Creepers

  Balenger and Vinnie lifted the professor to his good leg.

  “Cora.” Vinnie’s voice was unsteady. “We need to go.”

  But Cora didn’t move. She just remained slumped against the wall. Her head was down. The beam from her lamp illuminated her knees. It bobbed as her chest and shoulders heaved with quiet sobs.

  “I’ll get her inside,” Mack said. He pulled her up. With an arm around her waist, close to a breast, he walked toward the open door.

  “Don’t touch me.” She struggled.

  As Mack forced her into the darkness, Balenger shouted, “The floor!”

  “What?”

  “You need to test the floor first! Some of the rooms have rotten wood! That’s what happened to the staircase!”

  Mack lurched back.

  “The three of you go first,” JD said.

  “Yeah, if it’s rotten, the fat old guy’ll drop through,” Tod said.

  They shuffled over. Weighed down by the professor, Balenger put a shoe across the threshold and pressed down. The wood felt secure. He applied more weight and still detected no weakness.

  “Ready?” he asked Vinnie.

  “Why not?” Vinnie’s voice quavered. “The way this is going, if we don’t get killed one way, it’ll soon happen another.”

  The beams of their headlamps pierced the darkness, showing Balenger that the room was larger than those they’d already explored. Numbed by Rick’s death and the near certainty of his own, he turned his hard hat to the right and left, seeing vague shapes of furniture. They were in the living room of a suite.

  Mack brought in Cora. JD and Tod followed. Their flashlights and the four remaining headlamps were the only illumination, revealing chairs, couches, and tables, an odd array of black, red, and gray.

  “They’re going to need more light to find the vault,” Tod said. “Candles. Somebody mentioned finding candles.”

  “I did.” Mack let go of Cora, who remained in place, leaning one way and then another, almost catatonic from grief.

  He took off his knapsack and brought out a plastic bag of candles with a waterproof container of matches inside. He lit a candle and put it in a chrome tubular holder on a table against a wall. The flame wavered, then grew steady. He went about the room, lighting more candles, finding other holders or else dripping wax on the tables and sticking the base of the candles into it. The flames made Balenger feel he was in a desecrated church.

  The room had the modest depth of the other rooms Balenger had seen, but it was three times as wide. An expansive shutter, a door, and another shutter—all dusty metal—occupied the wall across from him. He imagined Danata gazing past the wide windows toward the boardwalk, the beach, and the ocean. Carlisle stood in this room after Danata’s death, he realized, enjoying Danata’s view, filling Danata’s space. But only at night. A full view during daylight would have terrified him.

  Footsteps made Balenger turn to where JD came back from checking behind two doors on the left. “Closet and bedroom,” JD said. “Bathroom’s through the bedroom. Nothing to worry us.”

  They scanned their lights around the room, filling the shadows between candles.

  “No TV in the old days,” Mack said. “What did he do with the time? He must’ve been bored to death.”

  “That.” Balenger pointed toward a felt-topped card table that occupied a corner. Keep the damned conversation going, he reminded himself.

  “And that.” Vinnie worked to follow Balenger’s example, indicating an odd-looking object: a flat rectangle with a semicircle rising from it. Its surface was black with red trim.

  “What is it?”

  “A radio.”

  “They sure disguised it. What’s that shiny stuff it’s made of?”

  “Bakelite,” Vinnie said. “An early form of plastic.”

  “Check these magazines lying open, as if Danata just went to take a leak,” JD said. “Esquire. The Saturday Evening Post. Never heard of it.”

  Mack went over to a bookcase that had ascending levels in the shape of a skyscraper. Again, the colors were black with red trim. “Gone with the Wind. How to Win Friends & Influence People. Yeah, Danata influenced people, all right. With a gun to their head.”

  Balenger kept staring at the candle-lit room. He couldn’t get over what he saw. Another time capsule, he thought. The terror of Rick’s falling scream reverberated in his memory.

  “Somebody tell me what kind of furniture this is,” Tod said.

