“Jesus,” Bishop said. “What happened to a simple ‘Beware of the Dog’? Is this property all Zaki’s?”
Ariel shrugged. “You should have just let me . . .”
“Yeah, yeah. Fly over. He probably would have shot you down with his handy, home-laser defense system. The gate’s coming up.”
“Just drive by,” she warned. “Don’t slow down.”
“I was a cop, Bird-Girl. I know how to do surveil . . .Wow!”
Spotlights on either side of a wide driveway illuminated the huge gate. Two massive wings of bright steel, twelve feet tall at their highest point, had been covered in finely-wrought metalwork. Leafy vines weighted with fruit sprouted from a massive metal tree trunk that split in half when the gate was opened. A serpent wound its way around the tree holding a bright gold apple in its mouth. Bishop caught a glimpse of naked human figures to either side. The pillars that supported the gate were topped with giant . . .
“Gargoyles!” Ariel said as they sped past. “This is not good.”
“What part of ‘not-good’ are we talking about here?” Bishop asked. “Did you see a gate house, were there cameras? Do you think anyone saw us?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Was there a guard? I didn’t see anybody.”
“I think the night shift is on duty.”
Bishop slowed the car. They were coming to the far edge of the estate’s wall, with any luck, out of sight of gate security. He planned to pull over in a mile or two and sit there until Ariel explained what the hell she was talking about.
“Let’s get off the road,” Ariel suggested. “I think there’s a place right up there.”
It was the faint remnant of an over-grown track that looked like it led nowhere except into the woods.
Probably an old lover’s lane or unpaved road leading to an abandoned summer cottage. At least the woods would hide the car.
He pulled in, rolled the front windows down and shut off the ignition. The only sounds were the engine ticking as it cooled, a chorus of crickets and, after a minute or two, the muted scurry of ground scavengers going about their business in the dark.
“You know,” Bishop said. “Before I met you my life was pretty simple. All I had to do was stay on the good side of a few people who could toss business my way. I spent my time finding runaway kids, doing the occasional skip trace, and investigating a nice, steady stream of insurance fraud. Now, suddenly, I’m in the Twilight Zone with flying avengers, demon billionaires, and dead lawyers who are a lot scarier than the mob bosses they get off on technicalities. What else is out there? Vampires? Werewolves? Brain eating Zombies?”
“I’d really rather not get into that right now,” Ariel said primly.
“Great!” Bishop threw his hands in the air. “I’m telling you, if one of them sneaks up on this car and tries to bite me, I’m taking you with me.”
“I don’t think that’s our immediate problem.”
“Well, we’re obviously not getting any closer to Zaki than that front gate. Electrified razor wire! The grounds are probably patrolled by packs of wild dogs. I guess he doesn’t think he needs a guard at the gate on top of all that.”
“The gate is guarded,” Ariel said. “He’s got gargoyles.”
Bishop slapped one hand on the steering wheel. “Well, of course. Why didn’t I think of that? Cement statues make all the difference.”
“They’re not cement.”
“El, there are gargoyles on old buildings all over the city. They’re decoration. They’re even on Notre Dame for God’s sake!”
“The ones on the gate are real. You don’t notice it because they’re like chameleons—-they can take on the color and texture of their surroundings, that’s why they look like stone—-and they can stay immobile for hours, days, weeks at a time. They only blink about once every forty-five seconds and their respiration is extremely shallow. No one ever stares at them long enough to see them move, and if they do their brain just writes it off as a trick of the light, or fatigue. Gargoyles have been around as long as demons have. They’re not too bright, but their eye sight is excellent, even in the dark. They’re ideal for what they do—-they watch.”
“That doesn’t sound very threatening.”
“Unfortunately, they can also be pretty quick when they need to be. I once saw one eviscerate a whole cow in about twenty seconds. Zaki probably rewards their service with small livestock. Watching them feed is disgusting, by the way.”
