Creepers Page 4

  “Tico, you take Mr. Thornbeck downstairs. Answer any questions he has. I’ll be right there.”

  Willie’s temporary second-in-command stared blankly for a moment, then began to hustle the Dogs of Hell and the hayseed reporter down the stairs. Why Willie kissed Corelli’s ass was none of his business.

  “Okay, Corelli, what can I do for you?”

  “You get wind of anything… unusual… going on down here?” Hoyte heard almost as much scuttlebutt as the TA-maybe more.

  “Unusual like what?” A shiver of fear traced its way up his spine.

  Corelli shrugged. “Can’t say for sure. People getting lost.”

  “Shit, man, what’s you talkin’ about?”

  “I’m talking about a woman who walked into the subway early Wednesday morning and never walked out, that’s what I’m talking about,” Corelli said hotly.

  “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no womens.” Fear gripped Willie’s chest and he nervously twisted the gold cross at his neck back and forth between his fingers. “You sound kina weird, you know that, Corelli? People gettin’ lost, indeed.” Miguel had said Ted Slade got “lost” in the subway, too.

  “Being called weird by you, Willie, is a compliment.” Corelli smiled easily, but he immediately grew serious again. “I want you to keep your eyes and ears open for anything out of the ordinary. Your boys are everywhere; they hear.”

  “And what exactly do I tell them to look out for, Detective Corelli?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking you. Now, come on.” He started toward the stairs.

  “You goin’ somewhere?”

  “Coney Island. For the rest of the day, Willie, I’m your shadow.”

  Willie shook his head and walked swiftly past Corelli to the stairs. “You do what you want, man, but I tell you one thing for positive: no way Willie Hoyte ever gonna have no white shadow.” Despite himself, he smiled, then raced down the stairs.

  Louise Hill had mixed feelings about Labor Day. On the one hand, it was a holiday and she could take a day off from work without feeling guilty about not putting in a full eight hours in her textile-design studio. On the other hand, Labor Day meant school was starting and for the next nine months Lisa, her seven-year-old daughter, would be away most of the day. It was only with the prospect of Lisa’s return to school that Louise realized how much she had come to depend on her company over the summer months.

  “Lisa, come on or we’ll be late,” Louise shouted down the long hallway that connected the living room to the bedrooms in the back of the apartment.

  “How can we be late for a street fair?” came a sweet, disembodied voice.

  “Never mind being smart, Miss Hill, just shake a leg.” Louise frowned on mothers who bragged about their children, so she rarely confided to her few friends her belief that Lisa was an exceptionally gifted child. Why bother? It showed in everything the child did-in her vocabulary, in the infinite variety of her interests, even in her skill with that most rudimentary form of artistic expression: finger painting.

  Moments later, Lisa appeared dressed in painter’s coveralls dyed a very vocal pink, a violet short-sleeved shirt, and red plastic sandals. She was every inch Louise’s daughter-long black hair framed mischievous brown eyes, a pert nose, and a laughing mouth. When she reached the sunny living room she stopped, leaned up against a wall, and wriggled her foot provocatively at her mother.

  “What on earth are you doing?” It was a trap, but Louise asked, nevertheless.

  “You told me to shake a leg. Is this one okay?” Lisa’s smile quickly became a convulsive belly laugh.

  “Lisa Hill, you are the silliest girl I know.” Louise scooped her daughter into her arms and kissed her. “And I love you very much.”

  “Me you too, Mommy,” she replied in their special code.

  “Now, let’s do get going before SoHo gets too crowded.” At Lisa’s insistence they were going to a street and crafts fair in the downtown section of New York that had grown from a refuge for artists to a fashionably arty and expensively bohemian extension of the Upper East Side. Louise hated the self-consciousness of SoHo and usually avoided it at all costs.

  “Will you buy me something, Mommy?” Lisa asked as they walked across Seventy-eighth Street toward Central Park West.

  “I’ll treat you to a ride on the subway. How’s that?”

