Vespers (5 page)

“This is unbelievable!” she said.

“What?”

“The way they keep throwing themselves at me.”

Joyce stopped and shoved the flashlight in her sample bag. Then she dug her fingertips under the bellies of the squealing bats and roughly pushed them off. Retrieving the flashlight with her left hand she began rapidly waving her right hand back and forth. Though the bats continued to fly at her, Joyce was able to swat them aside.

“That’s better,” she said. She picked up the pace slightly and looked skyward. “It’s odd, though. Only a few are attacking. The rest are still going about their business.”

“Someone forgot to tell them the war’s over,” Marc joked.

Joyce was about twentyfive yards from the forest now. It loomed large and dark, like the woods in Cornwall. But there was something unnaturally still about this place. Uninviting. When Joyce reached the edge of the woods, the bats suddenly flew off. The silence was complete. The scientist stopped and swept the flashlight beam slowly across the trees. Nothing seemed to be moving. She stooped, picked up a large rock, and heaved it ahead. Except for thethunk of the rock there was no sound.

“What’s happening?” Marc asked.

“Apart from my escorts leaving, nothing,” Joyce said.

“The bats just took off?”

“All at once, like they had somewhere else to go.”

“More pack behavior. Nancy, I don’t like this. Are you sure you want to go in there?”

“Answers don’t just walk up to scientists, Marc.”

“I heard a scientist say something like that in a movie once. Right before he was eaten by the ‘Beast from 2,000 Fathoms.’ At least talk to me.”

Joyce said she would. She moved cautiously into the woods, shining the flashlight left and right as she proceeded.

“It’s strange. I’m about ten feet in and it’s dead quiet. I also haven’t seen any flying insects.” She stopped at a rotted log and poked it with her toe. There were beetles in the soft wood; after a moment they rushed into the cracks and under moss-covered bark. Grubs glistened under her light. “There are some shelter bugs, but that’s it.”

“Maybe the bats got the others.”

“An entire airborne population? Very unlikely.” Joyce continued walking. “Besides, I don’t see or hear anything else here. Nothing in the grass, in the leaves, anywhere.”

At about twentyfive feet in, the ground sloped downward slightly. The soft earth was knit with large, looping roots and creeping vines. Bare patches of dirt were interspersed with tall grass and occasional thorn bushes. The incline ended in a small marsh that was about fifty yards across. Joyce crouched at the edge and shined her light across the murky water. The grasses, cattails, and motherwort were bowed, and the water was still. There were no minnows, no frogs, no waterbugs. No animal life of any kind.

She stood slowly. “This isn’t natural, Marc.There aren’t even any sounds coming from-”

There was a loud crack, and then something crashed into the water in front of her. Joyce stumbled back, swearing.

“What’s wrong?” Marc demanded.

“Something fell.” Joyce turned the light on the marsh as she got back on her feet. “A large branch.” She watched as the four-foot limb settled into the mud beneath the shallow water. Then she pointed the light up. “And I see where it came from. Very interesting. We’ve got what look like otherwise healthy limbs of all sizes. They’re broken and hanging from a row of red oaks along the right rim of the marsh.” She started walking along the water’s edge, looking up at the shattered limbs. “Strange.”

“What?”

“The trees are severely damaged from top to bottom but only on the marsh side.”

“That could mean there was a weather event. A small tornado could’ve touched down and scared the bats. They get those little twisters here.”

Joyce stood directly under one of the trees. “True. But some of these branches are pushed down and others are leaningup against the trees. They’re broken in the middle and folded back.”

“A funnel could have snapped them going in, then sucked them up again going out.”

“Possibly,” she said. “Do me a favor. Ask one of the TV reporters to call their meteorological people. Find out if there were reports of any ministorms in the region.”

“You got it,” Marc said.

Joyce continued to circle the marsh. A small twisterwould explain many things. The condition of the trees. The absence of anything living aboveground. The agitated bats.

She stopped as something shimmered on an old tree to the right. She turned her light toward the trunk. It took a long moment before she realized what she was looking at. The bark was covered with blood. It was running down in a thick coat, like paint. She stepped closer and angled her head so she could see up through the leaves.

