Dees, who had been made for sniffing blood and guts, had been delighted. His nose was the reason he was here, flying into Wilmington. There was a human monster down there, a man who thought he was a vampire. Dees had a name all picked out for him; it burned in his mind as a valuable coin might burn in a man"s pocket. Soon he would take the coin out and spend it. When he did, the name would be plastered across the tabloid display racks of every supermarket checkout counter in America, screaming at the patrons in unignorable sixty-point type.
Look out, ladies and sensation seekers, Dees thought. You don"t know it, but a very bad man is coming your way. You"ll read his real name and forget it, but that"s okay. What you"ll remember is my name for him, the name that"s going to put him right up there with Jack the Ripper and the Cleveland Torso Murderer and the Black Dahlia. You"ll remember the Night Flier, coming soon to a checkout counter near you. The exclusive story, the exclusive interview . . . but what I want most of all is the exclusive picture.
He checked his watch again and allowed himself to relax the tiniest bit (which was all he could relax). He still had almost half an hour till dark, and he would be parking next to the white Skymaster with red piping (and N101BL on the tail in a similar red) in less than fifteen minutes.
Was the Flier sleeping in town or in some motel on the way into town? Dees didn"t think so. One of the reasons for the Skymaster 337"s popularity, besides its relatively low price, was that it was the only plane its size with a belly-hold. It wasn"t much bigger than the trunk of an old VW Beetle, true, but it was roomy enough for three big suitcases or five small ones . . . and it could certainly hold a man, provided he wasn"t the size of a pro basketball player. The Night Flier could be in the Cessna"s belly-hold, provided he was (a) sleeping in the fetal position with his knees drawn up to his chin; or (b) crazy enough to think he was a real vampire; or (c) both of the above.
Dees had his money on (c).
Now, with his altimeter winding down from four to three thousand feet, Dees thought: Nope, no hotel or motel for you, my friend, am I right? When you play vampire, you"re like Frank Sinatra - you do it your way. Know what I think? I think when the belly-hold of that plane opens, the first thing I"m gonna see is a shower of graveyard earth (even if it isn"t, you can bet your upper incisors it will be when the story comes out), and then I"m gonna see first one leg in a pair of tuxedo pants, and then the other, because you are gonna be dressed, aren"t you? Oh, dear man, I think you are gonna be dressed to the nines, dressed to kill, and the auto-winder is already on my camera, and when I see that cloak flap in the breeze - But that was where his thoughts stopped, because that was when the flashing white lights on both runways below him went out.
4.
I want to run this guy"s backtrail, he had told Merton Morrison, starting with the first one we know about, up in Maine.
Less than four hours later he had been at c.u.mberland County Airport, talking to a mechanic named Ezra Hannon. Mr Hannon looked as if he had recently crawled out of a gin-bottle, and Dees wouldn"t have let him within shouting distance of his own plane, but he gave the fellow his full and courteous attention just the same. Of course he did; Ezra Hannon was the first link in what Dees was beginning to think might prove to be a very important chain.
c.u.mberland County Airport was a dignified-sounding name for a country landing-field which consisted of two Quonset huts and two crisscrossing runways. One of these runways was actually tarred. Because Dees had never landed on a dirt runway, he requested the tarred one. The bouncing his Beech 55 (for which he was in hock up to his eyebrows and beyond) took when he landed convinced him to try the dirt when he took off again, and when he did he had been delighted to find it as smooth and firm as a coed"s breast. The field also had a windsock, of course, and of course it was patched like a pair of Dad"s old underdrawers. Places like CCA always had a windsock. It was part of their dubious charm, like the old biplane that always seemed to be parked in front of the single hangar.
c.u.mberland County was the most populous in Maine, but you never would have known it from its cow-patty airport, Dees thought . . . or from Ezra the Amazing Gin-Head Mechanic, for that matter. When he grinned, displaying all six of his remaining teeth, he looked like an extra from the film version of James d.i.c.key"s Deliverance.
