They Thirst (7 page)

"Hey!" Jack said and swatted at Conan's rump. "Stop that!"

The dog didn't even look back. The frantic clawing continued.

"Damn it, what's wrong with you?" He reached down to pull Conan away from the door, and it was then that the dog whirled around, growling very softly, showing his teeth. Jack froze, his heart skipping a beat. Conan had always been a gentle dog, and lately Jack had been teaching him to catch a Frisbee out in the courtyard of the Sandalwood Apartments. Now Jack stared at those teeth and felt cold fear roiling in his stomach. The dog's eyes were unblinking, challenging the man to move.

"It's me," Jack said softly. "Conan? It's me, boy. I'm not going to hurt you."

The dog turned again, claws gouging at the door. The wood looked like a scarred battlefield.

Quickly Jack reached out and unbolted the door. Conan heard the click and stepped back, panting. When the door came open, the dog slipped through noiselessly and ran off across the courtyard toward Lexington Avenue. Jack stared after him, unable to believe that his pet had actually turned and snarled at him. Outside the fronds of palm trees stirred in the wind like lazy fans. At the base of the trees were multicolored lamps, and it was by the green light of one of these that Jack saw Conan's running shape, lengthened by its powerful strides, disappear from sight.

Gayle, now dressed in her tight Jordache jeans and checked blouse, stepped out of the hallway shadows and said, "Jack? What was that all about?"

"I don't really know. Conan just . . . went wild. He snarled at me. Actually showed his teeth! He's gotten feisty before, but he's never acted like this."

She stepped beside him and peered through the door. The rest of the apartment complex was utterly quiet. "Maybe it's the mating season or something. He'll be back."

"I don't know. You think I should go looking for him?"

"Not at this time of night." She glanced quickly at her wristwatch and made a face. "I've got to be getting home, Jack. Ace
Tattler
reporter has to have her head on straight in the morning when she goes to see the cops."

Jack stared out into the courtyard for another moment, hoping to see Conan bounding back, and then turned toward her. "Why don't you stay? I'll spring for breakfast."

"The last time I stayed for breakfast, I ended up burning the eggs. No thanks."

"Well, wait a minute while I get dressed. I'll drive you."

"What, and leave my car here overnight? Mr. Kidd, what would your neighbors think?"

"Screw 'em." He took Gayle in his arms and closed the door with his foot. "Who do you have to see tomorrow?"

"My favorite homicide squad captain—Palatazin. I imagine it'll be the same old 'no comment' session." She traced a line in Jack's forehead with a finger; she could feel his body beginning to respond beneath his thin robe and her own answering. "I have the feeling he thinks the
Tattler's
stories are a little on the sensational side."

"Imagine that." Jack nuzzled her neck and began to lick the base of her throat in slow circles. "Long live yellow

journalism."

She made a noise between a grunt and a sigh and felt the feather of need tickling at her thighs.
It's soooooo chilly outside,
she thought.
And soooooo dark. Oh, that feels good.
Jack took her hand to lead her back to the bedroom, and she said softly, "Breakfast at eight?"

Leaking blue exhaust fumes, a gray Volkswagen Beetle with a crumpled rear fender moved along Outpost Drive and up into the stark dun-colored hills above Hollywood. As the road steepened, the Volkwagen's engine began to rattle with a faint, evil, metallic chuckling. The headlights, slightly cross-eyed, threw wild shadows behind wind-stirred pines and granite boulders with edges as sharp as butcher knives. Low, rambling, glass and redwood houses on each side of the road lay in darkness, and only occasionally did a car pass on its way down to the city. The Volkswagen turned off Outpost Drive onto a narrow road of broken concrete that curved like a snake's spine and climbed upward at a forty-degree angle. Forbidding heaps of cracked granite loomed on the right-hand side of the road; on the left, where the road fell off abruptly into a series of ravines, stood a few hundred gnarled, dwarfish, dead trees.

Though there was no sign or road marker, the driver had made the correct turn onto Blackwood Road.

