Night Talk Read online

  * * *

  Greg’s phone rang, taking him out of Harvard and putting him back on a dark L.A. street. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and looked at the caller’s name.

  Ethan Shaw.

  8

  Leon leaned forward in the seat, hunched over the steering wheel as he watched the man in front of him. The man on the street had stopped walking to answer a phone call. He still had his back to Leon.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Leon asked aloud. “Don’t you know where you’re going?”

  As if he had heard the questions, the man started walking again.

  Leon was told by the Voice to follow the man, but not to approach or harm him until he received a command to do so. He was to hang back, but close enough so that the man would feel intimidated by the van’s presence.

  Leon accepted the Voice as part of his being and had no suspicion that the commands came through a microdevice that had been implanted in his head during the surgery he was told was needed to remove a tumor. Doctors at the psychiatric hospital were told that the operation was done to install an experimental control device that would automatically feed Leon a dose of an antipsychotic medicine when triggered by Leon’s emotions.

  That was partly true. He could feel a small device on the inside of his right thigh, but didn’t know that the mechanism was used to feed a calming drug through an artery whenever he became difficult to control—and another drug that spiked his manic state when his controllers wanted to increase his rage. He had tried to take the device off once and suffered excruciating pain.

  But in addition, an internal receptor was placed in his head that carried sound and mechanical vibrations along the acoustic nerve to the temporal lobe, permitting the Voice to speak to Leon. A similar system transmitted Leon’s spoken words back to the other end.

  He was “punished” by the Voice frequently in the beginning when he failed to instantly obey commands. The mildest form of punishment began with loud, harsh, grating noises in his head followed by the triumphant sound of his nonexistent father beating and humiliating him. The greater the sin, the more severe the pain. When he obeyed, he was rewarded with praise and allowed to watch his favorite movies and play violent games. As time went on he disobeyed less frequently.

  Installation of the communication mechanisms and drug dispensers that gave control over Leon’s actions had been predicated upon two scientific facts about the human race:

  The brain operates like a computer and can be biohacked to change the programming.

  Second, the behavior of humans can be modified and controlled by punishment and rewards. Pavlov proved it with dogs and Skinner with lab rats.

  Long before computers, Pavlov, a Russian scientist, discovered that dogs produced saliva not only when they were shown food but when they saw the white jackets of the lab attendants who brought the food to them.

  He put holes through the side of the dogs’ mouths to have salvia drain. He took the experiments further with children—paying the parents of poor children to permit him to drill holes in the side of the faces of the children so he could put tubes through to collect salvia as he showed them food.

  He also discovered that if he gave dogs a series of painful shocks of electricity while a metronome ticked, the dogs would cry out as if they were shocked when the metronome was played but no shock was administered.

  Pavlov received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work.

  Decades later B. F. Skinner came along with the Skinner box, which used rats that got food for good responses and electric shock for the wrong ones. Considered the most influential psychologist of the twentieth century, Skinner once noted that the primary issue concerning mankind was not how to free people but how to improve control over them.

  Like the dogs and rats, Leon usually avoided punishment by giving the right responses. But he had been conditioned not to salivate but to direct on command his mad dog urge to kill.

  Leon had never heard of Pavlov or Skinner but he would have enjoyed drilling holes in children’s faces.

  9

  Ethan Shaw.

  Greg stood rooted and stared at the caller ID. It took his breath away. He pressed a button to take the call and snapped, “Who is this?”

  No answer. Nothing from the other end. “Hello—hello?” No sound. The phone line was so empty of sound it was an electronic vacuum.

  He stared at the LCD screen. The caller ID was gone. For a flash he wondered if he had imagined it but he knew he hadn’t. The name had been there. Ethan Shaw. A dead man. At least there was a body on the street that he assumed was Ethan’s. He never saw the face and told the police he couldn’t identify the body because he had never seen Ethan.

  He hit “call return” to dial back the last call received and stopped when the number to his broadcast studio popped up. He had gotten a call from the studio earlier in the evening prior to arriving for the show.

  He checked his “received calls” bin and recognized the number of the last received call—his producer Soledad returning his earlier one. The phone’s voicemail was empty.

  He realized there was a reasonable explanation for the call. It could have come from the police, from Ethan’s cell phone, in an attempt to locate Ethan’s family or friends to identify his body.

  He thought about that for a moment and found a flaw. Ethan wouldn’t have his private number in his phone contacts. Greg’s sole contact with the hacker had been by way of his radio show phone lines. However, a person’s whole life is open to hackers. It would have been a piece of cake for Ethan to have gotten his private number. But if he obtained Greg’s number by hacking, he would have been calling it rather than getting blocked when he called the radio show.

  A sick joke played by one of Ethan’s hacker friends?

  Ethan’s death didn’t mean someone besides the authorities couldn’t have used his name. Greg knew that you could buy a phone app that lets you disguise the number and caller. But Ethan’s body was still warm. Few people outside the first responders would even know about his death.

  An eerie thought struck him—he had had callers on the show who claimed to have received calls from the dead.