The airport sat on the outskirts of the much plusher town of Falmouth, existing mostly on landing fees paid by rich summer residents. Claire Bowie, the Night Flier"s first victim, had been CCA"s night traffic controller and owned a quarter interest in the airfield. The other employees had consisted of two mechanics and a second ground controller (the ground controllers also sold chips, cigarettes, and sodas; further, Dees had learned, the murdered man had made a pretty mean cheeseburger).
Mechanics and controllers also served as pump jockeys and custodians. It wasn"t unusual for the controller to have to rush back from the bathroom, where he had been swabbing out the John with Janitor-in-a-Drum, to give landing clearance and a.s.sign a runway from the challenging maze of two at his disposal. The operation was so high-pressure that during the airport"s peak summer season the night controller sometimes got only six hours" worth of good sleep between midnight and 7:00 A.M.
Claire Bowie had been killed almost a month prior to Dees"s visit, and the picture the reporter put together was a composite created from the news stories in Morrison"s thin file and Ezra the Amazing Gin-Head Mechanic"s much more colorful embellishments. And even when he had made the necessary allowances for his primary source, Dees remained sure that something very strange had happened at this dips.h.i.t little airport in early June.
The Cessna 337, tail-number N101BL, had radioed the field for landing clearance shortly before dawn on the morning of July 9th. Claire Bowie, who had been working the night shift at the airfield since 1954, when pilots sometimes had to abort their approaches (a maneuver in those days known simply as "pulling up") because of the cows that sometimes wandered onto what was then the single runway, logged the request at 4:32 A.M. The time of landing he noted as 4:49 A.M.; he recorded the pilot"s name as Dwight Renfield, and the point of N101BL"s origination as Bangor, Maine. The times were undoubtedly correct. The rest was bulls.h.i.t (Dees had checked Bangor, and wasn"t surprised to find they had never heard of N101BL), but even if Bowie had known it was bulls.h.i.t, it probably wouldn"t have made much difference; at CCA, the atmosphere was loose, and a landing fee was a landing fee.
The name the pilot had given was a bizarre joke. Dwight just happened to be the first name of an actor named Dwight Frye, and Dwight Frye had just happened to play, among a plethora of other parts, the role of Renfield, a slavering lunatic whose idol had been the most famous vampire of all time. But radioing UNICOM and asking for landing clearance in the name of Count Dracula might have raised suspicion even in a sleepy little place like this, Dees supposed.
Might have; Dees wasn"t really sure. After all, a landing fee was a landing fee, and "Dwight Renfield" had paid his promptly, in cash, as he had also paid to top off his tanks - the money had been in the register the next day, along with a carbon of the receipt Bowie had written out.
Dees knew about the casual, hipshot way private air-traffic had been controlled at the smaller fields in the fifties and sixties, but he was still astonished by the informal treatment the Night Flier"s plane had received at CCA. It wasn"t the fifties or sixties any more, after all; this was the era of drug paranoia, and most of the s.h.i.t to which you were supposed to just say no came into small harbors in small boats, or into small airports in small planes . . . planes like "Dwight Renfield"s" Cessna Skymaster. A landing fee was a landing fee, sure, but Dees would have expected Bowie to give Bangor a shout about the missing flight-plan just the same, if only to cover his own a.s.s. But he hadn"t. The idea of a bribe had occurred to Dees at this point, but his gin-soaked informant claimed that Claire Bowie was as honest as the day was long, and the two Falmouth cops Dees talked to later on had confirmed Hannon"s judgement.
Negligence seemed a likelier answer, but in the end it didn"t really matter; Inside View readers weren"t interested in such esoteric questions as how or why things happened. Inside View readers were content to know what had happened, and how long it took, and if the person it happened to had had time to scream. And pictures, of course. They wanted pictures. Great big hi-intensity black-and-whites, if possible - the kind that seemed to leap right off the page in a swarm of dots and nail you in the forebrain.
