Fear the Night n-5

by John Lutz

  “I’m not looking for blunderbusses, Boniface. You aren’t helping me.”

  “Well, the kinda help you want, I can’t give, ’cause I don’t know the answers to your questions.” He uncrossed one arm and stood like Jack Benny, thumb and forefinger cupping his chin. He was thinking deeply, and just for Repetto. “Lemme put it this way. You ever do any hunting?”

  Repetto stared at him. “You mean birds and animals?”

  “Whatever. Things you’d use a rifle on.”

  “Not in a long time.”

  “If you were an avis hunter-”

  “You mean avid? Avid hunter?”

  “Yeah. You’d know from the bullets, the Sniper dude ain’t using hunting rifles. They’re target rifles.”

  “Target. . hunting … what’s the difference?”

  “Mostly the caliber or millimeter. The bore. Target rifles use those offbeat, smaller-size rounds, nothing like most hunting rifles. Plinker size but powered by large loads so they got muzzle velocity. Foreign make bullets, too.”

  “You saying the Sniper collects target rifles? The shooting-for-sport kind?”

  “Maybe not only target rifles. There are rifles made specifically for sniping, too, with some of the same characteristics, and he might have a few of them. But mostly from the bullet sizes the papers are saying, my guess is the rifles are manufactured for target shooting and are expensive.”

  “What do you mean by expensive?”

  “Four, five figures almost certainly. Up from there. What I’m saying, Detective Repetto, is the Sniper dude, if he’s a collector-and he probably is-he’s one rich mother to own the kinda guns he’s been killing with so far.”

  “Where would he obtain them?”

  “Oh, there’s all kinds of bad, bad people in the arms business, and all over the world. And I can tell you there’s some rich collectors avis enough to buy stolen collectibles and keep ’em just so they can get ’em out once in a while and play with ’em.”

  “Avid.”

  “What you say.”

  “So we’re looking for a rich gun collector who specializes in target rifles.”

  “Way I see it. I’m talkin’ about rifles that are rare, and they’re legal-not assault rifles or anything. But like I said, the way some gun buffs are, they don’t wanna advertise. ’Nother thing they’re afraid of is attracting thieves.”

  “Thieves who might steal their guns and sell them to other collectors.”

  “Why, yes, that could happen. Then those other collectors ’specially wouldn’t want anyone to know they owned those particular guns.”

  Repetto reached into his coat pocket. Boniface drew back as if he thought a gun might emerge. Instead, out came a business card.

  “I’m gonna give you my number,” Repetto said. “Two of them. Cell phone’s in pencil. You come across anything else I should know, you call me.”

  “Course.”

  When Repetto was at the door, Boniface said, “One thing I’d like to know, who told you about me?”

  “One of those secret collectors,” Repetto said. He glanced at the open door. “You really incorporated?”

  Boniface laughed. “Hell no! Don’t even know what it means.”

  Repetto doubted that.

  NYPD Patrolman Michael Skeppy woke up sweating.

  Damned air-conditioning was falling behind again. The bedroom was way too warm, and beams of light angling in along the edges of the black shades hurt Skeppy’s eyes.

  He squinted and looked at the clock on the nightstand.

  Damn!

  He’d overslept again. Gonna catch hell from the sergeant, never get off traffic detail.

  Where the hell is Maggie?

  He sat up on the edge of the mattress, a fleshy but powerful man in his thirties, with pleasant but homely features reminiscent of an amiable bulldog’s. Sitting there in only his jockey shorts, he knew he’d never get to the precinct on time. He needed a shower, a shave, something to eat.

  Maggie.

  He called her name, then stood up and plodded to the door and opened it.

  She was asleep on the sofa, in the middle of the afternoon.

  Irritated, he called her name again, louder, and her dark eyes opened wide and she sat up. She looked at her watch. “Oh, damn! I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I’m sorry.”

  “Doesn’t help,” he mumbled, and plodded toward the bathroom to shower.

