Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

So when the phone went with some gofer saying he had a guy on the line who wanted to check on a news item, Rosa’s first impulse was to push the thing off on one of the other ACEs, only neither of them were at their desks. Bill was over by the water fountain flirting with Lesha Roberts, while Jodie was probably outside on the fire escape sneaking a cigarette. There were sometimes more people hanging out on that metal staircase than there were in the office. One of these days someone would drop a smoldering butt into one of the garbage Dumpsters below and start the biggest blaze since Sherman torched the city.

Rosa sighed and said to put the caller through.

“Atlanta Journal-Constitution city desk Rosa Morrison speaking how may I help you?” she recited all in one breath, highlighting a potentially inflammatory subordinate clause onscreen and blowing it away with the delete key.

“I wanted to check on a news story?”

The caller was male, youngish, with a Yankee accent. Midwest maybe, Rosa couldn’t exactly place it.

“Uh huh,” she said noncommittally.

“See, I live out of state. Arizona? There was like a report in the paper here about a shooting at a house on Carson Street. I have relatives there, like on the same street, and they haven’t been answering the phone and I’ve been kinda worried, you know? I was wondering if you like had any more details.”

Rosa tapped a few keys, calling up a window with the library screen. She typed FIND “SHOOTING.”

“What did you say the street was called?” she asked.

“Carson-322’s where my folks live.”

Rosa typed CARSON STREET and hit ENTER. Short high-pitched cries punctuated the fuzzy silence on the telephone line. They made her think of summer holidays at Palm Beach, all those years ago, before her father backed the wrong investment and pissed away the family fortune. She could still feel the hot squishy sand between her toes and see the vast indolence of the Atlantic stretching away before her like her own future.

The blue display flickered as the database responded, SHOOTING: 1047. CARSON STREET: 2. TOTAL: 0.

“We don’t seem to have anything,” she told the caller. “When did this happen?”

“Pretty recently. Last couple days.”

“I’m showing two mentions for Carson Street, but nothing involving a shooting.”

“Really? Well, I guess I …”

Jodie’s head had appeared over the divider between their desks.

“Hold on a minute,” Rosa said, twisting the microphone of her headset aside.

“Was that something about a shooting on Carson Street?” Jodie asked.

“That’s right.”

“I just subbed the story Bottom of D2.”

Pecking away at the keyboard, Rosa killed the library window and got back into tomorrow’s edition. There it was, a short news item tucked away in the local section.

“I’ve got it,” she told her caller, scanning the text. “Correct, there was an incident last night in Carson Street. Not at a house, though. Two men killed, another in critical condition. One of the victims named as Vernon Kemp, fifteen, of 611 Garibaldi Street. The other two victims not yet identified. That’s about it. We got it off the police blotter, didn’t send a reporter out.”

There was silence on the other end.

“Hello?” said Rosa.

“The other two guys,” said the voice at last. “You know anything about them?”

“Hold on a second.”

She leaned over to Jodie.

“Have you got the blotter report on this?”

Jodie hunted around amongst the papers on her desk, coming up with a stapled sheaf of fax pages which she passed to Rosa over the divider.

“Who is it?” she whispered.

Rosa shrugged.

“Some guy”

She quickly found the police report of the incident, which Jodie had highlighted in fluorescent pink.

“OK, let’s see. Blah, blah, blah. ‘The unidentified white victim was in his late twenties, five eleven, one hundred eighty pounds, light brown hair cut short, scar on left cheek.’ Looks like he was packing a.22-caliber revolver. The guy they took to Emergency was also white. Nothing more on him. ‘A suitcase recovered at the scene was found to contain some pairs of handcuffs, a roll of tape and a video camera.’ That’s it. Hello? Hello?”

The phone had gone dead.

“Well, thanks a whole heap!” Rosa said savagely, cutting off the phone. “Asshole!”

“He hang up on you?” Jodie murmured sympathetically.

Rosa dragged her school story back on to the screen. An African-American honors student was quoted as saying race was not an issue for her. Her best friends were Japanese and Jewish and they related on the basis of personality, not skin color. That had to be balanced against a male student who supported segregated schools, claiming that students stuck to their own racial cliques and that talk of pride in diversity was just window-dressing designed to perpetuate white domination.

