John Lutz - Fear the Night

The cast gave a final bow from the waist, then jogged offstage in a way that made it clear they were spent from the performance, but still spirited. Some of them waved their appreciation of the audience’s response, or maybe of the audience’s courage in attending the theater.

As the houselights came up, the audience, smiling and making favorable comments, began filing toward the aisles and exits.

“Another one down,” Libby’s leading man, Victor Tobin, said, as she made her way to her dressing room. He was a tall man with generous actor’s instincts and ever-present Listerine breath. Vic was a little short in the voice department but could dance like Najinsky. He was, more than anything, a pro. Libby thought sharing the stage with him was a pleasure.

“It’d be nice to play to full houses,” she said, stopping for a moment to let two black-clad stagehands pass with a plywood prop.

“It seems odd,” Tobin said beside her, “to be playing to full-house matinees and half-house evening audiences.”

“Night Sniper asshole,” Libby said, by way of explanation. She opened her dressing room door.

Tobin grinned. “Dead on, Lib.” He bent down and gave her a peck on the cheek before moving on.

As soon as she was alone in her dressing room, Libby got a chilled bottle of carbonated water from the tiny refrigerator and downed half of it. It was too warm in the room, so she switched on the floor fan in the corner, wishing these old theaters would work on their air-conditioning.

There were three knocks on the door; then it opened and Beth from wardrobe entered.

The play had run long enough that there was no need for words between the two women. Their actions after each performance had become routine. The elderly, saturnine Beth helped Libby out of the tight black Lycra costume she’d worn in the closing dance number, then draped it over a padded hanger on the metal rack against the wall. After taking a few garments from the rack that needed cleaning or sewing, she waited to see if Libby required anything more.

Libby glanced around, smiled, and shook her head no, and Beth withdrew to help someone else with awkwardly placed Velcro or zippers.

Leaving the door open a crack to facilitate the flow of air from the fan, Libby sat down before her lighted mirror and looked at herself, the ultimate London cat burglar. Elfin, mischievous, even feline.

Anyone would pick me out of a lineup as a cat burglar. Maybe I missed my calling.

Nobody in the theater world would agree with that last part.

Time to disassemble the cat burglar. Libby carefully removed her wig and placed it on its form for Beth to comb tomorrow morning. Since the shedding of the Lycra dance costume, Libby was wearing only panties, no bra, and decided to stay that way to remain cool while she removed her makeup.

The door opened all the way and a male dancer named Edmund stuck his head in. “Oops! Wrong room,” he said. “Sorry.”

“You don’t seem sorry,” Libby said, smiling as the young man closed the door.

When she was in her street clothes, her dark, short-cropped hair a charming mess, she put on an ankle-length light raincoat, tinted glasses, and a jaunty denim cap. She had an appointment to meet her agent and a TV producer in Marteen’s Lounge, where they would have a few drinks and talk over a possible television series based on the success of Burglar.

Libby was sure nothing would come of the idea, but she knew this was the way it went in her business. Meet someone over drinks or food, then listen, talk, listen, forget it, take a phone call six months later, and you had work. The acting life. She loved it, and finally it was starting to love her back.

She adjusted the angle of the denim cap that made her look sixteen and as if she should be hawking newspapers, then lowered the dark glasses on her nose so she could peer over the tops of the frames at her image in the mirror.

Nothing left of the cat burglar.

“Good to go,” she said to herself, then left the dressing room and made her way to the glowing red exit sign, saying good night to people as she went. She was sure no one would recognize her on the street when she left by the stage door on the side of the theater.

She was wrong.

After closing the heavy steel door behind her, she turned around and felt a terrible pain in her chest. Her thoughts went flying. Her heart began a wild hammering.

Beyond the mouth of the passageway, almost everyone dropped flat or sought cover at the crack of the shot Libby had barely heard in her sudden shock. She felt dizzy, completely. . disoriented. She heard someone whimper- probably me -and with a dancer’s grace she sat down cross-legged on the hard concrete.

Libby lost her grip on time and didn’t know how much of it had passed. Her heartbeat was deafening and becoming more irregular, and that terrified her. She was only about ten feet back from the sidewalk and tried to call for help, but she could make no sound other than the soft whimpering.

Several minutes had passed since the echoing report of the rifle, and out on the street and sidewalk people were beginning to raise their heads and look around, or stand up uneasily and move on. None of them seemed aware that Libby had been shot. None of them happened to glance into the lighted passage where she sat bleeding.

Warm. . warm. . A m I bleeding?

She extended her forefinger and tried to touch the wavering red brilliance spreading all around her. She couldn’t reach it. Much too far away.

When she looked up she saw on the other side of the street a ragged derelict staring directly at her while hurrying along under the burden of a dark backpack.

He knows I’m here!

The way he’s staring at me. . we both …

Nothing more.

“We got trouble,” Melbourne said.

He was standing behind his desk in his spacious office. The desk was a slate-topped, massive mahogany affair he’d paid for himself. There was a bank of file cabinets along one wall, and a smaller desk nearby on which sat a closed notebook computer and a neat stack of green file folders. The other walls were festooned with photographs, framed news items, commendations, trophies, and personal letters from celebrities. The rewards of ambition and political acumen.

Repetto sat in one of the burgundy leather chairs facing the desk, his legs extended and his ankles crossed. His heels were dug into the plush carpet. “I guess by that you mean more trouble.”

“We should never have clued in the media on the nursery rhyme thing.”

“We had no choice,” Repetto told him. “They would have caught on to it anyway. Besides, would you want to take the heat if people were killed and we might have warned them?”

Melbourne ignored the question. He glared at Repetto from beneath eyebrows his barber had obviously forgotten to trim; then he leaned forward and supported himself with the knuckles of both hands on the desk, the way an alpha gorilla might stand. “The Night Sniper chose one hell of a victim last time out.”

“The thief,” Repetto said.

“So all the morning papers tell me. But Libby Newland wasn’t your ordinary thief. She was a scene stealer. The public loves-loved-her. The public is pissed off. That piss gets on the pols, who pressure the department higher-ups-”

“You,” Repetto interrupted.

“Me. Who, in turn, diverts all that piss and pressure to?”

“Me?”

“Uh-huh. The downhill theory.”

“More than a theory,” Repetto said.

“Right you are, there at the base of the hill. The stakes have been raised. We have to nail this guy, Vin.”

“Or I re-retire?”

That seemed to sober Melbourne. “No, no. . But I need something for the wolves that are snapping at me, so they can play show-and-tell with the others. Some meat to throw them.”