Jack O'Connell - Box Nine

At the very end of the alley, about thirty yards from the entrance to the boulevard, sits the telephone pole. Lenore starts at the street and follows it up to the big, grey metal box mounted near the top and the thick black cables that run off into the air.

Then she centers her vision on Vicky, Cortez’s runaway hooker. Vicky’s bare feet are planted on the top climbing spikes and she’s got one arm hugging the splintery wooden pole. She looks like a graphic symbol of hell, a child possessed and tormented beyond descriptive words. She’s dressed in a floor-length, satiny, black nightgown. She has the remains of the bottom half, torn and shredded most likely on her climb upward, haphazardly pulled together, sort of gathered up slightly and held against the pole. Above the waist, the gown is form-hugging and sparse, held on her body by a single thin strap around her neck. Her left breast has fallen out of the gown and is exposed to the air and the public. But it’s Vicky’s face that captures and assaults Lenore’s eyes. Lenore knows, from the moment she sees it, that it will perpetually define, give image to, maybe even devour, the word torment , for the balance of her life.

The face is a masterpiece of the pure lines and curves of horror, of a primal fear. The eyes are bulging and yet sunk back a full inch into the skull. The skin is unblemished but sallow and taut to the point of ripping off the bone. The cheeks protrude at the sides of the nose, as if casting a furious vote for skeleton over cartilage. But it is the mouth that is the center of everything, opened into an endless-seeming hole, a bottomless O. It appears never to draw breath but moves ceaselessly, so fast that its motions begin to blur within the lenses of the binoculars. Vicky is forming words faster than her tongue, lips, full mouth can handle. It’s as if they’re all instruments pushed suddenly far beyond the limits they were designed for, as if they were inadequate substances, forced to the point of shattering under immense and unnatural forces of speed and gravity.

“I have to talk to her,” Lenore says.

“You know her number,” Dennison jokes, pleased with himself, searching through his sport coat for a cigarette.

“I need to speak with her,” Lenore says slowly, enunciating each syllable as if Dennison were an inattentive child.

“Hang in,” he says, mimicking her voice. “This could take a while.” Then he goes back to his own voice and says, “My guess is she’ll go over the top in a while and drop like a stone. Whatever crap she’s on is going to burn her down sooner or later. We’ll just wait for the fall.”

“I’m going down there,” Lenore says.

“Like hell you are.”

“I need to ask her some questions.”

“Then you better hope she can still talk after she hits the ground.”

Lenore looks to the ground, waits a second, cocks her head, and smirks at Dennison. “You want to do this your way,” she says, “then great, we can do it your way. But I’ve got to tell you I’ve got weight on this, okay? I’m with DEA on this. Maybe others. If you want I can go back to my car and call it in. I can say I’m getting no cooperation and we can wait five minutes for some Federal boys to come down and insult the way you dress. They’ll pull your authority in front of all your people. If you want it that way, fine with me.”

Dennison’s head is rigid, and Lenore thinks a good wind would cause it to fall from his shoulders in a pile of heavy dust. His jaw is thrust out toward her and finally he opens it and says, “You are a real bitch.”

“Absolutely,” she says. “Now’re you ready to help me out?” He stares at her and she says, “I’m going to advance from the left side of the alley. Our left. I’m going to want the bullhorn to start out with. I want a line of your best shooters — what’ve you got, four, five guys with rifles — I want them in position, fully focused, but absolutely no firing unless she lets one fly …”

“You could be dead by then,” Dennison says.

“Odds are I’m safe. She’s a teenage hooker. Even on her best day she’s not a sharpshooter. In this condition she’d need a miracle to get anywhere near me.”

Dennison shrugs and turns away, snapping his fingers to reposition his men. Lenore looks around to find Woo at her shoulder and says, “You should really wait at the car, Freddy. Play the stereo till I get back.”

“I should probably go with you, don’t you think?”

Lenore just laughs.

“Seriously. I’m the only one who’s witnessed this before. Out at Spooner. If she can be talked to …”

“Her mouth was moving like, out of control. I wish I could hear what was coming out.”

Woo shakes his head no. “Very unsettling noise,” he says.

Lenore lowers her voice and says, “The two guys out at the prison, when they went nuts, could you talk to them at all? Was there any communication?”

Woo breathes out heavily. “Hard to say. My guess is they understood me, but it was as if they couldn’t—” he trails off, pauses, picks up—“slow down, slow their nervous systems. Maybe their brains, their language centers, couldn’t slow them down enough to make it a dialogue.”

“If the girl has gotten into some Lingo, and I’m certain that’s the story here, we don’t know the dosage or anything …”

“It’s all up in the air, Lenore. That’s why I suggest—”

She cuts him off. “Just go back to the car. Just wait for me at the car.”

She turns to Dennison and says, “We all set?”

A beat-up Lincoln Continental screeches to a stop at the police line, lights and sirens engulfing it.

“Oh, shit,” Lenore says, infuriated.

Zarelli jumps out and runs toward the blocking cars waving his badge and gun high in the air. Lenore hears at least one uniformed officer say, “What an asshole.”

Zarelli practically dives to the ground between Dennison and Lenore and says to Dennison, “Zarelli, narcotics.”

“Another one,” Dennison says, and rubs at his eyes.

Zarelli turns to Lenore and says, “It’s all right, honey, I’m here.”

For a second, Lenore doesn’t know what to do. She’s astounded by his presence, let alone his words. She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. Then she decides to forsake language entirely. She lifts her pants leg and pulls, in a furious motion, her secondary weapon, a.38 revolver, from an ankle holster. She sweeps her hand upward and presses the side of the barrel, not the front, to Zarelli’s forehead. She leaves it there for only a second, but it’s long enough for him to flinch brutally, fall sideways toward the ground, snap his eyes shut, and scrunch his face into a grotesque expression of shock.

Dennison lets out a bubbly, surprised bark of a laugh. Before Zarelli can recover any composure and speak, Lenore is gone.

She moves around the trunk of the patrol car, the bullhorn in her hand, out in front of her like a gun. She moves to the exposed corner of the car’s bumper, squats down, raises the bullhorn to her lips, and says, “Vicky, honey, where are you?” in a bad southern accent, made bizarre by amplification.

She looks up to see that Vicky has heard her call. Her head juts from one side of the pole to the other, insectlike. Her free arm shoots straight up into the air, waves a weapon, a Magnum, Lenore thinks, like a flag.

“Vicky, child,” she tries again, “it’s your sister Darleen. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

Though Vicky’s mouth continues to move at its unnatural, blistering speed, her head and eyes seem to be moving separately, trying to focus on the direction of the voice, trying to lock on something familiar.

Lenore starts to take small, slow steps down the alley, her left hand holding the bullhorn up, her right hand gripping her gun, held slightly behind her back. “Why you hiding from me, Vicky?” she yells. “I need to talk to you now.”