There were a few seconds of silence. Gayle could hear her heart pounding. Then a familiar voice said, “Miss Clarke? I’d like to see you…”
“Who is this?”
“Andy Palatazin. Captain Palatazin, from Parker Center.”
“What is it? What do you want?” Calm down. You sound fucking frantic.
He paused and then went on, “I need your help. It’s very important that I see you as soon as possible.”
“My help? Why? How did you find me?”
“I called the Tattler. A man there gave me your number. I need your help because…I’d rather not talk about this over the phone.”
“I’d rather you did.”
He sighed heavily. “Yes. All right. I’d like to tell you a story, and I’m hoping you’ll believe it enough to write about it in your newspaper…”
“Why? I thought you called the Tattler a rag.” She sipped her tea and waited for him to speak again.
“I can tell you who the Gravedigger is, Miss Clarke,” Palatazin said. “I can tell you why those graves are being torn up. I can tell you all that and much, much more.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m retired. I’m thinking about driving up to San Francisco for, a while—”
“LISTEN TO ME!” he said so furiously Gayle jumped. She was tempted to hang up on him, but there was a pleading note in his voice that held her attention. “Yours is the only paper in this city that would even consider printing the story I’m going to tell you! And by printing it, you could save lives, Miss Clarke. Possibly millions of lives! I thought you told me you were a journalist. You said you were a good one, and I believed you. Was I wrong?”
“Maybe you were.”
“Perhaps. But were you?”
She gripped the receiver. Her knuckles were white. She wanted to tell him to go to hell; she wanted to tell him to go over to the Sandalwood Apartments and help the other stumble-bum cops look for about twenty-five tenants who’d vanished overnight. Instead, she heard herself ask, “What kind of story is it?”
“One that you’ll have to have courage to write. I think you have it, Miss Clarke. That’s why I called you.”
“Cut the bullshit,” she said irritably. “Where are you? Parker Center?”
“No, I’m…at home.” He gave her the address. “When can you be here?”
“I don’t know. I…whenever I get there, I guess.”
“All right. That’ll have to do. I’ll be here all afternoon.”
“Good-bye.” As she was hanging up, she heard him say “Thank you.” And his voice was so full of relief and real gratitude that she was momentarily stunned. The line went dead, and she slowly put the receiver down.
She drank the rest of her tea and went into the bathroom. Her face in the mirror looked awful. She opened the medicine cabinet and took out a small yellow bottle. There were three Quaaludes rattling around at the bottom. She shook one out into her hand and lifted it to her mouth; her hand was shaking, and she had to grasp her wrist to hold it steady. Is this what cracking up feels like? Who said that? She looked down at the pill. No, she told herself. If I’m going to get back to work, I’ve got to stay straight. She looked at the pill longingly for a while, then dropped it back into the bottle.
She turned on the cold water tap in the shower, undressed, stepped in before she could reconsider, and stuck her head beneath the torrent.
SEVEN
At twelve noon Bob Lampley stood next to the Hell’s Hole Hilton and watched the sky. On top of the Hilton, enclosed by a chain-link fence, a great radar cup turned smoothly on its tower. In the space of a half-minute, a metal wind-direction indicator twirled, first due west, then west-northwest, due north, back to northwest, then slowly returned to due west where it hung steady. The winds swirled around Lampley as hot as the breath of a blast furnace. Every so often he felt the sting of sand on his face or hands, and his scalp itched. Thermals were coming up from the Mojave Desert, the strongest winds bringing sand with them. That’s odd as hell, Lampley thought. That’s one for the record books, I guess.
The Hell’s Hole Hilton was a wood-framed weather station 5,012 feet up on Old Baldy about twenty-five miles from the heart of L.A. and sixty miles from what Lampley considered the fiercest place God ever created—the hot, sand-choked throat of the Devil’s Playground at the center of the Mojave Desert. He’d tried to hike across that monstrous place a few years ago with some friends who were as crazy as he was. They’d wound up scorched to the bone, babbling with sun fever, packed into a Jeep racing toward a case of cold Coors in Ludlow.