His name was Walter Benefield, and on the seat beside him, head lolling with every lurch of the car, was a twenty-year-old Chicano girl named Angela Pavion. Her eyes were half-open, the whites showing, and every once in a while she whimpered softly. Benefield wondered what she was dreaming about.

Wafting through the car's interior was a thick, almondy, slightly medicinal odor. Beneath Benefield's seat was a wadded cloth that had turned brown after being soaked in a solution of chemicals that he'd stolen from work. His eyes, behind thick, black-framed glasses, were watering slightly, though he'd rolled down the window only seconds after the girl had gone to sleep.
At least this had been better than those first few times,
he told himself. The first time the girl had died because the mixture wasn't diluted enough, and the second time he had to lean out of the car to throw up, and his head ached all the next day. He was getting faster with it, though he missed using his hands. They were large, fleshy clamps that he exercised with stiff-springed handgrips. He often thought that he could squeeze those grips forever as he lay on his back in bed, staring at the pictures of posed musclemen with rippling backs and chests and arms taped to the walls, scissored from the pages of
Strength and Health
and
Strongman
magazines. And across the room the cockroaches scuttled in their wire-mesh cages, mating and fighting and sleeping. At the last count there'd been over a hundred, and some immense, cannibalistic bulls that had grown to three inches long.

He'd picked this girl up on the lower end of Sunset Boulevard thirty minutes ago. At first she'd been skittish about getting in the car, but he'd flashed a well-worn fifty dollar bill—kept just for the occasion—and she'd slid in as if her ass had been greased. She didn't speak or understand English very well, but that hardly mattered to him. She was pretty in a hard, coarse way; she was also one of the few desperate women who still walked the streets these days.
Too bad for her,
Benefield thought,
she should read the papers.
He had taken her to a deserted supermarket parking lot and unzipped his trousers. When the girl had leaned forward to do what he'd asked, he'd struck, too quickly for her to scream or evade him. The chemical-soaked rag was out from under the seat and pressed tightly against the girl's face, Benefield's other hand like a vise at the back of her neck.
It would be so easy, so easy,
he'd thought.
I could just squeeze a little bit—hardly an effort—and watch her eyes pop out of their sockets, like Bev's had. But no. That was not what the Master wanted done, was it?

Her thrashing was over in a few more seconds. He'd put the cloth away, positioned the girl so she wouldn't slide down onto the floorboard, and then drove north toward the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, the high crests that split L.A. in two. He was breathing hard with exhilaration. The girl had managed to scratch his right hand, and two lines of blood welled from the flesh. He was following the Voice of God, the holy will of his Lord and Master, and now Benefield peered into the darkness beyond the range of the headlights and told himself, "Hurry. You've got to hurry, he doesn't like to wait." His voice was small and breathless, as excited as a child's at the prospect of a reward for a deed well done.

The road had leveled a few degrees but still took the Volks higher. Occasionally Benefield could see the city below, glittering off toward the horizon where the half-dirt, half-broken-concrete road wandered close to a dropoff. He had driven this way many times before in the last two weeks, but it was a tricky, treacherous way; the first time, when he'd brought a pretty, red-haired girl who couldn't have been over sixteen, he'd gotten lost and had driven in circles until the Voice of God had guided him back to the path.

Now the Voice was speaking to him again, whispering softly in the rush of the wind, calling his name. Benefield smiled, tears of joy in his eyes. "I'm coming!'' he called out. "I'm coming!" A gust of wind hit the car's side and rocked it slightly. The girl whimpered once, something in Spanish, and then was silent.

