Jeff Rovin: Vespers

“Dad, help me!”

Scott scrambled around the haphazardly parked cars. “Hold on, I’m coming!”

Tommy tried to shake the creature off his hand as a sixth bat grabbed the inside of his elbow. It chewed through his jersey in three quick bites and scissored through the flesh. Its upper and lower fangs perforated the pulmonary artery. Blood pumped through the tear in the uniform.

The boy’s screams became yelps. He tried to raise his glove as two bats dive-bombed his left arm. He flopped to his side by the front fender and kicked along the ground, frantically trying to wipe the bats off. The flailing wasn’t his own; pain told him where to swipe and push and swat. Blood from his ears, hand, and arm dribbled onto the dying grass.

The boy’s wild motions attracted a second wave of bats. They descended steep and sharp like a monstrous arrow-head, breaking up as they came out of their dive. Most of them slipped around the buttons of the boy’s jersey. They crept up his chest and along his arms, gnawing relentlessly. Tommy shuddered; his movements suddenly slowed and then stopped. He felt nothing more, as pain, exhaustion, and the loss of blood triggered neurogenic shock.

A new swarm of bats sailed low over the boy. They didn’t stop but headed toward their next target. Scott Fitzpatrick swore as they knifed toward him. He wrapped his arms around his head, dipped it like a charging bull, and kept weaving through the parked cars. The bats slowed and covered him like a giant hand. They picked at his windbreaker, tore away pieces of nylon, burrowed into the rips. The man uncrossed his arms and slapped at the lumps beneath his jacket.

“Tommy!”

Another swarm arrived, attacking his now-exposed face.

“Shit!Shit! ”

They raked his eyelids, his forehead, the back of his neck. Blinded by wings and blood, Scott slammed into the back of a car. He shouted with pain and rage and dropped backward onto the trunk, trying to crush the bats that were under his clothing. He reached up to his face, squeezed two mouse-sized bodies with each hand, and threw them aside. They darted back.

“Fuckers!”

More bats swooped down and piled onto Scott’s face and hands. He slid from the trunk, wriggling and yelling as the tiny, slashing teeth and long hooked claws opened dozens of wounds.

Don Breen was a car length away when he saw Scott Fitzpatrick writhing on the ground. Breen stopped.

Scott was bucking violently beneath a layer of small bats. They crawled over him like an oil slick until he was covered from foot to forehead.

“Jesus!” Breen said.

One of the parents shouted, “Don, what’s wrong?”

“Stay away!” Breen yelled.

“Why?”

“Just do it!”he screamed.

None of the men moved. Slowly, Breen removed his team jacket. He held it like a matador holds his cape and leaned forward. He crept ahead, measuring the distance with his eyes, intending to throw the jacket on top of the bats.

Suddenly, Scott stopped moving. A moment later, so did the bats.

Breen stood watching as a gentle wind slipped through the cars. It blew across the fist-sized animals, stirring their fur and lifting the thin skin of their wings, but their spindly feet and five wing-digits held them fast. Then, using those claws, the animals turned themselves around. They moved like little dials, rotating clockwise, nearly in unison, and looked at Breen. Small, dark eyes gleamed from blood-smeared faces, and their wide, dangerous jaws hung open.

One of the kids yelled from the field. “Yo! Coach! You sure you don’t need help?”

Breen didn’t tell whoever it was to shut the hell up. A parent did that. Breen waited for the bats to attack. When they didn’t, he wondered if it had anything to do with not moving. Or maybe not moving forward. Tommy and Scott had both gone toward the woods.

There was only one way to find out. Slowly, very slowly, he lowered his jacket away from the bats. When the animals didn’t react, he took a cautious step back with his right foot.

Almost as one the tiny heads clicked to the right. He moved toward the woods.

Breen wanted to swear and run. He did neither. If the bats had wanted to attack, they would have. He waited several seconds. When nothing happened, he took a second step back, this time to the left. The twenty-odd small heads didn’t move.

“Okay,” he said softly. “Okay. If you’ll let me go that way, I’m leaving.”

Breen stepped again. Then again. The bats still didn’t move. When he reached the edge of the parking lot, Breen finally turned toward the diamond. The players and all of the parents were standing and watching. He walked swiftly toward the cage.

“What happened out there?” Bob Kidd asked. “Is Tommy-”

“I don’tknow.” Breen snapped. Cold perspiration dripped from the band of his cap. He picked up the pace as he approached the grandstand. He looked up at the parents and children. “All right,” he said. “I need everybody to go that wayslowly.” He pointed toward the picnic area. “If you’ve got jackets, use them to cover your heads. Does anybody have a phone?”

“I do,” one of the mothers said.

“Call nine-one-one.”

She punched in the number.

“Tell them we’ve got bats-maybe thirty of them. Two people are seriously injured. Tell themnot to come along Forest Road. Tell them they should pull in by the pond.”

The woman said all right. Coach Breen walked with her as she placed the call.

In less than a minute, the diamond and grandstands were empty.

When there was no longer a threat, the bats returned to the skies. They continued scooping down insects, watching one another, and making certain that nothing but wind and moonlight approached the forest.

One of the things Detective First Grade Robert Gentry liked about running the Accident Investigations Squad at Midtown South was that when he left the station house he left the work there as well.

Fender benders and buckets kicked over by window washers and pedestrians tripping over gas or water hoses didn’t depress him the way being a narc had for more than ten years, five of those spent deep undercover. Minor accidents didn’t have the same kind of despair and deterioration and rippling consequences as drug addiction. And major automobile or structural accidents were handled jointly by the NYPD and the Fire Department, with the ranking Fire Department official in command. All Gentry had to do was show up. When he came home at night he also didn’t have to wonder whose footsteps or shadows were behind him. And thanks to those long years he’d spent pretending to be Nick Argento, buyer and seller of hard drugs, he no longer had a wife to worry about. For Gentry, worrying that he’d been found out by a pusher or smuggler who’d gotten to the house and to Priscilla had always been his greatest fear.

Police Commissioner Joe Veltre had personally selected Gentry to run the small, relatively cushy AIS nearly six months before. It was the equivalent of a papal dispensation, since Veltre’s appointment as top cop had been given a big boost by Gentry’s successful antidrug efforts.

Gentry usually quit the station house around six P.M., leaving the report writing to Detectives Second Grade Jason Anthony and Jen Malcolm. Anthony in particular enjoyed the detail work. He’d come over from the Multi-Agency Salvage Yard Task Force and said it was gratifying to make order out of chaos.

Maybe. All it did for Gentry was make him want to look out the dirty office window and think. Think about the past. About that one here-then-gone instant that had taken him from narcotics to where he was. Think about Bernie Michaelson and what it had been like to have a partner, to be closer to someone than he’d ever managed to be with his wife. Think about how he missed that-and Bernie. They had been so attuned to each other that even when they hadn’t been able to speak, the movement of an eyebrow, the slope of a shoulder, the shape of a smile told the other one everything he needed to know.