The Vision (19 page)

It was an unusual piece—a .45 Auto Colt. But nothing off the shelf. Something special. A collector’s item. The metal was engraved with delicate leaves and vines. There were also a number of animals—rabbits, deer, pheasants, foxes—etched in positions of flight beginning at the forward sight on the barrel, all of them incredibly detailed, beautifully rendered, all racing toward the butt.

He saw what appeared to be printing on the steel, where it met the wooden handgrip. The bedroom light was poor. The letters were tiny, between a quarter and a half inch high, inscribed with a spidery flourish of the engraver’s tool. Holtzman couldn’t read them.

He stood up and, carrying the Colt on the pen, went to the nearest lamp.

by W. Thorben
Seattle 1975

A collector’s piece like this one often passed through the hands of many owners who purchased and resold it at gun shows without bothering to register it with authorities. Nevertheless, with the engraver’s name (and providing the gun had not been stolen from a collection), they should be able to find the man who had commissioned it from Thorben. From him they had a chance of tracing it to the man who’d dropped it while coming through the window.

Still manipulating the weapon with his ballpoint pen, Holtzman looked at the opposite side. Again, where the steel met the wooden handgrip, there was writing. Not the same words. He squinted. He read it. Then read it again. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

A siren rose in the distance and grew rapidly nearer.

Holtzman went down the hall to the side of the house that faced the dead-end macadam road. He stood in the open doorway he’d first found ajar.

Another police car, emergency beacons blazing, roared up the long hill from town. Patmore’s station wagon wasn’t far behind it.

Beneath the hall light Holtzman held up the Colt and read the second legend again.

commissioned by
Max Bergen

18

The darkness around
the pavilion was lumpy, velvety, and deep. It offered dozens of hiding places.

Mary carried the flashlight, hooding it with one hand. Every time she made a sudden move in response to imagined noises, shadows danced.

She stayed close to Max as they circled the building, looking for a place where the killer might have gotten inside. Last night the police had entered with a key provided by the owners. That was a convenience denied both them and their quarry. The killer would have to break something to get in and reach the tower; he would have to leave a trail.

She was impatient. Twice she urged Max to hurry.

Already the parade of lighted boats had begun its first circuit of the harbor, entering from the staging area at sea, still far down the channel but approaching fast. By seven-thirty the queen of the parade might well have begun her first pass of the tower.

On the west side of the pavilion, which faced the harbor and was flanked with a railed boardwalk, they found a shattered pane of glass in one of the mullioned windows that looked in on the lightless, deserted coffee shop.

“Did the killer do this?” Max asked.

She directed the flashlight at the ground, and in the soft glow of its backwash, she studied the damaged window. With the fingertips of her left hand she traced the wooden ribs that framed the missing pane. The night was already chilly, but the air got suddenly colder as she concentrated on the psychic impressions that the window held for her.

Wicka-wicka-wicka!

She shuddered, squeezed the flashlight as hard as she could, gritted her teeth but refused to panic.

“Something?” Max asked.

“Yes. He did this.”

“Is he inside now?”

“No. He was here . . . late yesterday . . . after the police left . . . I can see . . . many hours after the police left . . . early this morning . . . at dawn . . . up in the tower.” She took her hand from the window, and an invisible connection snapped. “But he hasn’t returned yet tonight.”

“You’re positive about that?”

“Absolutely.”

“But he’ll be here any minute?”

“Yes. So hurry.”

Wicka-wicka-wicka!

Ignore it, she told herself. It’s not real. Max doesn’t hear it, does he? Only you hear it. Psychic impressions. Nothing is really overhead. No wings. No danger. No wings at all.

“We don’t want to make this any more of a spectacle than we have to,” Max said. “Some of these restaurants farther around the harbor might have a pretty good view of us. Better shut off the flashlight.”

She did as he said.

The night closed around her.

Max put one hand through the missing pane, reached up, and fumbled for the latch on the vertical, metal center post. “Do you realize this is breaking and entering?”

“I suppose it is,” she said.

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Max, will you
hurry?
”

He swung the tall halves of the window outward without making a sound.

She climbed onto the sill, which was only three feet above the boardwalk, stepped down into the coffee shop. She glanced around the room, but she couldn’t see anything.

Max looked both ways along the boardwalk, then followed her, closed and latched the window.

“It’s even darker in here than it was out there,” she said. “We’ll be tripping over something every other step if I don’t use the flash.”

“Just be sure you don’t point it at a window,” he said. “Keep it hooded.”

She switched on the light, shielding half the lens with her left hand.

