Valley of lights

by Stephen Gallagher

  Nobody that we were hearing about, anyway.

  The next time he called, I had Winter's photograph – the one that I'd taken from his room – propped on the table by the phone. After making me wait for so long, at least he was punctual about the hour. I picked up the phone after two rings, and heard Winter's voice say, 'Me again.'

  'Still sticking with the college boy, I see.'

  'He's clean, no sign of any bad habits. But I only keep him for around the house, so don't expect to see him on the streets. I've got other faces for that.'

  Winter looked back at me out of the photograph. A plain, ordinary, smiling kid. But only an instrument, now.

  I said, 'How many faces do you have?'

  'You really want to waste today's question on me?'

  'I take it back.'

  'That's better. Here's Georgina.'

  He seemed to be in a playful mood today. And why not? He had everything under control, after all. I heard the phone being passed over, and Georgie came on the line and said, 'Hi, Alex.'

  'Hello, Georgie,' I said. 'You know the rules we have to play by?'

  'You get to ask me a question, and I have to answer it.'

  Winter must have been right there with his ear up against the receiver, because without a break he cut in and said, 'Was that it? Hot very illuminating, I must say,' and put the phone down on me.

  I sat there clutching the buzzing phone in disbelief, but it was already too late. I cradled it and paced the room in impotent fury, running my fingers through my hair and unable to decide what to do next.

  But then the phone rang again, and I dashed over and snatched it up.

  'Admit it,' Winter said happily, 'I had you worried.'

  'Stop playing around,' I said. 'Put her back on.'

  I could hear him laughing in the background as he handed over again. Georgie came on and said, 'He didn't mean that. He was only joking.'

  'Yeah,' I said, 'he's a real comedian. Answer me this, Georgie. Are you scared?'

  She thought about it for a moment. 'I was at first,' she said, 'but no so much now that he's explained some things to me. I've got my own room and a TV, and he brings me comic books and stuff. I asked for a bird in a cage, and he says he'll get me one. It's not like jail, or anything.'

  'Does he lock you in?'

  'Of course I lock her in,' Winter said unexpectedly, because this time the changeover at the far end had been quick and silent, 'but she understands why it has to be done. I wish I could say as much for you.'

  'I got what I wanted.'

  'You mean that was it? No catch-me-out question, just a welfare enquiry? Alex, does this mean you're beginning to trust me?'

  'I'd trust Nixon before I'd trust you,' I said. 'I genuinely wanted to know.' And now that I knew, I liked the situation even less, impossible as that seemed. I didn't like the rapport that he and Georgie seemed to be building up – something entirely manufactured from his end, I didn't doubt, but Georgie couldn't see through that. I felt very much like the outsider butting in, here.

  Winter said, 'Don't worry about her, Alex, she's getting everything she could possibly want. You think I don't know how to spoil a child?'

  'Don't tempt me,' I said.

  There was a moment's silence while I waited for his reaction, and then: 'A joke! You know, Alex, you may not believe this, but I've been getting to like you.'

  'Just what I always wanted.'

  'Poor, dull, unimaginative Alex. Thrust right into the middle of something that he can hardly believe, and he can't breathe a word about it to anybody because they won't believe him either. I feel for you, I really do.'

  I said, 'If you like me so much, will you listen to a suggestion?'

  'It costs me nothing to listen,' he said.

  I wasn't looking at the photograph of Winter now, I was looking at the face that had formed in my mind; it was composite, ugly, a kind of soft clay that could boil and mutate but which retained the essence of evil in any shape that it took. Being on the phone made it easier to visualise; and visualising made it easier to say what I had to say next.

  'Meet me one-to-one,' I said. 'You can be whoever you like as long as you wipe out all the reserves first. I'll meet you on equal terms and we'll see who walks away.'

  He seemed amused by the proposal. 'What makes you think I'd agree to something like that?'