Right at that moment Bishop noticed a low buzzing noise in his ears. It sounded like a radio losing the channel. Was it lack sleep or the prelude to losing touch with reality? Someone poked him in the arm.
“Bishop!”
There was that poke again.
“This is no time to have a psychotic break,” Ariel told him. “I’m going to fly over the estate. I’ll get as high as I can and come in from the lakeside. If I’m not back in twenty-minutes, go home.”
“We could both just go home right now, and forget the whole thing.” Bishop said. Gargoyles were beyond his pay grade.
“Can you really do that, Frank?” Ariel’s eyes had a light in them he found disturbing.
Bishop took a minute. “Unfortunately, no,” he admitted. He reached up and clicked off the inside light so it wouldn’t come on when the door opened. “Don’t get caught, okay?”
Ariel pulled off her boots, dropped them on the floor mat, and slid from the car. She slipped out of her coat and tossed it on the seat before quietly closing the passenger door. Her naked back flashed white against the darkness as she made her way through the trees toward higher ground. Bishop could have sworn she’d been wearing a black turtleneck.
Now that Bishop was alone, the night noises outside the car seemed to take on a deeper and more sinister tone. Just in case he fell asleep, it would probably be a good idea to engage the automatic locks and roll the windows all the way to the top. For the next several minutes he tried to stop himself from thinking about what the word ‘eviscerated’ really meant.
* * *
A knock on his window brought Bishop straight up in his seat. He made a lunge for the other side of the car before he realized he still had his seat belt on. He was clawing at the buckle as El’s voice hissed, “Bishop, open the damn door!”
Deeply embarrassed, he sat back and pushed ‘unlock’. El slipped back into her coat and slid in beside him. Another glimpse of her back showed him that her shirt was backless from the collar to just below her shoulder blades. A dark line followed the inside curve of each scapula, but there was no evidence of wings.
“Everything go okay?”
“I should be asking you the same question. I got a pretty good look at the layout. Zaki must have about 120 acres of prime lakefront property, completely fenced. The house is set back on a rise overlooking the lake, but there are also a lot of other buildings. Two look like they might be labs or office buildings. They have a good sized parking area and connect to each other by a second floor walkway.”
She felt around on the floor for her boots.
“Then there’s a really big building with a glass dome roof. It looks like a stadium, but I have no idea is that’s what it’s for unless Zaki brings in sport teams to play private games for him and his friends. Again, it’s got a good-sized parking lot that might hold fifty or sixty cars. The wall encloses the property all the way down to the beach and ends at a bunch of rocks on both sides. Zaki may have people working for him in there but he obviously has no intention of letting the neighbors wander over for tea and a swim.”
She peeled a couple of damp leaves off the bottom of one naked foot and pulled on the boots.
“Except for the stadium, the architecture has a neo-gothic feel to it like those robber-baron estates built before rich people paid income tax. That implies that the gargoyles we saw at the gate aren’t the only ones on the estate.”
Bishop rubbed the space between his eyebrows. The lack of sleep was getting to him. “So whether he has anyt
hing to do with missing kids or not, he’s probably a demon?”
“Not necessarily,” Ariel said. “He’s obviously very security conscious. The gargoyles could just be a gift from a grateful friend.”
“Some friend.” Bishop started the car. “Can we get out of here without going past the gate again?”
“Nope. This road ends at a dead end ‘T’ about three miles further on. There are two big houses down there, but the people in them all have to come back this way to get to the highway.”
“Okay. Here’s the plan. I turn around and go back the way we came. I don’t know how discriminating gargoyles are about cars, but this one doesn’t look like it would end up parked at the front door of those houses. You get in the trunk. If I’m alone maybe they’ll think I’m just the maid-from-down-the-road’s boyfriend dropping her off after a date.”
Ariel gave him a slit-eyed ‘I’m-not-getting-in-any-car-trunk’ look.
“Or,” Bishop back-tracked. “You could sit a little closer to me, I could put my arm around you and maybe they’ll think we’re just a couple who needed a dark, deserted road for about an hour.”