But the weird thing about this new weather picture was that the sand was being blown such a long way. The weather station at Twenty-nine Palms had reported some strong winds this morning centered between the Cady and Providence Mountain ranges in the Playground, but any loose sand should’ve been caught miles back by the peaks that stood between the San Bernardino National Forest and the desert. If the winds were strong enough and high enough to carry the sand over those mountains, then by all the rules of weather forecasting they should lose strength dramatically the further they got from the center of strongest activity and dump the sand at the lip of the forest. That wasn’t happening, and this new change in the rules was beginning to bother him. The hot winds were melting snowcaps for miles in all directions, the wind-direction indicator seemed to point due west most of the time when it wasn’t spinning around crazily to show the progress of a sudden corkscrew, and Lampley was getting sand in his face 5,000 feet up.
Won’t do, he thought. Nope. Won’t do at all.
Directly overhead the sun shone weakly through chinks in cirrus clouds as thick and gray as an iguana’s hide. Those clouds were racing, tumbling over each other in what seemed to Lampley like frantic haste away from the storm center. And there it was—he’d finally allowed the thought that had been lurking at the back of his brain to come forward—a hideous pupil allowed to sit in the front row. Storm center. What storm? he asked himself. Some high desert winds in the Playground sure as hell don’t constitute a storm, Lampley. You’re thinking in terms of tornado or a dust-devil, and neither of those can be right. There’s a pretty slim chance of a tornado, and if this is a dust-devil forming, it’s got to be the biggest bastard of a dust-devil that ever spun out of a whirlwind.
Okay, he thought. How about a plain old sandstorm? They happen all the time, kicked out of the Mojave Desert by two or more pressure ridges that meet and don’t like each other, stomping around trying to get out of one another’s way. The Mojave, like all the world’s deserts, crept. It already covered roughly 25,000 square miles of southern California and still wanted more. Every few years it lapped up to the back doors of some nearby town, as slowly and innocently as a golden dog who wouldn’t bite you, not for anything in the world. But then when the forty-five- and fifty-mile-an-hour winds came screaming out of that furnace—always quite unexpectedly—the golden dog turned into a ravenous beast who slithered over sandbag barricades and brick walls to leave its shifting spoor.
Can’t be a sandstorm, Lampley told himself. There’s supposed to be a high pressure ridge sitting astride California and six other states in a slow eastward sweep, supposed to be clear skies with moderate westerly winds until Monday. And no storm that Lampley had ever heard of or read about in his six years with the National Weather Service had ever shot tendrils of sand so high. It was as if the Mojave had decided it was better to leap than to creep.
Lampley watched the sky for a moment more and then walked up a slight grade to the Hilton. The place was weather-beaten outside and looked as old as the surrounding mountains, but inside it was quite comfortable with a woven, red-and-brown Indian rug on the floor, a couple of castoff but good chairs around a wood-burning heater, which was not needed now since the temperature up here had risen to the low sixties. There was a desk and a bookcase with dog-eared paperbacks set before a window that afforded a westerly view of the Mount Baldy winter sports area and Silverwood Lake. On the other side of the w
indow was a battery of electronic equipment—wind-speed indicators, pressure gauges, and a radar screen that now showed the soupy, green clumps of the cloud masses moving overhead. A black telephone sat on the desk next to a photograph of Lampley’s wife, Bonnie, and their two-year-old son, Chad. On the wall over a teletype machine, there was a red phone hooked up directly to National Weather in L.A.
Lampley sat down at his desk and dialed Twentynine Palms Weather on the black phone. In the distance he could see a ranger tower that looked like a spindly War of the Worlds Martian machine. “Hal?” he said when the phone was picked up about forty-five miles away. “This is Bob up at the Hilton. What are you showing down there?”
