The Vision (10 page)

“I’d like to see Chief Patmore,” Mary said.

Mrs. Yancy took a minute to correct a word she had just typed. “Him?” she said at last. “He’s out.”

“When will he be back?”

“The chief? Tomorrow morning.”

“Could you give us his home address?” Max asked, leaning against the formica counter that separated the foyer from the work area.

“His home address?” Mrs. Yancy said. “Surely. I can give you that. But he isn’t at home.”

“Where is he?” Mary asked impatiently.

“Where is he? Why, he’s up in Santa Barbara. He won’t be back until ten tomorrow morning.”

Mary turned to Max. “Maybe we should talk to a deputy.”

“Deputy?” Mrs. Yancy said. “There are five officers under the chief. Of course, only two of them are on duty right now.”

“If this guy’s like we’ve heard,” Max said, “it won’t do any good to talk to subordinates. He’ll expect to be dealt with directly.”

“Time’s running out,” Mary said.

“Don’t we have until seven o’clock tomorrow evening?” Max asked.

“If my vision’s accurate, we do.”

“Then if we see Patmore early tomorrow, that’ll be soon enough.”

“The officers on duty are out on patrol right now,” Mrs. Yancy said. “Did you want to report a crime?”

“Not exactly,” Mary said.

“Not exactly? Well, I have the forms right here, you know.” She opened a desk drawer, began to rummage through it. “I can take down the information and have an officer get back to you.”

“Never mind,” Max said. “We’ll be in tomorrow at ten o’clock.”

* * *

At the bay
end of the harbor, valuable shoreline was occupied by commercial enterprises—yacht clubs, yacht sales offices, dry docks, restaurants, and shops. Each of these businesses was as clean and attractive and well maintained as the many expensive homes that lined both sides of the harbor channel.

The Laughing Dolphin was a restaurant and cocktail lounge that fronted on the harbor. On the second level a narrow open-air deck was suspended over the water. In good weather patrons could get pleasantly drunk while the sun warmed their faces. This afternoon the deck was deserted. Max and Mary had it to themselves.

Holding a mug of coffee laced with brandy, Mary leaned against the wooden railing.

If you stepped out of the brisk sea breezes, the day was only chilly; but the wind from the ocean was downright cold. It nipped at her face and brought a healthy color to her cheeks.

When she looked up and to her right, she could see the Spanish Court, the hotel where she and Max had reserved a room. It stood on the north hill, high above the harbor. It was majestic, all white plaster and natural woods and red tile.

Closer to hand, eight dinghies were sailing in formation, snaking back and forth across the smooth slate-colored water. Against a backdrop of sixty-, eighty-, and hundred-foot sailing ships and motor yachts, the small vessels were lovely and amusing. Even today, without the sun upon them, their sails were dazzlingly white. Their graceful progress was a definition of serenity.

“Study the boats, the houses, the entire harbor,” Max said. “Maybe something you see will trigger the vision.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It was knocked out of my mind forever when I woke up and found I was being shot at.”

“You’ve got to try.”

“Do I?”

“Isn’t that why you wanted to come?”

“If I don’t go after this killer,” she said, “he’ll eventually come after me.”

The wind gusted suddenly, flapped Mary’s leather coat against her legs, rattled the large plate-glass windows of the cocktail lounge behind them.

She sipped her coffee. Tentacles of steam writhed across her face and dissolved in the wintry air.

Max said, “Maybe it’ll help if you tell me again how it’s going to happen.” When she didn’t answer, he coaxed her. “Tomorrow night at seven o’clock. Not too far from where we’re standing right now.”

“Within a couple of blocks,” she said.

“You said he’ll come with a butcher knife.”

“Lingard’s knife.”

“Some knife, anyway.”

“Lingard’s,” she insisted.

“You said he’ll stab two people.”

“Yes, two.”

“Kill them?”

“Maybe one of them.”

“But not the other.”

“At least one will live. Maybe both.”

“Who are these people he’ll stab?”

“I don’t know their names,” she said.

“What do they look like?”

“I couldn’t see their faces.”

“Young women, like in Anaheim?”

