And Crawling Things Lurk

Present day

Late winter

San Francisco Bay metropolitan area

The off-white, late model van tilted when a gust of wind hit it broadside, making it swerve on the rain-slicked street. Frederick wrenched the wheel of the unfamiliar vehicle too far, then too far the other way before he fought it back under control. An approaching car flashed its headlights and blared its horn as it swept past.

“Feel better, ass-hole?”

He had considered, just as he had usually considered taking a new one out occasionally, just enough to become more familiar with its handling, but he always managed to talk himself out of it. Why risk being caught in it any sooner than necessary? That had always been his philosophy, and it had served him well, the same as using each van only once, then dumping it. Besides, he was a good driver, and all the vans were pretty much the same. If he could handle one, he should be able to handle the next one.

But why in the world had he waited until the middle of February?

Because that asshole boss of his was an asshole, that’s why.

His reaction to his own wit came out as a derisive snort, and he blew a string of snot all over the steering wheel hub, its tail drooping down his chest. He wiped it off his lips and chin with the back of his hand then wiped his hand on his thigh. His watery eyes peered out through the misting windshield.

That asshole had wasted the whole summer urging ever more hordes of screaming little brats to ride around in circles while he took their money, refusing to shut down for even one day. So, then Frederick had to spend the whole after-season up until well after the first rains helping the asshole paint, repair and upgrade the equipment. Couldn’t have the little darlings stub a toe or pick up a splinter on a loose board or something. Now, because his boss was such a greedy asshole, he had to make an Auntie Sofia-run when he really shouldn’t even be out of bed. After all, it wasn’t like she could just wait indefinitely.

Tonight, he wanted nothing more than to stay in his trailer out in the back lot at the park, take half a bottle of cough syrup, maybe some pills, and curl up in bed. The thought of the fuzzy-warm blankets pulled up beneath his chin while he drifted off was almost compelling enough to make him dump what he had already collected and turn around.

But he didn’t. Auntie Sofia needed what he provided, and the obligation was now his to see that she had them. She was family, and family took care of family. He just hoped she had been able to hold out okay. Every time he went to see her, he made sure he stressed the hazards of her venturing out on her own. He was pretty sure she understood enough not to try it, but hunger could be a pretty strong incentive.

He turned off at the street he had selected on the city map now spread out on the passenger seat. He was pretty good at remembering the maps routes he laid out, but it never hurt to have it handy. He knew the chosen street would take him deep into a good area after just a few blocks. He had been there a year earlier from a different direction. Not hunting, just checking it out for future reference.

He was pretty sure a year would be long enough. People that lived in places like that didn’t pay much attention to cars passing through. They had enough problems figuring out where to steal their next meal. They wouldn’t have noticed a plain looking van just driving down the street. Besides, now that he thought of it, this was a different van than the one he had then, anyway.

He leaned over far enough to hook his handkerchief out of his back pocket and wadded it up to dab at the stream of mucus threatening to drip from a nostril. He sniffed a couple of times, hacked a couple of coughs when the stuff ran down the back of his throat, and wiped his handkerchief across his red, swollen eyes.

Should have gotten the flu shot. Shoulda done it.

Muffled crying drifted out from the back of the van, but he tuned it out. If they didn’t get too loud, it shouldn’t be a problem. But, then, a second cry, also muffled, drifted through the heavy, maroon curtains he had hastily rigged behind his seat, and it was louder. Maybe it still wasn’t too loud.

He had almost been tempted to keep looking for more back where he got them, just a couple more was all he needed to give him a full load. Well, full enough, the way he was feeling. But he had always made it a prime rule not to over-hunt an area, and it had kept him safe. Where he was going wasn’t all that far or different from where he was little more than half an hour earlier. Just a quick drive across the Bay Bridge was almost as good as going half way across the state. It should be far enough away not to be connected to the other ones. Not for a while, anyway. And, considering the nature of the creatures involved and the level of official concern apt to be stirred up to resolve the issue, more likely never.

At the next turn an old hotel hung with iron fire escapes on two of the four brick walls and housing permanent tenants of limited means loomed over the two, three and four-story buildings around it. Eighty-year-old houses with fading and flaking clapboards hunched behind sagging fences on narrow lots not worth developing or worthy of urban renewal. Multi-hued row houses faded to uniform beige, dilapidated duplexes and neglected apartment buildings mingled with an assortment of machine shops and body shops, tattoo parlors, liquor stores and pool halls. In walls of broken bricks, chipped and cracked stucco, and dull, unpainted cinderblocks, every window reachable from ground level wore iron bars.