The restaurant contained approximately thirty tables, all of them bolted to the floor. Apparently because the chairs couldn’t be bolted down as well, they had been removed and put in storage until Kimball’s reopened in the spring.

The only public entrance to the coffee shop—a pair of many-paned glass doors that matched the big mullioned windows—was from inside of the pavilion, of which this restaurant was but one small part. The killer had smashed the lock. When Max pushed open the doors, they moved stiffly and grated on their unlubricated hinges.

He stood still for a moment, listening to the settling sounds of the building. Finally he said, “You’re really sure he’s not here already?”

“Positive.”

Although the psychic impressions were not always complete, they’d never deceived her. She hoped her talent hadn’t failed this time; because if it had, if the killer
was
already here and waiting, she was as good as dead.

From the coffee shop they entered a corridor that curved out of sight in both directions. It was lined with small gift shops: Silly T-Shirts, The Ceramic Factory, The House of Glass Miniatures, and a dozen more, all empty and dark.

Max and Mary turned left and quickly discovered that the long corridor was a semicircle leading, at both ends, into the cavernous main hall of the arcade. That huge room was bare now, but in season it would be filled with a variety of pinball machines, shuffleboard, bowling, shooting galleries, electronic games, and carnival booths where you could get your fortune told or where a boy could spend ten dollars in quarters to win a three-dollar toy animal for his best girl.

They walked to the center of the room. Their footsteps echoed hollowly from wall to wall and from curve to curve of the high domed ceiling.

Mary stopped and pointed the flashlight where Lou had said to look. She saw an archway at the rear of the room, steps beyond it. Above the arch was a sign:
THIS WAY TO OBSERVATION DECK.

Screams, the sound of wings, a body hurtling off the bottom steps and through the archway, wings, a body writhing on the wooden arcade floor, wings, strangled cries for help
 . . .

She swayed under the impact of the psychic images.

“What’s the matter?” Max asked.

“I see . . . ” She tried to hold on to the vision, but it rapidly faded and would not be coaxed to return. “Someone’s going to die tonight at the foot of those stairs.”

“One of us?”

“I don’t know.”

“The killer?”

“I hope.”

“It’ll be him,” Max said. “Not us. We’ll live. We’ve got to. I know it.”

Not as certain as he was, reluctant to think about it for fear her courage would vanish, she asked, “Where should we wait for him?”

“I’ll wait at the bottom of the steps. You’ll wait at the top of the tower.”

“At the top of . . . oh, no!”

“Oh, yes.”

“I’m staying with you,” she said.

“Look, if Lou uses the car horn to warn us, we probably won’t hear it in here. But you’d be certain to hear it if you were in the tower—”

“Forget it.”

“—on the open deck.”

“Max, I’m staying here.”

“No, dammit!”

She took a step back from him.

His face was dark with anger. “
I’m
the one who’s an expert with guns. If it comes down to a shooting match, you’ll be in my way. If I have to move fast, I don’t want to have to stop and worry whether you’re in the line of fire.”

“I’m not a hopeless idiot,” she said. “I can stay out of your way.”

He glared at her and said nothing.

She said, “But what if I have a vision while I’m up there, something important? How will I let you know what’s going to happen?”

“I’ll be here at the bottom of the steps—not more than sixty feet from you. You can reach me quickly if it’s necessary.”

“I don’t know . . . ”

“I’ll put it more bluntly,” Max said. “Either do what I say and go to the observation deck, or so help me God, I’m going to take a punch at you, lightly as I can, but hard enough to knock you out. Then I’ll carry you back to the Mercedes and call this whole thing off.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t I?”

She knew he wasn’t making idle threats.

“I’ll do it because I love you,” he said. “I don’t want you to get killed.”

“And I don’t want
you
killed,” she said.

“Good. Then you’ll listen to me. We’ve both got a better chance of living through this if you’re not here to distract me when and if the shooting starts.”

She was filled with conflicting emotions. “Will you kill him?”

“If he forces me to.”

“Don’t hesitate to do it,” she said. “Don’t give him a chance. He’s too clever. Shoot him the second you see him.”

“The police might have something to say about that.”

“To hell with the police.”

“Mary,
are
you going upstairs? There’s not much time. Do we stay or do I carry you out of here? It’s entirely your decision, but you’ve got to make your mind up fast.”

Partly because she saw a glimmer of truth in his argument, but mainly because she had no choice, she said, “All right.”

They walked quickly to the archway. At the foot of the stairs he put his hands on her shoulders, and she raised her face to him. They kissed.