Ezra the Amazing Gin-Head Mechanic had looked surprised and considering when Dees asked where he thought "Renfield" might have gone after landing.
"Dunno," he said. "Motel, I s"pose. Musta tooken a cab."
"You came in at . . . what time did you say? Seven o"clock that morning? July ninth?"
"Uh-huh. Just before Claire left to go home."
"And the Cessna Skymaster was parked and tied down and empty?"
"Yep. Parked right where yours is now." Ezra pointed, and Dees pulled back a little. The mechanic smelled quite a little bit like a very old Roquefort cheese which had been pickled in Gilbey"s Gin.
"Did Claire happen to say if he called a cab for the pilot? To take him to a motel? Because there don"t seem to be any in easy walking distance."
"There ain"t," Ezra agreed. "Closest one"s the Sea Breeze, and that"s two mile away. Maybe more." He scratched his stubbly chin. "But I don"t remember Claire saying ary word about callin the fella a cab."
Dees made a mental note to call the cab companies in the area just the same. At that time he was going on what seemed like a reasonable a.s.sumption: that the guy he was looking for slept in a bed, like almost everyone else.
"What about a limo?" he asked.
"Nope," Ezra said more positively, "Claire didn"t say nothing about no limbo, and he woulda mentioned that."
Dees nodded and decided to call the nearby limo companies, too. He would also question the rest of the staff, but he expected no light to dawn there; this old boozehound was about all there was. He"d had a cup of coffee with Claire before Claire left for the day, and another with him when Claire came back on duty that night, and it looked like that was all she wrote. Except for the Night Flier himself, Ezra seemed to have been the last person to see Claire Bowie alive.
The subject of these ruminations looked slyly off into the distance, scratched the wattles below his chin, then shifted his bloodshot gaze back to Dees. "Claire didn"t say nothing about no cab or limbo, but he did say something else."
"That so?"
"Yep," Ezra said. He unzipped a pocket of his grease-stained coverall, removed a pack of Chesterfields, lit one up, and coughed a dismal old man"s cough. He looked at Dees through the drifting smoke with an expression of half-baked craftiness. "Might not mean nothing, but then again, it might. It sure struck Claire perculyer, though. Must have, because most of the time old Claire wouldn"t say s.h.i.t if he had a mouthful."
"What was it he said?"
"Don"t quite remember," Ezra said. "Sometimes, you know, when I forget things, a picture of Alexander Hamilton sorta refreshes my memory."
"How about one of Abe Lincoln?" Dees asked dryly.
After a moment"s consideration - a short one - Hannon agreed that sometimes Lincoln also did the trick, and a portrait of this gentleman consequently pa.s.sed from Dees"s wallet to Ezra"s slightly palsied hand. Dees thought that a portrait of George Washington might have turned the trick, but he wanted to make sure the man was entirely on his side . . . and besides, it all came out of the expense account.
"So give."
"Claire said the guy looked like he must be goin to one h.e.l.l of a fancy party," Ezra said.
"Oh? Why was that?" Dees was thinking he should have stuck with Washington after all.
"Said the guy looked like he just stepped out of a bandbox. Tuxedo, silk tie, all that stuff." Ezra paused. "Claire said the guy was even wearin a big cloak. Red as a fire engine inside, black as a woodchuck"s a.s.shole outside. Said when it spread out behind him, it looked like a G.o.ddam bat"s wing."
A large word lit in red neon suddenly flashed on in Dees"s mind, and the word was BINGO.
You don"t know it, my gin-soaked friend, Dees thought, but you may have just said the words that are going to make you famous.
"All these questions about Claire," Ezra said, "and you ain"t never once ast if I saw anything funny."
"Did you?"
"As a matter of fact, I did."
"What was that, my friend?"