Frederick sniffed again, hawked a couple of times, swallowed, and kept driving. He slowed down at mid-block and then crept the last few yards to the next intersection just as the light turned green. It wouldn’t do to be caught sitting at a red light and have someone pull up beside him or come walking out of a door just as one of them in back managed to get extra loud.

Not a lot of people were out and about at this hour, though, not in this weather. The few restaurants in the area remained viable only due to their attached bars, and storefronts had long since darkened behind padlocked gates.

He peered ahead and checked both side-view mirrors for movement among the reflections dressing every wet surface, but he saw no one. Still, there might be enough to make trolling worthwhile. There was little to invite the locals to venture out on a night like this, and that suited him. It was cold but not icy, wet and gusty but not actually raining. He nodded and allowed one corner of his mouth to lift in a grin that was more sneer. The streets were his.

He turned right at the next corner, shifted into low and slacked off to just above walking speed. He glanced over as the van crept past an alley, but the only one he saw was a man browsing through a dumpster. He avoided big ones even when he was feeling strong and healthy.

The next alley was empty of anyone, but the one after that looked promising. He was pretty sure he spotted several small figures about half way down, silhouetted against the light at the far end of the block. It was late for kids to be out, but not in a neighborhood like this. Not even in this weather. They were like barn-rats, prowling around half the night, poking into holes and places they had no business being. A lot of them probably didn’t even have homes, just living out on the streets, no one to miss them if they just weren’t there some morning. No great loss for anyone to get all excited about. In a day or two, they’d be forgotten.

He parked the van and got out in the shadowy area beneath a burned-out streetlight a little beyond the mouth of the alley. Then, leaning back in, he spread the curtain behind his seat enough to peek through at the forms heaped on the floor of the dark, windowless interior. Other than where they had squirmed about, they were still as he had laid them. No loose arms or legs protruded; they were still secured. A couple of them whimpered, but the tape across their mouths muffled all but the most energetic cries. They should be going into shock by now, lessening even more any efforts to resist their bonds. That was one of the advantages of the younger ones, even these back-alley waifs he preferred: they did cow readily once they saw escape was not possible and that further resistance would get painful. They didn’t really have to be uninjured, just alive. He only had to be careful not to inflict an injury that would result in uncontrollable screams of pain for which there was only one quick and sure method of handling, and they did have to be alive.

At the mouth of the alley, he slipped around the corner and crept on the balls of his feet along the base of the building. The debris littering the pavement was as integral a part of the milieu as the mold and soot staining the bricks of the canyon walls. Stray spirals of wind curling through the gorge stirred the accumulation of years, making them seem alive and independent of each other in their disconnected dances.

He had read about how a predator stalking prey can creep through a forest carpeted with dry, crackling leaves without making hardly a sound. He was a predator in a different environment, but he, too, was skillful.

When he drew within fifty feet, blending into the shadows, no more than an ink blot sliding across a surface covered with blots, he saw there were three, probably around eight or nine-years old, huddled around something in their midst, possibly in the hands of one of them. They were so engrossed they still hadn’t noticed him when he hovered over them, peering down over their shoulders at the kitten one was holding. It hissed and spat at the hands gripping it against its efforts to reach them with its needle-like teeth.

With a “Grrr!” the boy holding the kitten thrust it towards one of the girls, a teasing threat of teeth and claws. She jerked back and shook her head, firmly denying any desire to take hold of the tiny, feral beast.

In that same instant, also in reaction to the threat of ripping teeth and claws, Frederick flinched. The young ones, the little ones with their little, needle-like teeth, were always the worst. Tiny, razor sharp teeth would chew and chew until there was nothing left to chew. Stumbling half a step backwards, he gasped a tight, “Uhnn!”

Whether from the movement or the sound, the other girl glanced around.

Like a great, shadowy bat with his black raincoat billowing behind him, Frederick gave the impression of filling the alley. In that mass of blackness and further shadowed by the wide brim of a floppy, black hat, his gaunt, pallid face with its distortion of old scars, the beak of a nose from which the tip had long ago been brutally gnawed away, and the twisted stub of a destroyed ear seemed to float unattached. Beneath protruding brow ridges, his glaring, deep-set eyes, still open wide in sudden, phobic terror of bestial attack, appeared ebon in the night. With his mouth still agape in his gasp of fright, his never corrected overbite appeared more like fangs. His hand shot forward to grasp her with splayed stubs of long-ago gnawed fingers like the disfigured talons of a huge raptor.

