“Hey,” he whispered. “Do me a favor. Pray to the virgin when the tik-tik sings.”
Erin grimaced. “I'm a Baptist.”
“Yeah. I know. Well… Be careful when the tik-tik sings.”
“I can do that.”
Rickie was in good hands. That was one worry down but there were plenty left. She still couldn't swallow Ben's theories whole, no matter what he'd seen at The Well, no matter what she'd seen at the hospital. She had no choice, she figured, but to return to the Port District and see what she could see. She also had no choice, she figured, but to turn her squad radio off. Erin wanted nothing to do with the mayor's next press conference and couldn't explain her mission in the Port, if the chief asked. So why give him the chance to ask? She was all-in now and bound to do the one thing she'd promised Ben she wouldn't. She had to search for signs of this Vong, the one Ben insisted committed these murders.
She started her search from her lookout on the world, the point of Eagle Point Park. Erin climbed from her car, thinking again about Ben's story. If Vong was what Ben thought she was, she was also the lady Rickie had seen; the lady who'd put her legs back on and jumped the fence, whatever that meant. She passed the Duncan Memorial tower and thought about the scare she'd received during her jog the morning of the Garfield explosion; the morning all this had started. She remembered the fright, the flight, and the 'tick, tick, tick'. What of the big bat? And the ticky bird? What did bats and birds do? Where did they go? Where could they be found? A cave? A nest? An aerie? A perch? She reached the bluff and leaned on the fence overlooking the city. She asked herself the ridiculous question: If I was a bird, where would I build my nest? A tree? A pole? And if a bat? Did bats nests? High like a bird? What in Duncan came close to a skyscraper? Nothing at all. The hotel downtown? The old brewery where Ben lived? The Ulysses Grant Bridge? The Wisconsin and Iowa bridge? The golden dome on the City Hall? Several there had bats in their belfries, but bats in their dome?
A big bat and a ticky bird. That's what Rickie had said. Erin's cynical mind tried to insist it was just Rickie. Tried to insist she forget it and solve the murders the old fashioned way. But that wasn't fair. It wasn't smart either. Rickie was mentally challenged, he wasn't an idiot and he wasn't crazy. He got around as much as the police. He saw and remembered. He had the mind of a twelve-year-old, yes, but a sharp twelve-year-old all the same. Now, if a sharp twelve-year-old saw something he called a big bat or something he called a ticky bird? What had he seen? And where did he see it?
She thought of Linnea Keddy atop the Opera House. Nothing about the scene indicated anything unnatural lived there, the body had just been left. By a big bat? By a bird? Or, if Ben was right, by a Philippine demon? If not the Opera House, perhaps another roof? Maybe, but if so, Erin was screwed. It would take the department days, weeks, to search every roof in town. Alone, it would take her a year. Where could a bird hide a big nest without being seen? When the answer dawned, Erin could have kicked herself. She jumped back in her car, headed down the bluff, and toward the north end of the Port District. She followed Seventh Street out, turned onto Commercial, and eased her cruiser along the railroad tracks toward one of the lonely Mississippi points where the Shot Tower stood sentinel by the river.
One of the last of its kind, the Shot Tower was built in 1856 to produce cheap round lead ball (shot) ammunition for the military. A 120-foot-tall tapered column, the tower was nineteen feet square at the base, thirteen at the cap, with a hollow interior thirteen feet square top to bottom. Lead was melted, hoisted to the top, and poured through screens of differing gauges. The liquid metal drops rounded as they fell and splashed into water vats below to cool instantly as round shot. The death of the musket spelled the death of the facility, but in a city all about history, the Duncan Shot Tower lived on.
Erin stared up at the landmark; a perfect home for a nest. And, just then, no one would have known. A major renovation had been started and the tower closed to tourists for weeks. The work was half-finished, but problems with grant funds had developed, and the site stood temporarily abandoned. It's normally tapered shadow was deformed by scaffolding to its full height on two sides, and in the moonlight, the tower looked a misshapen parody of itself. Flashlight in hand, Erin slipped under the yellow warning tape around the perimeter. The door was locked but that meant nothing. A big bat could fly. Erin couldn't, but she could climb. She slid the light into her belt and started up the scaffolding.
