Scavenger

by Tom Savage

  “The game is nearly over.”

  Would that it were, he thought as he came out of the bathroom. He stopped, looking down at the cell phone on the bed, then over at the hotel telephone on the night table, thinking, Tracy.

  The New Orleans police had issued an APB on him, which had extended to Los Angeles. But what about his home, New York? What about Tracy? Had the police contacted her? His agent? His publishers?

  He was all the way around the bed, reaching down for the hotel phone, when he stopped abruptly. No, he told himself, Tracy knew nothing of this. He’d spoken to her when he’d arrived here yesterday. Although he could barely remember their conversation now, he was certain he’d told her where he was, what hotel he was in. If anyone from the police had called her looking for him, she would have called him here immediately. He looked down at the elaborate console of buttons on the instrument, noting that one of them was for messages received. The little red light that indicated messages was unlit: no one had tried to reach him here today.

  He would not call Tracy now, he decided. He wouldn’t share any of this mad game with her. He would keep it as far away from her as possible. He’d spoken with her yesterday, and he’d call her tomorrow from the next location.

  Still naked, he lay on the bed again, facedown, resting his head on the cool, soft pillow. He had to close his eyes for a few minutes; it was an overwhelming need. Then he would get up, dress in his clean clothes, check out of the hotel, and head for the airport, for the next city. Scavenger had conveyed his cryptic instructions. Second wind.

  Second wind, he thought, and he shuddered. He knew what that meant, and he wondered what the big, scarred sociopath had in store for him there.

  No, he wouldn’t think about it. Not now. Later. Now he would just lie here and rest for a few minutes. He thought about his wallet: he still had nearly seven hundred in cash, and he would risk using his ATM card for more cash at the airport. Now that he couldn’t use his name, he couldn’t use his credit cards. He would need lots of cash. He doubted that the police would put an alarm on his checking account. He was wanted for questioning, nothing more. He was not a suspect; he was an innocent bystander. He would close his eyes for a minute, then he would go.…

  In seconds, he was asleep.

  35

  “Good night, Jared.”

  “G’night, Tracy. Thanks for the grub. Let’s do this again just as soon as Mark gets back to town.”

  “It’s a date,” she said, leaning down to peck his cheek. He was already in the backseat of a cab outside the tavern, and that had taken some manipulating and maneuvering on her part. He’d stumbled twice in the short trip from the table to the front door. Outside, she’d flagged down the taxi, given the driver Jared’s address in Greenwich Village, and pressed some money into Jared’s hand, closing his fingers around it. She’d actually had to steady him as he shimmied down and sideways into the car. But now he was in, and she sighed in relief as the cab pulled away and turned south at the next corner.

  She turned around and headed off in the direction of her own home three blocks away, instinctively clutching her shoulder bag more tightly against her. She would have preferred a sober Jared who could have walked her to her door now, at nearly ten o’clock on a Thursday night, but it was not to be. Too bad: the streets around Gramercy Park were nearly deserted at this hour on a weeknight, and the bag was a target for thieves. She herself was the bigger target, she knew, but she also knew about the Mace canister in the purse. Another reason she clutched it so tightly against her hip.

  She came out of the side street into the one that ran along the east side of the park. Glancing over at the black wrought-iron fence that ringed the square, she could see no suspicious types loitering anywhere. She saw no one at all. The lights in the townhouses and apartment buildings around the park provided reassuring proof that others were nearby, all around her. This was, after all, the largest city in America, and Gramercy Park was hardly a remote part of it. Her apartment building was just around the corner, on the north side of the square, and she would be there in a few minutes.

  She reached up and clutched the collar of her light coat more tightly around her throat. The temperature had dropped while they had dined, and a strong breeze rustled the leaves and branches in the park. The weather report on the six o’clock news had not mentioned rain, yet it felt like an imminent possibility. The wind that whipped through her hair and against her cheeks was moist and heavy. If I were a farm woman, she mused, I’d get the horses into the barn and the chickens into the henhouse, or whatever it was they did when a storm was brewing. This wind was a precursor of rain, and even she, a Noo Yawker, knew that. She actually smiled at her whimsy.

