought him back to the moment. Continuing to sob, he opened her purse, took out her wallet, and put it in his Windbreaker. He kissed her parched forehead, picked up the crowbar and the walkie-talkie, and stalked up the stairs.

  Fury made him want to rush, but that would be playing Ronnie’s game, letting the son of a bitch manipulate him into making mistakes. I’m coming for you, Ronnie, he inwardly shouted. Ready with the crowbar, he emerged into the sixth-floor passageway and studied the wreckage of Danata’s living room. The furniture still barricaded the entrance.

  He climbed to the trapdoor. Beyond it, he heard a commotion, hurried footsteps, a gunshot. Frenzied, he knocked twice, three times, once.

  No response. What if they think I’m Ronnie? What if they shoot through the trapdoor?

  As he knocked again, he heard the lock being freed. The trapdoor was lifted. A headlamp blazed toward his face, stressing the sensor in his goggles, creating a flare that made him temporarily blind. The headlamp jerked away, allowing his night vision to return. He hurried up and locked the trapdoor behind him.

  The smell of burnt gunpowder was everywhere. Vinnie stood in the doorway to the surveillance room, aiming toward two jagged holes in the floor. He saw Balenger and retreated to him. “I did what you said. I counted to fifty. Then I turned up the volume on my walkie-talkie and set it on the floor. He blew it apart.”

  “How many rounds did you fire?” Balenger took the pistol.

  “Three. I hope you don’t think I wasted—”

  “You did your job. You distracted him. Nine rounds left. We’ll need to make them last.”

  “He’s been shooting at random through the floors.”

  “He can’t get into Danata’s living room and shoot at us from there. We’re safe for a moment. Give me your knapsack.”

  Balenger raised the walkie-talkie to his lips. “Hey, asshole, guess what?”

  Static.

  “I asked you a question, jerkoff.”

  “What am I supposed to guess? Are the vulgarities necessary?”

  “When it comes to you? Absolutely. I found my wife, you piece of shit.”

  Static.

  “You strangled her. You strangled them all.”

  Balenger took the knapsack from Vinnie and pulled the police report from the compartment in back. He reached into his pocket for the driver’s license from the corpse on the bottom level.

  “Candlelight gourmet dinners,” Balenger said into the walkie-talkie. “Soothing classical music. Literary reading sessions. Foreign movies with subtitles. All very proper and formal and intellectual. Need to keep it intellectual. Can’t let emotions get in the way. Emotions make you weak. Emotions make you lose control.”

  He studied the name on the driver’s license: Iris McKenzie. When Amanda listed the names of Ronnie’s “girlfriends,” something had nagged at him. Now he knew what it was. Iris. He flipped through the pages in the police report.

  “Found it!” he said to the walkie-talkie. “Iris McKenzie. Age: thirty-three. Residence: Baltimore, Maryland. Occupation: advertising copywriter. Hair: blond. Sound familiar, you bastard? She ought to. If I’m right, she was your first.” Balenger scanned the report, which an old man had written with painstaking neatness. “In August of 1968, Iris took a train from Baltimore to New York on business. Coming back, she decided to spend the weekend in Asbury Park at the famous Paragon Hotel. Nobody told her Asbury Park wasn’t the jewel it used to be or that the Paragon Hotel was a nightmare. She arrived on Friday. One night in this spooky old pile was enough for her. She checked out the next morning to go to the train station. Nobody saw her again. Except me. I saw her, Ronnie. She’s sitting downstairs in a corridor with her purse in her lap, still waiting for her train. It’s going to be a long time coming.”

  His mouth dry, his chest aching, Balenger needed to pause. He felt as if his surging emotions could cause his veins to explode.

  He raised the walkie-talkie. “Amanda says you treated her with terrifying politeness. Apart from locking her in the vault, of course. But what the hell, nobody’s perfect, right? Then you showed up with a sheer nightgown for her to wear. What happened, Ronnie? Did you decide the courtship was finally over? You fed her. You entertained her. You proved what a prince of a guy you were. Now you wanted something for your efforts. You’re a man of the world, after all. You know how the game’s played. But all of a sudden you got angry. You called her a whore. Did your sexual needs make you feel weak and resentful? I bet you’d soon have hit her. Then you’d have hated yourself for letting your weakness and needs get the better of you. Maybe you hated yourself for wanting her and hated her for being a woman you wanted. Or here’s an opposite possibility. I like this one better. Maybe you hated yourself because you believed you ought to want her but you didn’t. Maybe you didn’t feel any sexual interest at all, and that really bothered you. You were comfortable cooking gourmet meals, reading Proust, and watching subtitled movies. But when it came to the man-woman stuff, you were numb. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ you wondered. Gotta do something about that. So you made her put on a nightgown. That ought to give you a charge. But it didn’t, and now you hated her because she didn’t make you feel like a man. You knew where this was going. The same way it went with the others. You couldn’t make yourself screw them, so you strangled them to hide your shame and your failure. Maybe the next woman would make you feel like a man. Next time. There was always next time, right?”