Rosa stared up at the suspended ceiling, inset with frosted glass panels diffusing a subdued, generalized light. There must have been forty people at work in the huge open-plan office, but the only sound was the hush of the air-conditioning and the occasional burr of a phone.

“How the hell did he know?” she said aloud.

“How’s that, honey?” asked Jodie.

“If that story hasn’t even run here yet, how did that guy know about it?”

“Maybe he lives around there.”

Rosa shook her head.

“He said he was phoning from out of state.”

She highlighted a paragraph and dragged it down the page, then froze again, staring sightlessly at the screen.

“Sea gulls,” she murmured.

That was the sound she had heard in the background, the strident, mewing shrieks which had made her think of summer vacations at the beach.

“Do they have sea gulls in Arizona?” she asked.

Jodie gave a raucous laugh which turned into an attack of smoker’s cough.

“If they do, honey,” she said when the fit subsided, “those birds sure as hell got off at the wrong exit!”

Rosa laughed, shrugged and returned to her work.

“I guess it’s just one of those things,” she said.

16

I shoved my way past Andrea, sprinted across the cove and hurled myself at the rock face. It was almost sheer, with very few holds. After three vain attempts, bruised and bloodied, I gave up.

“What is it?” Andrea was shouting at me. “What’s the matter?” I ran back to her and looked up at the rock ledge. There was no one there. I pushed past Andrea and climbed back up the way we had come down. The outcrop where David had been standing was about fifty feet away. Trees and thick undergrowth grew right down to the point where the rock surface fell away to the cove.

I forced my way through the prickly shrubs and around the trees, the branches whipping my face and tearing my clothes. At one point I lost my footing and almost slipped over the edge, but I managed to clamber back, driven on by the knowledge that my son was alive and somewhere close by. At last I reached the spot where I had seen him a few minutes earlier.

There was no sign that anyone had ever been there. Searching the undergrowth all around, I discovered a path leading off into the woods. I raced off along it. The path was obviously disused, but the vegetation had not yet reclaimed the central strip. I must have run for at least fifteen minutes, up and down hills, around zigzags and hairpin turns, on and on, always expecting to see the diminutive figure I sought just around the next bend or at the top of the next rise. When I could run no more, I trudged on for another ten minutes before finally collapsing, near tears, on a tree stump I had tripped over.

The path ran around the coast of the island, just above the shoreline. Because of its tortuous course, caused by the uneven terrain, it was a lot longer than the trail I had taken on my first day there, but I eventually discovered that the two were connected by the network of overgrown paths which I had been tempted to explore then. Convinced that David was somewhere on the island, I now beat my way up and down every single one of them. I didn’t find David, but my persistence was not wasted. On the contrary, the knowledge I gained during those hours was eventually to save my life.

By the time I finally returned to the compound, Sam’s Blake lecture was in full swing. Even at some distance from the hall, I could hear his urgent, bellowing delivery, every word in italics, every line a punch line, every stop an exclamation mark. It sounded even more brutal and peremptory than the harangue I had witnessed the day before. But I did not hesitate. Lecture or no lecture, I was going to have this out with Sam there and then. He had my kid and I was going to get him back.

I strode in through the open door of the hall, and stopped dead. The huge space was deserted. The voice I had been hearing came from the television, where an image of Sam strutting his stuff was playing to an empty room. The emanations of his screen image were printed all over the walls and ceiling, the sound boomed and echoed in every nook and cranny, but there was no one there.

I switched off the TV and opened the door leading to Sam’s quarters.

“Sam!” I called. “It’s Phil. I need to talk to you.”

There was no reply. I went to the next room. Besides the pool table, there was an exercise machine, various weights and a set of wall-bars. The door to the bedroom was closed. I knocked. There was no answer. I opened the door and stepped inside.

“How are you doing, Phil?”

He lay sprawled on the bed in a white terry-cloth bathrobe, reading the Erdman edition of Blake’s works. On one side of him was the Fender guitar, on the other a rifle. Then I spotted the cellular phone, on a chest of drawers by the window. I strode over and picked it up.

