Nightmares and Dreamscapes Page 12

  "Not bad," Morrison said. "Who took them?"

  "I did," Dees said. "I always take the pix that go with my stories. Don't you ever look at the photo credits?"

  "Not usually, no," Morrison said, and glanced at the temp headline Dees had slugged at the top of his penguin story. Libby Grannit in Comp would come up with a punchier, more colorful one, of course--that was, after all, her job--but Dees's instincts were good all the way up to headlines, and he usually found the right street, if not often the actual address and apartment number. ALIEN INTELLIGENCE AT NORTH POLE, this one read. Penguins weren't aliens, of course, and Morrison had an idea that they actually lived at the South Pole, but those things hardly mattered. Inside View readers were crazy about both Aliens and Intelligence (perhaps because a majority of them felt like the former and sensed in themselves a deep deficiency of the latter), and that was what mattered.

  "The headline's a little lacking," Morrison began, "but--"

  "--that's what Libby's for," Dees finished for him. "So. . ."

  "So?" Morrison asked. His eyes were wide and blue and guileless behind his gold-rimmed glasses. He put his hand back down on top of the folder, smiled at Dees, and waited.

  "So what do you want me to say? That I was wrong?"

  Morrison's smile widened a millimeter or two. "Just that you might have been wrong. That'd do, I guess--you know what a pussycat I am."

  "Yeah, tell me about it," Dees said, but he was relieved. He could take a little abasement; it was the actual crawling around on his belly that he didn't like.

  Morrison sat looking at him, right hand splayed over the file.

  "Okay; I might have been wrong."

  "How large-hearted of you to admit it," Morrison said, and handed the file over.

  Dees snatched it greedily, took it over to the chair by the window, and opened it. What he read this time--it was no more than a loose assemblage of wire-service stories and clippings from a few small-town weeklies--blew his mind.

  I didn't see this before, he thought, and on the heels of that: Why didn't I see this before?

  He didn't know . . . but he did know he might have to rethink that idea of being top hog in the tabloid sty if he missed many more stories like this. He knew something else, as well: if his and Morrison's positions had been reversed (and Dees had turned down the editor's chair at Inside View not once but twice over the last seven years), he would have made Morrison crawl on his belly like a reptile before giving him the file.

  Fuck that, he told himself. You would have fired his ass right out the door.

  The idea that he might be burning out fluttered through his mind. The burnout rate was pretty high in this business, he knew. Apparently you could spend only so many years writing about flying saucers carrying off whole Brazilian villages (usually illustrated by out-of-focus photographs of lightbulbs hanging from strands of thread), dogs that could do calculus, and out-of-work daddies chopping their kids up like kindling wood. Then one day you suddenly snapped. Like Dottie Walsh, who had gone home one night and taken a bath with a dry-cleaning bag wrapped around her head.

  Don't be a fool, he told himself, but he was uneasy just the same. The story was sitting there, right there, big as life and twice as ugly. How in the hell could he have missed it?

  He looked up at Morrison, who was rocked back in his desk chair with his hands laced together over his stomach, watching him. "Well?" Morrison asked.

  "Yeah," he said. "This could be big. And that's not all. I think it's the real goods."

  "I don't care if it's the real goods or not," Morrison said, "as long as it sells papers. And it's going to sell lots of papers, isn't it, Richard?"

  "Yes." He got to his feet and tucked the folder under his arm. "I want to run this guy's backtrail, starting with the first one we know about, up in Maine."

  "Richard?"

  He turned back at the door and saw Morrison was looking at the contact sheets again. He was smiling.

  "What do you think if we run the best of these next to a photo of Danny DeVito in that Batman movie?"

  "It works for me," Dees said, and went out. Questions and self-doubts were suddenly, blessedly set aside; the old smell of blood was back in his nose, strong and bitterly compelling, and for the time being he only wanted to follow it all the way to the end. The end came a week later, not in Maine, not in Maryland, but much farther south, in North Carolina.

  2

  It was summertime, which meant the living should have been easy and the cotton high, but nothing was coming easy for Richard Dees as that long day wound its way down toward dark.

