"We should trade phone numbers before you go," I said. "We can't afford any communication delays tonight."
"I agree entirely," he said.
The three of us exchanged cell phone numbers. I wrote Vollman's down, then looked up to tell him "Stay in touch."
He was gone.
"I hate it when he does that," I muttered.
"I don't know," Karl said. "I think it's kind of cool."
Over the next few hours, I looked at that wall map so many times I'm surprised I didn't burn a hole through it. Karl downloaded and printed some aerial photos from Google Earth and had them spread out on a table. My eyes just about wore them through, too.
We'd pe ihe word out to every snitch we knew, human and otherwise. Anybody who could come up with reliable information about where Sligo was going to perform the ritual tonight would earn so much goodwill with us that he could probably knock off a dozen liquor stores without fear of arrest – although we didn't put it quite that way.
The other detectives in the squad knew the situation now, and they'd promised to work their own sources hard and to call in if they picked up anything useful.
Everybody was out on the street, except Karl, me, and McGuire. All three of us were so far past overtime that we probably weren't even getting paid anymore.
The silence in the squad room was like a vice pressing against my skull, squeezing tighter every minute. I willed one of our phones to ring, no matter who was calling – Vollman, one of the squad, a snitch, or even Christine letting me know that she was shacked up with a cute A-positive in Dunmore and wouldn't be home until dawn.
McGuire was at his desk, doing paperwork or pretending to. Karl stood in front of the wall map, staring like a desert traveler hoping for an oasis to appear. I was pacing around the room like an expectant father – exactly what I had done when Christine was born. I looked at my watch, for the thousandth time: 10:03.
"I bet the motherfucker is going to pick a yard with a big old swimming pool," Karl said, without taking his eyes off the map. "Then, once the spell's done, he can jump in and take a dip. Cool off a little. Black magic is hot work, I hear."
"The arrogant prick probably doesn't even–" and that was as far as I got.
I stopped pacing and stood utterly still, while images and sounds flashed through my brain:
–Sligo, swimming, with a conical cap on his head, like the wizard in Fantasia...
–Prescott's voice saying, "Still water, it has to be still water"...
–The photo on Jamieson Longworth's computer of a square, stone building near-surrounded by water...
–My cousin Marty, when I was fourteen: "Come on, Stan. Nobody goes up there, and the lock on the gate is a joke. You, me, and those two chicks from down the street. Whatdaya say? We'll have a cool swim on a hot night, and maybe we'll even get to see 'em naked!
"Well, fuck my ass and call me Shirley," I said softly.
"Stan?" Karl's voice. "Stan? Can you hear me? What is it, man?" I think he might have been speaking for a while.
I turned to face him. "Lemme borrow your pen."
I took the pen, ignoring the look on Karl's face, and went to the wall map. It took me only a few seconds to find the dot I was looking for. I circled it once, then again, and again, and stepped back. "That's where he is," I said. "Right there. He's right fucking there."
Speaking as fast as I could without becoming incoherent, I told McGuire and Karl what I had just figured out: Sligo was going to cast his spell in the pump house on top of the dam at Lake Scranton.
"He wants still water, and there's a shitload of it up there, and the place is isolated. It's not supposed to be for swimming – that's where the city drinking water comes from. But my cousin Marty and me and a couple of girls went skinny-dipping there one summer when I was fourteen. I saw the pump house close up, although we didn't go inside – it was locked. And the pump house is what's in that photo on Jamieson Longworth's computer – sure as I'm fucking standing here."
"That's good enough for me," McGuire said, and picked up the phon/div>
"Who're you calling?" I asked.
"SWAT. Dooley's supposed to be on call, twentyfour-seven."
"Good," I said. I went to my desk and started rummaging through the pile of papers on top of it.
"What're you looking for?" Karl asked me.
"That phone number Vollman left us. Here it is."
A few seconds later, I was listening to the phone ringing in, I hoped, Vollman's pocket. It rang. And rang. Then after the seventh ring, one of those synthesized computer voices that I hate said, "No one is available at the moment to take your call. Please leave your name and number, and your call will be returned as soon as humanly possible."
I wondered whether "humanly" was Vollman's idea of a little joke.
At the beep, I said, "Vollman, this is Markowski. It's going down at the pump house, at the top of the Lake Scranton Dam. I need to know if you've located Christine, because that's gonna determine our tactics. Call me, or get over here, fast!"
Karl had just finished checking the loads in that big Glock of his. He looked at me. "Determine our tactics?"
"If we know Christine's safe, we can go in there with all guns blazing – or SWAT can. But since she's still missing… don't you think Jamieson Longworth would get a giggle in Hell, knowing that Christine was going to be Sligo's final vampire victim?"
"But we don't know for sure that Longworth and Sligo were even in cahoots, Stan."
"Do you believe in that many coincidences?" I asked.
That brought a little smile to Karl's face. Before I could ask what was so damn funny, he said, the way you do when you're quoting somebody, "'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.'"
"Who said that? Although he's right, whoever it was."