“Ulysses—”
“Sorry to call at this hour—we’re redlining on the Mississippi Ripper. Is this a bad time?”
There was a pause, a sigh, and a series of rustling sounds on the other end.
“I can call back in the morning,” Grove said, pacing across the porch, keeping Aaron in his peripheral vision, the sound of the wind rattling something in the backyard.
“Naw, it’s okay, I’m just wading through a sea of junk e-mails,” the voice said.
“You’re gonna get a new series tomorrow, Cedric, and I’m wondering if you can put a rush on it.”
“From the St. Louis scene?”
“Yep, got a whole boatload of material off the vics this time, both secretions and tissues.”
Another pause.
Grove listened to the banging sound echoing across the darkness of deserted lawns, blending with the low intermittent rumble of thunder. What he didn’t notice was that Aaron had crawled all the way over to the opposite corner of the porch, and the banging sound was coming from the screen door, which had blown free of its latch, and now Aaron was crawling through the open doorway.
The voice in Grove’s ear said, “You airlifting it?”
“Yes, sir, Hollister’s got his Tactical guys on it, they’re flying it out to you as we speak.”
“Okay, I’ll clear my desk in the morning and have the rapid-test back to you before 5:00 your time.”
Grove did not notice his baby boy vanishing into the darkness of the rain swept backyard. The child was barely visible now, just a ghostly outline through the porch screen, trundling awkwardly over rain-damp grass toward the shadows beyond the birdbath.
“You are the man, Cedric,” Grove said with a satisfied nod, planning out the next day’s activities.
“Just do me a favor,” the voice said.
“Name it.”
“Just catch this guy already.”
“I will do my—”
Grove looked up then and saw many things at once: the empty porch, the banging screen door, the pale shadow of something moving out in the backyard. He dropped the phone. He leaped across the porch toward the open door. His heart raced as he stumbled outside.
He froze.
The child was maybe twenty-five feet away—maybe thirty feet—it was hard to tell in this light. But what made Grove abruptly stop and stare was a flicker of recognition in the back of his brain.
It flashed behind his eyes only for a beat, almost like a twinge of déjà vu, but not quite, as he stared at his baby vanishing into the pitch-black shadows at the end of the property line, where a forest of hardwoods lay choked with weeds and foliage. In the dark of night, the woods looked as cavernous and black as a leviathan’s mouth which was, at this very moment, about to devour Grove’s baby.
It was happening as savagely and suddenly as a giant fly trap closing around its prey. But there was something else about that image—a helpless infant voluntarily slipping into absolute darkness—that paralyzed Grove for the briefest moment, until he finally found his voice.
“Aaron!”
Grove dashed across the dew-slick lawn in one continuous headlong rush and scooped up the baby in a single fluid motion with the muscular grace of a juiced-up halfback retrieving a live ball at the buzzer. Grove only slipped once, just a few centimeters on his back heel as he was lifting the child, but he managed to keep from falling as he cradled Aaron against his heaving chest. He found his footing and stood there for a moment in the darkness with the baby in his arms and his heart pounding out a tarantella.
Aaron seemed oblivious. He wriggled and made squeaking noises.
Grove started to say something to his baby son when he abruptly stopped. The sound of the telephone had pierced the silence behind him in the kitchen. An instant feeling of apprehension stabbed at Grove’s solar plexus. Something was wrong. It was too late for anybody in law enforcement east of the Mississippi to call him, and since he had just talked to Cedric and Hollister in California it was doubtful that it was the west coast. That only left two possibilities: a wrong number or his mother.
“Please God, don’t make it my mom,” Grove muttered under his breath as he carried the child back toward the house. The kitchen was dark and cold. Grove answered the phone on the fifth ring with the baby still in his arms.
It was his mother.
“Let me guess,” he said, after detecting the note of somber dread in his mother’s greeting. “You’re working on another one of your premonitions?”
The silence that followed could have chilled the earth’s core.