  The major problem was his inability--at least so far--to get into the small Wilmington airport, which served only one major carrier, a few commuter airlines, and a lot of private planes. There were heavy thunderstorm cells in the area and Dees was circling ninety miles from the airfield, pogoing up and down in the unsteady air and cursing as the last hour of daylight began to slip away. It was 7:45 P.M. by the time he was given landing clearance. That was less than forty minutes before official sundown. He didn't know if the Night Flier stuck to the traditional rules or not, but if he did, it was going to be a close thing.

  And the Flier was here; of that Dees was sure. He had found the right place, the right Cessna Skymaster. His quarry could have picked Virginia Beach, or Charlotte, or Birmingham, or some point even farther south, but he hadn't. Dees didn't know where he had hidden between leaving Duffrey, Maryland, and arriving here, and didn't care. It was enough to know that his intuition had been correct--his boy had continued to work the windsock circuit. Dees had spent a good part of the last week calling all the airports south of Duffrey that seemed right for the Flier's M.O., making the rounds again and again, using his finger on the Touch-Tone in his Days Inn motel room until it was sore and his contacts on the other end had begun to express their irritation with his persistence. Yet in the end persistence had paid off, as it so often did.

  Private planes had landed the night before at all of the most likely airfields, and Cessna Skymaster 337s at all of them. Not surprising, since they were the Toyotas of private aviation. But the Cessna 337 that had landed last night in Wilmington was the one he was looking for; no question about it. He was on the guy.

  Dead on the guy.

  "N471B, vector ILS runway 34," the radio voice drawled laconically into his earphones. "Fly heading 160. Descend and maintain 3,000."

  "Heading 160. Leaving 6 for 3,000, roger."

  "And be aware we still got some nasty weather down here."

  "Roger," Dees said, thinking that ole Farmer John, down there in whatever beer-barrel passed for Air Traffic Control in Wilmington, was sure one hell of a sport to tell him that. He knew there was still nasty weather in the area; he could see the thunderheads, some with lightning still going off inside them like giant fireworks, and he had spent the last forty minutes or so circling and feeling more like a man in a blender than one in a twin-engine Beechcraft.

  He flicked off the autopilot, which had been taking him around and around the same stupid patch of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't North Carolina farmland for far too long, and grabbed a handful of wheel. No cotton down there, high or otherwise, that he could see. Just a bunch of used-up tobacco patches now overgrown with kudzu. Dees was happy to point his plane's nose toward Wilmington and start down the ramp, monitored by pilot, ATC, and tower, for the ILS approach.

  He picked up the microphone, thought about giving ole Farmer John there a yell, asking him if there happened to be anything weird going on downstairs--the dark-and-stormy-night kind of stuff Inside View readers loved, perhaps--then racked the mike again. It was still awhile until sunset; he had verified the official Wilmington time on his way down from Washington National. No, he thought, maybe he'd just keep his questions to himself for a little while longer.

  Dees believed the Night Flier was a real vampire about as much as he believed it was the Tooth Fairy who had put all those quarters under his pillow when he was a kid, bu
t if the guy thought he was a vampire--and this guy, Dees was convinced, really did--that would probably be enough to make him conform to the rules.

  Life, after all, imitates art.

  Count Dracula with a private pilot's license.

  You had to admit, Dees thought, it was a lot better than killer penguins plotting the overthrow of the human race.

  The Beech jounced as he passed through a thick membrane of cumulus on his steady downward course. Dees cursed and trimmed the plane, which seemed increasingly unhappy with the weather.

  You and me both, babes, Dees thought.

  When he came into the clear again, he could see the lights of Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach clearly.

  Yes, sir, the fatties who shop at 7-Eleven are gonna love this one, he thought as lightning flashed on the port side. They're gonna pick up about seventy zillion copies of this baby when they go out for their nightly ration of Twinkies and beer.

  But there was more, and he knew it.

  This one could be . . . well . . . just so goddam good.

  This one could be legitimate.

  There was a time when a word like that never would have crossed your mind, ole buddy, he thought. Maybe you are burning out.

