Black House (Page 80)

C: You have an emergency. Not me. You.

AH: Who is this, please?

C: Your worst nightmare.

AH: Sir, could I ask you to identify yourself ?

C: Abbalah. Abbalah-doon. [Phonetic.]

AH: Sir, I don’t —

C: I’m the Fisherman.

[Silence.]

C: What’s wrong? Scared? You ought to be scared.

AH: Sir. Ah, sir. There are penalties for false — 

C: There are whips in hell and chains in shayol. [Caller may be saying "Sheol."]

AH: Sir, if I could have your name — 

C: My name is legion. My number is many. I am a rat under the floor of the universe. Robert Frost said that. [Caller laughs.]

AH: Sir, if you hold, I can put on my chief —

C: Shut up and listen, asswipe. Your tape running? I hope so. I could shag [Caller may be saying "scram" but word is indistinct] it if I wanted to but I don’t want to.

AH: Sir, I — 

C: Kiss my scrote, you monkey. I left you one and I’m tired of waiting for you to find her. Try Ed’s Eats and Dogs. Might be a little rotten now, but when she was new she was very [Caller rolls r’s, turning the word into "verrry"] tasty.

AH: Where are you? Who is this? If this is a joke —

C: Tell the coppiceman I said hello.

When the call began, the Mad Hungarian’s pulse was lub-dubbing along at a perfectly normal sixty-eight beats a minute. When it ends at 8:12, Arnold Hrabowski’s ticker is in overdrive. His face is pale. Halfway through the call he looked at the Caller I.D. readout and wrote down the number displayed there with a hand shaking so badly that the numbers jigged up and down over three lines on his pad. When the Fisherman hangs up and he hears the sound of an open line, Hrabowski is so flustered that he tries to dial the callback on the red phone, forgetting that 911 is a one-way street. His fingers strike the smooth plastic front of the phone and he drops it back into the cradle with a frightened curse. He looks at it like something that has bitten him.

Hrabowski grabs the receiver from the black telephone beside 911, starts to punch in the callback, but his fingers betray him and hit two numbers at once. He curses again, and Tom Lund, passing by with a cup of coffee, says, "What’s wrong there, Arnie?"

"Get Dale!" the Mad Hungarian shouts, startling Tom so badly he spills coffee on his fingers. "Get him out here now!"

"What the hell’s wrong with y — "

"NOW,goddamnit!"

Tom stares at Hrabowski a moment longer, eyebrows raised, then goes to tell Dale that the Mad Hungarian seems to have really gone mad.

The second time Hrabowski tries, he succeeds in dialing the callback number. It rings. It rings. And it rings some more.

Dale Gilbertson appears with his own cup of coffee. There are dark circles under his eyes, and the lines at the corners of his mouth are a lot more prominent than they used to be.

"Arnie? What’s — "

"Play back the last call," Arnold Hrabowski says. "I think it was . . . hello!" He barks this last, sitting forward behind the dispatch desk and shoving papers every which way. "Hello, who is this?"

Listens.

"It’s the police, that’s who it is. Officer Hrabowski, FLPD. Now you talk to me. Who is this?"

Dale, meanwhile, has got the earphones on his head and is listening to the most recent call to French Landing 911 with mounting horror. Oh dear God, he thinks. His first impulse — the very first — is to call Jack Sawyer and ask for help. To bawl for it, like a little kid with his hand caught in a door. Then he tells himself to take hold, that this is his job, like it or not, and he had better take hold and try to do it. Besides, Jack has gone up to Arden with Fred Marshall to see Fred’s crazy wife. At least that was the plan.

Cops, meanwhile, are clustering around the dispatch desk: Lund, Tcheda, Stevens. What Dale sees when he looks at them is nothing but big eyes and pale, bewildered faces. And the ones on patrol? The ones currently off duty? No better. With the possible exception of Bobby Dulac, no better. He feels despair as well as horror. Oh, this is a nightmare. A truck with no brakes rolling downhill toward a crowded school playground.

He pulls the earphones off, tearing a small cut by his ear, not feeling it. "Where’d it come from?" he asks Hrabowski. The Mad Hungarian has hung up the telephone and is just sitting there, stunned. Dale grabs his shoulder and gives it a shake. "Where’d it come from?"

"The 7-Eleven," the Mad Hungarian replies, and Dale hears Danny Tcheda grunt. Not too far from where the Marshall boy’s bike disappeared, in other words. "I just spoke with Mr. Rajan Patel, the day clerk. He says the callback number belongs to the pay phone, just outside."

"Did he see who made the call?"

"No. He was out back, taking a beer delivery."

"You positive Patel himself didn’t — "

"Yeah. He’s got an Indian accent. Heavy. The guy on 911 . . . Dale, you heard him. He sounded like anybody."

"What’s going on?" Pam Stevens asks. She has a good idea, though; they all do. It’s just a question of details. "What’s happened?"

Because it’s the quickest way to get them up to speed, Dale replays the call, this time on speaker.

In the stunned silence that follows, Dale says: "I’m going out to Ed’s Eats. Tom, you’re coming with me."

"Yessir!" Tom Lund says. He looks almost ill with excitement.

"Four more cruisers to follow me." Most of Dale’s mind is frozen; this procedural stuff skates giddily on top of the ice. I’m okay at procedure and organization, he thinks. It’s just catching the goddamn psycho murderer that’s giving me a little trouble. "All pairs. Danny, you and Pam in the first. Leave five minutes after Tom and I do. Five minutes by the clock, and no lights or siren. We’re going to keep this quiet just as long as we can."