Hal’s voice was weakened not only by the distance but also by the strange weather. “Still got some high winds on the Play…crackle squeal… Bob. Wait a sec. Let me check the figures. Okay. West and southwesterly…squealllll…from thirty to forty miles per hour, gusting to forty-five. Air pressure’s dropped from…crackle-crackle…in the last ninety minutes. What do you have up there?”
“Cloud city,” Lampley said. “Pressure’s still hanging steady, though. I’m picking up some kind of electrical interference on this end, so you’ll have to speak louder.”
“What?” Hal said. “I didn’t…all of that…”
“Talk louder!” he said. “I don’t understand what’s going on. Did a pressure drop creep in on us or what?”
“Not from Canada it didn’t. Funny. Vegas weather…clear and sunny, high in the mid-eighties…”
“So whatever’s happening is right over the Mojave?”
“Sorry…didn’t hear…”
“I guess we’ve got a bad connection. Listen, I’ll call you back around two. If those winds build anymore, give me a call.”
“Sure thing. Talk…later…”
Lampley hung up and looked at the red phone on the wall. He’d feel like a fool calling L.A. National about some desert winds, no matter how hard they were gusting. So it was an infant sandstorm, so what? LAX Weather would keep the planes out of trouble, and the mountains would take the brunt of the winds. Sooner or later the storm would spin itself out.
But what if it doesn’t? What if this bastard gets so big and wild it whirls all the way across the mountains and into L.A.?
Impossible, he reassured himself. Los Angeles might get a little grit, but they needed the winds to blow off their smog cover anyway. Nothing to worry about.
He stared at that phone for a few seconds more, looked out the window at the lizard-hide sky, and returned to the Mike Shayne mystery he’d been reading before he’d heard the grate of sand against glass.
EIGHT
Gayle Clarke pulled her Mustang up to the curb on Romaine Street and stared at the house with the black crucifix painted on the front door. There was a word written underneath it in a foreign language. Some of the windows were painted with crosses, too—the house looked like some kind of weird church. She glanced at the mailbox: Palatazin. Reluctantly she got out of her car and walked up the porch steps to the door. The black paint was new; she could see where it had dripped. She knocked on the door and waited.
It was almost one o’clock. It had taken her two hours to get out of her apartment, then she’d driven over to Pancho’s and forced herself to eat two tacos before driving up through Hollywood. She wore clean denims and a light blue blouse; her face was scrubbed and, if not exactly infused with a pink glow, much healthier-looking than it had been this morning. There was still a glassy, shocked look in her eyes that wouldn’t go away. Behind her, wind swirled through the trees and hedges along Romaine, making a noise like barely restrained laughter.
The door opened, and Palatazin looked out at her. He nodded and without a word stepped back to allow her in. He was wearing gray slacks and a white pullover shirt that showed his belly in its full splendor; he looked oddly vulnerable, just another human being when not seen from the other side of a captain’s desk at Parker Center. His eyes were dark and troubled, and when they locked with hers, she felt the skin at the back of her neck prickle.
He closed the door, locked it, and motioned toward the sofa. “Please sit down. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Maybe a Coke?”
She could still taste the tacos, and now her stomach was doing flipflops. “Uh…a Coke would be fine.”
“All right. Just make yourself comfortable.” He disappeared toward the rear of the house, and she sat looking around, her purse in her lap. It seemed to be a cozy house, much warmer than she would have thought. It smelled vaguely of onions and potatoes; probably some kind of foreign dish he favored, she guessed. There was a rusted metal box on the coffee table in front of her.
“So you’re Gayle Clarke,” someone said, and Gayle looked up into the icy eyes of a gray-haired woman who stood gazing at her from across the room. She was pretty with high, sharp cheekbones, but now the flesh was stretched tight to give her face a hard, masklike appearance. “You’re the one who wrote such awful things about my husband.”
“I didn’t write anything—”
“Are you denying your trashy paper said he ought to be fired?” Her eyes flared.
“Maybe it did, but I don’t write editorials.”
