The Last Nightingale (24 page)

He took it, bit off a mouthful of bread and followed with a large bite of the turkey leg. Then he nodded and said, “You’re right. Let’s
give it back.” But all that came out was “You’re rihh, leth givih—” followed by a cloud of bread crumbs and turkey bits.

They both screamed with laughter. The sense of relief while the laughter poured out of him was so deep and so strong that all he could do was ride along with it. Shane realized that laughing to death would not be a bad way to go; he just hated the thought of missing out on more time with his sister.

The early afternoon light was blocked out of Randall Blackburn’s little garden apartment by thick drapes. He had been forced to accept the first place he could find because of the severe housing shortage, but he was grateful to have somewhere to go after work that was private and quiet. The artificial twilight inside was restful, giving the place a quiet feel that was the complete antithesis of his working life. On most days at this time, he lay sound asleep after the prior night’s shift. He slept on this day, also, but there was no peace in it. Images of his wife haunted him, as they sometimes did. She appeared to him holding their swaddled newborn daughter in such a way that he could not see the baby’s face. It was the same as always.

He had let the grim surgeon talk him into not viewing the dead newborn’s remains. What was there to see? they asked him. The infant had died in childbirth, shortly after the mother succumbed to blood loss.

And so he never got to see their baby. As often as his wife’s image came to him, the one thing that never varied was that she held their new baby so tightly that he could see nothing. He knew that the baby was a girl; someone had told him, but he had not even seen her in his dreams. No matter how many times his wife and baby visited his sleep, he never got a glimpse of his daughter’s face.

Blackburn sat up with a gasp, still reeling with dizziness. He focused his eyes on the blanket and made himself take deep, even breaths until the room began to hold still and his head cleared. The
heavy curtains rustled slightly at the open windows and the breeze gradually cleared the cobwebs from his brain.

He checked his watch; it was barely afternoon, too early to get up for work. Dropping back onto the mattress, he closed his eyes with a deep sigh. He felt stirred up inside, with the sort of emotional hangover that sometimes hit him after having to break up a married couple in the middle of a vicious fight.

He spent a few moments wondering what it was that had awakened him like that, leaving him sweating and so upset. But the images and words were already fading. Sleep began to pull at him. He closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths, and then he was out again.

Not long after sundown, Tommie paced back and forth across the floor of his study, angrily stepping over Friar John’s prostrate form each time. He had already tied his victim down once again by the feet and neck, but Friar John was so far gone now that the restraints were a ridiculous overstatement. Tommie was astounded by the speed of this infection. Friar John’s face had already turned several shades of red, purple, and black. His eyes were blank. He only moved when he convulsed with yet another sharp gut pain.

Tommie tried yelling into Friar John’s ear again, hoping to force some awareness back into him. “I trusted you and I
confided
in you that I have this difficulty with money. Parting with it is more painful for me than it is for you working morons. But all my bills get paid, eventually. It really is no one else’s concern. And yet you used that against me. How did you persuade the Nightingales to adopt Shane, in particular? Did you offer incentives to encourage them not to take some other child?”

He turned and kicked Friar John in the ribs and got a satisfying grunt of shock and pain out of him. Friar John’s eyes popped open and focused on Tommie, who was delighted to see that he was conscious again.

“Oh! Back with us, then? Lovely! They say many dying people often experience a final few moments of energy and clarity before they expire. How fortunate that this is also the case with you.

“You are dying of the plague. You were supposed to be my experiment and I was going to record every aspect of your death, but the disease, as you may have noticed, has turned out to be far too strong for my needs. Much too quick. Too quick.” He pulled out his heavy-bladed knife and admired its edge.

“This knife, however, is a highly controllable instrument. Simple and effective. Some things, it seems, need no improving. I should have trusted it to deal with you. I could have spent days carving my initials over every square inch of your body, keeping you gloriously alive
and conscious
the entire time! Think of that!
Think
of it!”