As she climbed, Erin was suddenly reminded of Horatio Shane and the late detective's fear of heights. How he would have hated this. Then again, given the choice of being where she was or being where he was… Erin told herself to knock it off. A philosopher she wasn't. Besides, thinking of Shane had returned her to thoughts of Peter Chandler. Where was her friend and mentor?
Eighty feet in the air, where the gray Galena Dolomite of the tower base met the soft red brick of the uppermost stories, Erin found a window broken in. It was more than the result of a vandal's rock. From the shattered and missing glass, and marks on the frame, someone – or something – had made entry. It was a textbook situation for backup. But she wasn't there, officially, and Chief Musselwhite wouldn't recognize chasing monsters as part of her job. She was on her own. Erin flashed her light inside and found the wood stairs she knew switch backed up from the base. She climbed through.
The cool of night grew cold within. A draft rose up the ancient column past Erin. She flashed the light down to the entrance, eighty feet below, to the working floor with the shot bath cordoned off to keep tourists from turning it into a wishing well. The depth, the darkness, and her recent nausea met. Erin gripped the wall and concentrated on her breathing. The dizziness passed in time for the so-near square walls to close around her like a tomb. Come on, she thought, vertigo and claustrophobia? Everything about being pregnant was a bed of roses! She turned her thoughts back to her mission, and turned her light, following the stairs into the darkness above. She stopped suddenly, gasped, and caught the rail. Something was hanging from the grate in the top of the tower.
Terror welled up as the ridiculous phrases big bat and ticky bird suddenly found life in her world. A moan escaped the detective's lips. She willed a quick recovery, and training the light on the hanging object, strained to see. Then Erin's hopes vanished. It was not a bat, or a bird, or a monster hanging in the tower. It was a man, suspended by his feet; it was Detective Peter Chandler.
Numb with the realization, on instinct alone, Erin raced up the stairs. But as she drew near, her training kicked in. She stopped, drew her weapon, and passed the light over the scene scanning for dangers. Convinced she was alone, Erin reached the grate, Chandler, and a sobering conclusion at the same time. Ben was right, this was the work of a monster. More than that, Vong had been telling the truth when she'd delivered her Easter greeting to Ben in The Well. She had left a little something… somewhere. Erin had just found it.
Thirty – Five
Love was a pain in the ass. Respecting the rules for cell phone use in the Emergency exam rooms, Ben had picked up the in-house phone, lied to the hospital operator (to Rickie's giggles) about a phony affiliation with the police, and got an outside line. He'd been trying to call Erin since, without success. It had happened a hundred times, before their relationship bloomed, and he hadn't given it a second thought. Now he and Erin were in love, and she was pregnant with his child, and she was out there in the streets with whatever else was out there – not being able to reach her was making him crazy. So, like a crazy person, he added both her apartment and his to the list of numbers she wasn't answering. He slammed the phone down with a snarl.
Rickie lay comfortably on his wheeled cot, watching cartoons and waiting on the doctor.
Ben joined him but couldn't concentrate. Soon he was back on the phone, trying Erin's office again. No answer. He called the PD front desk and got a repeat of, “Detective Vanderjagt is unavailable. If you'll leave your name and number.” Yada. Yada. When they transferred him
to the chief's office, Ben really started to worry. A voice, not Musselwhite's, demanded his name. Something was wrong. Either something had happened they were not telling or they had no clue where Erin was. Ben gently hung up, controlling his panic by muttering, “Erin, where are you?”
“Pro-ly looking for the big bat,” Rickie said.
“What?”
“Pro-ly looking for the big bat. Or the ticky bird,” Rickie repeated matter-of-factly. He returned to staring at cartoons.
Ben scowled, annoyed. Then he gave the matter an instant of thought and felt guilty as hell. Rickie was a middle-aged man with a child's mind. He had no part in Erin's silence, whatever the cause. He was just talking or, Ben realized, maybe trying to help. “Do you mean from the cartoon, Rickie?”