SIX
Around 10:00 the following morning, just outside Belleville, Illinois, a garishly painted panel van wended its way up the narrow switchback road that rimmed the Fenster Maximum Security Facility. The van had a small satellite dish mounted to its roof, and the NBC logo emblazoned across its bulwark. WJID-TV ST. LOUIS was stamped across its hood, and the driver wore a WJID windbreaker buttoned up to the collar, a Cardinals hat pulled down low against his dark glasses to mask his bloodshot eyes. The driver had spent the previous evening kidnapping, binding, torturing, and killing two nursing students from St. Vincent de Paul College in East St. Louis because the compulsion had washed over him again. But unlike his previous kills, this time he decided to bury these subjects in sealed oil drums in the barrens along the Mississippi south of Carbondale. Splet could no longer afford to play games with the media, or leave his victims in plain sight. He felt the heat of law enforcement on the back of his neck like the breath of an avenging angel.
It was time for drastic measures.
Now Henry Splet approached the outer security gate at Fenster with heart thumping, palms clammy, and knuckles white against the steering wheel. He pulled up to the guard booth, which was fortified with riveted steel framing and razor-wire borders. He rolled down his window and stuck his head out. “WJID Action News.”
The guard, a pear-shaped black man with a bald head like an artillery shell, shot a look out the pass-through at the van’s empty passenger seat. “Just one this time?”
“Yes, sir.”
The guard looked nonplussed. “You got clearance from the warden’s office?”
Splet had been there only a month earlier, but that time he had accompanied the lovely and annoying reporter, Anna Fong, on a routine background piece. Splet now gave the guard a cursory nod. “Just a follow-up with Milambri.”
A long pause. The guard shrugged and vanished back inside the booth.
The gate groaned open. Splet eased the van through the opening, then putted across the staff parking lot, searching for a parking place.
The granite edifice rose in the middle distance like some funereal pueblo, casting its sullen shadow everywhere you looked. A massive U-shaped fortress, it was like some great and hellish oven into which society’s rejects had been shoved to stew in their own juices. Chimney stacks gurgled black smoke from its many corners, and not a single window adorned its Gothic ramparts. Concertina wire gleamed dully along the imposing outer fences like desiccated spun sugar. There were no sinister gun turrets, no potbellied guards out of central casting, just a general stillness born out of soul-numbing despair.
Splet parked near the service entrance, got out, and carried his briefcase along the east wall, walking with an officious-looking posture and gait. He wanted to give the impression that this was just another ridiculous follow-up assignment, an errand so ephemeral and routine that the station hadn’t even bothered to send talent—only a lowly cameraman serving as an ersatz stenographer.
Inside the main entrance—a moldy-smelling foyer painted baby-vomit green—an obese black lady guard in cat’s-eye glasses stopped Splet with a ham-hock arm. Splet told her whom he had come to see. The lady cast an incredulous glance down at Splet’s laminated press card. “Y’all talked to the warden about this?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The lady guard kept staring at that ID tag as though it might blink with subtitles. It was true
—technically—that Splet had talked to the warden’s office. Maybe that was four weeks ago, and about a different matter, but he had indeed talked to them. Today, however, Splet was banking on the fact that this heavyset woman in the horn-rims was too lazy to get on the bitch-box and confirm things.
A big sigh from the fat gal. “Alright…I’m gonna need ya to step over to the window. Remove all metal objects, your shoes, and your belt.”
Splet did as he was told. Another guard, a middle-aged man with a buzz cut and hulking shoulders, came out of an inner office and patted Splet down. Meanwhile the fat lady opened the briefcase and made a feeble search. She looked at the notepad, the carton of cigarettes, the tape recorder, then sniffed absently and latched it shut.
“Gonna have to meet in the general population,” she informed Splet with a nod toward the corridor to the left. “Visitation block.”
“That’s fine. Thank you,” Splet said and smiled.
“Officer Tomkins will escort you to the cafeteria where y’all will have ten minutes, no more, no less.”
Splet gave her a polite nod. “I understand, thank you.”
“You may not pass anything other than documents or cigarettes to the inmate. You may not take anything.”
