Fear the Night

by John Lutz

  “You’re all right?” he asked.

  “Better than,” she said, her breath still ragged.

  He propped himself up on an elbow and gazed down at her. “You’re a wonderful creation, Zoe.” She felt his hand slide over her left breast, gently squeezing her nipple, then moving lower.

  “I’m a creation that’s going to be late for work,” she told him with a weak smile, grasping his wrist.

  He immediately withdrew his hand, knowing when not to pressure her. “Want to shower together?”

  “I should say no, but I won’t.”

  “That’s my Zoe.”

  She was, of course, much later getting back to her office than she’d planned.

  She also hadn’t planned on drinking a martini and two glasses of wine at lunch, then going to her apartment and getting her brains fucked out. The drinks they’d taken into the shower hadn’t helped, either. She was sure she no longer smelled of sex, and wasn’t tipsy enough for anyone to notice, but it wouldn’t hurt if she had about an hour alone in her private office to let the effects of the afternoon wear off.

  After telling her assistant she wasn’t to be disturbed, especially not for phone calls, she closed her office door and went to her desk. She had to be especially wary of the phone, since she might unintentionally slur a word. Settling back in her leather desk chair, she sighed. Now she was getting sleepy. Great.

  Resolution: No more love in the afternoon. It’s all too . . . inebriating.

  She caught herself smiling and felt a twinge of anger. What was she thinking? It made more sense to chastise herself. She covered her face with her hands, which were unexpectedly cool.

  Damn, I didn’t want this to happen today. Where was my vaunted willpower? Am I sorry it happened? Of course not. Okay, then. You’ve been a big girl for a long while. Stop your bitching, Zoe. Self-recrimination is nothing if not self-defeating.

  How does he do this to me?

  Peeking through her fingertips, she saw a file folder on her desk that hadn’t been there when she left ... over two hours ago.

  She leaned forward and opened the folder. Repetto had sent her a copy of the latest Night Sniper theater note, as they’d agreed. It had been located in a theater called Candle in the Night. She picked up the note and read. The show will go on.

  She smiled. Substitute “game” for “show.” He was taunting them now. The note was the kind of thing that must make Repetto furious. He was like so many of the old-time, hard-ass cops. Dinosaurs. Too proud for their own good.

  But one thing about them was, they never gave up. Never. And when it came to focused and applied obsession, Repetto was their leader.

  Zoe sat back in her comfortable leather desk chair and wondered if the Night Sniper truly understood that about Repetto. Repetto might seem primal, but he was locked onto his target like a heat-seeking missile, and the Night Sniper was burning hotter and hotter with his own detectable obsession.

  She fell asleep wondering.

  Some of the actors who played at Candle in the Night ate regularly at the diner on the corner. Like most actors, they’d had their hard times, and they knew homeless Joe DeLong and helped him out whenever they could. Joe had told them he’d been an actor himself long ago. He knew they didn’t believe him. But then they couldn’t completely dis-believe him.

  Joe would do his panhandling across the street from the diner, a bit diagonally so the people in the window booths wouldn’t have to look at him whenever they glanced outside. At the same time, he wanted people to know he was there. Often, after the ten o’clock curtain for whatever was playing now at the theater, half a dozen of the actors, including Tiffany Taft, the star, would make their way to the diner for a late-night snack.

  Tiffany was in her twenties, with bright blond hair and wide blue eyes to go with a gorgeous figure. Not scrawny like a model, but with lots of curves, the way Joe liked his women. Whenever he thought about women these days. He’d studied her on the blown-up photo on the show poster in front of the theater. He liked the sassy way she stood, with her knees locked and her rear end stuck out. He liked the way she pouted up her little mouth. There wasn’t much he didn’t like about Tiffany.

  And she must like him, at least a little. She’d smiled at him once. And when she ate at the diner, he could count on her leaving a white takeout container on top of the trash receptacle on the corner.

  After they’d all departed, Joe would pick up the takeout boxes left by the actors, but he was always careful to know which one was Tiffany’s. She sometimes left him almost complete portions. Once he’d even found a chocolate after-dinner mint in with some untouched pizza slices.

  At times Joe thought that if he weren’t so fucked-up, he’d approach Tiffany, introduce himself properly, and try to get to know her. As it was, he’d probably frighten her to death, and that would be the end of the takeout containers. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t ever going to talk to her unless the voices informed him it was okay to do so.

  Every night, or so it seemed to him, Joe would sit on the curb near the Aal Commerce Building, an ornate, iron-fronted structure on Broadway. High on the building was a tall metal antenna with a light on top that blinked red in the darkness. No voices emitted from the antenna during the day, but at night, when Joe sat on the curb leaning his back against the light post, the transmission would be just for him. Some of the voices even referred to him by name. They warned him who to watch out for, who was on the side of his enemies. Tiffany, the voices assured him, was not one of the rude people that made his life, and the lives of countless others, so difficult.

