John Lutz - Fear the Night

“Damn it, Adam!” Dante couldn’t hold back the sobs any longer.

“C’mon home, son. Come home to the ranch.”

Dante didn’t answer until he got his gasping sobs under control. He felt cold, but he noticed with surprise that his hands were sweating, slippery on the phone. “This weekend,” he said. “I can’t get there till this weekend. I’ve got a big calculus test.”

“Whatever you want,” Strong said. He sounded as if he might start sobbing himself.

“Goddamn that Orvey! Why the fuck-”

“You’ve gotta get used to it, Dante. It’s something that happened. A part of life you’ve got no choice but to learn to live with.”

“Don’t I know it?”

“You gonna be okay there by yourself?”

“I’ve always been okay by myself.”

“Dante, that’s not right. You don’t have to think like that anymore.”

“I know, Adam.” Dante wiped his nose with the back of his wrist. “Thanks for calling and letting me know.”

“I wish it hadn’t been necessary. I sure as hell do.”

Though his eyes brimmed with tears, Dante had to smile. Adam Strong using profanity. It didn’t happen very often. That touched Dante more than anything.

Verna, Orvey, they didn’t just mess themselves up; even if they didn’t mean to, they hurt a lot of people, caused so much pain. It might go on for years.

A part of life. .

“Thanks again,” Dante said softly, and hung up.

He felt so much older lying there. Like an old man who’d somehow found himself in a young man’s room. He realized he’d been old the first day he arrived at the ranch. Too much of him had died after his father killed his mother.

He’d begun to die when the gun his father aimed at him clicked on a bullet that hadn’t fired.

Verna’s letter wasn’t in that afternoon’s mail, but it arrived the next day. Dante didn’t open it. He knew why Verna didn’t want him, the only reason it could be: she’d seen beneath the thin new skin to the old Dante, the real Dante. He’d stared into the mirror last night and seen the real Dante himself, like sharp bones pushing through the flesh of a corpse.

He used both hands to crumple the unopened envelope with Verna’s handwriting on it into as small a damaged object as possible, then dropped it in one of the trash receptacles that were placed around the campus.

Verna was simply something that had happened.

Something in the past.

The present

This time when the Night Sniper’s simple typed note bearing a theater seat number arrived in Repetto’s mail, they didn’t have to waste time figuring out which theater.

“This is it,” Repetto said, standing up from his desk chair and showing Meg and Birdy the note. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” Meg asked, replacing the plastic lid she’d just removed from her Styrofoam coffee cup. She’d been prepared to sit at her desk, get her caffeine fix, and work the phones.

“We don’t have to play by his rules this time.” Repetto pointed to the Times on his desk, open to the page with theater listings.

Meg and Birdy looked. A play at the off-off Broadway theater Candle in the Night was circled: Beg, Borrow, or Steal.

“If he stays true to form, the Night Sniper’s next victim’s going to be the beggar man,” Repetto said.

“Big if , with this sicko,” Birdy said.

“Everything is,” Repetto said. “That’s one way he yanks our strings. But this is the only play listed with ‘beg’ in the title. It might not be the only place we have to search, but it should be the first.”

Fast and sure, when he decided it was time to move, Meg thought. It was one reason she respected Repetto.

He was already on his way out.

Meg and Birdy followed, Meg taking a hurried sip from where the tab was bent back on her cup’s plastic lid and scalding her tongue.

Candle in the Night was located in SoHo, in what used to be a restaurant. Repetto remembered having dinner there years ago with Lora and one of her clients, who was writing a book about cops and pumped him for information. There were show posters outside it now, advertising Beg, Borrow, or Steal. One of them featured the play’s stars, a handsome young guy wearing spiked hair and a tuxedo, who was handing a necklace to a beautiful young woman with platinum-blond hair and oversize blue eyes. Repetto noticed her name was Tiffany something. Near the bottom of the poster was a Village Voice review blurb that said, Delightful. . clever. . scintillating.

The theater was larger than it appeared from outside. Stepped wooden platforms had been installed to provide unobstructed seating. The stage was narrow and seemed to be at a slight angle to the audience. There was lots of lighting equipment in shadows overhead, and the set, what appeared to be an English drawing room or club, was surprisingly professional and richly detailed.

The seats on each side of a center aisle were a bit worn looking and had probably been acquired when an older, larger theater uptown had been renovated or demolished. They were bolted to the plywood risers and still clearly numbered.

Repetto led the way to 12-F, the number in the Night Sniper’s note, and raised the seat to check beneath it.

He looked, felt.

“Nothing.”

“I think you better talk to Irv,” a voice said.

Repetto turned and saw Jack Straithorn, the young production manager who’d met them at the theater entrance to admit them. Lurking behind Straithorn was a short, potbellied man in a gray work outfit that was too tight on him everywhere. He had a slightly crooked, smarmy smile that Repetto figured stayed stuck to him even when he slept. Irv, Repetto assumed.

Correctly. “I found this ’bout twenty minutes ago when I was sweepin’ up,” Irv said, holding out a tightly folded scrap of paper. “Had some tape on it, but I tore it off.”

Meg moved out of the way so Repetto could accept the note from Irv. He thought about lecturing the man on tampering with evidence but figured it would serve no purpose.

“I was gonna call you guys,” Irv said, reading Repetto’s mind.

Repetto simply nodded as he unfolded the note and read: The show will go on.

He handed the note to Meg, who read it with Birdy peering over her shoulder.

“So what’s it mean?” Birdy asked.

“Irv looked at the note earlier,” Straithorn said in a voice spiked with irony. He made a theatrical motion toward Irv, who was smirking.

“Means he’s gonna kill again,” Irv said. “There’s gonna be another act, and ain’t nothin’ nobody can do to stop it.”

The Night Sniper stood at a bus stop down the block, watching the entrance to Candle in the Night, with its makeshift marquee and movielike glassed show-poster frames. He was wearing a black beret and the Madre Verdi sunglasses he’d bought last year on the Costa del Sol . The glass’s lenses were dark green mirrors on the outside, but he could see out quite clearly.

Meg Doyle emerged from the theater first. Then Repetto and Birdy Bellman. The opposition. The Night Sniper smiled. They thought they were taking control, having figured out early this time which theater to go to and find his message. They didn’t know he’d been waiting for them here.

A bus rumbled up and he moved back, making it clear to the driver that there was no need to stop.

But there had been a need. The bus’s air brakes hissed, and it pulled up to the curb. Its rear door opened and a large woman laden with plastic shopping bags stepped down onto the sidewalk. The woman stood with her feet far apart and looked around, as if trying to orient herself, then walked swiftly away in the opposite direction from where the Night Sniper stood. She’d only glanced over toward where he stood and paid him little attention. The bus roared and belched foul exhaust fumes, then lumbered away.