“Or,” El said, getting out of the car again but leaning back in to take her parting shot. “I’ll be the angry date who had a fight with her grabby boyfriend and decided to fly home on her own.” She turned and disappeared into the woods, leaving Bishop to reach across the seat and pull her door shut.
Bishop managed a tight U-turn and drove out of the woods hoping he could make it home before he fell asleep at the wheel. As he sped past the Eden gate, he could have sworn that one of the gargoyles turned his head ever so slightly to watch the car until it drove out of sight.
- 9 -
Bishop’s cell phone woke him what seemed like minutes after he had fallen asleep. The phone had an obnoxious ring the know-it-all sales punk had programmed into it while he sneeringly tried to teach Bishop how to access all of its 300 hundred features. So far Bishop had mastered “on”, “off”, “dial”, “answer” and “retrieve messages”
“What?” he said, hoping it wasn’t a client.
“Yo, man. Bishop? Did I wake you?”
“Rain?”
“Yeah, man, wake up. It’s after eleven and I’ve got news.”
Bishop lifted his head to squint at the clock then threw himself back against his pillow. “Okay. I’m conscious. Try to keep it to words of two syllables, I had a long night.”
Rain laughed. “Hope it was worth it. Anyway, I had to be in court this morning for a case. And guess who was there? Tesslovich.”
“What?!” Bishop sat up.
“Tesslovich. Your missing lawyer. He had a bail hearing for one of his clients. Some greasy little . . .”
“Rain, you sure it was him?”
“Man, everybody knows Tesslovich. It was him in living color. Though I have to admit, he wasn’t lookin’ too good.”
“What do you mean?”
“He had one of those neck brace things on. You know, big white collar that holds your head straight, and he was moving pretty slow, like it was an effort to get everything going in the same direction. His voice was also pretty messed up. The judge kept asking him to speak up, but he couldn’t do it. He and the prosecuting attorney finally had to go up to the bench to get their business done. I heard later he told the judge his limo had been rear-ended by a drunk driver, which is bullshit because I saw him being helped out of his limo on my way into court. It’s the same one he’s had for two years and there wasn’t a scratch on it. You want me to ask around about the ‘accident’?”
“No!” Bishop took a breath. “I mean, no. Thanks. I just heard about his disappearance from somebody involved in another investigation I’ve been working on. He’s obviously not dead, so there’s nothing else I need to know. Thanks, man.”
“Anytime. Hey, they’re calling me back into court—gotta run. Keep in touch, Frank, I might hear something about the kids.”
Bishop thumbed the off button. He was wide awake now. He’d seen Tesslovich’s head leave his body. He was sure of that. There had been green blood everywhere. Then an armed and dangerous bird-lady had shot a gypsy, dragged him out a ten story window and flown him to the top of a nearby building.
If that was an elaborate series of special effects, somebody was really, really good at it. And if it was faked, why do it for him? It had to be real.
But had he ever seen El fly again? No. In fact he hadn’t seen much the first time either since he’d spent most of it with his eyes shut. Maybe she was on wires.
And the gargoyles? They looked like statues to him—ugly half-human faces, wings, pointy tails, just like the ones on historically preserved buildings all over town. It was her story that they were guarding Zaki. That is when they weren’t flying around the countryside eviscerating cows.
What a chump! But he still had to figure out why Tesslovich would appear in court in a neck brace? Because Rain would be there to see him and tell Bishop? Naw. Coincidence? Maybe. Or an impressive performance by the lawyer’s ‘enemy’, Ariel.
Bishop swung his feet over the side of the bed. Dead tired, he’d thrown his jacket over a chair as he shed clothing on the way to his mattress early that a.m. One sleeve trailed the floor and the left side had flipped open showing the lining.