  “Thanks a bunch,” Lisa replied somberly.

  Louise smiled, but her daughter’s reply was depressing; she’d phrased the answer just like Dave would have. He had a way of being cute that stung later, like an internal wound that never broke the skin’s surface. Louise rarely thought of her ex-husband anymore, but when it happened, she was always surprised to discover a deep well of resentment even after nearly a year. She told herself over and over she’d pulled through the divorce just fine. She had Lisa and the big West Side apartment, a successful career designing fabrics. But the undeniable fact remained that Dave had left her for another woman. And that hurt.

  At the Seventy-second Street Station, they just missed the downtown train and walked down to the steamy lower level to wait for another. With the shocking condition the transit system’s finances were in, plus the holiday, Louise knew she and Lisa might wait up to twenty minutes in the grimy station before another train came.

  Five minutes of silence later, Lisa pulled herself from her mother’s grip and sauntered down the platform, ogling the obscenity-covered posters and advertisements on the wall.

  “Lisa, come back here,” Louise said, her voice betraying her dampening enthusiasm as the heat began to wilt her.

  “I want to look at the pictures, Mommy,” Lisa complained with a touch of defiance in her voice.

  “I want you back here now!” Being in an empty subway station made Louise nervous. There were just too many horrible stories for her even to think of relaxing. “Lisa, it’s for your own safety.”

  “It’s okay, we’re the only ones here,” Lisa observed as she moved still farther down the platform away from the stairway where her mother had posted herself.

  Ten minutes later Louise was ready to call it a day. Her light cotton dress was soaked and her hair was matted across her forehead. Her mood had swung from cautious optimism to angry impatience. The train was late. She could barely breathe. And Lisa was being downright ornery about obeying her orders. Well, let her be stubborn! If something dreadful happened to her, never let it be said Louise hadn’t warned her.

  Angry voices from the upstairs station echoed down the stairway and caught Louise’s attention. An unseen man was reviling the token clerk, who, in turn, matched insult with insult over the microphone that linked him with the world outside his booth. The ferocious, mainly sexual imprecations of the argument had an other-worldly quality that somehow fit the hot subway station perfectly. Louise listened intently for a minute or two, and when the voices ceased, she yawned and returned her attention to her daughter.

  The platform was empty.

  Lisa was gone.

  Louise blinked, and a line of perspiration set free by the gesture trickled into her eyes and forced them shut. With two frantic swipes she cleared them and looked again. Still nothing.

  “Lisa?” she yelled, at the same time falling into a walk that quickly became a trot “Lisa? Where are you?” There was another stairway at the far end of the platform. She was probably there playing a trick. Some trick, scaring her mother half to death! “Lisa, are you hiding from me, honey?” She heard the panic in her voice and with that recognition was instantly engulfed in terror. “Lisa, where are you?”

  She was running full out now, sailing past the graffiti-covered posters Lisa had been examining, barely noting the same obscenities that, shouted out, had distracted her a few fateful minutes before.

  “Lisa, dammit, you’d better come out or…” Louise’s voice shattered the heavy silence. There was no place for her to hide. She had to have left the station, unless…

  Louise scrambled to the edge of the platform
and nearly tipped onto the tracks from the momentum of her flight. She scanned the roadbed north, then south, almost hoping to see her daughter’s body there; bruised, perhaps, but still within reach, within safety. The tracks were vacant. She peered far into the tunnel, thinking for a moment she’d caught sight of some movement, something that fleetingly captured her peripheral vision. There was a flutter of gray against the blackness, then nothing.

  The rumble of an approaching express train grew, and a vortex of dank air forced from the tunnel pressed against Louise like the moist hands of a stranger. Twin lights broke through the darkness as the train roared into the station on the far track and hurtled past her. The sounds of its wheels clattering over the rails grew in an unending crescendo as the noise pierced her brain like a scalpel.

  Lisa was gone!