“I understand.”
“You may not touch or come into contact with the prisoner at any time.”
“No problem.”
“Officer Tomkins,” the big gal nodded at her associate, and the beefy guard in the buzz cut grunted something that Splet didn’t understand, then started toward the E-Wing corridor to the left.
Splet followed.
They passed through a series of steel-riveted doors, the monkey-house noises of the cafeteria rising and bouncing off the iron walls like sonar blips in a submarine. The air was close and smelled of BO and bleach and fear. The two men did not speak. Splet’s heart was beating faster now. The noise rose and rose, until they finally entered the main cafeteria—Visitation Block E.
It was like a scene out of Dante’s Inferno performed by a trailer park full of crystal meth addicts. Hundreds of families and couples of all shapes and sizes, including errant children, milled around long tables arrayed across the football-field-size cement floor. The cavernous room, with its low ceiling of exposed plumbing and fluorescent lights, stank of fermented grease and urine, and positively vibrated with squeals, shouts, howls, laughter, and sobbing. A sense of fatigue pervaded the room, from the faded inmate togs to the angst-ridden faces.
Splet took a seat at the end of a nearby table, and the guard told him they would bring Milambri down.
The guard left, and Splet waited patiently with his heart pounding and his briefcase latched securely in front of him. The only other occupants of the table were an elderly couple at the opposite end, holding hands and scowling at each other and saying nothing. The old man, dressed in wrinkled orange garb, looked wizened and gray and tubercular, as though he had only weeks to live and was just waiting for the time to elapse.
“The hell you want?”
Splet whirled at the sound of Big Ben Milambri’s bourbon-cured voice.
The gray-haired man stood behind Splet, towering over the table, a potbellied golem in flame-colored fatigues. The man’s craggy face was a relief map of wrinkles, his dark Sicilian eyes like two salt-cured olives set deep in their sockets. His massive forearms were profusely tattooed and crawling with wiry black hair.
“Mr. Milambri, hello, good to see you,” Henry Splet offered, rising to shake hands.
The big man made no effort to shake the cameraman’s hand. “I was in the middle of a game of Texas hold ’em and I was winnin’ so I will ask you one more time: What. The. Hell. Do. You. Want?”
“Please, sir, have a seat.” Henry motioned at the folding chair next to him. “I promise this won’t take more than a minute or two.”
Milambri glanced around the noisy hall. Fifteen feet away, against an adjacent wall, a morose guard was chewing on his fingernails, pretending that he cared about what was going on around him. At a neighboring table, a woman in hair curlers busily masturbated an inmate through his pants.
“Aw, what the hell,” Milambri grunted, and sat down in the folding chair, making the legs creak with his weight. “What difference does it make?”
Henry Splet measured his words. “Do you remember me?”
“Sure, you’re the little hemorrhoid with the camera.”
“That’s right.”
Milambri grinned. His front tooth was rotten, capped in dull gold. “Came with that Oriental broad, what’s her name.”
Splet told him.
“That’s the one…Anna Fong…nice little piece of Chinese chicken.”
“She’s Thai, actually.”
Milambri fixed his dead stare on Splet, the same stare last seen by over three dozen mob enemies targeted for assassination by the Chicago outfit. That same empty, curdled stare proved to be the last thing each victim saw before expiring. “What do you want, dickhead?”
Henry casually opened his briefcase. Fifteen feet away, the guard stopped biting his nails and watched. Henry pulled out the tape recorder and the carton of Camel straights. The guard watched with mild interest. Henry gave the guard an earnest, questioning look, pointing at the cigarettes. The guard shrugged, then went back to his cuticles.
“Those for me?” Milambri inquired, smacking his lips, a negotiation pending.
Splet pushed the carton across the tabletop. “They’re all yours.”
“You gonna turn that thing on?” Milambri was pointing at the tape recorder.
Splet smiled. “Actually…no.”
Milambri waited.
