The Summoning

by Bentley Little

  "Donna," Robert said quietly. "You know who you just described."

  She was silent for a moment. "Yes," she said. "Burke's dead." "I know that. I'm just telling you what I saw. I'm not saying it was Burke. I'm just describing the man I saw with Mr. Tortes."

  "How dark was it? Maybe you didn't see"

  "They were under the streetlight next to the garage. I had my glasses on. I could see perfectly."

  There was something in Donna's tone of voice, a believability in her matter-of-fact declaration that caused a subtle chill to caress the back of his neck, an echo of his feelings from last night. He glanced down at Steve, who was looking at him expectantly, trying to follow the conversation from this side. "Did you see where the two of them went?"

  "No. They were walking west, away from the" garage, then I drove past them and turned off onto Gila to go home. When I heard what had happened, I thought I'd better call you and tell you what I saw, in case it might help."

  "Were they walking toward a car or a truck, or did you see any unfamiliar vehicles parked near the garage?"

  "That's all I saw. I've been wracking my brain all morning trying to remember something else, but that's all I could come up with."

  "Did you see anyone else on the street or in the general area who also might have seen something?"

  "Like I said, the street was empty." She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was quieter. "That really is what the man looked like.

  That's why I remember it so clearly."

  "What was Mr. Torres wearing?"

  ""He had on jeans and a dirty T-shirt."

  The chill was resurrected. That was exactly what he had been wearing when they'd found the body.

  Robert glanced again at Steve, who raised his eyebrows hopefully. He wanted to follow up with more questions, to go over every point of Donna's story in detail, but he sensed from her voice that such an attempt would not be successful right now. He would cruise by later, maybe this afternoon, maybe tomorrow morning, and talk to her in person. "I think we have enough for now, Donna, but I may need to ask a few additional questions later. Would it be more convenient for you if I contacted you at home or at the bank?" "Either one is fine."

  "Thank you for calling, then. I'll have this transcribed into a statement. I may add whatever additional information you can give me later, and then I'll need you to come in and give us your John Hancock, okay?"

  He hung up a moment later and walked across the office to his own desl

  "Anything there?" asked Steve..... "Hard to tell." :

  "Is she reliable?"

  "Donna Sandoval doesn't have an imaginative bone in her body." He sighed. "I believe she saw someone, but I don't believe she saw who she thinks she saw." "What's that supposed to mean?" : "Do you remember Caldwell Burke?" Steve shook his head.

  "Biggest crime we've had since I've been on the force. He was a child molester, and he was sent to Florence in seventy-nine for molesting Donna's daughter."

  "That's who she saw with Tortes?"

  "That's who she described. But Burke was cut and killed five years ago in a yard right

  "So you think she saw some guy with Tortes, didn't get a look at him, and put the molester's face on him?"

  Robert shrugged. "Could be. I don't know." He glanced out the window. There were a few thin white wisps of cloud near the hills on the horizon, but other than that the sky was a deep dark unbroken blue.

  It was going to be a hot one. '

  "So what's the plan?"

  He thought for a moment. This morning he wanted to go over Troy's Garage once more, and then the length of street between the garage and the arroyo, see if he could fred anything they'd passed by on first inspection. He would send Steve, and maybe Ted, to help out the DPS with the search for Mike Vigil. This afternoon, he planned to lead a full and complete search of the arroyo, from beginning to end. They'd examined the area immediately adjoining the segment in which they'd found the body, but little else, and he had a hunch they might've missed something, "Call Jud and Ben," he said. "I need every man out here. I want a full force today."

  "But it's their day off."

  "They'll get comp time." He looked at Steve. "You don't think a murder and a missing person's enough of a reason to adjust the regular work schedule?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "I hope not. Or I was going to Suggest you give up police work and try your hand at shoe sales."

  Steve grinned sheepishly. :/

  "We're going to make a thorough search of the garage, the arroyo, and the area between the two. I want you and Ted to assist the state in looking for Vigil."

  "What do we do? just call them up and tell them we're coming over?"