  During the infinitesimal moments she’d looked away, something terrible had happened to her daughter. It was her fault! Hers alone!

  It was then, as the last car of the express vanished into the darkness of the tunnel, that Louise began to scream.

  Corelli popped off the cap of a bottle of Miller’s, poured it into a chilled pilsner glass, and retreated to the small spare bedroom he used as an office and study. The beer went down smooth, constricting his throat, then releasing it with satisfaction. There was nothing like a cold one on a hot night.

  He kicked off his shoes and sat down in the reclining chair to catch his breath. It had been a long, hard day. Willie Hoyte had forced that poor sucker Thornbeck to ride out to Coney Island twice before letting him off the hook. The most Hoyte could hope from West Side News was a mention in the “West Side Personalities” column. Corelli chuckled at the irony of it.

  He finished the brew with one last long pull, belched grandly, then moved to his desk. There was work to do tonight He was onto something. It had started with the Penny Comstock report that morning. The thought of her disappearance had niggled him all day. Dolchik’s explanation that she’d run from an imagined bogeyman was lamebrained; it smacked of “investigation canceled due to laziness.” Or worse, a cover-up on the captain’s part. Still, the fact remained that this Comstock woman had vanished. A call to Lost Property out at TA headquarters in Brooklyn was a dead end-Penny Comstock hadn’t called about her lost purse, nor had she come down to claim it.

  Corelli switched on the light over his desk, flipped on the radio to an easy-listening music station, and opened his briefcase. It hadn’t taken much to find the file he’d wanted. He’d just waited until Dolchik left for the day, then opened the captain’s office door with a credit card. Illegal? Yes. Immoral? Never with Dolchik. The file had been there, as Corelli expected it would, stuck in the least accessible file cabinet in a bottom drawer near the back. But it was there.

  He turned the reddish-brown folder over a couple of times, almost afraid to open it Corelli had a gut feeling about this. His instincts told him he wasn’t going to like what he found; his sense of justice told him that was just too goddamned bad. He was a transit cop. His job was to make the subways safe for the paying passengers, Dolchik or no Dolchik.

  He arranged the file right-side-up in front of him. If it hadn’t been for Willie Hoyte, Corelli would probably be reading a book now or maybe watching an old movie on television. But Hoyte inadvertently had tipped him off earlier. It wasn’t so much what he’d said as what he hadn’t said. Not how he’d reacted, but how he hadn’t reacted. Corelli took a moment and remembered Willie’s face when asked about people getting lost in the subway. Hoyte had lied when he said he hadn’t heard anything. There was recognition in his eyes. And fear. Fear most of all. Willie Hoyte at least suspected something was happening in the hell called the New York subway. And just as soon as Corelli finished reading Dolchik’s secret file, he’d know something too.

  He readjusted the light to stall for a few seconds’ time, took in a deep breath, then opened the pilfered file marked “MISSING PERSONS.”

  September 4, Tuesday

  ------------------------------------------------

  3

  Corelli stood tensed at the edge of the subway platform. He leaned forward and squinted slightly. He’d seen movement in the tunnel, an almost imperceptible change in the gradation of darkness like shadows passing before shadows. It was about to begin. He’d read Dolchik’s file, knowing that justice would be meted out one day. But why should he be sacrificed when only Dolchik’s blood would balance the scales?

  The vague movements took form and shape and moments later an army of faceless men and women staggered forward from the dark tunnel, their outstretched arms wavering in the dank air like antennae of a monstrous new species of insect. These subterranean creatures were the ranks of the missing-the mothers, brothers, lovers, friends who had vanished into the maze of the subway forever. And now they wanted revenge.

