The Chill of Night (34 page)

The insistent ringing of the phone woke McCabe from his fitful sleep. Why didn’t the damned thing stop ringing? He glanced at caller ID.
J. VODNICK
. He pressed
TALK
. ‘This is McCabe.’

Too late. Vodnick had hung up. McCabe debated whether to call him back or not. It wasn’t much of a debate. If Joe Vodnick was calling his cell, it had to have something to do with the case. He called.

‘Sergeant, this is Officer Vodnick. Joe Vodnick? From last night at the pier?’

‘I remember, Joe. What’s up?’

‘It’s about that girl. That woman you guys put out the ATL on.’

McCabe sat up, instantly alert. ‘Yeah? What about her?’

‘Well, I didn’t see the ATL when it came out because I went off duty at midnight Friday.’

‘Okay. Keep going.’

‘I’m up at Katahdin. I’ve got a couple of days off, and I’m doing a little ice climbing and winter camping.’

‘Get to the point, Joe.’

‘I think I saw her. I think I know where she is.’

‘Katahdin? You saw her at Katahdin? You sure it’s her?’

‘No. Not at Katahdin. Let me back up. I was just talking to a pal of mine in Community Policing? My girlfriend, actually. She saw the ATL and was telling me about it. From what she said I’m pretty sure it’s the woman I saw –’

‘Joe, Joe, slow down,’ McCabe interrupted. ‘Just tell me where you saw this woman and why you think she’s our witness.’

‘I dropped her off about five this morning at 131 Summer Street.’

‘In Portland?’

‘Yeah. In Portland. She seemed disturbed, and she fits the description of the woman in the ATL. Right age. Right hair color. Right clothes.’

‘Did you get her name?’

‘Just her first name.’

‘Which is?’

‘Abby. She told me her name was Abby.’

Twenty-Nine

Abby looked around the room for a weapon. She didn’t see anything. She knew she could find something in the kitchen, but she didn’t want to go to the kitchen. Death might be waiting for her between here and there. So she looked harder and found something she thought might do. In a corner propped against a wall where she hadn’t noticed it just a minute ago was Uncle Willis’s old wooden tennis racket. Least it looked like Willis’s racket. Most of its strings still broken just the way she remembered it.

She slipped out of bed, lifting the hem of Leanna’s big flannel nightgown and gathering it around her so she wouldn’t trip, and went to the corner, where she examined the racket more closely. Looked just the same. She picked it up, took a practice swing or two. It felt just the same. She heard the Voices cackling quietly. She swung harder. The Voices cackled louder. She didn’t care. Maybe Willis’s racket wasn’t a frying pan, but the sonofabitch Death would sure as hell feel it if she whacked him in the balls with it. She cackled back at the Voices, but that didn’t shut them up. She swung the racket as hard as she could. Forehand. Backhand. Once. Twice. Again. Again. She sailed across the room, holding up the hem of the nightgown with her left hand and swinging Willis’s racket with her right. The Voices cackled louder. Suddenly Death was there in the room. Now in front of her. Now behind. She whirled and swung. The side of the racket connected with his head. She whirled and swung again. This time he went down. Just as he had on the ice. She stood over him and swung again. Chopping down at his head as if she were splitting logs for the stove. Wham! She chopped and kept chopping. He was spurting blood. Wham! More blood. Wham! Wham! Wham! Stupid nightgown with its stupid pink flowers kept getting in the way, but she kept swinging anyway. Swinging and swinging. Clubbing Death to death. Clubbing him into a bloody, bloodied pulp. The Voices were screaming. She’d never heard them sound so fucking happy before.

‘Abby, what in hell are you doing?’ Leanna. Not the Voices. She didn’t want to listen to Leanna now. Not yet. Not when one more swing would finish the fucker off! Wham! The racket exploded against the side of his head.

Leanna leapt from the bed and threw her arms around Abby. Squeezed and held her tight. Abby struggled to break free of the grip. Together they toppled, a flanneled flowery mass, with little pink ribbons at their necks and wrists, down onto the bed.

‘Let me go!’ Abby shrieked, struggling against the grip of Leanna’s arms. ‘Let me swing! Let me swing! Let me finish the fucker off!’

Abby screamed and writhed and squirmed. Leanna pushed herself into Abby, clamping her arms by her sides. Abby felt the racket slip from her hand. ‘My racket,’ Abby screamed. ‘I dropped my racket!’

‘There is no racket.’

‘There is, too. It’s Uncle Willis’s racket.’