  That was a pleasant thought on a dark and lonely street after witnessing a violent death. Keep it up, he told himself.

  He tried to shake it off but the phone call spooked him. The most probable answer was that Ethan had his private number but didn’t use it, and someone at the police department had made calls from the contact list in the phone to find next of kin and had hung up or got disconnected before Greg answered the call.

  The conclusion about the call didn’t make much sense to him but neither did the bizarre accusation or Ethan free-falling over a hundred feet.

  Give it up, he told himself. He needed some rest and sleep before he drove himself nuts trying to unravel a mystery wrapped in a conundrum.

  Headlights from the rear were on him again. He turned around and the lights went high beam and he spun back around. He was sure it was the van and this time it disturbed him. It had moved up the street with him and stopped about the same distance behind him. Stopped and didn’t move. It hadn’t pulled over and stopped in front of a store or a business building. Nothing was open. And no one got out of the van. The driver just sat there, silently, unmoving, hitting him with the brights when he turned to look. That really bothered him. Bright lights from out of the dark erupted deep fears from out of the past. As for Josh the caller, blinding lights had special meaning to Greg. They threatened him.

  Fears hidden deep in Greg’s subconscious gripped him. Stop it! he told himself. He was overreacting. He pushed through his fears. The guy was a plumber or an electrician looking for an address. That’s all it was. Had it not been the wee hours there would have been more traffic on the street and he wouldn’t even have noticed the van.

  He walked on, his back to the lights, and got his thinking straight. There was no ghost in the phone. Ethan had his private number and just hadn’t got
ten around to using it. Someone trying to find the next of kin had been hitting the buttons on the young hacker’s phone.

  It wasn’t a ghost call, but he chuckled as he admitted to himself he wouldn’t have been averse to a call from the beyond. Having been a seeker most of his life he had analyzed and investigated the claims of paranormal encounters with everything from ghosts to poltergeists, ancient aliens to yesterday’s UFO sightings, as well as ESP, telekinesis, life after death, reincarnation, faith healing and human auras, along with a host of cryptids—creatures whose existence was controversial, such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the New Jersey Devil, werewolves, Yeti and Mothman.

  It had been over only the past few years that another creature of the night, Big Brother, had raised its ugly head by dehumanizing people with the dark side of technology.

  His investigations had not convinced him that every claim of paranormal activity was genuine, but it had convinced him that most claims deserved to be investigated, that too many were ignored for no good reason and that there was enough evidence supporting some claims that a pattern of proof had been established.

  The callers and listeners to his show were also seekers, reaching out, looking for answers and sometimes coming up with ones that others found bizarre. He wasn’t judgmental about callers whose claims or ideas might seem outlandish to others because his own experiences had not been conventional. Sometimes at night he lay in bed, not sure if he was awake or dreaming as he sensed a presence around him—paralyzed by the sensation that whatever was in the dark was studying him as if he was a matter of curiosity … as if he was being looked over to see how the dissection should go.

  The weather was still aping the strange events of the night, staying dark and dreary and sullen as he moved on, trying to shrug off the sense of dread he felt as he walked toward the funicular that would lift him from the flatland of Broadway to Bunker Hill where his apartment was located.

  He was mulling over Ethan’s strange death and dying words when he realized the van was still behind him. As he had moved down the street, it had moved. Two or three times now.

  He didn’t turn because he knew the high beams would go on. He looked at the van’s hazy reflection in a store window but saw only that the van was white and had something written on the side panel.

  He was being paced on the dark street.

  Unfortunately, he remembered one of those unusual things he had learned as a late night talk show host:

  Vans were the vehicle of choice for serial killers.

  10

  The street was deserted except for Greg and the van. Like most big-city business districts, the downtown Los Angeles business corridors were a no-man’s-land after the offices and after-work watering holes had closed—creating a perfect storm if you wanted to rob or murder someone.

  My imagination is working overtime, he told himself. Keep moving, keep thinking good thoughts, get to your apartment, put up your feet and have a glass of wine. I’m not being stalked, it’s just a coincidence.

  But his body didn’t agree with what his rational mind was telling him. He was tense, his adrenaline pumping, getting ready for flight or fight.

  He deliberately stopped at a window and stared at the lighted display of a clothing store. The van stopped. He didn’t need to turn and look. He could tell from the headlights shining in his direction. It kept about a hundred feet behind. Not much space between them if the driver wanted to suddenly run him down.

  Now that was a pleasant thought.

  It wasn’t easy to follow someone on foot from a motor vehicle and be subtle about it. And there was nothing subtle about the way the van shadowed him. It kept pausing and creeping forward, making it obvious the van was following him.

  He thought about walking back and confronting the driver, but decided getting to the funicular that would lift him above the deserted street to Bunker Hill and his apartment was a more clever idea. In his own mind there was only one person in the van. A man. He knew for sure that it wasn’t gangbangers because they would have gotten right to business and not played any games.