  Her smile faded as she remembered the expression on Jared’s face, and her own growing trepidation, as she had repeated to him what Carol Grant and the Chicago Tribune had told her about Mark.

  Matthew Farmer.

  No. She couldn’t, wouldn’t think of him by any name but Mark Stevenson. That was his name now—his legal name, she presumed—and she would honor it. He was Mark Stevenson, and that was all there was to that. After all, it was Mark Stevenson, not Matthew Farmer, with whom she’d fallen in love.

  Love…

  Oh, stop it! she chided herself as she turned the final corner onto the north side of Twenty-first Street. She increased her pace, glancing once more about her. No one, anywhere.

  Well, not quite no one, she noticed as she turned into her building’s doorway and reached in her bag for her keys. A large black van, a minibus, was parked at the curb before her building, its sliding rear door open. Someone—a big man in a long, dark coat, judging from what she could see of him—was standing on the sidewalk, leaning into the open door. She could only see him from the waist down: the rest of him was inside the van.

  A new neighbor? she wondered as she turned and fit the key into the lock of the first of two lobby doors. Perhaps, but it seemed like an odd time to be moving in or, at least, unloading a van. Oh, well. She hadn’t checked her mail earlier. She should do that before she went upstairs.…

  When she heard the two swift footfalls behind her, she assumed it was the man from the van. The new neighbor, or whatever he was, and he was probably carrying something. She could hold the door for him. She formed a smile on her lips and prepared to turn around.

  She never made it. A huge, strong hand grabbed her left shoulder from behind and shoved her against the glass of the door. In the same instant, another huge hand shot over her right shoulder and clamped down over her mouth and nose. The hand was clad in a thick leather glove, and it was holding something, actually pressing it against her face. Something soft and white and …

  Wet. The sickly sweet chemical odor assaulted her nostrils, burning them. She drew in a deep breath, preparing to scream, but now the fumes were in her mouth, as well. She pulled the key from the lock and reached behind her, stabbing with it as best she could. It sank into a hard torso, and she heard a harsh grunt against her ear. Then her hand went limp. Everything seemed to be going limp, and getting darker. She tried to take in another breath, but the burning, sweet wetness was overwhelming her. The Mace was in her purse, but her right hand refused to take orders. It hung at her side against the cold glass of the door, utterly useless.

  This isn’t happening! her mind shrieked as she was pulled roughly away from the door and lifted up, up, up into the air. This can’t be happening on my own doorstep, in the middle of the largest city in Amer …

  Then her mind began to shut down, to retract as a telescope is retracted after use. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t think. She was going to die. She was floating through the air, borne up by massive arms, and then she was being set down on something soft, a carpet. She heard metallic sliding and the slamming of a car door. The van! was her final coherent thought. And she heard a deep, gruff voice beside her ear shouting “Go! Go! Go!” A grinding of gears, the roar of a powerful engine, and she and the entire dark, swe
et-smelling world lurched violently forward into black oblivion.

  36

  He was in the cemetery again, and he was running. The rain was pounding into him, lashing his face and soaking his clothes, but still he ran as fast as he could. Gravestones, markers, and mausoleums flew by him, threatening to trip him up and send him sprawling in the muddy grass. His breath was coming in sharp, painful gasps that he concentrated on trying to control lest he hyperventilate. That would not be good, he knew; it would force him to stop, to pause in his flight, and then Scavenger would get away.

  But where was Scavenger? He searched the hazy, rain-soaked landscape before him, peering among the monuments for the familiar, tall figure in the long black coat. A fog seemed to be settling down among the graves, and the rain was increasingly colder. It felt like ice. It was ice, he realized. Hailstones, tiny and sharp, stinging his exposed skin. He knew without looking up that the sky above him was black, ragged with clouds, and the gathering darkness was punctuated by the distant rumble of thunder.

  Still he ran. He threw himself forward through the black, wet graveyard, possessed of an overwhelming sense of panic such as he had never felt before. Fear—sharp, naked, all-consuming. Why was he so afraid? What was this compulsion, this need to propel his body on through the storm? If there were some haven, some sort of shelter … No. He knew, even as this thought occurred to him, that he must go on. He couldn’t stop, not for a moment. If he did, all would be lost.