“When you get to the top,” he said, “don’t stand around looking at the sights. Even at night someone on the ground might be able to see you. If the killer spots you, he might back off. You say we’ll have to have a showdown with him sooner or later. So we may as well do what we can to end it tonight.”

“Who gets the flashlight?” she asked.

“You keep it.”

She was relieved, but she said, “You’ll be in the dark down here . . . with him.”

“If I switched on a flashlight when I heard him coming,” Max said, “I’d only be making a target of myself. Besides, if he isn’t aware I’m waiting for him, he’s not going to enter a pitch-black building and try to navigate through it without a flash. I’ll be able to see him by his own light.”

She kissed him again, turned away, and climbed the eight flights of stairs alone.

At the top she doused the flashlight and stood for a moment in the fierce wind, looking out at the parade of lighted boats on the harbor. Then she heeded Max’s advice and sat down with her back to the waist-high wall that bordered the deck.

Darkness. Some light. Not much.

Alone now. All alone.

No. Not alone. Where did a thought like that come from? Max was nearby.

The wind raced through the belfry, moaned like a human voice.

She huddled in her leather coat and wished for a sweater.

It would rain soon. She could smell it in the air.

She pushed the read-out button on her digital wristwatch, and lighted numerals glowed bloodred in the dark.

The eyes
.

She suddenly remembered the luminous, reddish eyes that she had seen in Berton Mitchell’s cottage. She could not conjure up a face to go with them. Just the eyes . . . and the sound of wings . . . and the feel of wings all over her . . . and still the eyes, wild, inhuman.

She remembered something else, too; remembered it with a jolt—a small voice at the back of her mind, whispery but intense:
“I’m a demon and a vampire. I like the taste of blood
.
”

Someone had spoken those very words to her in Mitchell’s cottage twenty-four years ago.

Who? Berton Mitchell himself? Who else could it have been?

Although she tried to use her psychic talent to transform the vivid memory into a clairvoyant vision, she was not able to bring much light to the gloomy, penumbral images that swam and pulsed malignantly. The mysterious face of the creature that spoke to her remained just out of sight.

But the inner voice grew louder. Somehow it swelled and thundered and overwhelmed her, yet remained a whisper. The harsh words came faster, even faster, and she was shaken by them.
“I’m a demon and a vampire. I like the taste of blood. I’m a demon and a vampire, I like the taste of blood, I’m a demon and a vampire
—
”

“Stop it!” she said.

She put her hands to her ears and willed the voice from her mind. Gradually it faded. When it was gone, she slumped forward, dizzy.

“I’ll be all right,” she said softly, urgently. “It’ll be all right. No one will die. It’ll be all right. Tonight it ends. It’ll be fine after tonight.”

Slowly the realities of the night impressed themselves upon her once more: wind, cold, darkness.

Distracted by the memory of those luminous eyes, she hadn’t noticed the time when she pressed the button on her watch. She pressed it again.

7:24.

Six minutes to go.

* * *

Heavy ebony clouds,
vaguely phosphorescent at their bearded edges, sailed soundlessly toward the east. The sky was silent for long minutes, a muffling blanket tented over the earth; but now it crashed and flared again.

The wind lifted a scrap of paper from the pavement, pasted it to the windshield of the Mercedes for a few seconds, then tore it away.

Lou shifted uneasily, leaned into the steering wheel, squinted at the purple-black shadows that flanked the pavilion. The longer he stared, the more the darkness seemed to shimmer as if it were alive. He kept seeing movement where there was none; his eyes played a hundred tricks on him. He didn’t have the proper temperament for a sentinel. He had no patience.

He looked at his watch.

7:29.

Someone rapped three times, hard, on the window to his left, inches from his head.

He jerked around.

A familiar face peered in at him, smiled.

Confused and somewhat embarrassed by the terror that must have been visible on his face, Lou said, “Hey! You startled me.” He felt for the latch, opened the door, and got out of the car. “What are you doing here?”

Too late, he saw the butcher knife.

* * *

Lights were on
in most of the downstairs rooms at 440 Ocean Hill Lane, but when Rudy Holtzman rang the bell, no one answered.

Patmore tried the door and found it wasn’t locked. He pushed it open. Wind rushed past him and swept a stack of unopened mail off the small table in the foyer.

Patmore couldn’t see anyone in the entrance-way or in the living room beyond. He leaned through the door and shouted, “Pasternak! You in there?”

No one answered.

“Maybe he’s dead,” Holtzman said.

Because he was wearing civilian clothes, Patmore took a silvery badge from the pocket of his overcoat and pinned it to his lapel. He drew his service revolver from the outer coat pocket, and, holding it with the barrel pointed at the ceiling, he stepped into the house.