City of Endless Night (Pendergast #17)(74)
“Thank you.” And with a nod, Pendergast slipped past him and headed toward the garage, buttoning his overcoat as he went.
*
Just forty-eight minutes later, he turned off Route 25A onto Old Dock Road, which ran through the main campus of King’s Park Psychiatric Center. It was now almost nine, and a bitter night had fallen. He guided the big car down the deserted road, dark shapes of buildings, shuttered and forlorn, passing by on both sides.
He slowed, made a U-turn, pulled the Silver Wraith up and over the curb, turned off the headlights, then drove the vehicle over the frozen ground, pulling it in behind a stand of trees where it would not be visible from the road. There he stopped and consulted the map. Across the road stood a cluster of buildings his map identified as GROUP 4, or THE QUAD, which had once housed the geriatric insane. To his right, two hundred yards behind the chain-link fence surrounding the campus, rose a vast, ten-story structure shown on the map as BUILDING 93, its gables and towers rising up against the night sky. The massive fa?ade was bathed in ghostly moonlight and punctuated with empty, inky windows, which stared over the frozen campus like some monstrous, many-eyed beast. As Pendergast contemplated it, he felt a whisper, a shiver, of the memories it retained of the patients who had been shuttered inside, gibbering, weeping, beyond despair, subjected to experimental drug testing, lobotomies, electroshock treatments, and perhaps worse. A bloated moon, veiled by scudding clouds, was rising above its battlements.
Hidden within the building’s immense shadow, Pendergast knew from the map, lay the much smaller two-story structure known as Building 44. This was where he would find the Decapitator.
Exiting the vehicle and quietly closing its door, he made sure the street was empty before approaching the fence. A set of wire clippers appeared in one gloved hand, and it was the work of two minutes to cut a flap in the cheap chain-link fence large enough to permit entry without catching and tearing his overcoat, of which he was very fond. Slipping through, he walked silently over the hard ground, his breath flaring in the moonlight, past Building 29—a power plant constructed in the early 1960s, now rusting and deserted like everything else. Beyond, he picked up an abandoned railroad spur line and followed it to where it ended at the loading dock of Building 44.
Pendergast’s research indicated Building 44 had been a warehouse for the storage of food for the psychiatric center. The small structure was sealed, its windows covered with plywood and tin, its doors locked and chained. Not a glimmer of light could be seen through the cracks.
He glanced around once again, then lightly sprang up onto the building’s loading bay at the end of a railroad trestle. Grasping a handle, he lifted the door slowly, keeping to a minimum the inevitable complaint of rusted metal, until it was just high enough to allow him to slip underneath. He waited, listening. But there was no sound from within.
He found himself in a large loading area, empty of everything except a stack of wooden packing crates piled in one corner, covered in cobwebs. Ahead, across the wide floor of cracked concrete, a door stood open in the far wall. The faintest illumination could be seen beyond. It looked like a trap—which Pendergast had known from the beginning was precisely what it was.
A trap intended for him; but traps sometimes worked both ways.
Pausing, he glanced at his watch. It was nine oh two—three minutes left until the time limit expired.
Silently, he crossed the expanse of the loading area and approached the door. Placing the fingertips of one hand on it, he slowly opened it wider. Beyond lay a narrow corridor, punctuated on both sides by open doors. From one of the right-hand doors, almost closed, leaked the light that faintly illuminated the hallway. Absolute silence reigned.
Pulling his Les Baer, Pendergast slipped through the doorway and moved down the corridor until he reached the lighted door. He waited a few moments to assure himself there was no activity. Then he placed his palm on the door, gave it a sharp shove, stepped forward with the weapon raised, and panned the room.
The light was sufficiently dim as to illuminate only the immediate portion of the space he was standing in. The deeper recesses, going back through rows of empty shelves, were too dark to make out. There was a table in the center of the pool of light, with a figure seated in a chair, his back to Pendergast. He recognized the man instantly: even from the rear, the rumpled suit, powerful frame, and long gray hair could only belong to one man—Howard Longstreet. He was, it seemed, looking into the inky darkness at the rear of the room, head propped on one arm in an attitude of alert repose.
Pendergast paused for a moment, frozen by surprise. The man was not bound—in fact, he seemed to be under no restraint whatsoever.
“H?” he said in a voice barely more than a whisper.
Longstreet did not reply.
Pendergast took a step toward the seated figure. “H?” he said again.
Still Longstreet said nothing. Was he unconscious? Pendergast stepped toward the seated figure and reached out, resting a hand on Longstreet’s shoulder and giving him a gentle shake.
With a quiet, slippery kind of sigh, the man’s head fell off, hit the table with a dull thud, rolled away, and came to rest, rocking slightly, Longstreet’s gray eyes staring up at Pendergast in silent agony.
At the same time, the lights abruptly went off. And from out of the darkness came a low chuckle of triumph.
52
JUST AS QUICKLY as blackness fell, brilliant light suddenly flooded the room. There—seated in a wooden chair in a far corner—sat Lieutenant D’Agosta. He was hog-tied to the chair, wearing nothing but boxers and a sleeveless coat stuffed with packets of plastic explosive—a suicide vest. A cue-ball gag was in his mouth. He looked at Pendergast, his eyes on fire.