  "Basically...... "I don't--" '

  "I'll call Finn in Casa Grande and tell him to expect you two around noon."

  "Thanks."

  "Just don't let those guys push you around. Vigil's our missing person. They're working for us here." "Gotcha."

  The phone rang again, and Steve answered it. Robert listened to his deputy's side of the conversation and felt the chill return. He thought of Woods's report. Exsanguination.

  Steve hung up. "Man wouldn't give his name, but he says he knows who the vampire is."

  "The vampire," Robert repeated.

  Steve nodded slowly. "This is getting pretty weird," he said.

  "Yeah." Robert put his feet up on the desk and once again looked out the window. "It is."

  The temperature in the afternoon was even more unbearable than Robert had expected. He stood in the shade of the west wall of the arroyo and chugged the last half of his canned Coke. When was this damn Indian summer going to end?

  He watched the two closest men walk slowly across the arroyo floor.

  There was no way that the shifting, loosely packed sand could have held a footprint, but he'd hoped to find something: a thread caught on a jojoba branch, a strand of hair pulled out in a struggle, hell, even a discarded gum wrapper.

  But vampires don't chew gum.

  Damn it, he had to start taking this seriously

  They'd found nothing new at the garage, and the detritus along the side of the road had been impossible to differentiate. He'd called off that search early in order to concentrate efforts down here. He had a gut feeling that they might find some sort of clue in the arroyo. The deliberate placement of the dead animals about Torres's head suggested to him that the mechanic had not been killed and then his body dumped, that most of the action had instead taken place down here, away from any possible witness's line of vision. "Chiefl" " He looked up to see Stu Thiebert hurrying around the curve of the arroyo, his feet pumping furiously in the shifting sand, his body moving forward at an incongruously slow pace, looking almost like a cartoon figure.

  "We found something! ..... Robert stepped away from the wall, placing his Coke can on the sand where he could retrieve it on his way out, and headed toward Stu, motioning for Jud to follow. His own feet moved slowly through the sand, but he hardly seemed to notice. "What is it?" he called.

  "Mice! Dead desert mice! They're about a hundred yards downt"

  Robert stopped walking, frowned. "Mice?"

  "They look like they've been drained! You gotta come and see it!"

  Robert felt his stomach clench up. He suddenly wished he'd brought Rich along. He followed Stu around the corner, Jud hurrying close behind. Ahead, he could see the other three men in a huddle next to the arroyo's eroded east wall ...... "Here!" Robert, Stu, and Jud reached the spot almost at the same time.

  "Ben found them." Stu pointed toward a crack in the arroyo wall. "In there."

  Robert's gaze followed his deputy's pointing finger. On the floor of the upward sloping fissure, reaching all the way o the surface, were twenty or thirty desert mice. They had indeed been drained of blood and fluids. Their bodies looked like deflated sacs of fur, their heads like- hairy eyeless skulls, i Surrounding the top half of each mouse was a semicircle of shriveled, dried black beetles.r />
  "Mother of shit," Jud breathed. The other men were silent. He looked at Robert. "What do you think this means?"

  The knot in his stomach tightened. "I don't know," Robert said. "But go up and get the camera. And radio for Woods. I want him to see this."

  He stared for a moment at the dead mice and their halos of bee des then turned away.

  After shutting off the lights, closing the blinds, and locking up the office, Rich walked around to the rear of the building, sorting through his overstuffed ring for the keys to the pickup. The sun had almost set, was little more than an orange half circle on the flat border of the cloudless western horizon, and the ground, the cactus, the buildings, and the mesas behind were all bathed in a muted amber glow that lent the town a fake, cinematic quality.

  He stood next to the pickup, fingers on the door handle, watching the sun's slow descent, knowing that if he stood here long enough he would see the sky directly above shift from white across the red spectrum to purple. This was his favorite time of day, this hour of dusk between daylight and dark. He breathed deeply.

  God, he loved this land.