‘There is no racket.’

‘Yes! There! Is!’

‘I can’t see it.’

‘You’re a big fat lying fuck.’

‘I’m big and I’m fat, but I’m not lying. I can’t see it.’

Abby lay still in the dark with Leanna lying on top of her. She was quiet now. The Voices still chattered, but she didn’t listen. Tears poured from her eyes. Sometimes, she thought, Leanna was just like Wolfe. Just like the rest of them. If anyone should know there really was a racket even if she couldn’t see it, it was Leanna, because she was crazy, too.

Finally Leanna loosened her grip. Abby didn’t move. Leanna rolled off. When everything was quiet, when the Voices finally shut up, Abby reached one arm down to the floor and picked up Uncle Willis’s racket from where she’d dropped it. She pulled herself up into a sitting position with her back against the wall. She tucked her knees up under the nightgown and laid the racket across them. She did wonder how the racket got here. She hadn’t seen it in years and was pretty sure she hadn’t brought it over from the island. But Abby had years of experience of things happening she didn’t understand or remember, so she didn’t question it further.

She thought about Uncle Willis. He was her mother’s older brother, and he saw things and heard voices no else could see or hear just like she did. Abby knew, because she’d read up on it, that schizophrenia has a genetic component, that it sometimes runs in families, so she supposed that’s where hers came from. Uncle Willis. Crazy Willis people called him, usually behind his back but sometimes right to his face, which Abby thought was mean. But he didn’t seem to mind or really even notice. What Willis mostly saw when he was having one of his ‘attacks,’ as Gracie called them, was bats. Furry little black bats flying at his face and wanting to bite him. Nobody else saw them. Just Willis. He was forever swatting at them, and swearing at them right out on the street. Calling them furry little fuckers and dirty black bastards. All Gracie would say was ‘Dammit, Willis, don’t talk that way around Abby.’

Didn’t stop him, though.

Willis hadn’t always had the racket. He found it in the island dump and brought it home, about a year before he killed himself. He couldn’t have been happier. Gave him something to swat the bats with. Didn’t bother him that the racket had almost no strings left. He swatted anyway. ‘Gotta work on that forehand, Willis,’ some of the drunks outside the Legion hall on summer nights would shout as Willis walked by swatting at the bats. ‘Gotta work on that serve.’

Uncle Willis never answered them. He just looked confused and kept on swatting. Which is what he did right up until the day when Abby was eight and she opened her mother’s closet door and found Willis hanging inside. The wooden racket was on the floor under him. Abby didn’t scream when she found him. She’d seen enough dead things to know Willis was dead. She touched him once. The only thing she could remember thinking was
I guess the bats won’t be bothering him anymore.

Abby hadn’t seen the racket since. She thought her mother had taken it back to the dump along with the rest of Willis’s stuff. She sighed a long sigh and wondered if Death really was dead. She could still smell him. Even closer than before. She grasped the taped handle and flicked the racket back and forth with her wrist. She could hear the drunks at the Legion laughing at her. Or maybe it was the Voices. ‘Gotta work on that forehand, Abby. Gotta work on that serve.’ She felt tears running down the sides of her cheeks. She heard a banging on the door.

Thirty

McCabe drove the Bird and beat Maggie to 131 Summer Street by less than ten seconds. She pulled up right behind him. He was still wearing the clothes he’d worn all day. Maggie had on sweats, sneakers, a windbreaker, and a black watch cap, her shield pinned to the outside. Her holster and weapon were strapped around her waist. They looked at the house. A small wood-frame two-unit badly in need of TLC. Both doors had black numbers painted on them. Number 1 on the left. Number 2 on the right. Apartment 1 lay dark and empty, an
APARTMENT FOR RENT
sign taped to the window. Number 2 was clearly occupied. A dim light shone through the curtains, and the door was open a crack, a sliver of light shining through it as well. Maybe Abby had peeked out the door and seen them coming and then run off, failing to close it completely.

‘I’ll take the front,’ McCabe said. ‘You go around back and pick our girl up if she tries to slip out that way.’

Maggie nodded and headed down the driveway, running in a low crouch. McCabe gave her a minute to get in position and then started up the concrete walk toward the front. About halfway to the house he heard a woman scream. There was a shout of ‘Fuck’ and then a loud pop. All in quick succession. McCabe recognized the pop. A. 22 handgun. Maybe with a suppressor. More likely not. He took the three stairs to the porch in a single leap and hit the cheap hollow-core door low and at full speed, the force of his body shattering the wood. A chain latch and screws flew in front of him as he rolled into a dimly lit room, sweeping his .45 in an arc in front of him. Across the room he saw a figure dressed in blue disappearing through the wide-open back door.

