They Thirst

by Robert R. McCammon

  How? The man was crazy, of course. An animal, a fattyu, a maniac. But careful and cunning, too. And the city was so big, so sprawling, so full of potential killers. How? It was a question Palatazin wrestled with daily because, as Detective Captain of Homicide at Parker Center in downtown L.A., he was in charge of the investigation. He saw the fear, the mistrust in people’s face now as they stood talking in groups on the boulevards, as they pondered the fickle turnings of life and death in smoky bars. The sheer ugliness. of this maniac’s methods surpassed anything the Hillside Strangler had ever done. But if there was anything that riveted the attention of L.A., it was the horror show.

  A sickening thing, Palatazin thought as he stared up at the ceiling, trying to picture in his mind what the man must look like. Judging from the bruises on the throats of his victims, his hands would have to be abnormally large and very strong; probably his forearms and shoulders would be well-developed, too. He would also probably have very fast reflexes—only one of the women had gotten her nails into his flesh—but from that tiny bit of tissue the police lab technicians had determined that the Roach was a dark-haired Caucasian, most likely under forty. He was a very sadistic, sick man who seemed to be enjoying his newly found publicity. But what had made him go underground? What had made him decide to stop killing just as quickly as he’d begun? Thirteen days, Palatazin thought. The trail’s getting colder and colder. What is he doing? Where is he hiding?

  And suddenly Palatazin was aware of another noise in the room. The noise, he instinctively knew, that had awakened him.

  It was a slight, soft creaking, as if someone were walking on the floorboards down at the foot of the bed. Beside him Jo stirred and sighed, locked into sleep.

  Palatazin’s blood turned icy. He lifted his head.

  At the foot of the bed, over where the window looked down onto Romaine Street with its old, wood-framed houses standing shoulder to shoulder like aged friends, Palatazin’s mother Nina sat in her rocking chair, slowly rocking back and forth. She was small and wrinkled and weary-looking, but her eyes blazed fiercely in the darkness.

  Palatazin’s heart thudded in his chest. He sat upright in bed and heard himself whisper first in the language of his native Hungary, “Anya…Mama…my God…”

  His mother’s stare was unyielding. She seemed to be trying to speak; he could see her lips moving, the sunken cheeks quivering with the effort. She lifted a frail hand and motioned with it, as if she wanted her son to get up and hurry, lazybones, you’ll be late for school.

  “What is it?” he whispered, his face gone ashen. “What is it?”

  A hand gripped his shoulder. He gasped and looked around, his flesh crawling. His wife, a small, pretty woman in her early forties with bones like fine china, was looking up at him through deep blue, blurry eyes. She said thickly, “Is it time to get up yet?”

  “No,” he told her. “Go back to sleep.”

  “What do you want for breakfast?”

  He leaned over and kissed her cheek, and she settled back down into her pillow. Almost instantly her breathing shallowed. He looked back to the window, beads of cold sweat on his face.

  The rocking chair, over in the corner where it always sat, was empty. For a few seconds he thought it was moving, but as he stared at it he realized that the chair wasn’t rocking at all. It never had been. Another car moved along the street, casting quick reflections of light that chased the clinging shadows along the ceiling.

  Palatazin watched the chair for a long time, then eased himself back down in the bed. He pulled the sheet up to his neck. The thoughts whirled wildly through his mind, like remnants of tattered newspaper. It’s the pressure, of course, FIND THE ROACH, but I did see her, I did! Tomorrow more legwork and interviews and telephone calls. FIND THE ROACH. I saw my mother sitting in that chair…the day starts early so you must get your sleep…close your eyes…I saw her…close your eyes…yes, yes I did!

  Finally his heavy-lidded eyes did close. Sleep brought on a nightmarish shadowy shape, pursuing a small boy and a woman across a plain heaped with high snowdrifts. His last coherent thought before he began to run across the snowfield in his mind was that his mother had been dead since the first week of September.