  'Because you've already thought of it. Every time we meet up, you've got an escape hatch – which means that every time, it ends with you running away. But I'll bet you've wondered, what would happen if we both had to see it through to the finish?'

  'You'd lose,' he said flatly. But was there just a small hint of uncertainty in there?

  'Easy enough to say,' I persisted. 'Admit it, you're scared of me a little.'

  'Scared of you? Why?'

  'Because unless you've got me pinned down like you have now, you don't know where I'll be coming from next. And I think that's why you say you like me, as well, why you don't just break the chain and move on to some other town. I've put some spice into your life, and you'd forgotten what it can be like.'

  I heard him sigh. 'You're an entertainment, Alex, I'll give you that,' he said. 'Listen, I'm going to do something for you. I can promise you something good this afternoon, and I'll try to make sure it's within your squad area. Watch for it, okay? This one's just for you.'

  And with that friendly promise, he ended the call.

  TWENTY-THREE

  After the first hour or so of the shift, I could feel the resentment stirring in my patrols and knew that I'd have to ease off on them. I was riding them too hard, and I was doing nothing to enhance their operating efficiency.

  But then I knew that something was coming, while for them it was just a normal Watch.

  I forced myself to back off, to try to function as normal even though my heart was thumping and I had this sick feeling down in my gut for most of the time. When it happened, whatever it was going to be, I knew that I'd respond and be able to function perfectly well; what tore me up was the uncertainty, like standing in the dark and waiting for some unknown hand to fall on your shoulder.

  I cruised my area, staying close to my men and trying to manage at least a drive-past and visual check on every call. Mostly they'd raise a hand with the fingers extended meaning ten-four, everything's okay and no help needed. Driving around, I saw that there was some new spraycan graffiti around the Deuce; some of the gangs had picked up on the Young Life, Old Scores slogan and I noticed it several times both in English and Spanish. Coming out onto Van Buren I was flagged down by a heavy-looking Hispanic guy who seemed to want me to know all about his wife, who was about to have a baby; and I realised why he was telling me when I turned around and saw that two of his relatives were already helping the groaning woman into the back of my car, and it was too late to do anything about it.

  I looked over at his own car, which he'd pulled into the side and which seemed to contain an impossibly solid mass of people, heads everywhere and too many to count, and I said, 'Okay, follow me to the hospital. Don't try to keep up with me, and don't cross any red lights.'

  The woman herself spoke no English, but her two sisters had stayed with her and were able to translate. I mainly wanted to tell her not to mess up my seat, but what I said was, 'Ask her if the pains are continuous, or if they're like every minute or so.'

  There was a quick gabble in the back, and then one of the sisters said, 'She says it's both.'

  'Well, then,' I said confidently. 'Tell her she's got plenty of time.'

  The truth of it was that I had no idea, but the trick is always to make people think that you have.

  We went storming up 24th Street with all the lights flashing and the siren howling to scatter the traffic, and only a few minutes later they were loading her into a wheelchair outside the County General. This was the same parking lot where I'd tried to flatten the enemy in the shape of Woods, what seemed like about three centuries ago. The husband's car arrived shortly after, and
disgorged what appeared to be three complete generations of two separate families. I was checking the state of my back seat at the time, and that's how I was when I heard the call.

  It was a 921, a prowler seen trying to enter an occupied apartment on the East side of the Deuce. Something in me seemed to click, and the motors began to whirr; prowlers generally only become housebreakers when they come upon a place that they know is empty. Travis and Leonard were taking the call, and I jumped in behind the wheel with the intention of racing to join them.

  I must have cut through the late-afternoon traffic like a scythe. The address given was a run-down five-story block with its ground-floor windows boarded and a rusty strapiron fire escape climbing up its side; behind it were warehouses, and beyond them the railyards. I pulled in behind the patrol vehicle and went inside. Every tenant in the block seemed to be out on the stairs swapping opinions, and I almost had to fight my way through to the third floor.