  “I’ll fix you something to eat,” his wife said behind him. “You’re gonna need your energy.”

  “Damned straight,” Skeppy muttered to himself, wondering which of Manhattan’s busy intersections were going to demand his services this afternoon and evening.

  Twenty minutes later, showered, shaved, and in uniform, he made it a point to kiss Maggie good-bye before leaving for work on the afternoon shift. They had their problems right now, plenty of them. And he knew how she hated it when he worked this shift. It meant she had to sit alone most of the evening and wait up late if she wanted to see him at all that day.

  A cop’s wife, Skeppy thought. A hard life.

  But not as hard as standing on your feet all day waving your arms at people who’d just as soon run you over.

  Alex made sure the door to his workshop was locked. He wouldn’t want Detective Meg to enter unexpectedly, as she might very well do. It seemed to be her nature. The cop in her.

  The hiss of fine sandpaper on the custom gun stock he was toiling over soothed him as his hands lovingly worked the fine walnut. He’d created the stock out of a single block of prime wood over a yard long. Hours with the saws, the lathe, the sander, and now his hands separated from the wood only by the flimsy, clothlike sandpaper that allowed him almost to feel the grain. The graceful gun stock, of Alex’s own design, was for a.280 Remington rifle with an extended barrel. After the fine sanding, he’d get his wood chisels and spend long hours engraving the stock with exotic, sometimes erotic designs. It would become a work of art that Detective Meg might not comprehend.

  There were plenty of ready customers for his custom stocks. Lots of people understood, like Alex, the fascination and repulsion of long guns that delivered death from a distance. While in a sense he loathed such weapons, he was also drawn to them, and he didn’t want to consider too carefully the depth of satisfaction he got out of creating beautiful wooden stocks for such firearms. Hate and love, fear and love, were sometimes so similar as to be indistinguishable. Like opposite sides of a rapidly spinning coin.

  Detective Meg wouldn’t understand that.

  Or maybe she’d understand it too well.

  He sanded until the muscles in his arms began to cramp, thinking about Meg.

  After a dinner of potatoes, broccoli, and cheese, all mixed in some kind of casserole she’d learned about on one of those half-hour-recipe TV cooking shows, Meg surveyed the mess in the kitchen and vowed never to make the dish again. It hadn’t been bad, but then it hadn’t been good. It had tasted like potatoes, broccoli, and cheese, and so what?

  Well, there was enough of the stuff left over for tomorrow night, that was what. And these days Meg had a lot on her mind and was mostly eating for fuel rather than pleasure.

  After cleaning up the kitchen and putting the leftover casserole in the refrigerator, she went into the living room.

  She didn’t feel like watching television; she’d had enough of the world outside the apartment and didn’t want to watch news or some idiot’s idea of reality. Instead of sitting down on the sofa, she went to her desk chair, booted up her computer, and was told she had mail.

  E-mail. One message from AR3276@Kno.com.

  Alex.

  She fought against opening the e-mail, then admitted to herself that eventually she was going to read it anyway, so why not soon? She moved the mouse on its Dilbert rubber pad and clicked.

  Alex’s message was brief, like most of his others: Thinking of you.

  Meg deleted it from her e-mail but not from her mind.

  She leaned back in
her desk chair, thinking of Alex. Damn him! Why couldn’t he leave her alone? At least until the Night Sniper case was solved? He’d been a cop. He should understand.

  She shut down the computer, went to the sofa, and used the remote to turn on the TV in order to pass the time and not strain her brain. A commercial was playing, a woman sitting on top of a speeding car with her legs down through the open sunroof. A handsome young guy was driving while fondling her bare feet. They were both grinning. Music blared and another, identical car was speeding toward the first, driven by a woman. A handsome man was sitting on that car with his legs down through the open sunroof, and the woman driving was fondling his bare feet. They were smiling, too. Everyone was smiling and speeding. Both men needed to shave. Both women looked as if every hair other than the ones on their heads had been depilatoried out of existence.