  THREE

  Mitchell Everett Gideon, forty-four-year-old entrepreneur supreme and newly elected vice-president of the Los Angeles Millionaires’ Club, was lighting up a dark-leafed, two-dollar Joya de Nicaragua cigar with a gold Dunhill lighter at about the same time that Andy Palatazin was staring at an empty rocking chair. A short, feisty man with a spreading belly and a face that would have been as innocent as Humpty Dumpty’s except for the dark, deep-set eyes and the thin-lipped, callous mouth, Gideon sat in the gold-carpeted office of his Spanish pueblo-style mansion in Laurel Canyon staring at a half-dozen invoices spread across his antique mahogany desk. The invoices covered shipments of the usual items: a couple of freight-train loads of unfinished oak planking cut into prespecified lengths and widths, delivered to the factory in the Highland Park district; crates of varnish and stain; several dozen bolts of silk from Lee Wong and Company over in Chinatown; bales of cotton ticking; six drums of embalming fluid. “The robbers!” Gideon muttered, betraying his New York upbringing with a single flattening of the tongue. “The dirty, rotten robbers! Especially Lee Wong. Been doin’ business with that old chink for almost fifteen years,” Gideon told himself as he bit down on his cigar, “now the old bastid’s raised his prices for the third time in a year! Christ!” And the same with the others, too. The oak was costing an arm and a leg these days, and just last week Vincenzo at the Gomez Brothers Lumberyard had called Gideon to fell him what a terrific sacrifice he was making to sell the material that cheaply. Sacrifice my ass! Gideon thought, chewing on the cigar. That’s another goddamned robber! “Well, contract renewal time’s comin’ up in a few months,” he told himself. “Then we’ll see who wants my business and who don’t!”

  He sucked in a mouthful of smoke and spewed it up toward the ceiling, sweeping aside the invoices with a diamond-ringed hand. “Overhead is killin’ me this year!” he told himself. About the only thing that hadn’t skyrocketed in price was the embalming fluid, and the DeWitt Labs people were making threatening noises about that, too. How the hell can a man make a decent livin’ these days? Cigar gripped between his teeth, Gideon stood up from his desk to pour himself a solid shot of Chivas Regal from a decanter taken from across the room. He wore a pair of crisply pressed tan slacks, a flaming red shirt open at the chest with several gold chains dangling, a pair of brown Gucci loafers on his feet. The shirt’s pocket was monogrammed—MG in white letters. Gideon took his cigar and shot of Chivas out through a sliding glass door and onto a long terrace with a wrought-iron railing. Directly beneath him there was a fifty-foot drop into shrub- and tree-studded darkness, and off to the left, just faintly visible through a thick wall of pines, were the lights of another canyon dweller’s house. Before him, like so much gaudy jewelry flung out on a black velvet-covered table, was a dazzling panorama of multicolored lights—Beverly Hills and Hollywood and L.A. from right to left as far as he could see. The tiny headlights of toy cars moved along Hollywood, Sunset, and Santa Monica boulevards; neon pulsated to private rhythms above discos and bars and rock clubs on the Strip. The rolling streets of Beverly Hills were dotted with sparkling white lights, like so many stars fallen to earth and slowly sputtering to death. Parks and cemeteries were dark squares in the electric tapestry. Gideon drew on his cigar and watched a Fountain Avenue traffic light the size of a pinhead turn green. He turned his head a fraction of an inch and saw a dust speck of flashing blue veer up a ramp and onto the sweeping line of the Hollywood Freeway; it sped southward toward L.A. Millions of people down there, Gideon thought, right now they’re sleeping, drinking, fighting, talking, screwing, being screwed, loving, and hating. And sooner or later they’re all going to need what I sell. That thought made him feel a little better. The world turns and turns, he told himself, and spins off a few mo
re unlucky folks everyday. Auto accidents, suicides, murders, plain old Nature taking her course. I know what you need, baby, and I’m the man with the plan.

  Sometimes he felt like a god up here on Sky Vista Road; sometimes he thought he could stretch his arms and touch the heavens, take a piece of chalk and write MITCH GIDEON up on that huge blackboard for all the old bats at the public school (especially Four-Eyes Grimes who said he’d never amount to anything but a hoodlum) to see. Of course, they were all dead by now—and buried I hope, he thought, in pine boxes that leaked water on their dead gray heads—but he hoped that somehow all those people who said he’d wind up in the juvenile home or in the Tombs knew that now he was on top of the world, now he had a million-dollar Spanish mansion on Sky Vista Road, now he smoked two-dollar cigars and wore Gucci shoes, now he drank Chivas Regal from a crystal shot glass and watched the little people racing around down in the valley. Now he was Mitch Gideon, Mortuary King of Los Angeles.