She sprang to her feet from a squat with the speed of reflex, but Frederick expected it and was ready. With a flick of his wrist, the back of his bony fist slammed into the side of her head, and she slumped to the ground. Before she hit the floor of the alley, Frederick lashed out at the boy, again with a fist to the side of his head. The yowling kitten hit the pavement and was gone in three leaps. But the first one, taken blindly in its own panic, drove it straight toward Frederick before it caromed to disappear into lurking shadows. Frederick jerked away from the charging beast just as he swung at the second girl. She ducked his fist and spun away from his grasping other hand. Before he could reach her, she darted away in a fast sprint – developed, no doubt, in running from angry shop owners – towards the far end of the alley. Abandoning thoughts of chasing her, he scooped up the two others under his arms and skittered back out of the alley.

At the van, he dropped them to the pavement at his feet while he fished the key from his pocket. With practiced speed, he unlocked the sliding door on the side, grabbed a roll of duct tape from just inside, and ripped off a piece. Like a calf-roper at a rodeo, he whipped it around the boy’s wrists then pulled off another piece for his ankles. Another piece went over his mouth with care not to seal off his nose; they had to be alive. Frederick tossed him onto the crowded floor of the van, reached down for the girl and did the same with her. Neither one had even begun to come around by the time he slid the door shut and walked around to the driver’s door while taking the key from his pocket.

As soon as the van’s engine thrummed to life, he slipped it into drive. With satisfaction of another success surging through his body to replace the ebbing adrenalin rush, his mind flashed through visions of memorized street maps in a mental leap to the next essential step. If he turned left at the next corner, then across a one-way street going the wrong direction, he could take the next left where the road T’d, then right after two blocks to go around a what looks like a park, then left onto what looked like a major street, and then it was a straight shot to the boulevard and away.

He was almost to the corner when he heard tires squealing. In his left-side mirror, he watched a low-rider Caddy careen around the next corner back, swerve a couple of times, and then surge toward the van. That didn’t have to mean it was after him, though. It could as easily be running from the police – probably even more likely. He turned right on the one-way street that went the wrong way; he could always get back to the right direction after he was satisfied he wasn’t pursued. He nudged the gas a bit as he watched the mirror. He was only half way to the next street when the Caddy slid around the corner behind him. It could still be coincidence. It was still several car-lengths behind when he turned left onto the next street

The Caddy turned behind him. Damn!

With the big, low-slung car crowding his back bumper, Frederick whipped right into an alley at the last instant. The left rear corner of the van slammed against the corner of the building, but he got it straightened out and sped toward the far end. In quick glances to his mirror, he watched the big Caddy back up past the mouth of the alley then nose into it, its rising bellow echoing between the narrow walls like an enraged beast.

At the next street, Frederick turned left and stomped the gas pedal to the floor. But no sooner did the van jump forward that he had to slam onto the brake. Two other cars, both big sedan low-riders like the Caddy, had come around the corner from the left and stopped crossways in the street, blocking it from curb to curb just before the intersection.

The sidewalk was still open.

He veered left, bounced over the curb, and lined up on the sidewalk. It was wide enough for the van by mere inches between the unyielding wall beyond his side mirror on the left and street lamp poles, signposts, and parking meters lining the curb on his right. A newspaper box protruded too far, though, and he sent it bouncing out across the pavement. At the cross street just beyond the twinned low-rider barrier he bounced back onto the roadway and punched it again, hauling straight across. A glance in the mirror showed the Caddy following his course onto the sidewalk, but, long and wide, it sprayed a shower of sparks from its left side scraping the soot-covered bricks.

The van swayed right, then hooked a left onto the next cross street, a wide avenue with two lanes in each direction. It was probably the one that would take him past the park and to the boulevard – if he hadn’t gotten turned around in all the maneuvering. There were no moving cars as far ahead as he could see. The van’s engine scream dropped a fraction as it shifted into high gear. It was beginning to look like he was going to make it out and away. If he could just get to the freeway, it was only a short shot to the San Rafael Bridge and then an easy half-hour or so run up U.S. 101 to Cedar City and Aunt Sofia’s. He was confident the Caddy and its attendant low-riders wouldn’t follow even as far as the bridge. Just like any territorial animal, they didn’t like getting too far from their home turfs, especially for nothing more than a couple of expendable and replaceable young ones.