Ezra scratched his stubbly chin with long, yellow nails, looked wisely at Dees from the corners of his bloodshot eyes, and then took another puff on his cigarette.
"Here we go again," Dees said, but he produced another picture of Abe Lincoln and was careful to keep his voice and face amiable. His instincts were wide awake now, and they were telling him that Mr Ginhead wasn"t quite squeezed dry. Not yet, anyway.
"That don"t seem like enough for all I"m tellin you," Ezra said reproachfully. "Rich city fella like you ought to be able to do better"n ten bucks."
Dees looked at his watch - a heavy Rolex with diamonds gleaming on the face. "Gosh!" he said. "Look how late it"s getting! And I haven"t even been over to talk with the Falmouth police yet!"
Before he could do more than start to get up, the five had disappeared from between his fingers and had joined its mate in the pocket of Hannon"s coverall.
"All right, if you"ve got something else to tell, tell it," Dees said. The amiability was gone now. "I"ve got places to go and people to see."
The mechanic thought it over, scratching his wattles and sending out little puffs of ancient, cheesy smell. Then he said, almost reluctantly: "Seen a big pile of dirt under that Skymaster. Right under the luggage bay, it was."
"That so?"
"Ayuh. Kicked it with my boot."
Dees waited. He could do that.
"Nasty stuff. Full of worms."
Dees waited. This was good, useful stuff, but he didn"t think the old man was wrung completely dry even yet.
"And maggots," Ezra said. "There was maggots, too. Like where something died."
Dees stayed that night at the Sea Breeze Motel, and was winging his way to the town of Alderton in upstate New York by eight o"clock the next morning.
5.
Of all the things Dees didn"t understand about his quarry"s movements, the thing which puzzled him the most was how leisurely the Flier had been. In Maine and in Maryland, he had actually lingered before killing. His only one-night stand had been in Alderton which he had visited two weeks after doing Claire Bowie.
Lakeview Airport in Alderton was even smaller than CCA - a single unpaved runway and a combined Ops/UNICOM that was no more than a shed with a fresh coat of paint. There was no instrument approach; there was, however, a large satellite dish so none of the flying farmers who used the place would have to miss Murphy Brown or Wheel of Fortune or anything really important like that.
One thing Dees liked a lot: the unpaved Lakeview runway was just as silky-smooth as the one in Maine had been. I could get used to this, Dees thought as he dropped the Beech neatly onto the surface and began to slow it down. No big thuds over asphalt patches, no potholes that want to ground-loop you after you come in . . . yeah, I could get used to this real easy.
In Alderton, n.o.body had asked for pictures of Presidents or friends of Presidents. In Alderton, the whole town - a community of just under a thousand souls - was in shock, not merely the few part-timers who, along with the late Buck Kendall, had run Lakeview Airport almost as a charity (and certainly in the red). There was really no one to talk to, anyway, not even a witness of the Ezra Hannon caliber. Hannon had been bleary, Dees reflected, but at least he had been quotable.
"Must have been a mighty man," one of the part-timers told Dees. "Ole Buck, he dressed out right around two-twenty, and he was easy most of the time, but if you did get him riled, he made you sorry. Seen him box down a fella in a carny show that came through P"keepsie two years ago. That kind of fightin ain"t legal, accourse, but Buck was short a payment on that little Piper of his, so he boxed that carny fighter down. Collected two hundred dollars and got it to the loan comp"ny about two days before they was gonna send out someone to repo his ride, I guess."
The part-timer shook his head, looking genuinely distressed, and Dees wished he"d thought to uncase his camera. Inside View readers would have lapped up that long, lined, mournful face. Dees made a mental note to find out if the late Buck Kendall had had a dog. Inside View readers also lapped up pictures of the dead man"s dog. You posed it on the porch of the deceased"s house and captioned it BUFFY"S LONG WAIT BEGINS, or something similar.
"It"s a d.a.m.n shame," Dees said sympathetically.
