Get Off the Unicorn (24 page)

“Yeah, the punk says, ‘You gotta have evidence, Lootenant, and this time there ain't any, Lootenant. Not unless ya can read minds.' That's what he says, s'help me.”

Maria!
Pete thought with a sense of shock.

What was it Maria had said? When she was hungry, she didn't have the strength to hear far away. If she were well fed, how far could she hear? All the way to Chicago? To grab the numbers?

The conclusion just couldn't be dodged. Maria and her pa were involved. But how would she know she was doing something wrong? Whoever had latched onto her would be jubilant over the fact they were able to put something over on the cops. To Maria, cops were just the fuzz. Cops spelt trouble for her father. Cops meant Welfare, and hospitals, and she didn't know which one scared her the most.

“At least,” Pete said to Wizard, “she's not in that crummy room. She's cared for. That was all I wanted, wasn't it? And she is a minor, so even when the gangs gets pulled in, she wouldn't be booked. Why, those hoods might even get a doctor to try and fix her up.” He groaned. “And I sure as hell can't go to the Chief and say, ‘Look, there's a kid telepath running the numbers.' Not even if I
knew
where to find her.”

Wizard nuzzled his hand.

 

“
Now what would Al Finch be wanting with a high-priced specialist from Minneapolis?” the desk sergeant asked Pete when he came on duty the next night. “He's got medics and nurses hopping in and out of his pad like he had the Asian crud.”

“Better him than you,” said Pete, automatically laughing. But he was thinking
Maria!

Pete found out where Al Finch was living. Outside the building, Pete saw a truck from a pet shop deliver a triple cage of singing birds, and he knew his hunch was right. Finch was making book with Maria's mind-reading ability.

“Maria,” Pete called in his head, “Maria, answer me. I know you're there. What you're doing, reading numbers, is wrong. It's causing a lot of trouble. It'll get you in trouble, too.”

Pete,
came Maria's voice in his head, sweetly, happily,
Pete, I'm not hungry anymore and I have so many pretty birds. And you should see how nice Pa looks now he's got a good job. I'm clean, and my whole room is clean. I've got pretty dresses.

Her giggle was light and tinkling.
Smelly men come and poke me around. They say they want to fix me. They can't, of course. Some of them say it out loud and some tell Al they can. Then they say inside they can't, that I'm a hopeless case.
She giggled again, as if this were the funniest thing she'd ever said.

“Maria, I won't say Al isn't trying to help you and make you happy. But he gets more out of you than you get out of him. He's just using you. You miss getting the numbers through once and he'll hurt you.”

Maria's laugh bubbled up.
I don't let myself get hurt. And Al's all right. He thinks the damnedest things sometimes.
She giggled naughtily.
He says he's my sugar daddy.

“Maria, you shouldn't use such words.”

Maria's incredible laugh chimed through his head.
Al says it's cute the way I talk. And he really does like me.

“I'll bet,” Pete said in a harsh tone. “Look, Maria, you can have the birds, and the good food, and a good job for your father, but get them from the right sort of people. Al Finch is dangerous! He's got a record for assault, attempted homcide, you name it. I'm afraid he'll hurt you.”

He wouldn't dare,
Maria replied with complete self-assurance.
I'm very important to him, and I know he means it. Do you know I have my own Coke machine?

“Maria, Maria,” Pete said with a groan.
Oh God, how do I explain? How, please, do I have the nerve to try?
“Maria,” he called as loud as he could in his mind, “Maria, promise me one thing. You get scared of Al, or worried, just call Wizard or Pirate. Any of the dogs. They'll protect you. Just call the dogs!”

Wizard barked twice, paused, barked twice again. So did three stray dogs across the street. And a cat walking on a nearby fence meowed in the same sequence.

Pete tried not to worry. But she was so frail; well-fed or not, she couldn't have great reserves of energy. Finch might kill her without meaning to. He'd have to find a way to stop Finch using her.

On his day off, following a strong hunch, Pete hung around the betting windows at the Brandywine Raceway. Sure enough, Maria's father shuffled up to the ten-dollar window, just before the second race. Pete sidled up to him.

“You tell Al to be careful with Maria,” he said. “He can use her too much, you know. He could kill her. And the cops'll tumble to Finch soon enough. They got a lead.”