  Travis was listening to a beefy man in a singlet, nodding as he listened. Leonard had climbed out through the window to take a look down the iron stairway. Even at first glance I could see that there were a few spots of blood on the sill. I asked Travis for the story.

  'Kid comes into his bedroom and sees this deadbeat trying to climb in off the fire escape. The guy's got his leg through and he's struggling, so the kid pulls a shiv and starts spiking him in the thigh. That shifted him out fast enough.'

  I took a look around. I wouldn't have guessed that this could be a child's bedroom; there were no posters, no toys, nothing much at all other than three folding cots shoved over against the wall. I said, 'How old is the kid?'

  'Nine,' Travis said, 'and he wants to know if he's going to get a reward. That's the knife, over there.'

  It was lying on one of the beds, and we went over to take a look. As far as I could see it was a steel letter-opener that had been honed to a deadly point. So I'd been wrong about the total absence of toys, after all.

  I said, 'Any description?'

  And Travis said, 'Well, I guess you could start with a limp.'

  Leonard came up at the window then. 'Sergeant?' he said, peering through the opening at me. 'I think we're dealing with something more than a daytime burglar here.'

  'What do you mean?'

  He glanced over my shoulder at the man in the singlet, who was hanging around to see what he could overhear, and said, 'Come outside, and I'll show you.'

  We went out through the window of the next room to avoid disturbing any marks or prints on the bedroom sill, and followed Leonard down two creaking flights in the open air. Something had lodged there, something that had perhaps been dropped and had fallen through the open ironwork of the treads. We crouched down to look at it, not touching, and Travis said, 'What kind of a knife is that?'

  'It's a flensing knife,' Leonard said. Most of the rest of his family were in the meat trade, so I supposed he ought to know. 'They use them in slaughterhouses to strip the skins off carcasses.'

  A little shudder ran through both Travis and me then as the implications suggested themselves to us, but we didn't get long to speculate because there was another call coming through on the portable radio that Travis had clipped to his belt when leaving the patrol car. It clashing with my own, a weird effect that made it seems as if the dispatcher's voice was coming from the air all around us.

  'I'll give you good odds that's for the same guy,' I said. 'Come on.' And then, in what was a deliberate lapse of professionalism, I took Travis and Leonard down with me to the cars leaving the witnesses and the physical evidence unattended; but the call was for only a couple of blocks away, and we were probably closer than anybody, and the priority now was to grab our would-be perpetrator before he could do any actual damage.

  I didn't have any doubts about who we'd be looking for. The only uncertainty was that I didn't know how I might recognise him.

  At least there couldn't be any doubt about the location, because when we came around the corner there was a little barrel-shaped woman out in the middle of the street waving her arms in the air at us. We pulled in to either side of her, and I got out and said, 'Did you make the call?'

  'I did,' she said. 'Some bastard asking my kids of they wanted to go with him, and then when they said no he asked them if they wanted to die.'

  'What did he look like? Was he limping?'

  'He'll be more than limping when my man gets hold of him. They ran off over towards the yards.'

  Travis and Leonard took off in pursuit with a screech of rubber then, and I said, 'You mean that somebody was chasing him?'

  'You bet,' she said. 'You see what he dropped, when he ran?' And she pointed over toward the sidewalk behind her, where something bundled in a rag had been dropped on the paving and had started to come open. Leaving my car door open I went over to take a look, and saw an old iron-headed hammer and about seven long spike-nails. She added, 'You can't miss him, he's horrible-looking, got this long brown overcoat on. It flapped around when he ran, only he didn't run so good.'

  So, this was the show. He was dropping his kit as he went.

  I got back into my car. Other units were coming into the area by now, and I requested the Chase frequency to organise them into a ring that would effectively seal the streets for a couple of blocks in every direction. As soon as I'd done, Travis came on with a report that they had him pinned. I told the other units to hold in case he made a break, and then sped the four hundred yards or so to the location that Travis had named.