The part-timer sighed and nodded. "Guy musta got him from behind. That"s the only way I can figger it."
Dees didn"t know from which direction Gerard "Buck" Kendall had been gotten, but he knew that this time the victim"s throat had not been ripped out. This time there were holes, holes from which "Dwight Renfield" had presumably sucked his victim"s blood. Except, according to the coroner"s report, the holes were on opposite sides of the neck, one in the jugular vein and the other in the carotid artery. They weren"t the discreet little bite marks of the Bela Lugosi era or the slightly gorier ones of the Christopher Lee flicks, either. The coroner"s report spoke in centimeters, but Dees could translate well enough, and Morrison had the indefatigable Libby Grannit to explain what the coroner"s dry language only partially revealed: the killer either had teeth the size of one of View"s beloved Bigfeet, or he had made the holes in Kendall"s neck in a much more prosaic fashion - with a hammer and a nail.
DEADLY NIGHT FLIER SPIKED VICTIMS, DRANK THEIR BLOOD, both men thought at different places on the same day. Not bad.
The Night Flier had requested permission to land at Lakeview Airport shortly after 10:30 P.M. on the night of July 23rd. Kendall had granted permission and had noted a tail-number with which Dees had become very familiar: N101BL. Kendall had noted "name of pilot" as "Dwite Renfield" and the "make and model of aircraft" as "Cessna Skymaster 337". No mention of the red piping, and of course no mention of the sweeping bat-wing cloak that was as red as a fire engine on the inside and as black as a woodchuck"s a.s.shole on the outside, but Dees was positive of both, just the same.
The Night Flier had flown into Alderton"s Lakeview Airport shortly after ten-thirty, killed that strapping fellow Buck Kendall, drunk his blood, and flown out again in his Cessna sometime before Jenna Kendall came by at five o"clock on the morning of the twenty-fourth to give her husband a fresh-made waffle and discovered his exsanguinated corpse instead.
As Dees stood outside the ramshackle Lakeview hangar/tower mulling these things over, it occurred to him that if you gave blood, the most you could expect was a cup of orange juice and a word of thanks. If you took it, however - sucked it, to be specific - you got headlines. As he turned the rest of a bad cup of coffee out on the ground and headed toward his plane, ready to fly south to Maryland, it occurred to Richard Dees that G.o.d"s hand might have shaken just a tiny bit when He was finishing off the supposed master-work of His creative empire.
6.
Now, two bad hours after leaving Washington National, things had suddenly gotten a lot worse, and with shocking suddenness. The runway lights had gone out, but Dees now saw that wasn"t all that had gone out - half of Wilmington and all of Wrightsville Beach were also dark. ILS was still there, but when Dees s.n.a.t.c.hed the mike and screamed, "What happened? Talk to me, Wilmington!" he got nothing back but a screech of static in which a few voices babbled like distant ghosts.
He jammed the mike back, missing the p.r.o.ng. It thudded to the c.o.c.kpit floor at the end of its curled wire, and Dees forgot it. The grab and the yell had been pure pilot"s instinct and no more. He knew what had happened as surely as he knew the sun set in the west . . . which it would do very soon now. A stroke of lightning must have scored a direct hit on a power substation near the airport. The question was whether or not to go in anyway.
"You had clearance," one voice said. Another immediately (and correctly) replied that that was so much bulls.h.i.t rationalization. You learned what you were supposed to do in a situation like this when you were still the equivalent of a student driver. Logic and the book tell you to head for your alternate and try to contact ATC. Landing under snafu conditions such as these could cost him a violation and a hefty fine.
On the other hand, not landing now - right now - could lose him the Night Flier. It might also cost a life (or lives), but Dees barely factored this into the equation . . . until an idea went off like a flashbulb in his mind, an inspiration that occurred, as most of his inspirations did, in huge tabloid type: HEROIC REPORTER SAVES (fill in a number, as large as possible, which was pretty large, given the amazingly generous borders that mark the range of human credulity) FROM CRAZED NIGHT FLIER.