  Lost? he wondered, reaching up with his wet hands to clutch his aching chest. What would be lost? Scavenger?

  No. His life. If he stopped running, he would die. It was as simple as that. He knew now what had been eluding him as he ran. He was not chasing Scavenger.

  Scavenger was chasing him.

  And now he heard it through the rain and the hail and the thunder and the closer, louder sounds of his own gasping breath and thudding heart: footsteps. Behind him. Getting closer. Closer.…

  Oh, God, he had to run! The big man with the scar was gaining on him, closing the gap between them. Any moment now, Mark would feel the hot breath on the back of his neck, and the powerful hands clutching at him as they had come out of the darkness in Tennant House to clap the chloroform-soaked rag over his mouth and nose. He mustn’t let that happen, because this time Mark would not get away. This time Scavenger would finish it, kill him. Run! his mind screamed. Run!

  But there were too many gravestones. They were much larger than Mark remembered, and much closer together. He noticed now that the biggest ones in his path were mere inches apart, that he had been snaking through them, actually twisting his flying body sideways more than once to pass between them. They rose up before him more and more, faster and faster, bigger and bigger. How can that be? he wondered as he blinked to clear the rain and hail from his eyes, and the inevitable finally happened.

  The huge pink marble stone arrived out of the fog and rain—massive, impenetrable, final. The oversized letters chiseled into the wet surface were lit by a sudden, brilliant flash of lightning: FARMER. He collided with it at great speed, his legs and groin and stomach smashing against it, causing a wrenching, numbing pain. He doubled over, sprawled across the stone, then slid sideways to land facedown in the mud beside it. He lay still on his stomach, stunned, winded, aware of the wet dirt pressing into his face and his clothes and his outstretched hands. He gasped for air, wincing at the pain in his legs and his testicles, scrabbling with his hands for some purchase in the sodden earth. He had to get up now, now, or he would die.

  Then he realized.

  FARMER.

  Oh, God! he thought as he struggled to rise from the mud. I’m not in the cemetery above Los Angeles where I was this afternoon. I’m in the other place, the one near Evanston, where my own family is buried! How did I get here …?

  Before any logical answer could make its way into his frantic mind, the black figure was upon him. There was no time to shout, to breathe, to do anything. The sharp, clawlike fingers dug into his shoulders and yanked him roughly up from the ground. He was raised up into the wet, freezing air and slammed against the gravestone. Then the hands whirled him around, smashing his back into the stone, and he at last stood face-to-face with the monster.

  The pale white face loomed before him, huge, bigger than a face could possibly be. The bright red eyes bored into him, and the hot, fetid breath of the cemetery assaulted his nostrils. The great mouth was open, agape, yawning wide mere inches before him, the huge, jagged white slabs of teeth resembling nothing so much as the rows of tombstones that surrounded him. There was a sound coming from the monster’s throat, a strangled cry of desire, of hunger. Blood hunger. As Mark stared, frozen, powerless against the irresistible force that pinned him to the grave, the massive jaws came forward, toward his neck. In a second, he knew, those rank, dripping headstones would clamp down on his shoulder, piercing, sucking the lifeblood out of him.

  Then there was another flash of lightning, and in that moment Mark saw it, just below the hot red eyes and jutting mouth of the specter, above the black duster coat. The detail of the man he had not noticed before: the open red wound that slashed across his throat, separating his head from his torso, spilling bright red blood down onto his starched white clerical collar. The creature before him, the thing that had pursued him through the cemetery was not, had never been, Scavenger. It was Reverend Jacob Farmer.

  His father.