  A chill breeze came up the canyon, shaking pine branches before it, and swirled around him, knocking off a dangling inch of cigar ash. The dark brown hair of his toupee remained glued in place above his long, gray sideburns. In that breeze he thought he could smell the rich aromas of mellow oak, woodstain, varnish, shellac and clumps of wax caught in old, tattered rags, raw sawdust and chewing tobacco—the aromas of his youth, spent between the juvenile home and his apprenticeship with Jacob Richwine the Brooklyn coffin maker. Those were the days…

  He stabbed his cigar out on the railing until the sparks were gone and then thumped the butt out into the night. He was about to step back into the warmth of the house when his head turned to the right and he found himself staring off into the distance, past the scatter of white lights from Nichols Canyon and toward the slabs of darkness that were the hills just above the Hollywood Bowl.

  He could feel the magnetic pull of the Kronsteen Castle as if he were the needle of a compass; he knew his eyes had locked upon it across two miles of pine trees, palmettos, rooftops, and naked rock. It was there, like a scab where the earth had blistered into a peak, at the end of Blackwood Road where it had brooded for over forty years. And for the fifth time in as many days, Mitch Gideon felt the sudden strong urge to leave his house, get in his chocolate-brown Mercedes, and drive up along that broken, godforsaken road to that huge, gothic cathedral of stone. He moved along the terrace as far as he could go and stood with one hand gripped around the cold railing, staring off into space. Another chill breeze swept across him, raising bumps on his exposed flesh, and as it whispered past his face, he thought he heard his name called as if from a vast distance. His eyes seemed so unfocused, as if he were staring through a huge, rain-smeared, plate-glass window; the lights from Nichols Canyon distorted into elongated streaks of white and yellow. He felt a slight throbbing at his temples, as if an invisible hand were slowly caving in the sides of his head. And Gideon thought for an instant that he could actually see the looming, hundred-roomed Kronsteen Castle in the far distance with the white candle of the moon above it, guttering behind clouds of Spanish lace. His fingers gripped tighter around the railing, and now he was watching a river of plain, unfinished caskets come floating toward him along the banks of a wide, black conveyor belt. There were other people around him, too, both men and women and even some small children, but the shadows were thick, cobwebbed things that kept him from seeing their faces clearly. The conveyor belt rolled the caskets along to a loading dock where the trucks waited with engines rumbling. Everyone seemed to know each other, but for some reason no one spoke. Overhead the long banks of fluorescent lights were burning at less than half-power, and people moved around Gideon like sleepwalkers, shadowy things without faces. The conveyer belt whirred faster and faster, bringing more and more caskets to be loaded onto the trucks. Gideon had a shovel in his hands. As a casket neared him, the worker just in front of him would lean forward and throw the lid back. Gideon then scooped up a shovelful of brown, sandy earth from a huge heap behind him and dumped it in; the next worker did the same, as did the next. Further down the line the lid was closed again, and a forklift rumbled forward to hoist it to the trucks. Gideon realized that the front of his shirt was dirty.

  Quite close to his ear someone said, “Mitch!”

  He heard something crash to the concrete, and at first he thought it was his shovel. I’ll get behind! Got to hurry! he thought. But then he felt the October wind on his face and smelled Chanel; Estelle Gideon, a sweater thrown around her shoulders above a silver-colored gown that did not quite hide the stomach and hips that years of gourmet dining had given her, stood beside her husband, her dark brown eyes slightly puffed from sleep. Her face, unfortunately toadlike, was layered with green and white beauty creams from Elizabeth Arden’s on Rodeo Drive. Gideon blinked and looked down at his feet where the crystal shot glass had shattered. “Oh,” he said softly, “dropped it.”

  “What are you doing out here, hon?” his wife asked. “It’s cold!”

