Jeff Rovin - Vespers

“WPA?”

“Works Progress Administration. Government projects from the Depression. This was put in to give people work. They probably laid a whole lot of interconnected pipes through the town.”

“I see,” Joyce said. “So a bat that was born in one of the drains could get around quite a bit. It could listen at other openings, make sure that no one was near, then slip out unseen.”

“I suppose so,” Gentry said. “But would a bat be smart enough to do that?”

“Not an ordinary bat, no,” Joyce said.

“This isn’t an ordinary bat,” Gentry said. “So in addition to being bigger and stronger than other bats, it might also be smarter.”

“Very possibly,” Joyce said. “But it wouldn’t take intelligence to move around a system of pipes and listen until the coast was clear. That’s instinct. Survival. In any case, that could be one reason the bat was never seen.”

Cautiously, Gentry leaned across the mouth of the drain. He crinkled his nose. Even several feet below, Joyce could smell the odor coming from inside. It was definitely guano. The detective shined the light through the opening.

He screamed and jumped back.

“What’s wrong?” Joyce shouted.

“Cuh-rist!” he said.

She clambered up, grabbed the flashlight, and looked inside.

There was a face staring out at them, the face of a sheep. It was just the face; the rest of the body was broken bone and bloody sinew scattered along the length of the drain.

“I’m sorry,” Gentry said. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“It’s okay. I like a guy who’s not afraid to scream.” She leaned her head into the drain and raised the flashlight. There were long, deep gnaw marks on the sheep bone that resembled those on the deer carcass. She didn’t move for several seconds.

“Anything wrong?” Gentry asked.

“It smells like there’s guano,” Joyce said. She crawled partway in. “There is. It’s stuck to the back limbs. Jesus!”

“What?”

“There are two more sheep in there-”

“Bon fucking appetit!”

“-and-oh God!”

“What’s wrong?”

“One of them is still alive.”

Joyce slid back from the opening and motioned for Gentry to back away. Then she stepped back herself, raised the handgun, and fired into the drain. The clap echoed through the landfill. The sheep hopped back in a splash of red. Joyce lowered the gun.

“Robert,” she said, “these animals were freshly killed. The blood is still pretty damp, and the guano is only about two hours old.”

“Which means what? The big bat is back?”

“I don’t think so,” she said ominously. “I think it means the big bat is not alone.”

One day,thought Adrienne Hart,the financial districtis going to have a night life.

The young investment banker hated the fact that after the stock market closed and the traders went to the bars and then home, the streets were empty. There were no movie theaters or museums or galleries, the apartments and most of the hotels were farther uptown, and every shop in and around Wall Street went into hibernation until morning. One day, when she had the money, she was going to open a comedy club that would draw people downtown. And she’d be the headliner. Give up the big bucks for the big yuks. After years in this male-dominated world, she had plenty of stories to tell.

Until then, the World Trade Center was a dead-lonely place after hours, and the smooth, swift elevator ride from the sixty-seventh floor was a quiet, eerie, cocoonlike experience.

She looked at her watch and immediately forgot what time it was. It didn’t matter. By the time she got her car from the garage, drove back to her town house in New Jersey, and went to bed, it would be midnight. Then she’d be up at five-thirty and on-line to the markets in Tokyo and Hong Kong and London. Except for weekends, when the twenty-six-year-old went down to Philadelphia to see her fiancé, that was her life.

It happened so fast that she barely adjusted to one thing before the next thing hit.

The elevator shuddered violently, slapping her against the side wall. She slid into the corner, lost her briefcase, and put her arms out along the wall to keep from hitting the ground. The car stopped shaking.

Adrienne stood there, not moving, waiting to see what would happen.

A moment later the square door on the top of the car exploded in, shattering the lights, throwing the car into darkness, andthunking hard on the floor. The panel ricocheted into her left leg, gashing it just above the knee. The hot pain made Adrienne superalert. She swore and pushed away from the wall.

The car continued to descend as warm air spilled in through the opening. The young woman looked over at the lighted panel. She reached for the red emergency button.

She never got to it.

Something fell into the car. It was large and humid and it soaked up sound. Adrienne could no longer hear the whoosh of the air or the pings of the floor or anything but her own rapid breath. She also couldn’t see the panel. Something had blacked it out. All she saw was creeping darkness, ripples of black, then dark brown, then black again.

Then there was red. Directly in front of her. Two fierce orbs that looked like warning lights but couldn’t be, because what would they be doing right in front of her?

Adrienne turned to the right and reached out again, frantically trying to find the panel. She touched something that felt like satin. It was thin and soft and rippling. It was also moving closer. The woman wondered what the hell could have fallen through-

As the elevator eased to the bottom of the shaft, Adrienne suddenly felt a terrible pressure under each armpit. She stopped moving. Shecouldn’t move. It reminded her of when she was a kid on crutches-only the crutches were reversed. The pointy end was being driven up. She seemed to rise from her feet, but only for a moment. The pressure suddenly exploded into pain that obliterated the hurt in her leg. The nuclear fire raced up her shoulders to her neck, then down her arms to each fingertip. The awful heat ran its course in an instant, waking every nerve along the way. Then it blasted back up through her shoulders again, more intensely than before. She felt bone tear from sinew along her upper back and then something ripped through the flesh there. The pain was so severe that she would have given anything-including her life-to make it go away.

As Adrienne rose, her body quivered violently from her toes to the back of her head. Tides of heat and cold rushed over her in succession, and her heart slapped erratically against her chest. Her mouth fell open in a silent scream. The pain turned her vision swirling red-black to white and her throat filled with saliva and blood.

And then, mercifully, she died.

Joyce and Gentry stopped at the small New Paltz police station to tell them about the dead sheep. Sergeant Katherine Mintz said she appreciated the visit, and after asking what the two were doing at the landfill-they told her they were trying to solve an old mystery about Dr. Lipman’s bat-Mintz informed them that a farmer, Brian Silverman, had called to report the sheep missing two hours before. Gentry asked if Silverman had heard or seen anything. Mintz said he hadn’t; no bleating, no truck racing away, no sounds of a struggle. He simply went outside to feed the animals and they were gone.

Gentry also used the phone to call the Emergency Service Unit in Manhattan South. Joyce listened in on an extension. Lieutenant Kilar was still in the field, but Gentry learned from Sergeant Terry that the second team had been able to retrieve the bodies of the unit members as well as the vic without incident. Power remained shut down on the subway line when several small bats were spotted along the corridor. Al Doyle went in with a third ESU group and dealt with the bats according to the book: hairspray and a tennis racket. The bats were zapped with hair spray, which locked their fine-membraned wings. Then they were swatted with tennis rackets. In all, thirty-seven bats were destroyed. The MTA, the ESU, and Doyle then jointly decided that the crime scene status would remain in effect on the Number 1 track while it was searched for any additional bats. But the adjacent Number 2 track could resume operation. According to Sergeant Terry, Lieutenant Kilar was still convinced that the vic had been murdered by a person and not by a bat. The sergeant said they’d know more after the medical examiner had completed his autopsy on the man. Joyce felt a little sorry for Kilar. After the autopsy, everything he thought he knew about the case would come under serious reevaluation. Especially when, as Gentry had suggested, they compared notes with Chris Henry about the autopsy on Barbara Mathis.