  “Art deco,” the professor murmured. Tired of waiting for permission, Balenger and Vinnie eased him onto a sofa that had black vinyl cushions, black lacquered wooden arms, and a five-inch strip of chrome along the bottom. The dusty chrome was the gray Balenger had first glimpsed. The cushions had red piping.

  “It’s a style of architecture and furniture from the 1920s and 1930s,” Vinnie resignedly explained. His voice had little energy. Nonetheless, he forced himself to continue, seeming to realize that as long as he was useful, his captors would allow him to remain alive. “The name comes from an art exposition in Paris in 1925. The Exposition International des Arts Decoratifs Industriels et Modernes.”

  “Speak English.”

  Vinnie breathed with difficulty. “It means the International Exposition of Industrial and Modern Art Decorations. Art Decorations was shortened to art deco. Industry and art. Put simply, it tried to make a living room look like a cross between a factory and an art gallery.”

  “The materials are industrial.” The professor leaned wearily back on the sofa. He too seemed to realize that if he didn’t make himself useful, he’d be dead soon. “Glass, steel, chrome, nickel, vinyl, lacquer, hard rubber.”

  “Not normally attractive,” Vinnie pressed on. “But they were given a lustrous veneer and the shapes they were formed into tended to be curved and sensuous. Look at that chair. A strip of lacquered wood, black with red trim, molded into a reclining S that looks like a body rippling. Or look at the tubular steel legs on the glass coffee table over there. You want to stroke them.”

  No, Balenger thought, quit talking that way. Don’t reinforce Mack’s obsession with sex.

  “Or that lamp”—Vinnie pointed—“which has three nickel tubes holding up a frosted-glass shade with three circles forming a lip on top of a lip on top of a lip.”

  The candles and flashlights showed furniture that worshiped geometry made seductive: circles, ovals, squares, triangles, pentagons.

  “Sometimes, the furniture doesn’t look sensuous, even though it is,” Vinnie said. “The sofa the professor is on. The lacquer makes the back look hard and uncomfortable. So do the stiff edges on the wooden arms. They’re designed as a deception because the deep vinyl cushions are in fact comfortable. Surprisingly so. Isn’t that true, Professor?”

  “Carmine Danata could have happily napped here.”

  “But you’re not going to,” JD said. “I looked in all the rooms. Where’s the vault?”

  Conklin’s mouth opened and closed.

  “He lost a lot of blood,” Balenger said. “He’s dehydrated.”

  JD took a bottle of water from his knapsack and tossed it to Balenger. “Lubricate him.”

  Mack snickered.

  Balenger twisted off the cap and offered it to the professor, but Conklin didn’t seem to notice it, so Balenger raised the bottle to the injured man’s lips and helped him drink. If Conklin didn’t get to an emergency room in the next couple of hours, gangrene would set in, he knew. Water trickled from the professor’s mouth and into his beard.

  Use the opportunity, Balenger warned himself. He raised the bottle to his mouth, gulping the tepid water.

  “Where’s the vault?” Mack demanded.

  An eerie whisper made them turn.

  “Moon…” Cora sang to herself. “River.” She swayed from side to side, as if hearing private music, ghostly refrains of the melody her dead husband had played for her. “Wide…” Her raw red eyes were huge, but she seemed to see nothing in front of her. “Drift
ing…” As she shifted her weight from one foot to another, Balenger had the disturbing impression that she danced with someone, slowly, chest to chest, cheek to cheek, never leaving the spot where she was rooted. “Dream…” Tears rolled down her cheeks as candlelight wavered over her. “Heartbreak.”

  “She’s your date,” Tod told Mack. “Do something to shut her up.”

  Conklin gathered the strength to interrupt. Balenger gave the injured man credit for trying to distract attention from Cora. “The vault was hidden. That was the whole idea.” The professor leaned back on the sofa, his eyes closed. “If people knew there was a vault, they’d wonder what was inside.”

  “Hidden where?” Tod asked.

  Conklin didn’t answer.

  “If you don’t know, why the hell did we bring you?”

  “We’ll find it. Vinnie, give me a hand.” Balenger sensed lethal impatience building in his captors. He’d been there before, felt it before, from beneath a sack tied around his head. We need to keep making them think we’re useful.

