Yet his long association with evil had not given him a bleak, mournful, or even sour aspect; he was a happy man. He smiled broadly as he stood there behind the house, at the edge of the dead brown grass, looking up into the whirling snow. He felt strong, relaxed, content, almost unbearably pleased with himself.
He was tall, six-three. He looked even taller in his narrow-legged black trousers and his long, well-fitted gray cashmere topcoat. He was unusually thin, yet powerful looking in spite of the lack of meat on his long frame. Not even the least observant could mistake him for a weakling, for he virtually radiated confidence and had eyes that made you want to get out of his way in a hurry. His hands were large, his wrists large and bony. His face was noble, not unlike that of the film actor, Sidney Poitier. His skin was exceptionally dark, very black, with an almost purple undertone, somewhat like the skin of a ripe eggplant. Snowflakes melted on his face and stuck in his eyebrows and frosted his wiry black hair.
The house out of which he had come was a three-story brick affair, pseudo-Victorian, with a false tower, a slate roof, and lots of gingerbread trim, but battered and weathered and grimy. It had been built in the early years of the century, had been part of a really fine residential neighborhood at that time, had still been solidly middle-class by the end of World War Two (though declining in prestige), and had become distinctly lower middle-class by the late 70s. Most of the houses on the street had been converted to apartment buildings. This one had not, but it was in the same state of disrepair as all the others. It wasn’t where Lavelle wanted to live; it was where he had to live until this little war was finished to his satisfaction; it was his hidey hole.
On both sides, other brick houses, exactly the same as this one, crowded close. Each overlooked its own fenced yard. Not much of a yard: a forty-by-twenty-foot plot of thin grass, now dormant under the harsh hand of winter. At the far end of the lawn was the garage, and beyond the garage was a litter-strewn alley.
In one corner of Lavelle’s property, against the garage wall, stood a corrugated metal utility shed with a white enamel finish and a pair of green metal doors. He’d bought it at Sears, and their workmen had erected it a month ago. Now, when he’d had enough of looking up into the falling snow, he went to the shed, opened one of the doors, and stepped inside.
Heat assaulted him. Although the shed wasn’t equipped with a heating system, and although the walls weren’t even insulated, the small building—twelve-foot-by-ten—was nevertheless extremely warm. Lavelle had no sooner entered and pulled the door shut behind him than he was obliged to strip out of his nine-hundred-dollar topcoat in order to breathe comfortably.
A peculiar, slightly sulphurous odor hung in the air. Most people would have found it unpleasant. But Lavelle sniffed, then breathed deeply, and smiled. He savored the stench. To him, it was a sweet fragrance because it was the scent of revenge.
He had broken into a sweat.
He took off his shirt.
He was chanting in a strange tongue.
He took off his shoes, his trousers, his underwear.
Naked, he knelt on the dirt floor.
He began to sing softly. The melody was pure, compelling, and he carried it well. He sang in a low voice that could not have been heard by anyone beyond the boundaries of his own property.
Sweat streamed from him. His black body glistened.
He swayed gently back and forth as he sang. In a little while he was almost in a trance.
The lines he sang were lilting, rhythmic chains of words in an ungrammatical, convoluted, but mellifluous mixture of French, English, Swahili, and Bantu. It was partly a Haitian patois, partly a Jamaican patois, partly an African juju chant: the pattern-rich “language” of voodoo.
He was singing about vengeance. About death. About the blood of his enemies. He called for the destruction of the Carramazza family, one member at a time, according to a list he had made.
Finally he sang about the slaughter of that police detective’s two children, which might become necessary at any moment.
The prospect of killing children did not disturb him. In fact, the possibility was exciting.
His eyes shone.
His long-fingered hands moved slowly up and down his lean body in a sensuous caress.
His breathing was labored as he inhaled the heavy warm air and exhaled an even heavier, warmer vapor.
The beads of sweat on his ebony skin gleamed with reflected orange light.
Although he had not switched on the overhead light when he’d entered, the interior of the shed wasn’t pitch black. The perimeter of the small, windowless room was shrouded in shadows, but a vague orange glow rose from the floor in the center of the chamber. It came out of a hole about five feet in diameter. Lavelle had dug it while performing a complicated, six-hour ritual, during which he had spoken to many of the evil gods—Congo Savanna, Congo Maussai, Congo Moudongue—and the evil angels like the Zandor, the Ibos “je rouge,” the Petro Maman Pemba, and Ti Jean Pie Fin.
The excavation was shaped like a meteor crater, the walls sloping inward to form a basin. The center of the basin was only three feet deep. However, if you stared into it long enough, it gradually began to appear much, much deeper than that. In some mysterious way, when you peered at the flickering light for a couple of minutes, when you tried hard to discern its source, your perspective abruptly and drastically changed, and you could see that the bottom of the hole was hundreds if not thousands of feet below. It wasn’t merely a hole in the dirt floor of the shed; not anymore; suddenly and magically, it was a doorway into the heart of the earth. But then, with a blink, it seemed only a shallow basin once more.