“I’ve seen David,” I told him. “I’m going to call 911 and get the police out here.”

Sam turned back to his book. I switched on the phone and dialed. Nothing happened. I tried again.

“OK, what’s the deal?” I asked Sam.

He set down the volume of poetry.

“There’s a code number you have to enter to enable it. Prevents unauthorized use.”

“What is it?”

“Well, I don’t actually give it out, Phil. The rates they charge for airtime, it would cost me an arm and a leg if-”

I threw the phone at him.

“Don’t fuck with me, Sam!”

In one movement he rolled up off the bed and leveled the rifle at me. The muzzle looked enormous, like a tunnel. Neither of us spoke for what seemed like a very long time. Then Sam slowly lowered the rifle and heaved a sigh. I realized that he’d been holding his breath all along.

“Sit down, Phil,” he said. “I think it’s time we had a little talk.”

I edged backward to a leather armchair. Sam perched on the end of the bed. The bedroom was at the back of the hall, and had a large picture window overlooking the strait. The setting sun had tinted the clouds with a delicate pink wash.

“I’m not going to give him up,” I said. “You’ll have to kill me first.”

“I thought he was dead,” Sam replied.

“You know about that?”

“I saw it in the papers. We get them once in a while. I figured you probably didn’t want to talk about it.”

“He’s not dead. I saw him just now, down by that pool you took me to yesterday. That’s why you set up that meeting with Andrea, isn’t it? That’s how she knew I could find it.”

Sam looked at me expressionlessly.

“Did Andrea see anything?” he asked.

“She claimed she didn’t, but she has to be lying.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.”

He sighed.

“But I have to say, Phil, a lot of people, listening to you, would think you were just plain crazy. I imagine that’s what the police would think.”

“I’m willing to take that chance,” I retorted.

He shook his head slowly.

“It’s too risky, Phil. We aren’t too popular with the locals. They’d love to have an excuse to give us a hard time. Plus I’ve got problems of my own right now.”

“I’m not leaving without David,” I snapped.

Sam put down the rifle and walked over to the window.

“You’re not leaving anyway,” he said.

He took a pair of binoculars from a hook and scanned the view outside.

“What do you mean by that?” I demanded.

“No one can leave. Mark and Rick have taken the boat over to Friday. They’re worried about Pat and Russ, the guys who’re gone. They haven’t been in touch, and Mark thinks that something might have happened to them.”

“I don’t care about that!” I shouted, standing up.

Sam whirled around.

“Well, you’d better start fucking caring!”

He glared at me.

“I had high hopes for you, Phil. I’ve been running this whole thing single-handed for years now. Do you have any idea of the strain I’ve been under? The only person I’ve been able to confide in is Mark, and he’s got shit for brains. They all have. You’re the only person who ever really understood me, the only one I could talk to as an equal.”

He gripped my shoulders.

“Just say you’re with me, Phil! That’s all I ask, that leap of faith. Only you can make it, but once you do, everything else will come right!”

His eyes bored into mine. He was crazy, of course, but that didn’t matter. As long as there was the slightest chance that David was still alive, I had to play along.

“All right,” I said. “I’m with you.”

He stared at me, blinking. His eyes had filled with tears.

“Really?” he said in an almost inaudible voice. “You really are?”

I nodded. He let go of me abruptly and moved away, rubbing his head.

“I can’t believe this, Phil! It changes everything.”

He fell to his knees suddenly, hands clasped together, trembling with tension, head bowed in silent prayer. I felt a surge of nauseated terror. Whatever Sam was up to, this was no scam. He believed.

“OK, here’s the deal,” he said, getting up. “You saw the hall, right? No one there. It’s the first time that’s ever happened. Mark’s turned them all against me.”

He measured me with his eyes for a moment. I tried to look sincere.

“What happened,” he went on, “the last time some of our guys left the island, one of them didn’t come back. That created problems, and now they’ve gotten worse. Andy, the guy who went along that time, told Mark what really happened. Mark told the others, and now they’re all freezing me out.”

“What did happen?”

He shook his head impatiently.

“I can’t explain all that right now. Just trust me, all right?”

He clapped his hands together and began striding up and down the room.