He turned from the television to look at Ben as if he were crazy. “No.”
Ben grimaced and tried not to laugh. “You know about the big bat and bird?”
“Yes.”
“You saw them?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell Erin about them?”
Before he got his answer, the doctor, lantern jaw and lab coat, entered eying an x-ray film against the ceiling lights. He switched to another, and another, then turned his Hollywood smile on Ben. “I don't see any fractures. Looks like he's good to go.”
Ben was helping Rickie dress, when his cell phone rang. He nearly dropped it answering. But the nervous excitement was wasted. It wasn't Erin. It was Nestor, from his room upstairs. Ben filled his partner in, complaining, “Erin isn't answering anywhere.”
“She's looking for the big bat,” Rickie shouted, pulling on his shoes. “I told you. The big bat. The ticky bird. Pro-ly, the lady who takes off her legs.”
“What's that?” Nestor asked on the phone.
“Rickie has seen it… them,” Ben said, anxious again. “He saw them. And he apparently told Erin all about them. But she didn't tell me.”
“She believes it?” Nestor asked. “She's looking for the creature?”
“I don't know if she believes it. I believe it. I met the damned thing and believe me, I believe it. Erin still sounded skeptical. But your answer is, no. She promised she wouldn't go after it alone.”
“My God, Ben,” Nestor squawked on the other end of the line. “I told you before I know more about you than you do. Apparently I know more about your girlfriend than you do. She's the lead investigator. She'd go after it in a heartbeat.”
“What do I do? Damn, Nestor, what do I do?”
“What do you think? You go find her. We both go find her.”
Ben glared at the phone. “How are you going to get out?”
“Jesus, Ben,” Nestor yelled. “Come get me!”
Erin was in tears. Her attempts to free Chandler's body and get it off the tower grate had failed. It remained dangling a hundred feet above the floor. The last thing she wanted was to accidentally drop it, and alone, she had neither the leverage nor the strength to get it loose and onto the stairs. Worse, she couldn't call for help. To raise an alarm would be to end her search. No one would believe an aswang had killed him. And no other explanation could touch the facts. Ben was right. Nestor was right. She knew it now. A supernatural creature, a demon, was killing people in the Port District.
“I'm so sorry, Peter,” she said, choking off the tears. “I have to leave you here right now. I'll get you down, I promise. I'll get you out of here. But I've got to find the thing that did this. I've got to stop it. You taught me the importance of duty and priority; that nothing means more to a cop. You taught me people can understand or get the hell out of the way. I know you understand.”
She made her way down to the window, slipped out, and onto the scaffolding. “Okay, you bitch,” she told the night sky. “Ready or not, here I come.” She started down.
The psych unit was no prison, by any stretch, but patients' peace and safety were jealously guarded and visitors strictly regulated. Ben's 'upsetting' phone call several days earlier had already made him persona non grata in the mind, and chart, of Nestor's charge nurse. Getting onto the floor to see him would be difficult. Getting him out of the hospital would be impossible. They needed a plan.
The unit was shaped like a great 'T', a long wing of patients', community, and consultation rooms stretching from the west, intersecting shorter north and south wings at a nurses' station (Four East). The south door, to a fire stairwell, and west doors, to the hospital proper, had keyed locks. The hospital's visitor elevators by-passed the floor. All Four East visitors came and went through an electrically locked door leading to a second set of elevators at the far end of the north wing. Each arriving visitor rang a bell and, once they were seen through a wire-reinforced Lexan panel in the door, were buzzed in via a nurses' station control panel. Green and red lights on the panel indicated when the door was secure and a clerk watched it like a hawk. Strike that. According to Nestor, she watched the panel like a humorless three-hundred-pound ogre. Any hope of freeing Nestor meant diverting her attention. Ben needed help.
“What the hell do you want?”
He hadn't expected hugs and kisses when he called Forester's number, but Ben hadn't expected to get his head bitten off either. “Is that any way to talk to a good source?”
“A good source of what? All you've ever brought me is grief. Come to think of it, all you've ever brought anyone is grief.”