Whether or not it was that image which did it, Friar John’s eyes glazed over again. This time, he continued sinking. He seemed to melt into the floor and shrink within his cocoon.

“No!” Tommie cried. “Not yet, damn it!”

But as if to spite him at the last, Friar John completed the act of dying without paying any regard to Tommie’s demands. The last air wheezed out of his stilled lungs in that familiar death rattle that Tommie knew always signaled an end to his special recreations.

He stomped the floor. “It’s too soon!” Yet even as he spoke the words, he began moving toward the side door leading to his garage and stable. He knew it would take half an hour to hook up the buggy.

All this work,
Tommie lamented. The time and effort and personal risk that he expended—all of it wasted. The strain was so powerfully toxic that it killed within hours, and it rendered a victim unconscious long before that. The weapon was too powerful, period. This vile germ was hardly slower than using a shotgun.

The only priceless moment was the look on Friar John’s face when Tommie bludgeoned the boy to death in his presence. The sweetest things never last. Tommie was discovering that terror was
much better than pain for motivating a victim. It was certainly more entertaining for him.

After all of this, it was not going to be enough to merely kill The Bastard. Tommie needed to terrorize him first, then utterly destroy him. His simple existence was a claim on Tommie’s wealth. The destruction of his father’s bastard son would be an exorcism.

R
ANDALL
B
LACKBURN
PICKED HIS WAY
along the broken sidewalk. Every step carried him past crowded temporary dwellings and lean-to tents that served to replace the buildings of the Bar-bary Coast district. The neighborhood had been decimated when the fires swept through. Citizens’ committees clamored for changes to the district, and a sea change of public image for the entire district seemed inevitable.

Strangely, little had changed so far. Familiar faces swirled all around him in the darkness, popping in and out of the lantern light and the campfire shadows. True denizens of the bottom-dwelling existence had gravitated back to the old Barbary Coast area like homing pigeons. No matter what happened to the real estate itself, the location, location, location, was still near the ships. The ships brought cargo, and many times the cargo included alcohol. Sailors needed somewhere to blow off steam and get rid of their pesky money. And so it continued to propel an ongoing dark party that randomly rotated through the neighborhood.

Blackburn was the lone, wandering force of order for the district, the cold point of contact where the law’s carriage wheels met the cobblestone. At least until the eventual day when the powers that be finished the neighborhood’s transformation.

But tonight he felt his energy sagging even though he had several hours left to go. The destruction of nearly everything all around him seemed to be a lesson that his efforts on behalf of justice were wasted in the law. The civic powers that controlled him and paid his wages could be dethroned with a single shaking of the earth, but the low criminals displayed a resistance to change that rivaled rats and roaches. The Barbary Coast denizens triumphed at the art of survival by learning to live off of garbage.

In a small tent less than ten yards away, he caught a clear view of some poker player turning over the table, grabbing up the pot and fleeing into the darkness. It took another second or two before Blackburn noticed that his own feet were not moving. He was perfectly capable, but in that brief moment of decision, it was the same petty thief who had fled from him a thousand times before. Easy to chase down, difficult to beat into submission, time-consuming to arrest, and pointless to rehabilitate. They were chipping away at Blackburn’s life, one street fight at a time.

He watched for another moment while the thief fled with the howling players hot behind him, then he turned and walked away. “Bastards,” he muttered.

Bastards. He walked away with blinders on and left them to work out their own difficulties. What was he doing? In the days before the quake, his self-delusion was much easier to maintain amid the red-lighted windows, loud piano music, and raucous laughter of the Barbary Coast’s fake hotels. The doomed women in their gowns and layered makeup looked so much better under the tinted gaslights of the old dance hall atmosphere. Now, most women’s desperation was plain in their ragged appearance and their aggressive, angry manner. Makeup was seldom seen. Quick contact in its most base form was all that their clients could expect.

Blackburn bumped into them in the shadows under stairways, stepped over them rutting like pigs in back alleys, arrested them when they did it out in full view, and ignored them on any other oc-
casion. Nothing stopped it. The word was out, hanging over the city like a dark cloud, worming its way into the brains of anyone with nothing else to anchor down their life.