She froze. A twister wouldn’t explain the deer carcass flopped across a massive branch roughly fifteen feet up. The buck was lying on its side, its head and hindquarters hanging down, its eyes staring lifelessly. From where Joyce stood it looked as though the midsection of the animal had been torn open and gutted.

“Marc?”

“Wait a sec. I’ve got Kathy Leung checking-”

“Forget that.”

“What?”

“Forget the weather report,” Joyce said. “I’m coming out. Tell Trooper Anderson we’re going to need the chopper again. And tell Commissioner LoDolce something for me.”

“What?”

“Tell him I don’t think his problem is little brown bats.”

The Hudson River is one of the most heavily traveled waterways in the world.

The river begins in upstate New York at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondack Mountains and flows 315 miles in a mostly southward direction. It divides New York State from New Jersey for seventeen miles before spilling into the Atlantic Ocean.

Grant’s Tomb, the final resting place of President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, is among the most famous landmarks along the river. This is primarily due to the old joke about “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” and not because the mausoleum is a popular tourist stop. Located in an isolated area off residential Riverside Drive and West 122nd Street, inconvenient to pedestrians because of heavy vehicular traffic to the east, the monument has become a hangout for drug dealers and graffiti artists.

At 150 feet tall, the top of the domed rotunda is one of the highest points on the upper New York City side of the river. Whether travelers are coming south by water or by air, it is considered the beacon that welcomes them to Manhattan.

The bats glided gracefully to the top of the tomb.

Their powerful feet found clawholds in the wind-pitted stone, on the marble knob at the top, at the decorative ridges. Their wings settled gracefully on the sloping sides of the dome, and their bodies slumped forward. Many hung upside down from the eaves. They preferred letting gravity work for them to help them take flight or keep their ears erect.

A strong, persistent river wind washed over and around the monument. A tiny claw at the apex of each wing helped the bats hold on wherever they were. The wind carried with it the strong scents of the city and of the streets directly below.

They listened. First, they listened for the high, drumming cries of their kind. Some of the voices were faint, bouncing here and there before reaching them. The bats focused on the location of the nearest members of the colony. They were coming from a cave in the direction of the lightening sky. They marked the mouth of the cave not just by sight and sound but also where it was relative to the direction of the wind and the first glow of the new day.

The bats would go there-but not yet.

They also listened for the sounds of insects flying toward them. Nourishment for themselves. They listened for the sound of the bat that had summoned them. The bat that had not yet arrived.

A short time later a sound reached them from the north. It grew louder, until finally a large shadow passed over them. A shadow accompanied by a high, whistling cry. A sound that stirred them to activity by its strength and the ringing pain it caused inside the head.

Relaxing their claws, the bats released their grip on the tomb. Some walked awkwardly down the sides as they raised their wings and flew into the dawn. Others just dropped off the sides, snapped out their wings, and took off like flying devils in the wind.

It was days like these that made Barbara Mathis glad she hadn’t gone into another profession.

Look at her husband. Hal had once said that there was nothing worse than being a stockbroker who was heavy into the European markets. He was right. He left their home on the Upper West Side at threeA.M. each morning and headed down to Wall Street. He came home dead tired at sixP.M. They had dinner together, and he was asleep by eight.

Barbara’s brother was a journalist. He was never home. Her sister-in-law wrote computer software. Things changed so fast that no sooner was something written than it had to be rewritten. She was never home.

But Barbara was smart. She’d turned her teenage fancy into a profession and became a makeup artist. She freelanced for several modeling agencies in town. Most of the time her hours were tenA.M. to two or threeP.M. Models didn’t like to work early in the morning or late in the afternoon. They didn’t look their best then. That worked for Barbara. It left her time to work out in the afternoon, play around with her oil paints, and read.

But once in a rare while one of her clients had a great idea to shoot on top of a building and catch the sunrise. Like today. So Barbara had gotten up with Hal, who seemed way too happy to have her with him. She’d loaded her makeup kits into the baskets on the back of her ten-speed, armed herself with helmet, cellular phone, mace, and a loud battery-powered siren bracketed to the handlebars-to use against reckless drivers or would-be attackers-and headed into the morning.