  Joe DeLong’s schizophrenia hadn’t presented itself until he was in his early twenties—about the usual age for males, he’d learned later. The disease ran in his family, on his mother’s side, so he shouldn’t have been surprised. His uncle Roger had spent most of his life in a sanitarium in Virginia, and Great-Aunt Vi, whom he’d never met, was rumored to have committed suicide when she ran her car into a bridge abutment on her way to see her psychiatrist. But schizophrenia was a subject seldom discussed in Joe’s family. His wife, Eva, had never heard the word in his presence until three years into their marriage, when Joe became difficult and she had to turn to someone for help. After her phone conversation with his mother came the first visit to the psychiatrist.

  When the disease struck, it struck hard. It shook Joe’s life and turned it upside down. Medication helped, the increasing dosages of lithium, but he couldn’t remember to take his medicine every time. You had to do that, take it every time you were supposed to. It said so in the instructions right on the vials or bottles, even though you were too sick to pay much attention, which was why you needed the medicine. Sometimes the voices helped him to remember. They gave him guidance.

  The job went first. Who needed a phone solicitor who might say anything at any time, and to anyone? Eva left him; then Joe drove wedge after wedge between himself and the rest of his family. He began deliberately refusing his medication. Alcohol was almost as good. Alcohol was more socially acceptable than mental illness. Alcohol temporarily relieved the fear. But alcohol was sneaky, invented by the enemy. Alcohol exacted its price.

  After one of the increasingly frequent arguments with his mother, and a fistfight with his father, Joe left home for good with nothing but a suitcase full of clothes and a wallet containing almost a thousand dollars—all the money left in his savings account.

  The money lasted less than a month, as Joe sank deeper into alcoholism. Some of it went for booze and rent, and some even went for food. Hamburgers and French fries at first, then canned stew, then watery soup.

  When there was no more money, he left the fleabag hotel where he’d been sleeping and began his life on the streets. It wasn’t as if he had a choice. He was broke, and the voices said his family, even if he had wanted to talk to them, were away somewhere on a ship. Eva was married now to a surgeon in Warsaw. The voices spoke of him as “the sawbones in Warsaw.” Joe always smiled when he heard that
.

  Joe’s luck didn’t last much longer than his money. He was mugged one night in Washington Square and walked thereafter with a slight limp. The pain never left his right hip. Wine helped that, when he had enough money to buy some. The wine dulled the pain and helped to keep his mind from shattering. The food left by the Candle in the Night actors helped to keep his body from destroying itself. The voices said that’s what the body did when it couldn’t get enough to eat: it digested itself. Joe often had bad dreams about that.

  When the weather was nice, like this time of year, he didn’t think it was such a terrible life there on the streets. He’d perfected techniques for panhandling, for begging directly to carefully chosen fellow citizens. He could tell by their shoes, sometimes by their aura, if they’d part with some pocket change. Often enough, he was right. He took an odd kind of pride in being an effective beggar. Pride in what he did for money. That was a part of his soul that begging couldn’t smear.

  Joe had in his possession about a third of a bottle of Pheaser’s Phine Burgundy. Now and then he’d duck into a doorway and take a carefully controlled sip. He suspected that when the wine ran out, his luck for the day would run out at the same time. He didn’t want that to happen before the actors came out of the diner and left their takeout containers. He was hungry.

  So far, he wasn’t worried. The voices had predicted he’d be hungry. Joe laughed and spat on the sidewalk. That was an easy call. Sometimes he wished he could talk back to the voices and actually record their conversation and play it back over and over. But, if he wasn’t mistaken, something about that was against the law.

  It was almost midnight when the actors emerged from the diner. Joe had been seated on the second step of the dark doorway he would occasionally back into to take sips of wine. He didn’t move when they came out the diner door, talking and laughing. His heart fell when he saw no white containers. Most of the actors had on dark clothes, like people wore in New York, as if they were mourning, and if they’d had containers, he would have seen them.

  This wasn’t right! This was goddamned—

  There was a flash of white against Tiffany’s dark jacket.

  Yes! She was carrying a takeout container between her coat and her black purse. That was why Joe hadn’t seen it.

  When the cluster of actors reached the corner, then crossed without waiting for the traffic signal to change, Tiffany unobtrusively and daintily placed the container on top of the day’s trash in the wire receptacle.

  Joe stood trembling, waiting until the shadowy figures had disappeared in vaster darkness down the street; then he hurried toward the trash receptacle.

  It was going to be a good night after all.

  39

  2001

  After Verna’s departure, Dante applied himself all the harder. He focused on himself, on what he could and would do, and thought of the past as what it was—something that no longer existed. It was a delicate and protective attitude, but one he could maintain. If only he didn’t have bad dreams.

  He graduated magna cum laude from ASU in three years, then promptly earned his MBA from the Wharton School. Corporate recruiters saw him as prime cut. A month before his graduation from Wharton, he had a position secured as a bond analyst in the Chicago financial firm of Koch and Banks.

  Dante liked Chicago and was soon making a six-figure salary. Koch and Banks profited from his talents, and was generous in its bonuses and stock options. Investing was a game he found incredibly simple, and his own holdings grew exponentially. He wasn’t yet as rich as he wanted to be, but only because he hadn’t had time. For Dante, money wasn’t going to be a problem.

