Whisper in the Dark (A Thriller) by Robert Gregory Browne Page A

have doubts about what he’d seen, thinking he may have let sixty-eight years’ worth of backwater superstition cloud his judgment. After all, the lighting in that ambulance wasn’t all that great, right? Maybe he’d been mistaken and it was Myra after all. His Myra. All that dirt and blood on her face. Maybe he’d been done in by a trick of the eyes.
    He sure hoped so.
    “Tell me something,” he said, interrupting his table mate’s running monologue.
    Red didn’t seem to mind. He’d been talking with his mouth full and took a quick swallow. “Yeah?”
    “Somebody goes Section Eight on the street, gets picked up by the cops, where do they take ’em?”
    Red frowned, took another bite. “How long you lived here, you don’t know that?”
    “I wouldn’t be askin’ if I did.”
    Solomon had seen the cops grab quite a few crazies off the street, had heard the usual bullshit about where they might be headed, but didn’t really pay much attention. Wasn’t his business.
    Red looked at him a moment as if trying to decide if he was for real. Then he said, “You got two choices; the psych ward at County or, if they’re full up, they ship you up top the hill.”
    “Up top what hill?”
    “Pepper Mountain, my man. Headcase Hotel. Up on the mesa? Half the squatters down at the riverbed have checked in at one time or another. It’s like a goddamn five-star compared to County.”
    Headcase Hotel.
    Solomon remembered hearing the name, something about folks trying to get themselves locked up there on purpose, just so they could get a hot bath and a decent meal. But he’d never been curious enough to fill in the blanks. Had never known it was located up on Pepper Mountain Mesa, just above Baycliff, a little oceanside community about five miles northwest of the city. All he knew about the area was that a bunch of rich folks had beach houses there.
    He wondered if you could see those houses from atop the mesa, and found himself smiling at the thought of all those loonies looking down on Bayside Drive. It undoubtedly made a few of the blue bloods squirm.
    He wondered, too, about Myra. Wondered which one of the nut houses they took her to. He was convinced now that he’d overreacted this morning when he shoulda kept his cool. He’d been nervous was all, that big cop and people in their pj’s staring at him as he climbed into the back of that ambulance. Maybe he shoulda just followed Clarence’s lead and stayed the hell away from it.
    Too late now.
    Drums or no drums, he knew he had to take action. Either to help a friend, or—if his old eyes hadn’t been seeing things after all—to warn the poor sonofabitch who got in her way.
    Only problem was, where had they taken her? County or HH? It was a coin toss. And there were no guarantees he’d be able to track her down even if he knew.
    But in his time on this planet, one thing Solomon had learned—and learned the hard way—was that you can’t win the game if you don’t bother to roll the bones. And he was just superstitious enough to think that, one way or another, The Rhythm would set him on the right path.
    So all through the rest of breakfast he formulated a plan. Not much of one, but he didn’t have all that much to work with.
    Looking at the glass of watery orange juice in front of him, he gulped it down, then got up to ask for another. They were pretty generous with the liquid around here and he figured he’d better start loading up the ammunition.
    Forty minutes later, Solomon St. Fort took a long arcing piss onto the hood of an Ocean City Police cruiser, shouting, “Make it stop, Mama! Please make it stop!” and hoped that after they finished beating on him, they’d take him exactly where he needed to go.
     

15 
     
    B LACKBURN KNEW HE was about to lose his case. Had known it the moment he saw that winking smiley-face emoticon burned into Janovic’s lower lip. The return of Vincent Van Gogh was not the kind of thing the department left to a single