  They were outside a scrapyard, by gates in a high wooden fence behind which dead cars had been stacked in towers to be watched over by the tip of a crane. The sky above was a deep, scorched blue. The patrol car had been parked across the gateway, and about half a dozen men in baseball caps and most of them carrying sticks had surrounded Travis and were all talking at once. It didn't take much to guess that the blockwatch committee had pursued their quarry this far, and that he'd disappeared into the yard itself. Travis was waving them down, asking them to speak one at a time, and they were all too excited to take any notice.

  I beckoned him out, as much to rescue him as anything else.

  'Call in for any extra units they can spare us,' I told him, 'and ask them to put the SWAT team on standby. Make sure we've got coverage on all the yard's exits.' While he was making a start on that, I turned to the man who seemed to be the leader of the neighborhood posse.

  I said, 'When you saw him go into the yard, was he carrying a gun?'

  The man shook his head. 'I didn't see him carrying anything,' he said.

  Try again. I drew my own revolver and held it up where he could see, and cocked the hammer noisily.

  I said, 'Was he armed and dangerous, or not?'

  'Fuck yes,' the man amended hastily.

  Leonard had been in to alert the yard's foreman and now its few employees were filing out, squeezing through the deliberately narrow gap between the patrol car and the gate. They looked bewildered and uncertain. I asked Travis if he was game to go in and take a look, and Travis unholstered the tank-stopper that he carried in place of the standard weapon and said that he was.

  I knew that this was, in a sense, futile, but there were several reasons why I had to go ahead with it. Besides appearances, I had to consider that beating Winter one more time might push him a little of the way towards taking on my challenge, about which I'd been deadly serious. And although in one sense we might not be playing for real at this stage, try telling that to any victims who might have had the misfortune to get in his way. We went in with our radios off, me leading the way and Travis covering our backs against any approach, moving in silence down the first of the shaded alleys of metal and chrome.

  The place where we came out was an oil-stained clearing where half-salvaged shells stood ready for the crusher. So far we'd seen no signs of life at all, unless you counted a cat which had turned and dived off into the iron jungle at the first sight of us, but now Travis touched my arm at a sound from above. He hardly needed
to; there wasn't much chance of me missing the noise of a skylight trap being thrown open, and the shrieking of a woman as she was hauled out into the air.

  They were up on the high corrugated roof of the yard office, which itself stood on stilts over the breaking workshop and was reached by an external stairway. From where we were standing, it was like looking up at a high-diving board. A gaunt, bony-looking man had a grip on the shoulder of the woman's dress, and it was pulling up and showing all her underwear as he dragged her out kicking. Winter had chosen well, the guy looked like a ghoul, his long brown overcoat flapping around. The screaming and the kicking stopped as the woman got a hold on the roof ridge and clung there, and one of her shoes came off and bounced three times on the corrugated iron before sailing all the way down and bouncing again off a pile of dented hubcaps, which clattered like dropped plates. The woman was probably the office help, and had somehow been missed in the staff roundup. The ghoul shaded his eyes from the sun and peered down at us, grinning, and called out, 'Hiya, officers, come for the show?' And then he clambered around and straddled the ridge as his victim hung on shivering only a couple of feet away. He was moving awkwardly, dragging one of his legs, but he didn't show the slightest fear of the height or of the delicacy of his perch.

  Then he looked inside his coat, thin straggly hair lifting in a breeze that wasn't touching us down below, and pulled something out which seemed to catch on the lining; it took me a moment to recognise it as an office billspike carrying a thick wad of papers, and by then he was already starting to pull the invoices off in handfuls and letting them scatter.

  Travis said in a dull, oh-shit kind of voice, 'He's going to do her while we watch. The marksmen aren't even here yet.'

  The paper flimsies were showering down over the yard now like oversized stage snow. The ghoul gave us another encouraging grin, and threw another handful as wide as he could. The spike was almost fully exposed now, about as slender and sharp as an icepick.

  I said, 'Let me have your magnum,' and Travis, transfixed by what was going on up above, didn't quite hear me.