  He pivoted toward Mack. “Give me the crowbar.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  Cora kept singing faintly, swaying as if on drugs or dancing with a ghost. Her blank eyes saw nothing. “Cross…” Her throat sounded raw, her voice breaking.

  “That bitch is getting on my nerves,” JD said.

  “No crowbar?” Balenger said to draw their attention. “All right, damn it, I’ll improvise.” He grabbed a stainless steel ashtray from a glass-and-chrome table, clamped it between his taped hands, and went to the wall on the right. In a fury, he pushed away the bookcase and pounded the ashtray’s edge against the wall, the noise blocking Cora’s lament. A stylized painting of a woman in a streamlined 1920s roadster, her long hair flying in the wind, fell from the wall.

  “No,” the professor murmured.

  Balenger shifted along the wall, continuing to hammer with the ashtray. Plaster cracked. Another painting crashed.

  “Forget the gold coins!” Vinnie told JD, raising his voice to be heard above the noise. “That ashtray he’s destroying was in mint condition. You could have sold it for a thousand dollars on eBay. And those two paintings that fell.”

  “A thousand dollars?”

  “Probably more. And then there’s the chrome candleholder and the frosted green glass vases and the stainless-steel cigarette case.”

  Mack picked the case off a table and opened it. “It still has cigarettes.” He pulled one out. Paper and tobacco crumbled in his fingers.

  “The lamps, the chairs, the glass tables, the lacquered sofa. Perfect condition,” Vinnie emphasized. “All told, you’re looking at a quarter-million dollars, probably higher, and you don’t need to worry about the government coming after you for trying to sell gold coins stolen from the mint. Easy job. Rent a truck. We’ll help you load it. We’ll smile and wave as you drive away. Just leave us alone. I swear to God, I’ll never tell anybody about you.”

  “A thousand dollars?” Tod repeated. “For an ashtray?”

  “But not anymore. Now it’s junk.”

  Balenger overturned a glass table and whacked the ashtray against the continuation of the wall. The table shattered.

  “There goes twenty thousand dollars,” Vinnie said.

  “Hey!” Mack told Balenger. “Stop!”

  “But you ordered us to find the vault!”

  “How’s pounding the wall going to—”

  “Aren’t you listening? The wall’s hollow from bare spaces between the joists!” Balenger’s hands throbbed from the force of his hammering. His chest heaved from the frenzy of his exertion. “We need to keep pounding till we find a section that sounds solid. That’s where the vault is.”

  “Then why are you just standing there?” Mack told Vinnie. “Give him a hand!”

  Vinnie grabbed a stainless-steel vase and headed toward the wall.

  “How much is that worth?”

  “Probably five thousand.”

  “Put it down. Use this.” Mack hurled the crowbar toward Vinnie’s feet.

  “Try to hit us with it,” Tod said, “and I’ll shoot your eyes out.”

  Vinnie grabbed the crowbar between his taped hands and walloped it against the wall. It smashed a huge hole in the plaster.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” JD said.

  “Mighty nice gun. Heckler and Koch P2000, it says here on the side. Forty caliber,” Tod emphasized.

  Balenger and Vinnie kept pounding.

  “More powerful than a nine millimeter. Less powerful than a forty-five. Like Goldilocks and the three bears. Not too much. Not too little. Just right. A forty caliber’s a police load, right?”

  Balenger kept slamming the ashtray against the wall.

  “Hey, hero, I asked you a question,” Tod said. “I’m talking to you. Stop and look at me.”

  Balenger turned. He breathed deeply.

  “A forty caliber’s a police load,” Tod said.

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “Right.”

  “Far from it.”

  “Sure. The more I look at this gun, the fancier it is. It’s got a slide release lever on both sides so you can reload with either hand if one of your arms is wounded. It’s got a magazine release lever behind the trigger guard where either hand can reach it if one of your arms takes a bullet.”

  “Mostly, those features are for left-handed shooters.”

  “Of course, of course, why didn’t I think of that? What’s your name again?”

  “Frank.”

  “Well, Frank, while your buddy works and gives you a rest, why don’t you tell us about yourself?”