Eat that, Farmer John, Dees thought, and continued his descent toward Runway 34.
The runway lights down there suddenly flashed on, as if approving his decision, then went out again, leaving blue afterimages on his retinas that turned the sick green of spoiled avocados a moment later. Then the weird static coming from the radio cleared and Farmer John"s voice screamed: "Haul port, N471B: Piedmont, haul starboard: Jesus, oh Jesus, midair, I think we got a midair - "
Dees"s self-preservation instincts were every bit as well honed as those which smelled blood in the bush. He never even saw the Piedmont Airlines 727"s strobe lights. He was too busy banking as tightly to port as the Beech could bank - which was as tight as a virgin"s cooze, and Dees would be happy to testify to that fact if he got out of this s.h.i.tstorm alive - as soon as the second word was out of Farmer John"s mouth. He had a momentary sight/sense of something huge only inches above him, and then the Beech 55 was taking a beating that made the previous rough air seem like gla.s.s. His cigarettes flew out of his breast pocket and streamed everywhere. The half-dark Wilmington skyline tilted crazily. His stomach seemed to be trying to squeeze his heart all the way up his throat and into his mouth. Spit ran up one cheek like a kid whizzing along a greased slide. Maps flew like birds. The air outside now raved with jet thunder as well as the kind nature made. One of the windows in the four-seat pa.s.senger compartment imploded, and an asthmatic wind whooped in, skirling everything not tied down back there into a tornado.
"Resume your previous alt.i.tude a.s.signment, N471B!" Farmer John was screaming. Dees was aware that he"d just ruined a two-hundred-dollar pair of pants by spraying about a pint of hot p.i.s.s into them, but he was partially soothed by a strong feeling that old Farmer John had just loaded his Jockey shorts with a truckload or so of fresh Mars Bars. Sounded that way, anyhow.
Dees carried a Swiss Army knife. He took it from his right pants pocket and, holding the wheel with his left hand, cut through his shirt just above the left elbow, bringing blood. Then with no pause, he made another cut, shallow, just below his left eye. He folded the knife shut and stuffed it into the elasticized map pocket in the pilot"s door. Gotta clean it later, he thought. And if I forget it, I could be in deep s.h.i.t. But he knew he wouldn"t forget, and considering the things the Night Flier had gotten away with, he thought he"d be okay.
The runway lights came on again, this time for good, he hoped, although their pulsing quality told him they were being powered by a generator. He homed the Beech in again on Runway 34. Blood ran down his left cheek to the corner of his mouth. He sucked some in and then spat a pink mixture of blood and spit into his IVSI. Never miss a trick; just keep following those instincts and they"d always take you home.
He looked at his watch. Sunset was only fourteen minutes away now. This was cutting it much too close to the bone.
"Pull up, Beech!" Farmer John yelled. "Are you deaf?"
Dees groped for the mike"s kinked wire without ever taking his eyes from the runway lights. He pulled the wire through his fingers until he got the mike itself. He palmed it and depressed the send b.u.t.ton.
"Listen to me, you chicken-fried son of a b.i.t.c.h," he said, and now his lips were pulled all the way back to the gum line. "I missed getting turned into strawberry jam by that 727 because your s.h.i.t genny didn"t kick in when it was supposed to; as a result I had no ATC comm. I don"t know how many people on the airliner just missed getting turned into strawberry jam, but I bet you do, and I know the c.o.c.kpit crew does. The only reason those guys are still alive is because the captain of that boat was bright enough to allemande right, and I was bright enough to do-si-do, but I have sustained both structural and physical damage. If you don"t give me a landing clearance right now, I"m going to land anyway. The only difference is that if I have to land without clearance, I"m going to have you up in front of an FAA hearing. But first I will personally see to it that your head and your a.s.shole change places. Have you got that, hoss?"