  “I was…” He thought for a minute, What was I doing? “I was working,” he remembered. “In the office.” He rubbed his eyes and glanced toward where he knew the Kronsteen Castle perched in the darkness. A shiver rippled up his spine, and he quickly looked away. “I just stepped out for some air. Can’t you sleep?”

  “I was sleeping,” she said and yawned. “I got hungry for some ice cream. When are you coming to bed?”

  “Just a few minutes. I’ve been going over some bills. That bloodsucker Wong’s on my ass again.” He looked out over the shimmering city and thought, Someone’s dying out there right now. Tell you what I’ll do—I’ll give you the special rate for that shaded plot and the silk-lined, oak, conquistador-style casket, and I’ll throw in the Golden Eternity service gratis. He smelled polishing wax, sweet and sour. He looked down at the hand that had guided the shovel.

  “You’ve made a real mess here,” the woman said, making a clucking sound with her tongue. “How many have you had?”

  “Huh? Oh, just one. Watch your feet, babe. Shit, leave it for Natalie in the morning. She’s got to have somethin’ to do besides dumpin’ out ashtrays and watchin’ her goddamned soap operas!”

  Estelle looked at him in silence for a few seconds. “You look funny, Mitch. Everything okay?”

  “Funny? How?”

  “Bothered, worried, I don’t know. If business was bad, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Sure I would.” Like hell I would, Gideon thought. The last time he’d tried to tell her about a business problem she fell asleep on him, still vacantly nodding her head. No one seemed to be interested in his problems anymore except Karen, Gideon’s twenty-year-old mistress who lived out at Marina Del Rey. She made him feel like a kid again, but there were many nights spent just talking instead of fucking. Estelle had her lovers, too; Mitch could always tell when a new one had leeched onto her because she would always start taking exercise classes at the Beverly Hills Health Club again. They were always young men with tans—tennis players, lifeguards, beach bums. He didn’t mind because he knew Estelle was smart enough not to let them get too near her purse. It was a good arrangement: he had his, she had hers. But in their own way they loved each other, even if not physically. They were good friends. And a divorce settlement would carve him too close to the bone because he’d built his business on the strength of her father’s old New York money.

  “It’s cold out here,” Estelle said. “Come on to bed.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I will.” He stood motionless and felt the Kronsteen Castle at his back, tugging him like a magnet. “It’s spooky…” he whispered.

  “What’s spooky? Mitch? You heard something on the radio about another one of those Roach murders?”

  “No, not that. Damn it, what the hell happened to Mitzi? You’d think we would’ve heard something by now!”

  She shrugged. “Dogs run away.”

  “Watchdogs aren’t supposed to! I paid over three-hundred bucks for that bitch! You’re telling me she ran away afte
r four years?”

  “So maybe somebody stole her? I’ve heard of that before. Dognapping. They like to get Dobermans.”

  “Dognapping my ass! Mitzi would’ve chewed the fuckin’ arms off anybody who tried to throw her into a car! It’s just not safe in this fuckin’ city anymore! Burglars breakin’ into houses all up and down the canyon, nuts like the Roach runnin’ around; the cops don’t know which way to turn!” His eyes darkened. “And you remember what happened up at the Kronsteen place.”

  “That was eleven years ago,” she reminded him.

  “Eleven years or eleven minutes, it still happened, didn’t it? Christ, I should know! I saw the old man’s body…what was left of it.” There was a thick dryness at the back of his throat and a taste similar to the smell of embalming fluid. He wished he hadn’t broken that shot glass because he badly needed another sip of Chivas. He resisted the impulse to turn his head and like a man transfixed, stare off into the night, toward that huge pile of stone and concrete two miles away. If there was any other place that had a better view of L.A. than mine, Mitch thought, then the castle was it. “The cops never found the maniacs who did it either. Probably never will.”

  “That’s California for you,” Estelle said quietly. “The land of nuts and fruits.”

  “The land of maniacs and murderers. I don’t know, babe, I’m feeling awful damned strange these days. Spooked or somethin’. Scared.” He ran a hand over his forehead; his fingertips were numb, like in that old game Dead Man’s Hand where you squeezed a thumb until the blood drained out of it and it became so cold and alien that it hardly felt human at all. “Somethin’ like what happened to old man Kronsteen could happen to us. It could happen to anybody.”