  Meg wondered what any of this had to do with cars, then stopped watching and listening, and saw and heard nothing more of it. With so much else to occupy her thoughts, there was no way she could concentrate on television fare.

  Thinking of you. .

  35

  1991

  To Adam Strong’s amazement, Dante’s performance on the target range wasn’t a fluke. He continued to shoot well, though he was such a natural shot that learning the fine points only marginally improved his aim. He was phenomenal at both skeet and still target shooting, accurate with a handgun, but particularly efficient with rifle or shotgun. And Dante continued to grow scholastically, especially in mathematics. Calculating distance, speed, and angles in shooting, and taking aim at solutions requiring similar calculations in mathematics, were talents that nourished each other.

  Dante became increasingly important to Adam Strong, and Strong made it obvious. It was as if he’d found a son, and Dante had a father again. Dante grew in confidence and ability. The other boys respected him, especially when he began to defeat them regularly in the games they played. In everything from matchstick poker to chess, Dante became an obsessive and fiercely competitive opponent. He seldom lost. Then, after a while, when he had the measure of each of his opponents on the ranch, he never lost.

  Strong gave Dante much more individual attention than he did any of the other children, and none of them complained. They all seemed to see something special in the relationship of Strong and the boy with the scarred face. Or maybe they figured that Dante had an extra measure of grief in the world, the way his face was, so he deserved special attention.

  After one of their shooting expeditions plinking varmints-mostly jackrabbits and voles-on the ranch’s outskirts, Dante and Strong were walking side by side toward Strong’s pickup truck. The Arizona sun was brilliant and the temperature high. Neither Dante nor Strong was perspiring, but the heat still had to be taken into account. It worked internally and created a slight nausea. It discouraged fast or sudden movement.

  They walked leisurely without talking, as they often did, content and comfortable with silence and each other’s company. The only sound was the regular slapping of their leather boot soles on the dry ground. Rooster tails of dust sprang up at their heels and settled back to earth slowly in the dry, still air.

  Strong was wearing jeans, a western shirt, and a broad-brimmed straw hat. Dante had on jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt and was wearing a long-billed baseball cap.

  Beside Dante, Strong slowed his pace slightly. He had his European single-shot breechloader broken down and balanced over his shoulder, freeing both his hands. This enabled him to remove his hat with his right hand and simultaneously swipe his left forearm across his forehead, where the hat’s leather brim had left a red indentation.

  “Sun bother your scars?” he asked Dante.

  Dante momentarily broke stride, surprised by the question. His burn-scarred face was something Strong never mentioned. Everyone on the ranch had learned not to mention it.

  “Some,” he said, hoping Strong wasn’t going to pursue the subject.

  “I been talking to some doctors in Phoenix,” Strong said. “Will you hear me out on what I learned?”

  “Don’t I always hear you out?”

  Strong smiled. “Yeah, I guess these days you do.”

  “What kinda doctors?”

  “The kind that can repair the damage to your face. It’s their specialty, helping people like you.”

  Dante stopped walking. He swallowed. “I don’t wanna hear no more. Nothing about plastic surgeons.”

  They began walking again. Strong said nothing for another dozen steps.

  Then: “You scared?”

  “It isn’t that.”

  “Okay, we’ll let it drop.”

  Neither of them spoke until they reached the truck.

  “Not plastic surgeons, though,” Strong said, as they made sure their rifles were unloaded and placed them in padded cases, then in blankets in the pickup bed. “Cosmetic surgeons, they call themselves. They showed me pictures. They can show them to you. It’s amazing what they can do.”

  “I thought we were gonna let it drop.”

  Strong slapped the side of the pickup, startling Dante. “Listen, I know how you feel, and I’m only gonna push this so far. But I’m duty-bound because I’m fond of you, Dante. I want you to hear the facts, to think about them. Affection works both ways, you know. You really oughta give me a chance.”

  Dante looked off to the horizon. The distant mountains were purple. The sun would be setting soon.

  “I’ll listen,” he said.