“Who're you?” the little man asked nervously, his face twitching as his red-rimmed eyes slid over Pete's face. “Fuzz?” He scurried away.

Pete had had a good look at his face, though, and was able to identify him in the rogue's gallery as Hector Barres. He had a record; vagrancy, drunk and disorderly, petty larceny.

No appeal based on Maria's frailty would reach Barres. Right now he had all he wanted from life. Barres' thoughts were only for the money rolling in today. Tomorrow, and Maria's welfare, were far from his mind.

Now that he had Maria's last name, Pete checked hospital records and found her date of birth. Her mother had been picked up unconscious, already in active labor, and brought into the emergency ward. The intern who had delivered Maria had expressed doubts that the infant would survive, due to prenatal malnutrition.

Maria's mother had died in the same hospital two years later. The cause was neglect. Not on the part of the hospital. She had had tuberculosis, diabetes, and a coronary condition. She had been severely beaten about the abdomen and died of internal hemmorrhaging before they could operate.

Pete took to talking to Wizard on the beat at night, hoping that Maria would overhear him. He told Wizard all about Maria's mother, about her father's record, about how Maria could use her great gift to help people. He told her all he knew about paranormal powers, his feeling that she must conserve her energies; and he repeatedly cautioned her to call Wizard or Pirate if she felt endangered. Sometimes he had the feeling she listened to him. He knew she often talked to Wizard.

Then Al Finch stepped up his operations to include narcotics, apparently having approached and reached an agreement with the local drug pushers in an unprecedented crossover in vice. Pete and the police went quietly berserk. No known pushers were suddenly in evidence. There was no direct contact with or indirect approach to Finch. All known pushers were clean when they were picked up on routine searches. Not a sniff on them. But the stuff was circulating in greater quantities than had ever reached Wilmington before.

“Maria,” Pete called resolutely to her from the corner opposite Al's apartment. “Do you know what drugs do to people?”

Sure. They have the coolest dreams to read.

“Do you take it?” He gasped, frightened.

I don't need to,
Maria laughed with a mirth that no longer chimed. Her voice—the essence of the voice she sent—was hard and brassy.
I dig it from others. It's boss, man.

“Then dig what happens when they can't pay to get it, Maria. When they have withdrawal. Dig that and see how boss it is!”

But, Pete honey: you gave me the idea yourself. It's much easier to grab the stuff from . . . well, never mind where.
Her voice was sickeningly smug.
Easier than reading numbers out of Chicago. You said I was to take care of myself. I am.

“I don't know why I bother with you. You know you're doing wrong, Maria. And when you get hurt, it'll be your own fault.” Then . . .

He didn't know what hit him. When he came to, he was in the emergency ward with Joe bending over him anxiously.

“Brother, you've been out three hours and there isn't a mark on you.”

Pete carefully touched his sore head with exploratory fingers. He hurt all over, every nerve felt twisted, his head half unscrewed.

“I got clobbered.” The phrase had never seemed so apt.

“Yeah, I know,” Joe replied drily. “But with what?”

“Would you believe a girl telepath?” Pete asked in a plaintive voice.

“Right now,” Joe said wearily, “I'd believe an invasion of little green men.”

Pete looked up at him, startled by the credulous bitterness in the young doctor's voice.

“What'd you mean, Joe?”

Annoyed with himself, Joe grimaced, then swore under his breath. He stepped to the door, looked up and down the hall. Closing the door tightly, with one final cautious look through the small glass insert, he asked, “Do you know where Al Finch is getting narcotics, Pete?”

The policeman groaned. “From the locked pharmacy cabinets of the hospitals.”

Joe's eyes widened in stunned amazement. “How in hell did you know? Hahlgren didn't report it until noon and you've been in dreamland since then.”

It was a relief to Pete to be able to tell someone his secret. When he finished, Joe shook his head slowly from side to side.

“Believe you, I must. The drug cupboard was bare at eight this morning. The question is, what do we do now?”

 

A few days later, Hector Barres was admitted to the hospital, stricken with a paralysis of the spine. Some of the drugs Maria had lifted from the hospital shelves were not pure opium. One was a thebaine compound which acted like strychnine and commonly caused spinal paralysis. Her father died of a heart attack shortly after his admission.