‘Police! Freeze!’ he shouted. The figure kept going.

‘Police! Freeze!’ Maggie’s voice echoed his own, from the backyard.

To his left, a woman wearing a flannel nightgown writhed on the floor. Blood gushed in spurts from a wound in her neck. Not Abby. Someone bigger, fatter, older. She looked like someone dying.

‘Freeze!’ he heard Maggie shout again. ‘Flat on your face! Hands behind your head!’

In a desperate attempt to stanch the woman’s bleeding, McCabe yanked up the hem of her nightgown, rolled the soft cotton into a kind of bandage, and pressed it into the wound on her neck. But it didn’t do much good. There was too much blood, and it kept coming. Deep red spread across the makeshift bandage. The woman’s eyes were open. She blinked. Gurgled a word. ‘Ellie.’ Her name? ‘Ellie,’ she gurgled again. Her eyes began to glaze over.

From outside he heard two pops followed by the deeper boom of Maggie’s .45. Shit. He thought she had the bastard. He raced for the open back door onto a small deck, leapt through, and heard another pop. Then nothing. Below to his left he saw Maggie. She was on her knees, her two hands still shakily holding her .45 in front of her, trying to aim at the fleeing figure. McCabe calculated the distance and direction to the target, aimed, and fired. The man kept running. McCabe knelt. Using the deck rail as a platform, he aimed again into the darkness. Then he stopped. He could no longer see who he was shooting at, and there were innocent civilians out there. Sleeping in their bedrooms. Walking on the street. An errant slug could easily hit one of them. He couldn’t risk that. Even if it meant letting the bastard get away.

He holstered his weapon and ran down the steps. Maggie was lying in the snow at the bottom. He could see a small red circle slowly expand across the right side of her sweatshirt just above the black of her holster. Her .45 was still in her two hands. She was trying to sit up. Cupping the back of her head in one hand, he took her weapon, engaged the safety, and stuffed it in his coat pocket. Then he eased her down on her back, her head on the snow. Keeping his own .45 pointed in the direction of the shooter, he took out his cell and hit PPD911. That number took him straight through to Department Dispatch. Maggie looked up at him, conscious but in obvious pain. She tried to smile. ‘This is McCabe.’ He spoke fast. ‘Detective and civilian down. Both gunshot wounds. One thirty-one Summer Street. That’s one three one Summer. Civilian a possible 10–49. Send two ambulances and alert all units. Male suspect fleeing on foot, south from location toward Commercial Street. Tall. Dressed in a dark hooded coat.’

‘Wearing glasses,’ Maggie croaked.

‘Anything else?’ McCabe asked her.

She shook her head. ‘It was dark. He had the hood up. All I saw was his glasses. Black frames.’

‘Wearing glasses, black frames,’ McCabe repeated. ‘Suspect is armed. Consider extremely dangerous.’

He pulled up her sweatshirt to look at the wound. There was a small red and black hole in the right side of her abdomen. About what you’d expect with a .22. Not a lot of blood. It didn’t look lethal, but you never knew. If the bullet hit an organ she could be in trouble. He wondered if there was an exit wound on the other side. He didn’t want to roll her over to look.

‘Gotta go,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back.’ He ran up the stairs.

The voice from Dispatch came back on. ‘Ambulance en route. All units alerted. We’ll be right there.’

The living-room floor was covered in blood. Ellie, if that was the woman’s name, was dead. Her eyes were open but empty. He knelt by her side and wrapped two fingers around her wrist to feel for a pulse. Nothing. He unrolled the bloody nightgown from around her neck and covered her nakedness. There was no further need for bandages.

He had to find Quinn if she was still here, still alive. It was a small apartment. Living room. Kitchen. A single bedroom. A small bath. ‘Abby!’ he called out. ‘This is the police. We’re here to help you.’

He listened. No answer. Leading with his .45, he moved into the bedroom. Dim light shone through the curtains. An unmade king-sized bed. A chair. A lamp. No Quinn. He moved to the closet door, stood to one side, whipped it open. Abby wasn’t there either. He called again. ‘Abby Quinn! This is the police. Come out!’ Still no answer. Either she was in the bathroom or she was gone again. He moved to the bathroom door. Outside he could hear sirens. Shouts. The sound of running feet. Red flashing lights bounced against the living-room walls.