  Still, big stacked headlines danced in his head like sugarplums: INSIDE VIEW REPORTER APPREHENDS CRAZED NIGHT FLIER EXCLUSIVE STORY ON HOW BLOOD-DRINKING NIGHT FLIER WAS FINALLY CAUGHT. "NEEDED TO HAVE IT," DEADLY DRACULA DECLARES.

  It wasn't exactly grand opera--Dees had to admit that--but he thought it sang just the same. He thought it sang like a boid.

  He picked up the mike after all and depressed the button. He knew his blood-buddy was still down there, but he also knew he wasn't going to be comfortable until he had made absolutely sure.

  "Wilmington, this is N471B. You still got a Skymaster 337 from Maryland down there on the ramp?"

  Through static: "Looks like it, old hoss. Can't talk just now. I got air traffic."

  "Has it got red piping?" Dees persisted.

  For a moment he thought he would get no answer, then: "Red piping, roger. Kick it off, N471B, if you don't want me to see it I can slap an FCC fine on y'all. I got too many fish to fry tonight and not enough skillets."

  "Thanks, Wilmington," Dees said in his most courteous voice. He hung up the mike and then gave it the finger, but he was grinning, barely noticing the jolts as he passed through another membrane of cloud. Skymaster, red piping, and he was willing to bet next year's salary that if the doofus in the tower hadn't been so busy, he would have been able to confirm the tail-number as well: N101BL.

  One week, by Christ, one little week. That was all it had taken. He had found the Night Flier, it wasn't dark yet, and as impossible as it seemed, there were no police on the scene. If there had been cops, and if they had been there concerning the Cessna, Farmer John almost certainly would have said so, sky-jam and bad weather or not. Some things were just too good not to gossip about.

  I want your picture, you bastard, Dees thought. Now he could see the approach lights, flashing white in the dusk. I'll get your story in time, but first, the picture. Just one, but I gotta have it.

  Yes, because it was the picture that made it real. No fuzzy out-of-focus lightbulbs; no "artist's conception"; a real by-God photo in living black-and-white. He headed down more steeply, ignoring the descent beep. His face was pale and set. His lips were pulled back slightly, revealing small, gleaming white teeth.

  In the combined light of dusk and the instrument panel, Richard Dees looked quite a little bit like a vampire himself.

  3

  There were many things Inside View was not--literate, for one, overconcerned with such minor matters as accuracy and ethics, for another--but one thing was undeniable: it was exquisitely attuned to horrors. Merton Morrison was a bit of an asshole (although not as much of one as Dees had thought when he'd first seen the man smoking that dumb fucking pipe of his), but Dees had to give him one thing--he had remembered the things that had made Inside View a success in the first place: buckets of blood and guts by the handful.

  Oh, there were still pictures of cute babies, plenty of psychic predictions, and Wonder Diets featuring such unlikely ingestibles as beer, chocolate, and potato chips, but Morrison had sensed a sea-change in the temper of the times, and had never once questioned his own judgement about the direction the paper should take. Dees supposed that confidence was the main reason Morrison had lasted as long as he had, in spite of his pipe and his tweed jackets from Asshole Brothers of London. What Morrison knew was that the flower children of the sixties had grown into the cannibals of the nineties. Huggy therapy, political correctness, and "the language of feelings" might be big deals among the intellectual upper class, but the ever-popular common man was still a lot more interested in mass murders, buried scandals in the lives of the stars, and just how Magic Johnson had gotten AIDS.

  Dees had no doubt there was still an audience for All Things Bright and Beautiful, but the one for All Shit Grim and Gory had become a growth stock again as the Woodstock Generation began to discover gray in its hair and lines curving down from the corners of its petulant self-indulgent mouth. Merton Morrison, whom Dees now recognized as a kind of intuitive genius, had made his own inside view clear in a famous memo issued to all staff and stringers less than a week after he and his pipe had taken up residence in the corner office. By all means, stop and smell the roses on your way to work, this memo suggested, but once you get to there, spread those nostrils--spread them wide--and start sniffing for blood and guts.