  For the next twenty minutes, then on the drive back to the ranch house, Strong told him what the doctors in Phoenix had said. They couldn’t make Dante perfect, but there’d been important advancements in dealing with scar tissue, and burn scar tissue in particular. They could make him normal.

  It was dark when Strong parked the pickup alongside the tractor shed, in what he knew would be morning shade. He and Dante got out and walked around to the back of the vehicle to remove their rifles.

  Strong smiled. “You gonna think on this, Dante?”

  “Not much use. I’ve done some reading about it myself.”

  “Then what do you mean, not much use?”

  “I know how expensive it is. And I know I’m here because I don’t have any money.”

  Strong removed his rifle from the back of the truck and shook his head. “I’ve got money, Dante.”

  “Foundation money. You fix my face, you might have to do stuff for everyone here.”

  “My money,” Strong said. “It’ll be my personal money.”

  Dante stared at him in the dying orange light. “Why would you do that?”

  Strong bit his lip. “Because I. . think of you as a son.” He reached out with his free hand and drew Dante close, hugging him.

  Dante hugged him back. They stood that way for a long time, each awkwardly clinging to the other with the arm that didn’t hold a rifle.

  Dante began to cry. Strong held him even closer until he gained control of his emotions.

  It was several minutes before the sobbing stopped. By then Dante knew he’d do whatever Strong wanted.

  He knew that this time the father-son bond would never break.

  36

  The present

  Officer Michael Skeppy was dropped off by a radio car at his intersection at eight that evening. Con Ed was doing street repairs in midtown, and select strings of traffic signals were scheduled to go black a few minutes past eight and remain so until ten o’clock. For two hours, that section of Manhattan would have to do without electric signals and rely on old-fashioned traffic cops.

  Skeppy had drawn the busy intersection of Fifty-fifth and Lexington. He stood on the corner observing the still-functioning traffic signals, noting that there were still a lot of vehicles on the street despite the end of the after-work rush. Pedestrians veered around Skeppy’s stolid blue form with a glance; he was as much a part of the New York scene as the Empire State Building or Radio City Music Hall-the fabled New York cop. You could buy into whichever fables y
ou chose, from Serpico and corruption, to the Twin Towers and incredible heroism. Skeppy could study the faces passing him by and pretty much know what their owners thought. There were variations, unless they needed directions or had just had their pockets picked. When people needed help, the faces were the same.

  A subtle change in the rhythm of the passing traffic, then the distant blaring of horns, told Skeppy that the signals up Lexington were going dark one by one. Time to do his thing. He waited for a break in traffic, then strode like an emperor out into the middle of the intersection, whistle clamped in his teeth.

  He surveyed the traffic, reading what must be happening blocks away on Lexington, then gave a shrill blast with the whistle and took charge. He raised a hand and fixed the driver of a minivan with a neutral but stoic stare, stopping traffic from turning off Fifty-fifth onto Lexington. Then he waved on the twenty or so cars that had raced the last block to arrive at the intersection and were waiting at the blank signal.

  Skeppy knew how to direct traffic. A part of him even enjoyed it, when the weather was good like this evening. He used his hand signals expertly, getting into the rhythm, extending a hand palm-out, using his other arm to wave through vehicles waiting to make a left turn. In heavy traffic, like tonight, it could be almost a dance. Skeppy didn’t hotdog it like some of the cops working traffic, but he definitely was into it. So much so that a few people stopped and watched his skillful ballet done to the tempo of traffic and the shrill music of his police whistle.

  They watched him spin like a dancer and wave an arm gracefully but decisively for a stopped truck to make its left turn, then come square with Lexington traffic, and with a blast of his whistle summon waiting vehicles on with both hands raised to shoulder level. Husky as he was, he possessed the elegance, balance, and daring of a matador. Onlookers watched as he demonstrated an amused disdain for speeding cars that almost brushed his clothing as they passed. They watched him not so much ignore danger as embrace it.

  They watched him drop to his knees, as a sudden, reverberating crack like near thunder rolled and echoed along the avenues.