“I really don’t know.”

“What about the high-powered rifle?”

“I saw it in the vision.”

“He’s got a butcher knife and a gun?”

“After he’s stabbed those two people,” she said, “he’ll take the rifle up into a tower. He intends to shoot everyone.”

“Everyone?”

“A lot of people, as many as he can.”

At the far end of the harbor, a dozen seagulls kited in from the ocean, riding very high on the wind, white feathers silhouetted dramatically against the stormy sky.

“How many will he kill?” Max asked.

“The vision ended before I could see.”

“Which tower will he use?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look around,” Max said. “Look at each one of them. Try to sense which it will be.”

To her right, three hundred yards farther around the bend of the harbor’s bay end and five hundred yards from the Laughing Dolphin, the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity lay one block from the waterfront. She had been inside it once. It was a brooding Gothic structure, an impressive fortress of weathered granite and darkly beautiful stained-glass windows. The hundred-foot bell tower, which had a low-walled open deck directly beneath its peaked roof, was the highest point within two blocks of the harbor.

The sound of seagulls distracted her for a moment. Above the formation of sailboats that were playing follow the leader, still soaring inland, the gulls began to squeal with excitement. Their sharp voices were like fingernails scraped across a blackboard.

She tried not to hear the birds, concentrated on Trinity. She received nothing. No images. No psychic vibrations. Not the vaguest premonition that the killer would strike out at King’s Point from Trinity’s bell tower.

St. Luke’s Lutheran Church was between Mary and the Church of the Holy Trinity. It was two hundred yards north and a half a block from the harbor. It was a Spanish-style building with massive carved oak doors, and a bell tower slightly more than half as high as the one at the Catholic church.

Nothing from St. Luke’s either.

Just the ghostly wind and the cries of agitated seagulls.

The third tower was to her left, two hundred yards away, at the edge of the water. It was only four stories high, part of Kimball’s Games and Snacks, a clapboard and cedar-shingled pavilion that housed an amusement arcade. In the summer camera-laden tourists climbed to the top and took photographs of the harbor. Now the place was closed for the season, quiet, empty.

“Will it be Kimball’s tower?” Max asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It could be any of them.”

“You’ve got to try harder,” he said.

She closed her eyes and concentrated.

Screeching angrily, a gull swooped down, flashed past their faces with only eight or ten inches to spare.

Mary jumped back in surprise, dropped her coffee mug.

“You okay?” Max asked.

“Startled. That’s all.”

“Did it touch you?”

“No.”

“They don’t dive that close unless you trespass on their nesting grounds. But there’s nowhere around here they’d lay eggs. Besides, it’s not the time of year for that.”

The dozen gulls that had entered the harbor a few minutes ago were circling overhead. They weren’t taking advantage of the wind currents as gulls usually do; there was nothing lazy or graceful about their flight. Instead, they twisted and fluttered and soared and dived and darted frantically among one another within a tightly defined sphere of air. They seemed tortured. It was surprising that they didn’t collide. Screeching at one another, they performed an unnatural, frenzied dance in midair.

“What’s upset them?” Max wondered.

“Me,” she said.

“You? What did you do?”

She was trembling. “I tried to use my clairvoyance to see which tower the killer will use.”

“So?”

“The gulls are here to stop me from doing that.”

Astounded, he said, “Mary, that makes no sense. Trained gulls?”

“Not trained. Controlled.”

“Controlled by whom? Who sent them?”

She stared at the birds.

“Who?” he asked again. “Lingard’s ghost?”

“Maybe,” she said.

He touched her shoulder. “Mary—”

“You saw the poltergeist that was after me, dammit!”

In a let’s-calm-down-and-be-reasonable tone of voice that drove her mad, he said, “Whatever causes poltergeist phenomena can lift and hurl inanimate objects—but not living animals.”

“Listen,” she said, “you don’t know everything. You don’t know—” She looked away from him, looked up.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“The birds.”

The gulls still capered maniacally overhead, but they were silent. Perfectly silent.

“Strange,” Max said.

“I’m going inside,” she said.