  As the flailing hands of the leader made contact with Corelli and twisted fingers settled around his neck, a distant buzzer sounded. The ghouls froze, then began to retreat as the noise grew louder and louder and louder and…

  Corelli rolled to the side of the bed and punched the alarm clock, immediately silencing it. He stretched to release the tension from his muscles and sat up, wiping a fine gloss of perspiration from his forehead. After a glass of orange juice he’d feel better; he always did. Having nightmares was so familiar that the ritual of getting over them each morning was as automatic as shaving and showering. But this latest terror was different; it had broken an apparently endless cycle of reliving Jean’s death. And for that reason alone Frank knew unequivocally that finding Dolchik’s missing-persons file would be another milestone in his life.

  Showered and dressed and still feeling shaky from the dream, Frank concocted a mug of bitter instant coffee and sat down at the table crammed into a corner of his tiny kitchen. He stared out the window down at Hudson Street where it ended abruptly at Abingdon Square; usually he liked this particular view of his Greenwich Village, but today he suspected he wasn’t going to like anything.

  Damn Dolchik, he thought to himself, he’s up to something. Keeping track of M.P.’s was no mere parlor game, not when human lives were involved. Yet he’d been secretly collecting missing-persons reports all along like some kid hoarding baseball cards. The reports were all fragmentary, usually based on the testimony of a token-booth clerk or maintenance worker. They followed the same pattern: a lone passenger, waiting for a train late at night, cries for help, then… silence…no one on the platform, and a confused-and usually terrified-subway worker. Dolchik obviously had seen a pattern. Many of the disappearances had occurred in parts of the city where he had no business being. He was onto something, all right. But why, yesterday, had he lied about his interest in Penny Comstock when hers was the last-and most recent-name on the list?

  Corelli sat back and sipped the coffee thoughtfully. He’d often suspected that behind the facade of Stan Dolchik’s redneck boisterousness there was a cunning and agile intelligence. And now, more than ever, he believed his instinct about the captain was right. Now the question was: What was he going to do about it?

  A tapping on the front door roused Corelli from his quandary. It had to be Ralph Myers with the morning newspaper. Corelli had few friends, and those he had never came prowling around at seven-thirty in the morning. He opened the front door.

  “How ya doing, Mr. Myers?”

  “It’s a fine morning, Detective Corelli,” Myers replied, the hint of a smile on his face. He was the super’s father, a white-haired man in his early seventies who refused to grow old and useless. For Ralph Myers, fetching the morning paper for Corelli, then carrying it up six flights to his top-floor apartment, was proof positive he wasn’t ready to be fitted for a shroud quite yet.

  “Anything worth reading?” Corelli took the Daily News from the old man and glanced at the front page.

  “Wouldn’t know myself. Not much interested in what’s going on in this lousy world.”

  “Sounds sensible.” Corelli gave him two quarte
rs. “Want to see this when I’m through?”

  The old man shook his head like always and started back down the stairs. Myers had read every word of the paper before delivering it, but never would have admitted to the crime. This was his little game, and in a small way, it usually got Corelli’s day off on the right track. Today the sight of the old man only depressed him.

  He made himself a second cup of coffee before scanning the newspaper. Shit, today was going to be a bad one. He’d known it the minute he woke up from the dream, and reading the deep sadness and loneliness in Ralph Myers’ face cinched it. Well, the latest news would certainly take his mind off his own troubles. The inch-high headline “KID GRABBED FROM IND” assaulted Corelli from the front page. Opposite the lurid story was a blurry photograph of a young girl Corelli guessed to be six or seven. Her wide-eyed innocence was deceptive, for even in the grainy black-and-white picture a spark of mischief gilded her eyes. Her name was Lisa Hill. She looked like a nice kid. A smart kid.

  But not smart enough.

  He read the story, expecting the usual sensation-seeking drivel designed to hold a reader’s interest during a morning subway ride. But as he read the details of Lisa Hill’s “abduction” a second time, Corelli felt the muscles at the back of his neck tense. Lisa and her mother had been alone on the downtown platform, and witnesses on the uptown platform swore that at the time of the child’s disappearance no one had come upstairs! Officials speculated Lisa had to have been taken up the two levels and out onto the street. Any other explanation was absurd.