“Oh. Of course you don’t,” Jo said with a bitter edge. “Do you realize the strain you’ve put on my Andy? You and all the rest of the filthy papers in this city?” She came forward a few steps, and Gayle tensed. “Well, you got what you wanted. You can be happy now.” Her lower Up was trembling, and now tears of anger were beginning to dance in her eyes. “Why did you want to hurt him?” she said quietly. “He never did anything to you…”
“What’s this?” Palatazin said, coming into the room with Gayle’s drink. He looked at Jo in bewilderment, then at Gayle. “What’s going on?”’
“Nothing,” Gayle said. “Your wife and I were just getting…acquainted.”
He handed her the glass and picked up the morning Times from where it lay in a chair. “Have you seen this, Miss Clarke?”
“No.” She took it from him and looked at the front page. The headline was about the Mid-East situation, the talks breaking down again. But another story just above the fold caught her eye. The headline said “Bats Kept Coming,” Says Shaken Officer. There was a shorter kicker line above it, Six Die At Parker Center. “What’s this?” she said, looking up at Palatazin.
“Read it.” He sat down in the chair and folded his hands before him. “Those men who were killed were my friends.” His eyes seemed almost black. “When you’re finished with that, I’d like you to look through the clippings in that box on the table.”
Gayle read the article, feeling Jo Palatazin’s gaze burning into her skull. “This says a suspect in the Roach killings got away. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“A suspect? Or the Roach himself?”
“It was him,” Palatazin said quietly.
“My God!” She looked up sharply. “What is this all about? What’s with the crosses scrawled on your doors and windows?”
“In time,” he said. “There’s someone else coming to join us. He should be here soon.”
“Who?”
“A priest from East L.A. named Silvera.”
“A priest? What’s this going to be, a confession?”
Jo said coldly, “I think you’re the one who has sins to confess…”
“Please,” Palatazin said and touched his wife’s arm. “She’s a guest in this house, and she was very kind to come.”
Gayle opened the metal box. When she saw what the clippings were about, she felt as if she’d been kicked in the head. She looked through them for a few minutes, her hands beginning to tremble.
There was a knock at the door. Palatazin answered it, and Father Silvera stood there staring darkly at the crucifix painted on the front window. “Come in, Father,” Palatazin said. When Silvera entered the house, he instantly caught the same odor Gayle had smelled. He recognized it as the aroma of garlic. Palatazin introduced
Jo and Gayle, and Silvera sat down on the sofa.
“Thank you for coming, Father,” Palatazin said. “I appreciate your driving all this distance. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
“Yes, please. Cream and sugar.”
“I’ll get it,” Jo said; she glared once more at Gayle before leaving the room.
“Did you bring what I asked, Father?” Palatazin asked quietly, leaning forward in his chair.
Silvera nodded and reached into his coat. He brought out something wrapped in white cloth and handed it to Palatazin. “Just as you asked,” he said. “Now I’d like to know what you need it for, and why you called me since there are maybe thirty Catholic churches within a five-mile radius of this house.”
Palatazin was stripping away the white cloth. Inside was a small, corked bottle holding about two ounces of clear liquid. “I called you,” he said, “because I thought you would understand the…gravity of the situation. You were in that tenement building in East L.A. You saw the bodies being carried out. I hoped you’d—”
“I see,” the priest said. “So that’s what this is all about—your belief in vampires. That’s why you’ve painted crosses on your doors and windows. That’s why you felt you needed a vial of holy water. Mr. Palatazin, I don’t wish to seem…condescending, but I’m afraid vampires should be the least of this city’s concerns. I still don’t know what was wrong with those people, but I’m sure it’s strictly a medical question and not one of vampirism.” He glanced at the girl beside him, who was going through some clippings from a metal box. Her eyes were glazed, and she didn’t even seem to realize he was sitting there. Did I break my gasoline budget for the week for this? he asked himself.
“I suppose you’ve called Mercy Hospital to check on those people?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Then let me tell you what you found out. Absolutely nothing. I called Mercy this morning, and I was shuffled around from doctor to doctor until a press relations man told me no information was being given out about these cases. Is that what you were told?”
They Thirst Page 37