Suddenly, the Caddy swept past him, its powerful engine roaring. He expected it to sideswipe him as it went past, but it waited until it was ahead of him before whipping back in front of him. Its brake lights came on and went off in a steady deceleration he was forced to copy. He swerved to pass it, but it swerved to match him, and it continued to slow down. Headlights in both mirrors caught his attention. The other two cars came up on him fast. He tried again and again to veer around the Caddy, but it matched his every move. The other two cars moved up alongside him, one on either side where they prevented him from trying another detour on the sidewalk or a cross street, and then slowed to match the Caddy’s speed. Then, as a group, they slowed to a stop in the middle of the street at mid-block. The car on his left even stopped with its tail end angled over behind him so he couldn’t back up.

No longer concerned with the van or its cargo, Frederick throw open his door, but then yanked it back closed and hit the lock button just as a figure lunged toward it from outside. He scrambled over the center console, fought through a tangling in the spread map, then out the passenger door. But his feet no sooner hit the pavement than a fist smashed him full in the face. He slammed back against the passenger seat and sagged to his knees with his nose burning and his lips and mouth gone numb as the salty taste of blood flooded it.

Through the loud ringing in his ears, he thought he heard someone say, “Where...?” He didn’t catch the rest of it.

He blinked away the tears flooding his eyes enough to see an open route between the man who had hit him and another one coming his way from the passenger side of the Caddy. He lurched to his feet and took three steps before someone slammed him from his right side, knocking him to the pavement. When he rolled over and looked up, four faces glared down at him as two more joined them, angry faces, faces that promised more pain.

He heard a whoosh and a bang as the van’s side door slid open.

Someone said, “Shit!”

Someone else said, “How many...?” and then another, “Where’d they...?”

When he heard, “Cops’re coming!” and he heard distant sirens, his first thought was that he might be saved. But, of course, the cops were next to the last thing he wanted. The last thing he wanted was already there, more than six of them, now, and they were beginning to gather around him again, closer and closer. He saw a tire iron, two knife blades, two sawed-off baseball bats, and something that could have been a screw-studded cue ball swinging on the end of a chain. They all had balled fists and clenched rage behind glaring eyes.

The siren of the first patrol car abruptly shut off as the tires slid it to a stop on the wet pavement, its white spotlight sweeping back and forth across the lone van and the lumpy form on the pavement beside it. The second and third patrol cars stopped on either side of the first, and their spotlights swept around at the buildings, trashcans, utility poles, empty streets and empty sidewalks. The officers got out of their cars and peered up and down the street with its shadowy doorways, up at the tops of buildings, across the shadowy park with its sparse trees, around in all directions. Besides their own movements, the only other motions were red and blue strobe flashes from the lights atop their cars reflecting on every wet surface.

They checked the van with its locked driver’s door and the passenger door and sliding door standing open, and they wondered at the significance of all the pieces of duct tape on the cargo area floor and beside it on the pavement with remnants of a torn and crumpled street map becoming soaked in the light mist. The body of the man beside the van had no identification, not even a wallet. They could see it was a man, but they would never know what his face looked like before his assailants started on him. Without fingertips, no fingerprints could turn up in any database. His DNA would be collected and put into a data file. Perhaps someday it could be matched to another case.

They determined the van had been recently stolen from the San Jose airport, and its stolen license plates were from a similar van in long-term storage in Sacramento. They could speculate, but with no witnesses and no other evidence, it was only speculation.

The sergeant’s car pulled up, and he got out, hunching his shoulders against the chill and wet of the night. His passenger emerged from the right side, a city councilman whose goals beyond the council chambers led him on a crusade to monitor police operations in a crime-ridden area of his city. After the officers briefed the sergeant on what they had found, he turned to the councilman with a nod and said, “Well, there you go. A clear case of P-V-P, N-H-I.”

As expected, the councilman turned to the sergeant with confusion on his face.

Wearing a sardonic smile, the sergeant explained, “A van that’s stolen from a hundred miles away, wearing plates that were stolen separately half a state away in the other direction. Nothing inside but scraps of tape that were cut off something somebody probably considered secure, and absolutely nothing on the body for identification. What else but a drug deal gone bad? Or, as we call it, P-V-P, N-H-I. That’s Puke-Verses-Puke, No-Humans-Involved.”

Pleased that he now possessed one more bit of insider police jargon, the councilman added to his list of unsolvable homicides one more whose victim would probably not even be missed by anyone that mattered.