Mouser’s printouts were sticking out of the inner pocket. Back at the Caf’, when he’d been more interested in keeping up with El than looking at Mouser’s Blog gossip, he’d given the pages a quick length ways crease, and shoved them away. There must be at least ten pages there that Mouser had either made up, or doctored-up from other sources. He was tempted to toss them, but maybe they would at least give him a clue of what the intention of this whole con might be.
Taking them with him, Bishop staggered into the kitchen and put on a full pot of coffee. It was going to be another long day.
* * *
Bishop started with the missing persons reports. To his surprise, they seemed perfectly legitimate, if illegally obtained. The PD had become a lot more automated since his stint there, although he suspected the 17th was still using the same ancient PCs he’d prepared his reports on.
Mouser had been right. Over the last three years, a parent, or parents had filed eight reports on missing children. The responding officer’s notes had been transcribed into the report, and further notations added as the investigation proceeded. The children were uniformly bright, well fed, upper middle class kids with no history of abuse, truancy, medical or mental problems. Investigation of the parents, neighbors, teachers, etc. had all proved negative. Investigation of the nannies, for those children who had one, had come to a dead end. They were suspect, but also missing and therefore unchargeable, except in absentia.
Bishop was surprised that that many missing kids hadn’t created a firestorm of publicity and demand for action from the parents and local, even national, advocacy groups. It was as if the whole thing had just been hushed up and put away as an unsolved disappearance. That often happened for adults, but rarely for kids and certainly not so soon after they went missing.
Bishop got out his notebook and copied names, addresses, precincts and the names of investigating officers into it. His own client wasn’t even the last family that had lost a child. There was a nine year old boy who had disappeared less than two months after little Susan Elizabeth with hardly a peep from the media.
The next few pages contained missing persons’ reports, all filed by the same person—Sister Mary Catherine from the Children’s Shelter Project. These kids were older as Mouser had pointed out, and both girls and boys like the other missing children. Many of them, however, did have a history with the police as runaways often did; battery, drugs, theft, solicitation, even arson. Sister Catherine had insisted that every one of them had been coming to the shelter, getting their lives together, even getting jobs, before suddenly disappearing. She was sure something bad had happened to them. The investigations were all perfunctory or non-existent. The police didn’t ca
re about one more teenage street punk who’d decided to move on. After all, that was the ‘away’ part of being a runaway.
Bishop wrote those names down as well under the heading “Sis. Catherine.” He knew where to find her and he wanted to know what she had to say.
The last few pages had been printed from the blogs, where a myriad of faceless conspiracy theorists traded rumors and gave their opinions on the validity of the rumors in other theorist’s posts. Some user names turned up in more than one chat room, or even in all of the sites Mouser had copied. Although disputes ran rampant, and some posters were vituperative to the point where their access had either been revoked, or they’d been frozen out by no one replying to anything they posted, the commonly held belief seemed to be that demons were real, they walked among us and their goal was, (surprise!), world domination. High profile politicians, corporate moguls, businessmen, lawyers, famous criminals, rock stars and other celebrities were outed as demons, or accused of being their minions.
Bishop could feel his level of frustration climbing. Even as a cop he hadn’t run into this level of supernatural paranoia. It sounded like group fantasy taken to weird and twisted heights.
The list of U.S. based “demons” on the back page of the report included, the President of the United States, Carl Rove, Paul Ryan, the Koch brothers, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Michael Jackson, Vladimir Putin, Nicolai Tesslovich, Yamazaki Kiriyenko, and, interestingly enough, the entire executive hierarchy of WalMart--their wives, children and dogs--along with the reasons each listee was suspect. The Bloggers made some good points, but Bishop really doubted than anyone had solid proof that Carl Rove and Mitch McConnell cast no shadows. He tossed the blogs aside.
The last three pages were profiles of Tessolovich and Yamazaki Kiriyenko. Mouser had even found a classified military satellite photo of Yaki’s estate. It was much as Ariel had described, but a picture was truly worth a thousand words.
Raptor: Urban Fantasy Noir Page 4
