An Incident At Bloodtide

that much better, but at least my hands had stopped shaking. I sighed, blew my nose, picked up the telephone receiver, and once again punched the redial button. The line was still busy. I redialed the number, just to make sure I had gotten it right. Busy.

I hung up the telephone and stared at it some more. When the line was still busy five minutes later, I got out my reverse directory for Rockland County and looked up the number. It was a pay phone in a shopping mall in Nanuet. Now I did what I should have done in the first place, what I probably would have done if I hadn't been just slightly unnerved. I picked up the receiver once again and called Garth and Mary's home. This line was busy also, but that didn't surprise me. I kept pushing the redial button until I finally got through.

'Hello,' Garth said in a cracked voice.

I was certain there had been times in my life when I'd been happier, or felt more relieved, but at the moment I simply couldn't recall them. I closed my eyes, heaved a deep sigh. 'It's Mongo, Garth.'

There was silence at the other end of the line for a few seconds, then a tentative 'Mongo?'

'Yep.'

'Oh, Jesus, I thought you were-'

'Dead, yeah. You were out, and Mary took the message that I was dead, and you were to call a certain number to get the grisly details. The number's for a pay phone at the Nanuet Mall. The receiver must be off the hook.'

'Jesus,' he said again. 'Just a minute. There's someone tearing at my sleeve here.'

There was a brief pause, and then Mary came on the line. She was sobbing, but with joy. 'Mongo! Is that really you?'

'In living color. I emphasize the word 'living.' '

'But I got a call from the police. .'

'It was just a misunderstanding that's been cleared up. I assure you the report of my death was highly exaggerated, and all that.'

'But how could the police-?'

'Just a misunderstanding, babe, like I said. A case of mistaken identity. You know all dwarves look alike to you normal-size people.'

'You know,' she whispered hoarsely, 'I really would miss you, Mongo.'

'Yeah, I'd miss me too. Can you put Garth back on the line?'

'Sure. Love you, brother-in-law.'

'Love you, sister-in-law.'

'Yeah,' Garth said in a low voice when he came back on the line. 'A pay phone at the Nanuet Mall, huh?'

'That's right-but not for publication around there, because you-know-who has to be the one who pulled this little stunt. I don't think Mary should know. Can you talk?'

'No.'

'All right, I'll talk. It looks like we've got a merry prankster on our hands.'

'Now I'll kill the son-of-a-bitch,' Garth said quietly in his casual, matter-of-fact tone of voice that was always a danger signal.

'Shhh. That's talking. You leave him to me; he's mine. I'll take care of Sacra Silver. Your job is to take care of Mary.'

'What are you going to do?'

'For openers, find out who the fuck he really is.'

'Maybe that is his real name,' Garth said very softly. 'Mary told me she never heard him call himself anything else.'

'Yeah, but he's a bullshit artist, and he's got things to hide. I've got a glass in my glove compartment with his prints on it, and I'm going to get out the old fingerprint kit as soon as I get off the line. He's close by you, maybe somewhere right in Cairn. This little prank took some careful timing to make it work. He not only knew when I left, and how long it would take me to get to New York, but also when you left the house. That was his window of opportunity, when he called Mary and Francisco to leave his message. He's watching your house-or was. The fact that he didn't just shoot us tells us something about him: he's an overgrown juvenile delinquent, probably fairly bright, who tries to get his way through bluff, intimidation, and manipulation. But he apparently doesn't have the guts to kill, not even from ambush.'

'Maybe he's waiting for a better opportunity.'

'I don't think so. It turns out our friend is a fucking practical jokester.'

'I'll show him a practical joke.'

'No, I'll show him a practical joke. You just keep your eyes open up there. And don't discuss any of this with Mary.'

'Agreed. But what if he doesn't. . uh, show up anywhere?'

'What if he doesn't have a record?'

'Yeah.'

'A dipshit like this has to have a record with somebody, somewhere, even if it's only for an arrest. If I can find out who he really is, then I'll be in a better position to take a run at him. Most of these people who are into the occult begin to believe their own bullshit, and that's a weakness. I'm going to show him a little sorcery. But you let me handle it. All right? Mary will get all wound up if she gets wind of this.'

'I hear you.'

'I'll be in touch. You keep your head low.'

'Yeah. And before you tell me how low your head already is, let me tell you to keep it even lower.'

'I'll talk to you, brother,' I said, and hung up.

I went downstairs to the garage, took the plastic-wrapped tumbler out of the glove compartment of the Volkswagen Rabbit, brought it back up to my office. I retrieved an old fingerprint kit from the bottom of a filing cabinet and went to work dusting the glass, working carefully around the curved surface. There was, of course, no guarantee that the prints were going to be of any use at all, but, as I had told Garth, I had a strong feeling that Mr. Sacra Silver had been a bit too clever by half at least once in his life, had run afoul of the law, and that his prints would be on file somewhere.

I ended up with good prints of every finger on his right hand, including the thumb. I transferred the prints on the tumbler to plastic film, took the film to our photo lab in a back room.

There I set up our high-resolution Polaroid camera and shot the fingerprints with high-speed film against a soft gray background. When I had finished, I picked up the telephone and called a friend, a captain in the NYPD, who owed me a couple of favors.

'I don't know where you got this water, Mongo, but I don't see how it could have come out of the Hudson River.'

I studied Frank Lemengello, the husky, bushy-haired chief chemist at the lab where I had brought the samples I had taken from Tom Blaine's basement. He was sitting on his desk, with the three green plastic jugs to his right. Beneath each jug was a computer printout of the chemical makeup of each sample.

'Actually, I didn't take the samples. They were collected by a man who's dead now, but he almost certainly did take them out of the Hudson. What's the problem with that?'

'The stuff in all three of these jugs is seawater.'

'Seawater?'

'Yeah. You know, like from the ocean.'

'The Hudson is an estuary, lower than sea level, all the way to Albany. It has tides, and the water in that part is saline.'

'It may be saline, but it's not seawater.' Frank paused, patted the jug closest to him. 'This is seawater. Even at the mouth of New York Harbor you get a lot of mix with fresh water; you wouldn't have this concentration. But there's other stuff in there too.'

'Like what?'

'Some heavy metals, and petrochemicals like ethyl benzene and toluene. It's all on the printout. Nasty stuff, by the way.'

I thought about it, trying to figure out how a concentration of undiluted seawater laced with heavy metals