The car's headlights glinted off a new chain strung across the road from tree to tree. There was a metal sign: PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING. Benefield, his heart pounding, pulled the car to the side of the road, cut the headlights and waited. The Voice was like a cooling balm on the fever blister of his brain; it came to him almost every night now as he lay in that gray place between sleep and wakefulness on the mattress of his efficiency apartment near MacArthur Park. On those terrible anguished nights when he dreamed of his mother lifting her head from that man's lap, the throbbing penis as big as a python in her grip, her mouth opening to shout drunkenly, "YOU GET OUTTA HERE!", the Voice whispered like a sea-breeze around his head, enveloping him, protecting him. But some nights even the Voice of God couldn't stop the garish unreeling of the nightmare through his brain: the stranger grinning and saying, "The little bastard wants to watch, Bev. Come 'ere, Waltie, look what I got!" And the child Walter, standing transfixed in the doorway as if nailed there by hands and feet, his head thrashing in agony while the stranger pushed his mother's face down until her laughter was muffled. He had watched it all, his stomach and groin tied into one huge knot, and when they were through his mother—
Good old Bev never says no, never says no, never says no
—
swigged from the bottle of Four Roses that sat on the floor beside the sofa and, hugging the stranger, said in a thick slur, "Now you take care of me, honey." Her dress, the one with the white dots on it, had been pushed up over her large, pale thighs, and she wore no underwear. The child Walter could not tear his gaze away from the secret place that seemed to wink like a wicked eye. His hands had dropped to his crotch, and after another moment the stranger laughed like a snorting bull. "The little bastard's got a hard-on! Little Waltie's carryin' a load! Come 'ere, Waltie. COME HERE, I SAID!"

His mother had lifted her head and smiled through swollen, glazed eyes. "Whozzat? Frank? Is it Frank?" His father's name, old Frank. Out the door and gone so long ago all Waltie could remember of him was how hard he swung his belt. "Frank?" she said, smiling. "You come home, baby? Come gimme a great big kiss . . ."

The stranger's eyes had glittered like dark bits of glass. "Come 'ere, Waltie. No.
Frank.
Come 'ere, Frank. It's Frank, baby. It's your man come home." He laughed softly, his gaze bloodshot and mean. "Drop your drawers, Frank."

"Honey?" his mother had whispered, grinning at him. "I got something needs you soooooo bad . . ."

"Come give your baby a great big kiss, Frank," the stranger had said quietly. "Oh, Jesus, this I gotta see!"

When those dreams came, even the Voice of God couldn't calm the fever. And he was grateful, so grateful, when the Voice told him it was all right for him to go out into the night in search of another laughing Bev, to take her away from the dark-grinning strangers and bring her to the holy mountain.

He winced as those bad things danced through his head. His temples were aching, and he wished he had a Bufferin. Sometimes when the Voice spoke to him he felt as if a cauldron was being stirred in his brain, a thick mixture of magic that had changed his life into something with real purpose and meaning—service in the Master's name. Turning his head to the left, Benefield could look down upon the shimmering city. He wondered if there were any others down there who were part of the cauldron brew, who were ingredients in the magic that now rippled through his soul and his being and set him aflame with sweet, cold fire. Of course, it was magic—
the way of God is righteous, and He shall brighten the City of Night with magic and kill all the Bevs in that bubbling cauldron brew
—
because what else could it be?

A car was coming. Benefield could see the flicker of headlights off in the distance, coming down the mountain toward him. He got out of his car, went around to the other side, and opened the passenger door. The dazed girl almost tumbled out, but Benefield reached down and picked her up in his arms like so much deadwood. Then he turned to face the approaching car.

It was a long, black Lincoln polished so highly the sides and hood shone like glass. It stopped ten feet from the chain, its headlights centered like greedy eyes on Benefield and the offering he held in his arms.

He smiled, his eyes filling with tears.

The driver left the limousine and approached him, followed by a young girl that Benefield immediately recognized. Her long hair was blond and wind-tossed, and her dress was dirty. Benefield saw that the driver was the Servant of God—an old man in a brown suit and white shirt, his long, white hair flowing in the wind, his darting, ferret eyes sunken deep in a pale, wrinkled face. He limped as he walked and was slightly stooped, as if shouldering a backbreaking burden. When he reached the chain, he said to Benefield in a halting, weary voice, "Hand her over."