Splet went on: “There’s a photograph sealed inside that carton.” Splet didn’t point, didn’t look at the guard, didn’t even take his eyes off Milambri, just kept smiling his courteous frozen smile. “Go ahead, take a look.”
Milambri frowned, furrowing his brow skeptically. “What the hell is this about?”
“Go ahead.”
Milambri sighed, turned the carton over, and thumbed the cellophane open where it had been carefully steamed off and then reglued. He tore the seam and noticed a foreign object pasted to the underside of the packs. Milambri glanced up, looked around, looked at the guard, then looked back down at the cigarettes.
There was a wallet-size photograph nestled inside the carton. It was a Xerox carefully trimmed and glued onto card stock, probably taken from a JPEG off a public Internet web site. The picture was of a slender, handsome black man in his early forties.
Splet kept smiling. “Mr. Milambri, meet Special Agent Ulysses Grove.”
The big man looked up. “Who?”
“Grove. Ulysses Grove. He’s a criminologist, a psychological profiler for the Bureau.”
After a long moment the hit man said, “And why the hell do I give a shit about this?”
Splet lowered his voice slightly, his tone becoming faintly conspiratorial. “You should care because I will pay good money to have this gentleman…eliminated.”
Milambri cocked his huge head. “Eliminated?”
Splet licked his lips. His smile faded. “‘Whacked’ is the word, right? Whacked?”
Three hundred miles to the north, at that very moment, Chicago was sweltering in an August fever. The heat from a high pressure cell off the prairies had slowly, incessantly, drew across the city like an invisible shroud. It was only 10:00 A.M., and the mercury had already risen to ninety-five. Asphalt along the Kennedy Expressway simmered and cooked. The neighborhood directly east of the highway, a gray enclave of New Deal tenements gone to rust known as Uptown, cooked in the humidity like a fragrant pot of dirty socks.
On the eastern edge of the neighborhood, just off Clark Street, an odd clicking noise pierced the customary rhythms of the street—the traffic, the birds, the sirens, the distant car alarms. This incongruous sound might easily be misidentified by harried passersby as a ticking engine or a loose gate banging in the breeze. But upon closer observatio
n this click-click-click-clicking noise was revealed to be the tip of a wooden cane tapping the surface of a slate porch.
The cane belonged to an elderly Kenyan woman who was currently sitting on her porch rocker, waiting in the heat for an airport taxi to arrive, a shopworn valise at her feet. The woman gave off an air of broken-down royalty, like some lost queen of a forgotten banana republic. Her porch was crawling with ivy, riotous with trumpet-pitcher vines and herbs and dried medicinal flowers. The cane itself was a doozy: a long spiral length of shellacked wood from a baobab tree, its handle carved from genuine ivory that had worn down over the decades to the color of rotten milk. She wielded it like a sword.
Vida Grove had just turned eighty last month and still smoked, her ubiquitous Camel straights tucked into a pouch that hung from a cowhide strap around her neck. This morning she wore a traditional floral kente dress with scarlet do-rag wrapped around her ashy silver braids. Her long regal face was the color and texture of arid earth, cracked and pocked with hardship. Her brown eyes, deep set and huge in her face, scanned Clark Street with sober wariness.
One of the reasons for Vida’s nervous sobriety—and the tapping cane—was the fact that she hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Occasionally she went through a period of insomnia not uncommon for a woman her age. White nights, she called them. But once in a while the sleeplessness coincided with a bout of visions. They would come unannounced—sometimes appearing in the very bedroom she occupied in that three-flat building—like ghosts. They would flicker at dusk or flash in the darkness of a closet, and they would invariably take Vida’s breath away.
But these recent ones had done more than that; they had taken her back to her days as a young mother in Kenya.
The vision that bothered her most was almost like a memory, but not exactly. It was more like a snapshot of her past twisted and distorted through the lens of a carnival mirror: the sight of her only son, Ulysses, when he was a mere toddler, wandering off into the blue darkness of the Chalbi desert on the edge of their village. Something like that had actually happened years ago, but it had been fleeting, a minor incident. Vida had managed to immediately rescue the child.
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