Ben ignored it. “You've been pestering me for weeks. Now I've got it and I'm offering it to you; the biggest story of your life.”
“Please.” If he looked like he sounded, Forester's disbelief had become disgust. “One, if you really had anything you wouldn't give it to me. You've proved that. Two, you've got nothing. You're out of the loop, suspended, which means you know nothing, which means you've got nothing.”
“How do you ever get a story when you talk so goddamned much?”
“I can fix that.”
“Don't hang up,” Ben shouted.
“All right. I'm listening. What's your story?”
“You'll get it. But first, I need a favor.”
“How are you in a position to ask a favor? Your own mother wouldn't do you a favor.”
“I'm not asking, Mark. I've got the story that's going to make you the big reporter you've dreamed of being. Yours, exclusively. Not from the front row; from the stage. You're in the show. For this story, you will do one huge, easy favor without negotiation. I'm counting three, then I'm hanging up and calling Jamie 'Bigmouth' Watts and making her famous instead. One. Two—”
“All right. What's the favor?”
Ben told him.
Outside of the movies, complex covert plans usually collapsed under their own weight. When telling lies or pulling fast ones, simple was always better. So too, when sneaking a friend out of a psych ward.
One quick, three-way conference call arranged it. Ben and Rickie waited, Rickie wrapped in a blanket, in a borrowed wheelchair, between the electric north door and the visitors' elevators. Nestor waited, on the opposite side of the same door, in his room twenty feet down the hall. Forester waited, in the center stairwell, outside the keyed door nearest the nurses' station. When a legitimate visitor was buzzed out, they all went to work.
Ben smiled, said hello, and grabbed the door as the visitor passed, preventing its closing. He spoke into his cell phone, “See you.” Forester took his cue, hung up, and started banging the hell out of the stairwell door. Nestor, loitering in his doorway and holding a small wooden chest, watched the nurses vacate their station for the hubbub. The ogre didn't move. Thanks to Nestor, they hadn't expected she would. But, in what for her was an explosion of frenzied activity, she turned her head from the panel to the to-do. A nurse unlocked the stairwell door and Forester, a professional question asker, started in, spreading manure and raising enough cane to get everyone's attention. Everyone but Nestor, who walked calmly and quickly out the open north door. He traded places with Rickie, and Ben and Rickie rolled him into the elevator and down. They didn
't stop until they reached Ben's car. Forester joined them in the lot a few minutes later, chewed out, but none the worse for wear. He climbed into the rear, beside Nestor, with Rickie and Ben gawking back from the front seat.
“I promised you a story,” Ben said.
“What story?”
“It's coming. We had to get our team together first.”
“What team?” Forester said, with a laugh. “A washed-up reporter conspires with a suspended firefighter, and a coin-slot checker to help a second out-of-work fireman escape a psych unit. Okay, we're the Justice League. Where's my Pulitzer? You owe me a story. Give!”
Ben started the car. “I'll empty the bag on the way. We've got to get to the Port District now.”
“Not yet,” Nestor exclaimed.
“We have no time to lose.”
“Ben, Erin's after that thing. When we find her, we're going to find that thing. It's not going to do us or Erin any good if we're unprepared,” Nestor insisted. “We won't be helping the city, or Angelina, or any of the other victims, for that matter. We'll only have one shot. We have to be ready.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Forester asked.
Ben ignored the reporter, asking Nestor, “What do you recommend?”
“I know where we can get a manta tail.”
“That's not funny, you son of a bitch.”
“Sorry. Forget it. But we need the stuff on that list. As much of it as we can come up with quickly.”
“Fine,” Ben said. “Where do we start?”
Nestor held up the small chest he'd carried with him. He handed it forward to Rickie. “Here.”
Ben nodded and Rickie opened it. The chest was full of gray ashes. “Ashes?” Ben asked.
“Blessed by a priest,” Nestor said. “They were on the list, weren't they?”
“Yes. But… where did you get them?”
“I called my priest; told him I needed something tangible to help me through my difficulty. I asked him to bless some ashes and bring them to me.”
When The Tik-Tik Sings Page 22
