Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

“Oh my God, what do I do?” she asked.

His voice was calm. “Answer it. Put it on speaker.”

She clicked open the speakerphone. “Hello?”

She heard breathing on the end of the phone and the noise of city traffic. He was in a car. She said again, “Hello?”

A singsong voice, as bitter as the wind, chanted to her.

“Fran-kie... Fran-kie.”

She tried to answer, but she couldn’t make her mouth form any words.

“Fran-kie...”

Chills wracked her wet body. She hissed into the phone. “Stop this, you sick son of a bitch. Stop playing this game.”

He didn’t answer; he simply breathed. And then he said with an odd, childish giggle, “Game’s almost done... game’s almost done.”

Frost gestured for the phone, but Frankie clutched it tightly in her hand. “What else do you want from me? Leave my patients alone. Leave me alone. Don’t you know you’ve already destroyed me? What more is there?”

The Night Bird didn’t answer. Laughter bubbled out of his throat.

Frankie felt her self-control bleeding away. “For God’s sake, why are you doing this? Why?”

The laughter faded to silence, and when he spoke again, his voice was low and cruel.

“You know why... to watch you die.”

Frost peeled the phone out of Frankie’s fingers and barked into it. “This is Frost Easton. Stop the car, and tell us where you are.”

He listened to the dead air.

“You don’t have anywhere to run. Where are you? Where’s Lucy?”

The Night Bird finally whispered back. “Luuuucy... Luuuucy... where are you... Luuuucy...”

Frankie watched Frost close his eyes and try to control himself. “What did you do to her?”

“Luuuucy...”

He slapped the phone shut and pushed it back into her hand.

“Drive,” he told Frankie. “We need to hurry.”

“Drive where?”

“You said Todd woke up in Dogpatch. We’ll start there.”

“Frost, what do you think he’s doing?”

He turned to face her. She could almost hear the pound of the detective’s heartbeat. “I don’t know what this game is all about, but Lucy’s in the middle of it. And so are you.”

Frost guided Dr. Stein up and down the streets of the bayside area south of the ballpark known as Dogpatch.

The neighborhood was a study in contradictions. Million-dollar lofts looked out on warehouses. Trendy restaurants sprang up next to boarded-up buildings. At midnight, in the midst of the driving rain, the hip neighborhood was mostly empty. The headlights of a dozen squad cars crisscrossed the streets, searching the ruins near the water. Flashlights swept through the weeds and parking lots underneath the concrete jungle of the elevated 280 freeway.

Two hours had passed, but the hunt had turned up no evidence of Darren Newman’s Lexus or the torture chamber of the Night Bird. Frost’s mood was dark, and his head throbbed with intermittent shocks of pain.

The windshield wipers ran back and forth, pushing away rain. They drove past a long, low building with windowless metal walls, and Frost gestured for Frankie to stop. He got out into the rain and shined his light around the grounds. He saw metal storage sheds painted over with graffiti. The beam lit up the columns of the freeway ramp beyond the industrial yard, and trucks kicked spray over the side of the highway as they passed overhead. There were no signs of life.

He got back inside, and they inched down the street, checking each vehicle parked on both sides.

“It’s late,” he said finally. “I can get someone to take you home.”

“No. You heard him. He wants to see me die. If you’re out here looking for him, I want to be here, too.”

He didn’t try to dissuade her. He knew she was stubborn. Another stretch of silence lingered between them.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he said.

Stein shrugged. “Go ahead.”

“Why did you say you’re not sure if you’ve done more harm than good in your life?” he asked.

She gripped the steering wheel tightly. Her eyes closed briefly and then opened again. The rain drowned out any other sounds around them.

“Oh, there are about a thousand answers to that,” she replied. And then a moment later, she added, “I’m an arrogant human being.”

“There are worse flaws.”

“Well, it can be fatal in a scientist. All this time, I thought I knew what I was doing, and the people who opposed me were simply misguided. Now I wonder if I was just a child pushing buttons on a computer I didn’t really understand.”

“People aren’t computers,” he pointed out.

“Maybe it would be better if we were. Then we’d know the right answers. It’s ironic, really. We build machines that remember everything, but our own brains are like the world’s most disorganized storage units. We put memories away and never see them again, or if we find them, they don’t look anything like we thought they did. I thought I was bringing order to all this chaos, but maybe I was just making it worse.”

He was trying to think of something to say when Dr. Stein stopped the car.

“Storage units,” she murmured.

“What?”

“I’m so sorry. I’m a fool. Here I am complaining about memory, and I forgot something important. I followed Darren that night when he went across the bay, but before he did, he stopped at a storage unit here in Dogpatch. I couldn’t see what he kept inside—”

“Where is it?” Frost interrupted her.

“At the end of Twenty-Second Street near the bay.”

“Let’s go. I’ll have Jess and a squad car meet us.”

“Do you think it means something?”

“I think a man who owns multiple buildings in this area doesn’t need a separate storage unit unless he has something to hide.”

Stein accelerated his Suburban through the rain. They headed east toward the water, and once they crossed the main artery at Third, they found themselves in a deserted commercial area leading toward the piers. Frankie drove until it looked like the road was ending, and then she turned again, where the street was barely wider than the SUV. She continued to the gates of a self-storage complex, and she stopped.

“It’s here,” she said.

Frost got out. The storm lashed his face. He walked up to the locked gates of the storage complex and found a bell to alert the security guard. Behind him, he saw the flashing lights of a police car racing to join them. Jess’s sedan followed.

The guard, who wore a hooded raincoat to stay dry, didn’t protest when he saw their badges. He slid the gates open for them. Like a mini parade, Frankie drove them through the gates, and Jess and the squad car entered behind them. She navigated the maze and stopped in front of a green trailer with a metal door. All of the other trailers had white doors, but here, the door had been painted green to match the rest of the unit. Frost wondered why.

“You saw Darren Newman go inside this storage unit?” he asked Frankie. “You’re sure it was this one?”

“I’m sure.”

Frost got out. Jess was waiting for him. They checked the door, which was secured with a heavy padlock. The rain on the metal roofs around them sounded like nails being hammered into wood. Jess wiped her face and had to shout to let Frost hear her.

“What do you think is inside?” she called.

“Lucy Hagen,” Frost replied. “I hope.”

Jess stared at his wet face, reading his eyes. Her round face showed no reluctance to break inside the compartment. She gestured at the squad car, and when a burly cop got out of the door, Jess put her arms over her head and banged the heels of her palms together. The cop retrieved a large bolt cutter from the trunk of his car, and he used it to make two cuts in the lock’s shackle, as easily as if he were slicing butter. The lock fell to the ground, and the door was open.