She almost reached the mullioned door that connected the deck to the second-floor cocktail lounge when a seagull struck her from behind, between the shoulders, like a hammer blow. She stumbled and instinctively put one arm across her face. The wings beat at her neck. Battered the back of her head. Thundered in her ears. These weren’t like the wings that she associated with Berton Mitchell. Those wings had been leathery, membranous. These were feathered. But that didn’t make the seagulls any less frightening. She thought of the bird’s wickedly sharp, hooked beak, thought of it pecking out her eyes, and she screamed.

Max shouted something that she couldn’t hear.

She started to reach for the bird, realized it might tear her fingers, jerked her hand back.

Max knocked the gull away from her. It flopped on the deck, temporarily stunned.

Max opened the door, pushed her inside, went in after her, and pulled the door shut.

The bartender had seen the attack, and he was hurrying around the end of the counter, wiping his hands on a towel.

A heavyset, red-haired man at the bar swiveled around on his stool to see what was happening.

In one of the black vinyl booths by the windows a young couple—a pretty blonde in a green dress and a dark, intense man—looked up from their drinks.

Before the bartender had taken three steps, a seagull struck the mullioned door behind Max. Two small panes broke inward. Glass tinkled musically on the floor.

The cocktail waitress dropped her tray and ran toward the stairs that led down to the restaurant foyer.

With a sound like a shotgun blast, another gull slammed into one of the five-foot by six-foot windows that overlooked the harbor. The glass cracked but held. The injured bird toppled backward to the deck outside, leaving a smear of blackish blood to mark the collision.

“They’ll kill me.”

“No,” Max said.

“That’s what they want!”

He held her protectively, but for the first time since she had known him, his arms didn’t seem big enough, his chest broad enough, his body strong enough to guarantee her safety.

A seagull caromed off the window beside the young couple’s table. The glass cracked in a jagged, lightning-bolt pattern. The pretty blonde shrieked and scrambled out of the booth.

An instant after her companion prudently followed her, another gull rammed the same window and shattered it. Large shards of glass collapsed onto the dark pine table, bounced up in many smaller pieces, and showered over the vinyl where the couple had been sitting.

The decapitated gull landed in the center of the table; and its bloody head plopped into the woman’s martini.

Two more gulls flew in through the broken window.

“Don’t let them!” Mary shouted hysterically. “Don’t let them, don’t, don’t, oh don’t,
please
don’t!”

The young couple went to their knees, taking shelter behind and half beneath a table.

Max pushed Mary into the nearest corner. He shielded her as best he could with his body. One of the birds sailed straight at him. He threw up one arm to ward it off. The creature squealed in anger, shied away, circled through the room.

The other gull attempted to land on one of the round tables in the middle of the lounge. Its wings knocked over a centerpiece—a copper and stained-glass lantern with a candle inside—and the candle set fire to the tablecloth.

The bartender used his damp towel to extinguish the flame.

The gull swooped from the table to the shelves of liquor behind the bar. Two, three, four, half a dozen, eight bottles crashed to the floor. On his stool, a few feet from the crazed gull, the red-haired man was too bewildered to be frightened. He watched the bird with fascination as it flapped and kicked and sent more bottles to the floor. The fragrance of whiskey blossomed through the room.

The first gull flew at Max again. It came in above him, fluttered wildly in the corner, then with malign intelligence dropped behind his back, onto Mary’s head.

Its feet tangled in her hair.

“God, no! No!”

She grabbed at the bird, not caring about its beak, not caring if it pecked her fingers. It was unclean. She had to get it off her. Max reached for it, too. Then it rose from her, up and away once more, circling into the room. In a second, however, it darted back and thumped into the wall beside her head. It dropped to the floor at her feet and twitched spasmodically.

Gasping for breath, her hands to her face and fingers spread, she backed away from it.

“It’s terror-stricken,” Max said.

“Kill it!” She hardly recognized her own voice; it was altered by fear and hatred.

He hesitated. “I don’t think it’s dangerous anymore.”

“Kill it before it flies up!”

He kicked the bird into the corner, raised his foot, and with evident reluctance stepped on its head.

Gagging, Mary turned away.