  Especially the horizon. He loved the horizon. Standing here in his parking lot, he could see the curve of the earth, a gentle rounding of the corners between north and west and south that somehow dwarfed the entire landscape. There were desert mountain ranges in the distance, and isolated mesas, but they were like bumps on a log, noticeable but not large enough to affect the totality. What he liked most was the open space. There was room to breathe here, the vistas were spectacular, the air was clear, and the sky covered three-fourths of the world.

  That was one thing he'd noticed when they'd lived for that first year with Corrie's parents in California: The sky had seemed so small. It had been white there instead of blue and was revealed only in small segments between buildings and houses and trees. Even in the flatter areas of Los Angeles, the sky had still seemed low, claustrophobically close, not wide and expansive as it was in Arizona. He had never said so to Corrie, but it was that smallness of space, that feeling that he didn't have enough room to stretch even in the open air, which as much as anything had made him want to return to Rio Verde. It was a stupid reason for returning, he supposed, an immature attachment to the emotions of place. But strange as it might sound when articulated, it felt right, and he had never regretted coming back.

  He opened the pickup door and slid onto the seat. He'd wanted to call Robert this afternoon, but things had been so busy with Corrie gone that he just hadn't had the time. Something had been nagging him. He should talk to his brother and find out what was going on with the investigation, but he'd rationalized his inertia by telling himself that if anything important happened, Robert would call. Besides, the scanner had been silent the end re time he'd been in the office.

  He would phone Robert when he got home.. Rich looked at the clock on the dashboard as he turned the key in the ignition and the truck roared to muffierless life. Six-forty. His new class started at seven. That gave him only twenty minutes to grab some chow and dig through the pile of papers on the seat next to him for the lesson plan he'd roughed out last weekend.

  Buford's Burgers was on the way, and while it wasn't a drive-thru, it was the closest thing to it. He could sort through his papers in the pickup while he waited for his order.

  He threw the truck into reverse, pulled out of the parking lot, then jammed it into gear and took off down Center, slowing only for a moment at the corner, then speeding down 370 toward Buford's.

  He passed the small brick American Legion hall and saw that both the U.S. and Arizona flags were at half-mast, their colors altered and darkened by the setting sun and the growing twilight.

  The obit for Manuel Torres he'd written this afternoon had been pitifully inadequate. He had spoken to Troy and Manuel's other coworkers at the garage, but they had not been very articulate in their expression of grief. Manuel's widow had not wanted to talk to him at all, and he had respected that, leaving her alone. He'd done the best he could under the circumstances, but he had not really known the man himself, and that distance, combined with the bizarre circumstances of his death, had cast an almost tabloid air of sensationalism over everything he'd tried to write.

  Maybe he would go over the obit tomorrow, try it one more time before putting it permanently to bed.

  He found himself thinking about the autopsy report and what Robert had told him. It had not been a surprise, really. But somehow the written confirmation--typed, dated, and signed in triplicate on official county forms-gave it an air of authenticity and turned what had been merely a suspicion into frightening fact. He'd been right when he'd told his brother that it was like being in a horror movie.

  The coroner, he knew, had pressured Mrs. Torres into having the body cremated, and although, as a devout Catholic, she had wanted to see her husband decently buried, she had reluctantly agreed to the cremation, electing to bury the ashes afterward in a traditional cemetery plot instead of having them interred. This capitulation of faith worried Rich because he knew the impetus behind it. He had heard all day the whispers, the thinly veiled references. He knew the word in everyone's mind. Vampire.

  It was a belief that such a creature really could exist which had led Woods to suggest cremation and Mrs. Torres to agree to this otherwise unsatisfactory burial alternative.

  Cremation was insurance that Manuel Tortes would not rise from the dead.

  Rich wanted to be angry at this superstitious regression on the part of what would seem to be rational people, but he too had seen the body, he too had seen the halo of animals, and he could not drum up as much anger as he would have liked. The shriveled and empty form of the old man had frightened him far more than he would have thought possible.

  He was equally frightened at the prospect of mass hysteria and paranoid panic. Deep down, he did not believe in vampires. Not really.

  Something strange had happened to Manuel Torres, but he had no doubt that once the murderer was found, a rational explanation for the death would be forthcoming.