Now, still singing, Lavelle leaned forward.
He looked at the strange, pulsing orange light.
He looked into the hole.
Looked down.
Down...
Down into...
Down into the pit.
The Pit.
13
Shortly before noon, Nayva Rooney had finished cleaning the Dawson’s apartment.
She had neither seen nor heard anything more of the rat—or whatever it had been—that she had pursued from room to room earlier in the morning. It had vanished.
She wrote a note to Jack Dawson, asking him to call her this evening. He had to be told about the rat, so that he could arrange to have the building superintendent hire an exterminator. She fixed the note to the refrigerator with a magnetic plastic butterfly that was usually used to hold a shopping list in place.
After she put on her rubber boots, coat, scarf, and gloves, she switched off the last light, the hall light. Now, the apartment was lit only by the thin, gray, useless daylight that seemed barely capable of penetrating the windows. The hall, windowless, was not lit at all. She stood perfectly still by the front door for more than a minute—listening.
The apartment remained tomb-silent.
At last, she let herself out and locked the door behind her.
A few minutes after Nayva Rooney had gone, there was movement in the apartment.
Something came out of Penny and Davey’s bedroom, into the gloomy hallway. It merged with the shadows. If Nayva had been there, she would have seen only its bright, glowing, fiery white eyes. It stood for a moment, just outside the door through which it had come, and then it moved down the hall toward the living room, its claws clicking on the wooden floor; it made a cold angry, hissing noise as it went.
A second creature came out of the kids’ room. It, too, was well-hidden by the darkness in the apartment, just a shadow among shadows—except for its shining eyes.
A third small, dark, hissing beast appeared.
A fourth.
A fifth.
Another. And another...
Soon, they were all over the apartment: crouching in corners; perching on furniture or squirming under it; slinking along the baseboard; climbing the walls with insectile skill; creeping behind the drapes; sniffing and hissing; scurrying restlessly from room to room
and then back again; ceaselessly growling in what almost sounded like a guttural foreign language; staying, for the most part, in the shadows, as if even the pale winter light coming through the windows was too harsh for them.
Then, suddenly, they all stopped moving and were motionless, as if a command had come to them. Gradually, they began to sway from side to side, their beaming eyes describing small arcs in the darkness. Their metronomic movement was in time with the song that Baba Lavelle sang in another, distant part of the city.
Eventually, they stopped swaying.
They did not become restless again.
They waited in the shadows, motionless, eyes shining.
Soon, they might be called upon to kill.
They were ready. They were eager.
CHAPTER THREE
I
Captain Walter Gresham, of Homicide, had a face like a shovel. Not that he was an ugly man; in fact, he was rather handsome in a sharp-edged sort of way. But his entire face sloped forward, all of his strong features pointing down and out, toward the tip of his chin, so that you were reminded of a garden spade.
He arrived at the hotel a few minutes before noon and met with Jack and Rebecca at the end of the elevator alcove on the sixteenth floor, by a window that looked down on Fifth Avenue.
“What we’ve got brewing here is a full-fledged gang war,” Gresham said. “We haven’t seen anything like this in my time. It’s like something out of the roaring twenties, for God’s sake! Even if it is just a bunch of hoods and scumbags killing one another, I don’t like it. Absolutely won’t tolerate it in my jurisdiction. I spoke with the Commissioner before I came over here, and he’s in full agreement with me: We can’t go on treating this as if it were just an ordinary homicide investigation; we’ve got to put the pressure on. We’re forming a special task force. We’re converting two interrogation rooms into a task force headquarters, putting in special phone lines and everything.”
“Does that mean Jack and I are being pulled off the case?”
“No, no,” Gresham said. “I’m putting you in charge of the task force. I want you to head back to the office, work up an attack plan, a strategy, figure out everything you’ll need. How many men—both uniforms and detectives? How much clerical support? How many vehicles? Establish emergency liaisons with city, state, and federal drug enforcement agencies, so we don’t have to go through the bureaucracy every time we need information. Then meet me in my office at five o’clock.”
“We’ve still got work to do here,” Jack said.
“Others can handle that,” Gresham said. “And by the way, we’ve gotten some answers to your queries about Lavelle.”
“The phone company?” Jack asked.
“That’s one of them. They’ve no listed or unlisted number for anyone named Baba Lavelle. In the past year, they’ve had only two new customers named Lavelle. I sent a man around this morning to talk to both of them. Neither is black, like your Lavelle. Neither of them knows anyone named Baba. And neither of them made my man the least bit suspicious.”
Driven by a sudden hard wind, snow grated like sand across the window. Below, Fifth Avenue briefly vanished beneath whirling flakes.
“What about the power company?” Jack asked.
“Same situation,” Gresham said. “No Baba Lavelle.”
“He might’ve used a friend’s name for utility connections.”
Gresham shook his head. “Also heard back from the Department of Immigration. No one named Lavelle—Baba or otherwise—applied for any residency permit, either short-term or long-term, in the past year.”
Jack frowned. “So he’s in the country illegally.”