  Mark screamed. Pinned back against his family’s monument, with the hailstones whipping against his hot cheeks and the foul stench of death exploding into his startled face, he opened his mouth and cried out. He pressed himself back, back against the freezing, wet stone, using every ounce of strength he had left to recoil, to get away from this man, this vampire, this thing that had once been his father. But something was wrong, very wrong. His voice rose up, sharp, piercing, filling the landscape of death with his cry, but the grave behind him was no longer cold, no longer even stone. It was soft and warm and pliable. It was … it was …

  A bed. The big bed in the hotel room in Los Angeles. He was sitting on the floor of the room, naked, drenched in sweat, leaning back against the side of the bed. The pillows and most of the bedspread lay nearby on the burnt-orange carpet. He was making a low, strangled sound deep in his throat, and his arms were stretched out rigidly in front of him to ward off the biting, hungry mouth. But there was no longer anything holding him, mere empty space where the red-eyed Reverend Farmer had been a moment ago. The bedside lamp cast a friendly, reassuring glow, enough to clearly illuminate the empty, warm, dry, safe hotel bedroom.

  He leaned back against the bed, gasping, willing his heart to slow down, and his aching arms fell limply to his sides. He sat there, blinking several times to clear the final echoes, the last vestiges of the dream from his eyes. But the feverish feeling continued, and at last he began to think. Logic and reason crept slowly into his hot brain, and he concentrated on trying to move, to get up from the floor and go into the bathroom. There was a bottle of aspirin in his bag, and all he had to do was stand up and find it.…

  Then he was up on his feet, shivering as the conditioned air attacked his gleaming skin, drying his perspiration, causing a thrill of goose bumps everywhere on him. He brought up a clammy hand to push the damp hair out of his eyes and looked around for the bag. He rummaged through it until he found the little plastic bottle, then walked unsteadily, drunkenly into the bathroom and switched on the light.

  The aspirin was extra-strength, but he swallowed four of them anyway, followed by a glass of cool water from the tap. He turned on the shower, aware that he had taken one just before he’d lain down on the bed. No matter: once inside, the warm spray washing over him, he began to feel better, almost normal. Whatever normal was.

  He used a fresh towel from the ample supply on the rack to dry himself before the bathroom mirror, gazing into it. He was struck by how normal—that word again—he appeared. Eyes, hair, skin: all just as before. The nightmare had taken no physic
al toll, which seemed odd. He’d fully expected to look different: wild, sick, haunted. But the eyes he’d regarded every day of his life gazed steadily back at him, clear and shining. The dream was over.

  And now he had to leave. He dried his hair with the hotel’s blow-dryer and went out into the bedroom for his clean clothes. It was just after nine o’clock; he’d been asleep for more than two hours. He had to get to the airport. There would be late flights, he was certain, and he would be on one. If not, he would sleep in the terminal waiting area and take the first available flight out tomorrow. But he had to go, had to be moving.

  Ten minutes later he was in the hotel lobby, paying cash to settle his bill. Then he went quickly outside to his rented Mustang. The pain of the afternoon had ceased, he noticed. He drove away from the hotel and headed through the late evening traffic on the wet streets toward the airport. As he traveled, he tried to sort everything out in his mind.

  Robert Gammon, Millicent Call, the LAPD officer. Three murders. Ron O’Hara was dead as well, but that had been suicide. Why would Scavenger lie, decline to take credit for one kill, when he was so obviously proud of his handiwork? Mark remembered the odd little smile, the expression of triumph on the tall man’s face as he stood in the rain beside the hillside road, holding up Mark’s revolver like a trophy, a winning lottery ticket. No, such a person would never hide his light under a bushel. It was not in his nature.

  Besides, how could Scavenger possibly have murdered the FBI agent in Georgetown this afternoon, when he was at the cemetery watching Mark at the moment in question? Unless …

  What had Ron O’Hara said the other night? “This tall man with the scar could be legs.” Mark thought about that. Was it possible? Was it logical? Was Scavenger working with someone else? Working for someone else? How could that be? More to the point, who could it be?

  No. He would not entertain that line of thinking. He would go mad if he did. He would accept that this man, Scavenger, was in charge, as he so obviously was, and proceed accordingly. He would go on to the next destination, the next phase of the game, but it was time to establish rules of his own. Rule number one: be prepared. He could do that as soon as he got off the plane. He would find some insurance, some weapon, now that he no longer had the gun. But first, rule number two.