  At least once a month he returned to the Strong Ranch and saw Adam. His mentor and surrogate father couldn’t have been more proud of Dante, and was still providing a kind of permanent home both physically and spiritually. Though he lived in a luxurious Lakeside Drive penthouse apartment, the ranch remained Dante’s still point in the universe, where he could always retreat to and regenerate himself when life became difficult.

  On one of these visits, when Dante was temporarily escaping a bitter Chicago winter for the warmth of the Arizona sun, Strong seemed markedly older and unlike his usual self. During their stint at the target range, he’d missed almost a quarter of his shots.

  Their rifles propped in the crooks of their arms, the two men were walking side by side toward Strong’s dusty, three-year-old Ford pickup. It was a walk they’d taken together many times, and usually it soothed Dante’s soul. This was how he always saw Adam in his mind, striding tall and powerful alongside him, rifle or shotgun broken down and slung over his shoulder or, as today, cradled in the crook of an elbow. The Arizona heat, the sun, the dust he could feel when he licked his teeth, the vast expanse of sky stretching to distant mountain ranges, it was all part of why he came here. It was reassuring to Dante. It fed the soul.

  “You’re quiet, Adam,” Dante said, “even for you.”

  One, two, three paces before Strong spoke: “I suppose I should tell you things aren’t going well, Dante.”

  Feeling a cold dread, Dante glanced over at him but didn’t break stride. “Your health?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Then whatever it is, it’s not serious.”

  “Oh, it’s serious, all right. Most of my money—the ranch’s money—was invested in Global Venue.”

  Dante stopped and stood still. Global Venue was a publicly traded capital management firm that controlled the resources of major clients, including some of the country’s largest pension funds. Global had hedged its clients’ billions of dollars in investments with complex money rate plays, and in an ironic, and illegal, round-robin sequence, with some of Global’s own stock. The company was under federal investigation. Most of its major clients had left, and Global stock had plunged almost 90 percent and would soon be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.

  “You mean Global Venue was investing some of your money for you?” Dante asked.

  “Not exactly. I figured I wasn’t smart enough to place my eggs in different baskets myself, so I thought it’d be simplest to buy GV stock. When the trouble started with the government, the accusations and indictments, I kept thinking the stock would stop falling, that I could recoup at least some of my losses. This was one of the biggest companies in the world, Dante. It was about to become one of the Dow Thirty.”

  Dante rested a hand on his rifle’s warm walnut stock and shook his head sadly. “I don’t need to tell you, you can’t sell was about to.”

  Adam looked off to the left where a turkey vulture circled in the blue void beyond the ranch house. “They’re right when they say the hardest thing about investing’s knowing when to sell.”

  “I . . . we never talked about it, Adam. I knew about your wealth and assumed you were a sophisticated investor, or that what you had was in a trust.”

  “I took it out of the trust some years ago, when I saw so many people I knew getting rich overnight on tech stocks. Thought I could build up some wealth and put it in the ranch. Even managed to do that some. You notice the new dam and culvert to divert water when the arroyo floods?”

  Dante had noticed. He figured the object was to eventually create a lake. “You had tech stocks when the bubble burst?”

  “Quite a few of the biggest losers. Peanuts compared to Global Venue stock, though. I’m ashamed to tell you what percentage of my holdings were in that single stock, in a company I thought was internally diversified enough to protect me.”

  “You’re not the only one who made that miscalculation about Global. Lots of smart people rode it up and rode it all the way down. Do you still own the stock?”

  “Yeah. Most of it. For what it’s worth.”

  Dante knew it was worth about five dollars per share and falling. A little over a year ago, Global Venue’s stock price had been over eighty dollars per share.

  “I’ve been selling my shares off a little at a time to keep the ranch going. We’ve got eleven kid
s here now, and three more on the way.” Strong quit staring at the distant vulture and looked at Dante. “You think there’s any chance the stock’ll come back?”

  Dante shifted his weight in the hot sun, not wanting to answer. “It won’t come back. Global’s going down for corporate malfeasance. When the regulators and lawyers are finished with it, some board members will be sent to prison and the government’s gonna dismantle the company. If you hang on to the stock, you might receive par value.”

  “Next to nothing.”

  “About a dime a share. That’s if there’s anything left after bondholders and preferred stockholders take their meager cuts. My guess is none of you is going to get even the dime.”

  “So I should get out?”

  Dante smiled sadly. “You should.” He felt a dark remorse move through him, and an ugly guilt. He’d been paying so much attention to his own affairs, he’d never discussed Adam’s with him. It had seemed like two different worlds, Chicago and the ranch. Dante had always assumed Adam was well invested, that he’d brought the same common sense and prudence to managing his wealth as he exhibited in every other facet of his life. Dante should have known better. He’d learned that when it came to money, people weren’t always in character. He could have prevented this.

  “Even after I sell,” Strong said, “I’ll be down to my last hundred thousand.”

  “That’s something.”

  “Not much. The ranch is an investment that eats hay, as they say in this part of the country. And the bank’s pressuring me on some loan payments. I’m afraid I’m not good for more than a few more months.”