  Dees, who had been made for sniffing blood and guts, had been delighted. His nose was the reason he was here, flying into Wilmington. There was a human monster down there, a man who thought he was a vampire. Dees had a name all picked out for him; it burned in his mind as a valuable coin might burn in a man's pocket. Soon he would take the coin out and spend it. When he did, the name would be plastered across the tabloid display racks of every supermarket checkout counter in America, screaming at the patrons in unignorable sixty-point type.

  Look out, ladies and sensation seekers, Dees thought. You don't know it, but a very bad man is coming your way. You'll read his real name and forget it, but that's okay. What you'll remember is my name for him, the name that's going to put him right up there with Jack the Ripper and the Cleveland Torso Murderer and the Black Dahlia. You'll remember the Night Flier, coming soon to a checkout counter near you. The exclusive story, the exclusive interview . . . but what I want most of all is the exclusive picture.

  He checked his watch again and allowed himself to relax the tiniest bit (which was all he could relax). He still had almost half an hour till dark, and he would be parking next to the white Skymaster with red piping (and N101BL on the tail in a similar red) in less than fifteen minutes.

  Was the Flier sleeping in town or in some motel on the way into town? Dees didn't think so. One of the reasons for the Skymaster 337's popularity, besides its relatively low price, was that it was the only plane its size with a belly-hold. It wasn't much bigger than the trunk of an old VW Beetle, true, but it was roomy enough for three big suitcases or five small ones . . . and it could certainly hold a man, provided he wasn't the size of a pro basketball player. The Night Flier could be in the Cessna's belly-hold, provided he was (a) sleeping in the fetal position with his knees drawn up to his chin; or (b) crazy enough to think he was a real vampire; or (c) both of the above.

  Dees had his money on (c).

  Now, with his altimeter winding down from four to three thousand feet, Dees thought: Nope, no hotel or motel for you, my friend, am I right? When you play vampire, you're like Frank Sinatra--you do it your way. Know what I think? I think when the belly-hold of that plane opens, the first thing I'm gonna see is a shower of graveyard earth (even if it isn't, you can bet your upper incisors it will be when the story comes out), and then I'm gonna see first one leg in a pair of tuxedo pants, and then the other, because you are gonna be dressed, aren't you? Oh, dear man, I think you are gonna b
e dressed to the nines, dressed to kill, and the auto-winder is already on my camera, and when I see that cloak flap in the breeze--

  But that was where his thoughts stopped, because that was when the flashing white lights on both runways below him went out.

  4

  I want to run this guy's backtrail, he had told Merton Morrison, starting with the first one we know about, up in Maine.

  Less than four hours later he had been at Cumberland County Airport, talking to a mechanic named Ezra Hannon. Mr. Hannon looked as if he had recently crawled out of a gin-bottle, and Dees wouldn't have let him within shouting distance of his own plane, but he gave the fellow his full and courteous attention just the same. Of course he did; Ezra Hannon was the first link in what Dees was beginning to think might prove to be a very important chain.

  Cumberland County Airport was a dignified-sounding name for a country landing-field which consisted of two Quonset huts and two crisscrossing runways. One of these runways was actually tarred. Because Dees had never landed on a dirt runway, he requested the tarred one. The bouncing his Beech 55 (for which he was in hock up to his eyebrows and beyond) took when he landed convinced him to try the dirt when he took off again, and when he did he had been delighted to find it as smooth and firm as a coed's breast. The field also had a windsock, of course, and of course it was patched like a pair of old Dad's underdrawers. Places like CCA always had a windsock. It was part of their dubious charm, like the old biplane that always seemed to be parked in front of the single hangar.

  Cumberland County was the most populous in Maine, but you never would have known it from its cow-patty airport, Dees thought. . . or from Ezra the Amazing Gin-Head Mechanic, for that matter. When he grinned, displaying all six of his remaining teeth, he looked like an extra from the film version of James Dickey's Deliverance.

  The airport sat on the outskirts of the much plusher town of Falmouth, existing mostly on landing fees paid by rich summer residents. Claire Bowie, the Night Flier's first victim, had been CCA's night traffic controller and owned a quarter interest in the airfield. The other employees had consisted of two mechanics and a second ground controller (the ground controllers also sold chips, cigarettes, and sodas; further, Dees had learned, the murdered man had made a pretty mean cheeseburger).