His energy dropped again. It was hard to walk. It felt useless. He stepped into a lean-to “bar” with two small tables, both occupied, and rapped his nightstick on the nearest one. The two men seated there promptly got up and hustled away. He sat down and motioned for the barkeep to bring him a beer, then he turned his back to the outside world and asked himself once again what the hell he was doing.

Yet here he still was, on the Barbary Coast beat.

This is what they think of you.

His disgust and resentment burned so deeply that the beer glass was empty before he knew it. His parents had not brought him up to risk himself in this way. How would he explain it to them, when he could no longer explain it to himself? As a “guardian of society,” who was he actually protecting?

His original goal of working his way up to the rank of detective seemed like a bad joke to him, now. Chasing down thieves and arresting wife beaters was never going to bring him the sort of action that moves an officer up the ranks. His beat could kill him at the drop of a hat, but it wasn’t going to get him any glory.

And of course, somebody up there knew that. As for the city mucky-mucks he took orders from, reports were coming into City Hall of officials whose mansions were not covered for earthquake damage, so they set fire to their own homes, which all had fire insurance as required under the law. Entire insurance companies were now teetering on the brink of bankruptcy while these hogs were helping to collapse the system so that they could build themselves bigger mansions next time.

What was he doing? Life had slapped him to the ground so hard during his rookie year that it had been hard not to take it as a direct repudiation from God. In a single day, his wife and infant daughter disappeared, leaving him haunted by the sense that if he had cho-
sen some other line of work, their deaths would not have happened. And yet after almost ten years of burying his grief and his rage in his dedication to his work, this is where it put him: seated in a nasty, smoke-stained tent that served as a temporary tavern of the crudest possible nature, drinking alcohol on duty, right out in the open among the very people he patrolled every night. And so what?

It was still dark out while Tommie drove his one-horse rig up to the northern tip of the San Francisco peninsula. He steered the big draft animal down the rutted road leading to the rocky shoreline. The Pacific Ocean flowed into the San Francisco Bay through the narrow Golden Gate, and Tommie was parked near the narrowest part of the strait. The opposite shore lay less than a mile away, swallowed in the darkness and the fog. A relentless current of six or seven miles an hour swept everything before it into the bay when tides were rising, and then back out to the open sea when they drained back out.

With a little push, any floating object would either join the rush toward the bayside shoreline or disappear out to sea over the western horizon, all depending on the direction of the tides. At several points during the drive up, Tommie had found himself debating whether there was more merit in letting a body disappear at sea or causing a bold statement to wash up onto any of the Bay’s public beaches.

He appreciated the value of secrecy, living as he did behind veils of it, but he was repeatedly swamped by the giddy sensations that rushed through him when he pictured the unsuspecting beach-goers who might encounter his handiwork and vomit on the spot.

Humor won the internal debate.

He would dispose of the body while the tide was coming in, guaranteeing that Friar John would have himself one final opportunity to present his naked carcass to the view of small children.

Whatever was left of him by then, Tommie cackled. Given the cold seawater and nibbly fishes, he was still going to castrate his victim, but this time he would use Mother Nature instead of a heavy-bladed knife.

The darkened sea break was deserted at that hour, and he had no problem in avoiding detection while he parked the buggy and stepped around to the back. He grabbed Friar John’s carcass by the ropes and pulled the fabric cocoon out and onto the ground. The water’s edge was only a few yards away at that point, but to get the body there he would have to traverse a row of jagged boulders and fist-sized rocks.

Tommie was wiry and fit, but he was smaller than his passenger by a good six inches in height and by thirty or forty pounds. There was no way to carry the load over that terrain. He would have to drag the cocoon by its ropes. That was just as well. To carry the thing any distance involved far too much close contact, given the virulence of the disease. There was surely no good reason to touch the thing. So Tommie put his strength into it and dragged his burden across the rocks, yard by gasping yard, until he was nearly at the water’s edge.