swallowed the men without so much as a belch. Ness waited. He brought the hand with the gun in it up near his face and chewed a hangnail on his thumb.
Then a flicker-on and off, on and off-signaled one man was in place.
More flashlight flickers followed, down in the darkness, like so many oversize fireflies, signaling that the rest of Chamberlin's men were in place as well.
Ness thumbed on his massive flashlight and swept a beam across the area below in one broad swing, signaling those guarding key positions down there, and those waiting up top, that he was about to move in.
And move in he did, the other raiders moving with him, rushing through the darkness and the brush and the wild trees, sliding, stumbling, tumbling at times. As they reached the outskirts of the sleeping shantytown, barking dogs announcing the raiders' impending arrival, Ness swung his flashlight arcing through the night behind him in another signal.
A blaze of white light banished the darkness and left the shabby village naked in its glare. A giant searchlight mounted on the fire truck above swung its beam slowly across the landscape, as if giving the hillside hovels a collective third degree.
Cats scurried away, screeching, but dogs held their ground and howled.
So did their masters.
'Goddamnit!'
'What the fuck-'
'What in the name of God are you-'
'Sons of bitches!'
Those outraged occupants who rushed out of shacks in protest and surprise were grabbed and cuffed by uniformed cops. The charge was vagrancy, and basic personal information, mostly just names, was quickly taken down; as per Ness's instructions, each bum was tagged with a number, and the shack that bum belonged to was tagged with the same number. Then the alleged vagrant was dragged up the hill and tossed in a waiting Black Maria. Once a uniformed cop had deposited a 'bo in the back of one of the vans, said cop would head back down the hillside and repeat the process.
Other doors required kicking in, much of which was done by Ness himself; if he seemed to have knack for it, he certainly took no pleasure in it on this raid.
Gun in hand, Ness would kick in a makeshift card-board-tin-and-wood door and throw the flashlight beam into the eyes of a just-awakened man, blotting out the man's face with light, jerking him from his sleep on his bed made of boards atop battered steel drums, and a cop would rush in and grab the guy, yanking him out of the security of his packing-crate home.
Those whose slumber was a drunken one sometimes required carrying out; one heavyset, bad-smelling 'bo took two cops to hoist him, like a sandbag, up the hill.
There were a few women and children. Not many. They were treated gently, though one woman screamed and kicked worse than any two of the men. She outswore them, too. The kids were quiet, scrawny things. One of the plainclothesmen present, Gold, was with the juvenile bureau, and he took charge of the ragamuffins.
It sickened and saddened Ness to see how these poor bastards lived. These men weren't criminals, not in the sense that he considered a man a criminal.
What was criminal here was not the shantytowns inhabitants, but that such a town needed to exist; what was evil was men somehow becoming faceless noncitizens who could be preyed upon by a Butcher made anonymous by the very anonymity of his victims.
The fire-truck searchlight continued its all-pervasive swing, casting dark shadows, making this ragged world seem unreal, here sharply white, there sharply black. A cacophony of screams, curses, barks, yowls, commands, provided a tuneless sort of background music. For better than an hour Ness moved across a landscape littered with refuse, some of it human, cops like garbage collectors of humanity hauling screaming men away. He felt like a man moving through a nightmare.
'Eliot, jeez, look…'
Ness turned quickly; saw the shovel blade coming and ducked.
'… out!'
It was Curry who yelled, and a massive, wild-eyed, bearded hobo who had swung the shovel; and he was still swinging it. It cut the air, slashing, swooshing.
Ness, still dropped in a crouch, kicked a foot out and up and caught the man in the stomach; doubling him over.
The 'bo was groaning on the ground when Curry cuffed him, kicking the shovel away.
'I'll get him out of here,' Curry said.
'Don't forget to tag him, and his home,' Ness said, standing, brushing himself off.
Curry nodded.
Ness returned to kicking down doors; nearly another hour passed. Now and then a siren would rend the night, as a filled Black Maria would head back to Central head-quarters.
Merlo came over; he looked like a ghost. A tired one.
'We've rounded 'em all up,' he said. 'Thirty-nine of 'em.'
'Good,' Ness said, tucking his revolver in its shoulder holster and glad to do so. 'Link up with Bob Chamberlin and have him turn over his men to you. It's going to be a long morning.'
'And it's not even dawn yet,' Merlo said with a sorrowful roll of his eyes.
Ness intended to have the detectives begin grilling the vagrants immediately and at length, at Central headquarters. Each one of them would be questioned regarding the torso slayings-sorting out the suspects from the witnesses, gathering whatever information about the Butcher these men might have.
As Merlo was leaving, Ness called out, 'I want them all fingerprinted! Make sure.'
Merlo turned and a confused look crossed his face. 'But we don't have any fingerprints to compare them with,' Merlo said. 'The Butcher's never left us anything to…'
A few last vagrants were still in the process of getting tagged and having basic information taken down.
Ness walked to Merlo and spoke softly. 'That's not what I'm thinking of. I'm thinking of the future.'
'The furture?'
'Future victim identification.'
Merlo's smile was mirthless; he said with grim admiration, 'You are a detective, Mr. Ness,' and went off up the hill.
Ness called Chamberlin over and said, 'Round up your men. It's time to make the trek down to the other settlement.'
'Are you coming?'
'No. I'll keep Curry and half a dozen others here. We're going to sort through the shacks for evidence. Now, keep the procedure identical, Bob-I want every vagrant and his shack tagged. Once you've emptied the settlement of its squatters and had them hauled away, then search the shacks, bagging up any possible evidence or personal belongings.'
'And tagging that with the same number,' Chamberlin said, nodding. 'Right. Do you really expect to find the Butcher among these fellows?'
Ness lifted his eyebrows in a facial shrug. 'It's possible. If we can find a ringer… somebody who doesn't belong here among them.. some rich guy slumming… we may have our Butcher.'
'An undercover maniac,' Chamberlin said. He glanced at the clustered huts around them. 'But there's no place here that our friend could be keeping the bodies of his victims for months on end.'
'Yes, precious few refrigerators in these modern homes,' Ness noted wryly. 'Even if he's been living here, he has to have some other place to store the bodies… and do whatever else he does to them.'
Chamberlin's tiny black mustache twitched in a moment of disgust. Then, matter-of-factly, he said, 'Well, we know for sure those cardboard boxes in the dump, with the human bones in them, came from the Central Market area. There's no doubt of that.' He made a clicking sound. 'I think this raid was needed.'
'It was time,' Ness nodded.
Chamberlin, with his customary precision and speed, gathered his men and left.
Soon, with the exception of the fire truck, its search light still shining, most of the vehicles had moved out. The Black Marias were already gone; they would deposit their human cargo and meet up with Chamberlin at the