Suddenly all the dogs began to howl. Every dog in Wilmington added his note to the clamor. The dogs howled for a full ear-splitting hour despite every attempt to silence them. The SPCA and the Humane Association, police and firemen were called in—unsuccessfully—to disband a huge pack of hysterical dogs, cats, and tree beasts congregated in Maria's neighborhood.

Only when Maria released them, did the animals disband, melting away in a matter of moments. Pete and Joe took up a position across from her windows.

“Maria,” Pete said. “I brought Joe with me. He did everything he could to save your father. But you've been stealing the wrong kind of drugs. It was one of those that killed your father.”

I know,
Maria said in a flat, hard tone. There was an odd blur to her projected voice that had always rung so clear and true in Pete's mind.
I've been . . . experimenting a little.

There was a long pause. Pete suddenly experienced wild grief, a sense of terrified guilt which was quickly overlaid by a sullen resentment; and, finally, an irrational feeling of satisfaction.

He was a nasty old man. He was mean to me. He killed my mother.

Joe caught Pete's arm, his eyes wide with repugnance and dread.

You go away, Pete,
Maria said.
Or I'll set my friends on you.

“Maria, I don't care how much you threaten me,” Pete said stolidly. “I have to tell you you're doing wrong.”

Bug off, fuzz,
Maria snapped.
I'm having fun. I never had fun before in my life. I'm living it up good now. You go away.

“Pete,” Joe cautioned urgently.

“Damn it, Maria . . .”

This time when Pete woke up in the emergency ward, Joe was in the next bed. They managed to talk the intern on duty into entering “heat prostration” on their charts as the cause of collapse. They promised faithfully to go to their respective homes and rest for the next twenty-four hours. Out on the hot street, Pete suggested that a couple of beers would start their unexpected holiday the right way, so they adjourned to the nearest air-conditioned bar.

The dogs began to howl again as they crossed the street.

“If we'd told anyone why the dogs howled,” Pete said, moodily doodling in the moisture on the beer glass, “they would send us to the funny farm.”

“Would you believe a hopped up preadolescent telepath?” Joe asked wistfully, and raised his glass in a mock toast.

“I only told her the truth.”

“For truth she puts holes in our heads.”

“All right, wise guy, what should I have done?”

“How do I know?” Joe asked with a helpless gesture of his hands. “My specialty's going to be internal medicine, not head-shrinking or pediatrics. I'm as lousy at this sort of work as you are.” He thought for a while, holding his head. “The trouble, Pete, lies in neither you nor me . . . nor Maria. The trouble is the situation and the circumstances. If she'd had the sense to get born a Dupont instead of a Barres . . .” And he made a slicing motion with one hand.

They got drunker and drunker, somehow agreeing on only one thing: they were both so sensitive in the head bone that they couldn't give a j.d. brat the spanking she so richly deserved.

Or rescue her from hell.

 

Success on a small scene went to Al Finch's head. He decided that Wilmington offered too little scope for his operation's potential. Pete got the word from the desk sergeant that Finch had hired a private plane and a private ambulance.

Pete called Joe Lavelle, told him to meet him across from Maria's at once. Joe arrived in time to watch Maria being carried from the apartment on a stretcher.

“God Almighty, look,” Pete cried. “Al Finch, framed by canaries.”

Executing an intricate shuffle step, the gang leader was maneuvering the elaborate five-foot cylindrical triple birdcage through the door, all the while bellowing conflicting orders at his subordinates. That kept them bobbing so solicitously between Al and Maria that they all got royally in each other's way.

Then the rear stretcher-bearer tripped on the uneven sidewalk. He went down on one knee, losing his grip on the handles. Maria, her tiny body strapped to the stretcher, was jolted. The forward bearer, unaware for a moment of the accident, continued on and pulled the handles out of his companion's grip so that Maria, head downward, was dragged jouncingly along the sidewalk. With a yelp, Al leaped forward, unceremoniously depositing the canary cage on the lawn, where it rested at a dangerous tilt. He collided with one of his cohorts who had also jumped to the rescue. The two of them succeeded in startling the forward bearer and the front end of Maria's stretcher dropped with a second jarring jolt.