  He usually enjoyed the sudden quiet and calm of the dark, empty streets after being on the air. With the van behind him pacing him like a demon-possessed car in a Stephen King horror story, tonight they were long, lonely blocks. Worse, there were streets to cross. Picking him off on a crosswalk would be easier than jumping the curb to nail him.

  Greg thought about it some more, took some steps forward and then said, “What the hell.” He spun around to face the van and headed toward it.

  * * *

  Leon slammed back against the driver’s seat, letting out a startled yell. What the hell was that bastard doing? He was coming at him, to attack him.

  He popped the clutch and hit the gas pedal, burning rubber as the van shot forward.

  “You’re dead!” he screamed.

  * * *

  Greg froze as the van jumped the curb with the passenger-side wheels and came at him, half on the sidewalk. He couldn’t move or think as the van surged forward like a rocket. Some primeval instinct kicked in and he threw himself to the left, slamming up against a shoe store display window.

  The van’s side-view mirror brushed his right arm and wind whipped him as the vehicle flew by in a flash. It hit a city trash can on the corner and sent it flying into the intersection.

  The van made a sharp right turn, rear end swaying, tires screeching, and disappeared around the corner.

  Greg leaned against the store window. He was breathless. The crazy bastard had nearly killed him. He was lucky he hadn’t broken the window.

  He hurried to the corner and looked for the van. It wasn’t in sight. Someone with a malicious sense of humor, he thought, and then corrected himself. If he hadn’t moved fast, it would have hit him. This was no joke. Yet had the intent been to harm him, the van could have done so earlier when he had his back to it. The attempt to hit him was an impulse. But isn’t that how many killers operated? They suddenly saw an opportunity and went for it?

  He still thought it might have been a company van, someone on a call or returning from one. As it flashed by he again saw the wording on the side, probably a company name, but didn’t catch what it said. And white vans were as common in the city as smog alerts.

  Even if he had gotten a look at the company’s name and reported it to the police, the driver would probably tell them he’d been moving slow, looking for an address, when some crazy guy on the street suddenly charged at him. He hadn’t gotten a look at the driver.

  He stared at his own reflection in a store window. He looked even worse than before. Now he looked like a man who had lost a battle but still didn’t know who the enemy was.

  It had been a hell of a night. Ethan killing himself. Getting stalked and nearly killed by a crazy in a van. A call from the dead.

  Maybe Chicken Little was right.

  * * *

  In the van Leon’s sense of glee had immediately deflated as soon as his rage dissipated.

  He knew he was in trouble with the Voice. He had been told to follow the man, but stay in the background and intimidate him with the van’s ominous presence. He would be punished for his disobedience and it would be painful because while logic and reason had little impact on his behavior, severe pain did.

  When it started he pulled the van quickly over to the curb.

  The feeling began in his testicles, a feeling that something had grabbed them. And squeezed. He cried out but the pressure got worse. Squeezed until his balls felt like they were being crunched in a vise.

  He shouted promises, swearing that he would never disobey an order again.

  Then he screamed.

  11

  The iconic little funicular called Angels Flight was the shortest railroad in the world, about the length of a football field. The cable cars connected Hill Street up a steep incline to Bunker Hill.

  Greg had a laundry list of things like insufferable traffic and dirty air that he hated about L.A.
What he loved was the city’s surprises. Like a good movie, the City of Angels had constant plot twists to keep you on your toes as you made your way around its vast basin, which extended from the desert, being chewed up by four-by-fours, to beaches lined with surfboards.

  Only a block or more from some of the greatest movie palaces ever built on the planet, in an area that had been going through a Latino renaissance but was bordered by Skid Row, where the homeless lined the sidewalks with tents, trash bags, boxes and shopping carts, he was about to step aboard the smallest and strangest railroad in the world. The cable car would lift him a few hundred feet to Bunker Hill, an elegant water garden and billion-dollar high-rises.

  Bunker Hill overlooks Broadway and the rest of downtown. It was once the bastion of L.A.’s wealthy, who looked down their noses from elegant Victorian mansions at the common folk in the flat streets below. Stately mansions slowly evolved into slum housing as the rich moved away from the smells and traffic of downtown, the old buildings eventually got torn down, the terrain got lowered a bit and glassy skyscraping office and residential high-rises and art and museum venues went up.

  Despite all the changes to Bunker Hill over the years, one thing hadn’t changed from Victorian times—you could still see the common folk and Skid Row on the flatlands from its heights.

  A cable car was waiting and he hurried to board before it started up. The tiny railroad had two counterbalanced cable cars—Sinai and Olivet. One car went up the short, steep incline as the other slid down. Operating in opposite directions on overlapping tracks, the railcars appeared destined to collide at the halfway point but swerved at the last moment to pass. At least that was the theory. In 2001 there was a fatality and injuries when Sinai, nearing the top, suddenly reversed direction and went down, hitting the other car.

  The two cable cars had an unusual layout inside: the interiors were just as steep as the tracks because the tracks were on a steep grade from start to finish. After entering the steep interior of the bottom car, passengers climbed a series of steps and platforms to exit at the other end once the car reached the top.