  He drove into the dirt parking lot of Buford's, pulling next to a dusty Jeep with a round NRA sticker on the corroded back bumper. He turned off the ignition and got out. Reading the lighted menu, he realized that he was hungrier than usual. Tonight he wanted more than just his usual hamburger and medium Coke.

  Stress always made him hungry.

  It was Corrie's fault as well. She could have waited until things calmed down a little before bailing out on him. He told himself not to be so harsh on her, not to be so unsympathetic; he was her husband, not just her editor; he should be able to understand her side. But, as she never tired of pointing out, that was one of his chronic problems He was too selfish and insensitive to sympathize with her feelings. :

  But, damn it, she should've given him warning.

  She'd already found a job. That surprised him. She'd been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, and she was now the secretary for the Church of the Holy Trinity. That was okay, he supposed, but the fact that she was going to be working for Pastor Wheeler bothered him a little. He did not know the pastor, had had no real contact with the man aside from a few short phone conversations regarding events for the "Church Notes" column of the paper, but he'd always had the impression that Wheeler was something of a sleaze and a charlatan, a man who aspired to and was perfectly suited for televangelism. He didn't like Wheeler, and he didn't like his wife working for Wheeler, but at this point it was probably wiser for him to say nothing about it.

  He was not sure if he could bring himself to be supportive, though.

  Buford himself, a blond crew cut ex-Marine gone only slightly to seed, stepped up to the window. "Whatcha want today?"

  "I'll take a double cheeseburger, large fries, and an extra-large, super-thick chocolate shake." Buford grinned. "Bad day, huh?" "And it's not over yet." "That'll be four forty-five."

  Rich broke out his wallet and handed him a five-dollar bill.


  Buford gave him back two quarters and a nickel. "So, do you think there really is a vampire?" "What?" Rich stared at him.

  Buford shrugged. "Rumors." "There're no such things as vampires."

  "Well, even if there are, I've got enough garlic in here to hold them at bay until dawn." Buford laughed.

  Rich forced himself to smile. ""Look, I have a few things to do, so when my food's ready, give me a holler. I'll be in the truck."

  "Will do."

  Rich walked slowly back to the pickup. Even Buford was talking about vampires.

  He would call Robert tonight when he got home. The two of them had a lot to discuss.

  Sue stood next to the gym, looking down the hallway.

  It felt strange being back here again. She had not re turned to the high school since graduation, and although it had only been two years and she had not, to her knowledge, grown, everything seemed smaller: doors, drinking fountains, lockers. It was like visiting a school built for munchkins. : I It also seem el somewhat threatening, and that was not something she would have thought possible. For her, school had always been a refuge, a haven where even the uncivilized were forced to behave in a civilized manner. The micro society created by teachers, administrators, and the other adults in authority had created for her a very pleasant environment, a sharp contrast to the rougher and more chaotic world outside the school boundaries.

  But everything had changed. That familiar society had shut off for the night and left in its wake this scaled-down and darkly alien travesty of her old stomping grounds. She glanced to her right at the door to the girl's restroom and was thrown off by its surprisingly diminutive stature. It was probably just her imagination, but, like everything else, the doors in the buildings looked as though they had shrunk and been reduced to dimensions more appropriate to a junior high school.

  She stared straight ahead. The hallways had not shrunk, however. They seemed to have grown much longer.

  And darker.

  She shivered, turning around, and looked back toward the parking lot, but hers was still the only car in sight. Orce again, she faced the hallway. It looked like a runnel or a cave, the staggered shadows forming stalactites, stalagmites, d outcroppings of stone. The shadows overlapped, created shapes where there weren't shapes, darkened areas that were already dark. There were lights on, but they were few and far between, and Sue wondered if perhaps she'd misread the class schedule and come on the wrong day. The only illumination seemed to come from downward trained vandal lights on the corners of each building and from single bulbs housed in protective mesh which hung down from the ceilings of the hallway at long intervals. The lights near the lockers were off, and the windows in all of the classrooms were black.