  “Yeah,” Mack said, “convince us you’re not a cop.”

  Vinnie paused.

  “Hey, Big Ears, nobody told you to quit,” JD said.

  Blank-faced, Cora sobbed and sang.

  Vinnie whacked the crowbar against the wall.

  “Frank, maybe you’re not taking us seriously,” Tod said.

  “Believe me, I am.”

  “Then talk to us,” Mack said. “Convince us you’re not a cop.”

  “Yeah,” Tod said. “Convince us not to shoot you.”

  Slowly, carefully, Balenger set down the ashtray. He didn’t want to tell them what they wanted to know, but he didn’t see an alternative. Maybe this would help him bond with them. “I’m former military.”

  “And how come you know the professor?” Tod asked.

  “I took a class from him.”

  “I don’t get the connection.”

  “I was in Iraq.”

  “I still don’t get the connection.”

  “The first Gulf War. Desert Storm. 1991. I was a Ranger.”

  “Hi, yo, Tonto,” JD said.

  “After I came back home to Buffalo, I got sick. Aches. Fever.”

  “Hey, I didn’t ask for your medical history. What I want to know is—”

  Vinnie pounded another hole in the wall.

  “The VA hospital in Buffalo kept telling me I had a stubborn case of the flu. Then I heard that a lot of other veterans were sick, and finally the newspapers and TV started calling it Gulf War syndrome. The military said Saddam Hussein might have used chemical or biological weapons on us.”

  “If you don’t answer the question…”

  “Or maybe it was caused by a disease spread by sand fleas. The desert has a lot of insects.”

  “I ask you to prove you’re not a cop, and I get your life story.”

  “But the more I read about it, the more I suspected what made me sick was the depleted uranium in our artillery shells. The uranium hardens them and makes it easy for the explosive heads to go through enemy tanks.”

  “Uranium?” Vinnie frowned.

  “Hey, Big Ears,” Tod said. “A little less listening and a little more pounding on that wall. You’re too close to that candle. Move it away before you have an accident.”

  “The military claims depleted uranium is safe.” Balenger shook his head
in fierce disagreement. “But I hear it makes a Geiger counter click. We fired an awful lot of artillery shells in Desert Storm. The wind blew a lot of smoke and dust in our direction. It took years before I felt normal again. It ended my military career.”

  “That’s when you became a cop?”

  “I’m telling you, I’m not a cop. I drifted from job to job, mostly driving trucks. Then the second Iraq war happened.” Balenger paused. He was getting close to his previous nightmare. Sweating, he wondered if he could make himself talk about it. No choice. I’ve got to, he thought. “Our military got overextended. Corporations trying to rebuild Iraq hired civilian guards for their convoys. Former special-operations personnel. The need was so great, they even accepted guys like me who’d been out of the service for a while. And the pay was fabulous. One hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year to make sure supply trucks didn’t get ambushed.”

  “One hundred and twenty-five thousand?” Tod was impressed.

  “A year. Then conditions deteriorated, and more convoys got hit, and the pay got even better: twenty thousand a month.”

  “Shit, you’re rich.”

  “Not hardly. The companies paid by the month because not a lot of guys were willing to make themselves targets. You needed to have not much going for you at home. Bad job prospects. Nobody close to you. Like me. I mean, it was really crazy over there. Snipers and booby traps all along the road. Most guys didn’t last long. Either they got killed, or they said ‘To hell with this’ and quit. In my case…” Balenger paused, listening to Vinnie pound with the crowbar. “I got a chance to collect only one paycheck.”

  “Only one? Shit, what happened?”

  Finally, I’ve got them, Balenger thought. “I was guarding a convoy. We were attacked. An explosion knocked me unconscious.” He rushed through it, not wanting to remember the pain and gunfire and screams. “The next thing I knew, I was tied to a chair in a filthy smelling room. Most of the smell came from a sack tied around my head.”

  Tod, Mack, and JD stared.

  “And?” JD said.

  “An Iraqi insurgent told me he was going to cut off my head.”

  Vinnie stopped pounding and looked at him.