She was happy that days like this happened only once every few months.

Barbara left the old building she and her husband had bought, gutted, and renovated and pedaled quickly down Riverside Drive. The morning air was smooth and the streets cooperatively deserted. She hunkered down over the bars and turned up the speed. She smiled, savoring the healthy slap of her heart and the just-short-of-painful burning in her thighs.

Suddenly there was a burning in her neck, then along her scalp, up the backs of her arms, and across her shoulders and down her spine. She saw something flash past her on the left, then come back at her. Something small and black that her mind registered as a pigeon. When it doubled back and flapped at her face and closed her left eye with its claws, she saw that it wasn’t a bird.

She tried to hold the handlebar with her left hand while she reached for the bat with her right. She screamed with shock and then pain. She had trouble seeing. The bike wobbled.

A moment later Barbara thought she’d hit a pothole. The nose of the bicycle dipped. She felt herself being thrown forward, but she didn’t fall. She continued forward. The muscles of her shoulder cramped for an instant, and then knife-sharp pain ripped across her back from the tops of her arms to the middle of her neck. Her back stiffened and her mouth fell open and she wanted to scream. But she couldn’t. The pain had slapped the air from her lungs, and all she could do was squeal.

She felt her throat tighten with sound, but she didn’t hear it. All she heard was the rush of the wind and something beating all around her. It sounded like when she was a little girl and hid in the sheets on her mother’s clothesline and wondered if that’s what it felt like to be an angel in the clouds.

Barbara was dimly aware of the bicycle falling to the ground in front of her. Or the street growing dark and her back trembling and weak, hot and then cool. She tried to reach up, but there was no strength in her arms. Then her lungs stopped. Her eyelids sagged.

For a moment before they shut, she thought she saw the comforting clouds of her youth…

Robert Gentry spent the night at the Hotel Windermere on West End Avenue and Ninety-second Street. The manager, Dale Rupert, was one of his oldest and closest friends.

Rupe used to run the Hotel Dixie on West Forty-fourth Street. When Gentry was still a beat cop, the Dixie Hotel was the “Midtown Eden” for junkies and pushers. Rupe hated the drug traffic and had Gentry boot the pushers out. The one-armed Vietnam veteran hated it even more when swaggering drug boss Stevie “Cool” Kuhl came to see him one day. Cool threatened to break Rupe’s remaining arm with a mallet if he stopped Kuhl’s people from dealing in the lobby.

That was all Rupe had to hear.

With the veteran’s full cooperation, Gentry brought in the Special Narcotics Enforcement Unit. The SNEU fitted Rupe with a wire, and thanks to his efforts they sent Stevie Cool to prison for fifteen years.

But the Dixie operation uncovered a larger New York-southern Connecticut drug chain that SNEU agents in both states wanted to break. Having completed his requisite two-year tour as a patrolman, Gentry asked then-Precinct Commander Veltre to be transferred to SNEU. He spent several weeks undergoing intense tactical training at Camp Smith in upstate New York, then came back to Midtown South and worked as a plainclothes narc running buy-and-bust operations. Later, in order to break the Mizuno ring, he went undercover. Tearing down that smuggling-and-dealing chain consumed the next five years of his life. It sent fourteen major dealers to prison and earned Gentry a Medal of Valor for bravery. He gave the medal to Rupe. He wasn’t sure why, but his partner Bernie was gone, and it seemed like the right thing to do. Gentry and Rupe remained friends. Rupe stayed at the Dixie until it was torn down in 1990.

There were no rooms available at the Windermere, but Rupe let Gentry have the couch in a psychiatrist’s office on the first floor. The leather couch was comfortable, though Gentry had trouble sleeping for more than an hour at a time. Some paranoid kept calling the answering machine and waking him. The man was complaining that his apartment building was too quiet. He was sure the neighbors were listening to him. He said he could hear them putting drinking glasses against the wall and moving them around. By fourA.M. Gentry seriously considered calling the man back, informing him he was listening from the room next door, and telling him to go the hell to sleep.