  Unseen lightning cracked. Amanda and Vinnie watched Balenger, listening in horror.

  “So now you’re a pop psychologist in addition to being a failed soldier and a mediocre policeman?” the voice asked.

  “Detective. I was a detective. And I guess all that research you did about me didn’t tell you the crimes I investigated. Or maybe you made yourself ignore that because you didn’t want to think about your problem. Sex crimes, Ronnie. I investigated sex crimes. I can see into your head, pal, and it’s a sewer.”

  Ronnie. That name, too, kept nagging at Balenger.

  “1968,” Balenger said into the walkie-talkie. “There’s a photograph of you and Carlisle. It has a date on the back: July 31, 1968. A month later, Iris McKenzie disappeared. By the end of the year, Carlisle closed the hotel, dismissed the staff, and lived here alone. Or maybe he wasn’t alone. Ronnie. Ronnie. Why does that name—”

  Balenger flipped through the police file, page after page, remembering something, searching for it. Ronnie. Then he found the page, and the name stared up at him. It made him shudder. “Ronald Whitaker.”

  “What?” the voice asked.

  “Ronnie. Ronald. The Fourth of July, 1960. Ronald Whitaker.”

  “Shut up,” the voice said.

  Thunder rumbled.

  “You’re Ronald Whitaker.”

  “Shut up. Shut up.”

  Amid the din of the rain, Balenger heard pounding from below. Not from the trapdoor. Farther down. Aiming, he unlocked and opened the trapdoor. His goggles revealed the curved, green-tinted stairs.

  “Shut up. Shut up,” Ronnie yelled.

  As the fierce pounding continued, Balenger eased down the stairs and peered through the demolished wall into Danata’s ravaged living room.

  The pounding came from the barricaded door, powerful enough to jostle the furniture stacked against it.

  “Your mother died,” Balenger said into the walkie-talkie. “Your father molested you.”

  “I’ll make you hurt so much, you’ll beg me to kill you!” Ronnie shouted from outside the door. />
  Balenger entered Danata’s living room and aimed toward the door. Keeping his voice low, trying to make Ronnie think he was still in the penthouse, he continued speaking into the walkie-talkie. “Then your father thought he’d earn a few dollars out of you, so he brought you here to the Paragon Hotel for the Fourth of July, and he rented you to another pervert.”

  “I won’t listen!”

  “The guy tried to bribe you with a baseball, a glove, and a bat. I can’t imagine how unspeakable it was. Afterward, your father came back to the room with the money. He was drunk. He fell asleep. You bashed his head twenty-two times with the bat. Ronnie, in your place, I’d have hit him fifty times. A hundred. I can’t tell you how sorry I feel for that little boy. I’m enraged when I think about what was done to him. My heart breaks for the childhood he lost.”

  Rain lashed against the building. Thunder shook the walls.

  “But I hate everything he became, Ronnie.”

  “My name’s Walter Harrigan!”

  Balenger fired toward the voice. Once. Twice. At the door’s middle, his bullets plowed through the wood.

  Immediately, he shifted position, an instant before part of the wall roared open from two shotgun blasts, pellets spraying toward the noise from his gun.

  One of the pellets caught Balenger’s arm. Ignoring the pain, he fired to the right and left of the holes in the wall. He veered toward the stairwell as two more holes roared through the wall.

  From the darkness beyond the holes, he heard Ronnie reloading the shotgun.

  Damn it, I let him trick me! He got me to waste ammunition! Only five rounds left!

  Static crackled from his walkie-talkie.

  Ronnie’s aiming toward the sound! Balenger realized. As the walkie-talkie again crackled, he charged up the stairs. Two roars sent pellets clanging off the metal steps below him.

  “The holes don’t show the light from your headlamp,” the voice said from Balenger’s walkie-talkie. “Now I understand. While your friends distracted me, you went down the stairwell to the bodies. You got their night-vision goggles.”