“Or he’s not here at all,” Rebecca said.
They looked at her, puzzled.
She elaborated: “I’m not convinced there is a Baba Lavelle.”
“Of course there is,” Jack said.
But she said, “We’ve heard a lot about him, and we’ve seen some smoke.... But when it comes to getting hold of physical evidence of his existence, we keep coming up empty-handed.”
Gresham was keenly interested, and his interest disheartened Jack. “You think maybe Lavelle is just a red herring? Sort of a ... paper man behind which the real killer or killers are hiding?”
“Could be,” Rebecca said.
“A bit of misdirection,” Gresham said, clearly intrigued. “In reality, maybe it’s one of the other mafia families making a move on the Carramazzas, trying to take the top rung of the ladder.”
“Lavelle exists,” Jack said.
Gresham said, “You seem so certain of that. Why?”
“I don’t know, really.” Jack looked out the window at the snowswept towers of Manhattan. “I won’t pretend I’ve got good reasons. It’s just... instinct. I feel it in my bones. Lavelle is real. He’s out there somewhere. He’s out there... and I think he’s the most vicious, dangerous son of a bitch any of us is ever going to run up against.”
2
At Wellton School, when classes on the third floor recessed for lunch, Penny Dawson wasn’t hungry. She didn’t even bother to go to her newly assigned locker and get her lunchbox. She stayed at her desk and kept her head down on her folded arms, eyes closed, pretending to nap. A sour, icy ball lay lead-heavy in the pit of her stomach. She was sick—not with any virus, but with fear.
She hadn’t told anyone about the silver-eyed goblins in the basement. No one would believe she’d really seen them. And, for sure, no one would believe the goblins were eventually going to attempt to kill her.
But she knew what was coming. She didn’t know why it was happening to her, of all people. She didn’t know exactly how it would happen or when. She didn’t know where the goblins came from. She didn’t know if she had a chance of escaping them; maybe there was no way out. But she did know what they intended to do to her. Oh, yes.
It wasn’t merely her own fate that worried her. She was scared for Davey, too. If the goblins wanted her, they might also want him.
She felt responsible for Davey, especially since their mother had died. After all, she was his big sister. A big sister had an obligation to watch over a little brother and protect him, even if he could be a pain in the neck sometimes.
Right now, Davey was down on the second floor with his classmates and teachers. For the time being, at least, he was safe. The goblins surely wouldn’t show themselves when a lot of people were around; they seemed to be very secretive creatures.
But what about later? What would happen when school was out and it was time to go home?
She didn’t see how she could protect herself or Davey.
Head down on her arms, eyes closed, pretending to nap, she said a silent prayer. But she didn’t think it would do any good.
3
In the hotel lobby, Jack and Rebecca stopped at the public phones. He tried to call Nayva Rooney. Because of the task force assignment, he wouldn’t be able to pick up the kids after school, as planned, and he hoped Nayva would be free to meet them and keep them at her place for a while. She didn’t answer her phone, and he thought perhaps she was still at his apartment, cleaning, so he tried his own number, too, but he didn’t have any luck.
Reluctantly, he called Faye Jamison, his sister-in-law, Linda’s only sister. Faye had loved Linda almost as much as Jack himself had loved her. For that reason he had considerable affection for Faye—although she wasn’t always an easy person to like. She was convinced that no one else’s life could be well-run without the benefit of her advice. She meant well. Her unsolicited counsel was based on a genuine concern for others, and she delivered her advice in a gentle, motherly voice even if the target of her kibitzing was twice her age. But she was nonetheless irritating for all of her good intentions, and there were times when her soft voice seemed, to Jack, as piercing as a police siren.
Like now, on the telephone, after he asked if she would pick up the kids at school this afternoon, she said, “Of course, Jack, I’ll be glad to, but if they expect you to be t
here and then you don’t show, they’re going to be disappointed, and if this sort of thing happens too often, they’re going to feel worse than just disappointed; they’re going to feel abandoned.”
“Faye—”
“Psychologists say that when children have already lost one parent, they need—”
“Faye, I’m sorry, but I don’t really have time right now to listen to what the psychologists say. I—”
“But you should make time for just that sort of thing, dear.”
He sighed. “Perhaps I should.”
“Every modern parent ought to be well-versed in child psychology.”
Jack glanced at Rebecca, who was waiting impatiently by the phones. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged as Faye rattled on:
“You’re an old-fashioned, seat-of-the-pants parent, dear. You think you can handle everything with love and cookies. Now, of course, love and cookies are a part of it, but there’s a whole lot more to the job than—”
“Faye, listen, nine times out of ten, I am there when I tell the kids I will be. But sometimes it isn’t possible. This job doesn’t have the most regular hours. A homicide detective can’t walk away in the middle of pursuing a hot lead just because it’s the end of his shift. Besides, there’s a crisis here. A big one. Now, will you pick up the kids for me?”
“Of course, dear,” she said, sounding slightly hurt.
“I appreciate it, Faye.”
“It’s nothing.”