The Scream Catcher Read online

  “Sensational . . . masterful . . . brilliant.”

  —New York Post

  “My fear level rose with this Zandri novel like it hasn’t done before. Wondering what the killer had in store for Jude and seeing the ending, well, this is one book that will be with me for a long time to come!”

  —Reviews by Molly

  “I very highly recommend this book . . . It’s a great crime drama that is full of action and intense suspense, along with some great twists . . . Vincent Zandri has become a huge name and just keeps pouring out one best seller after another.”

  —Life in Review

  “A thriller that has depth and substance, wickedness and compassion.”

  —The Times-Union (Albany)

  “I also sat on the edge of my seat reading about Jude trying to stay alive when he was thrown into one of those games . . . Add to that having to disarm a bomb for good measure!”

  —Telly Says

  “…a gripping psychological thriller that will keep you riveted on the edge of your seat as you turn the pages.”

  —Jersey Girl Book Reviews

  “This book is truly haunting and will stay with you long after you have closed the covers.”

  —Beth C., Amazon 5-star review

  “The action never wanes.”

  —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinal

  “Gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting.”

  —Harlan Coben, bestselling author of Six Years

  “Tough, stylish, heartbreaking.”

  —Don Winslow, bestselling author of Savages

  Permanence

  The Innocent

  Godchild

  The Guilty

  The Remains

  Scream Catcher

  The Concrete Pearl

  The Shroud Key

  Moonlight Falls

  Moonlight Mafia (A Dick Moonlight Short)

  Moonlight Rises

  Blue Moonlight

  Murder by Moonlight

  Full Moonlight (A Dick Moonlight Short)

  Like the cat I have nine times to die . . .

  Dying

  Is an art, like everything else.

  I do it exceptionally well.

  —Sylvia Plath

  Sweeny’s Boxing Gym

  Lake George, New York

  Tuesday, August 15, 2010

  6:10 A.M.

  The man is hiding. Has been for a long time now, since his life—his physical body—became reduced to a shadowy reflection of his own fear. A fear so real, so palpable and heavy, it seems like there are times it might be possible for him to unzip it like you would a second skin and maybe hang it up on a sixpenny nail to dry. If only that were possible.

  But his fear is more than skin deep. It is both an internal demon and it is bone cold and stubborn. It is what he has in the place of a soul. Rather, it is what replaced his soul. Only when he least expected it did it reveal its beastly head of pale white skin, black eyes, and fang-like teeth before entering into his body and holding him hostage.

  Ever since that day he has been trying his best to purge the demon from his body. But he does not use a priest for his exorcist. He does not use a shaman. He does not use a psychiatrist. He does not use God.

  He uses only physical exertion.

  He attempts to push the fear out through his ribs by improving his physical body with exercise. Grueling exercise on an everyday basis. Running, lifting, boxing, hiking, sweating, groaning, pushing, pulling, crying, bleeding, sucking air, and on occasion, passing out. It’s bad that those closest to him no longer trust him. It’s worse that he no longer trusts himself. And a man who cannot trust himself, can never know what it is to love or be loved.

  Yet, he lives and carries on as if today—this very moment in time—will be the end of something bad and the beginning of a new life free of the demon.

  But today will not be that day.

  Because today, Jude Parish forty-five-year-old ex-cop turned true crime writer, gets to be the eyewitness to a murder. Here’s how it happens:

  He’s only just exited Sweeney’s Boxing Gym by way of the back door. It’s raining. The new summer dawn hidden by a black and blue sky; its heat by fierce wind gusts; its calm by lightning and thunder. The early morning workout—six rounds jump rope, six rounds speed bag, six rounds heavy bag—is all but historical fact. Now, oxygen starved lungs crave the fresh air; tired muscles and joints welcome cool rain. Kissing the sky, Jude lets the rain pelt a stubbled face, soak cropped hair, dampen gray sweats.

  Mounted to the block wall behind him are a reflective exit sign and a lit spotlight. To his right, a blue dumpster with the letters B.F.I. printed on the four metal side panels. To his left, an open sea of cracked and blistered blacktop. Beyond that, a too dark nothing that stretches way beyond the Canadian border.

  Dead ahead, he spots two people.

  At first glance it appears to be a long-haired man chasing a T-shirted man from out of the old Malloy gravel pit. Two grown men stumble down the pit embankment, crash through second growth woods like a couple of hunted deer until spilling out onto the flat lot.

  Back pressed against the block wall, Jude watches, listening to his heartbeat inside his temples. He’s no stranger to the pit. As a boy, he used to play Johnny Quest inside the big dig during the day, but never at night when the Lake George Dark Monster came out of hiding. Standing in the rain, his mind recalls deep craters, jagged shale, abandoned automobiles, empty beer bottles, used condoms and rock piles galore. The images flashback while he works up a smile. Black Bear’s Bar and Grille is located on the opposite north end of the old pit. Black Bear’s is open all night for the commercial salmon and charter fishermen and their pickled livers.

  As for the running men?

  They must be drunk as rabid skunks.

  Pulling himself away from the wall, he sucks in a wet breath, prepares for the two mile jog back home to pregnant wife and child when the T-shirted man drops to his knees on the pavement; when Longhair raises up a hand exposing a silenced automatic.

  What happens next takes forever and an instant.

  Longhair extends the right arm, presses the automatic to T-shirt’s head. “Scream,” he orders in a strange, high-pitched voice. “Scream. For. Me.”

  The man on his knees hesitates. Peering slowly up at the long-haired man, he doesn’t scream. He produces only silence and a frightened smile. Until Longhair thumbs back the hammer on the automatic.

  “Scream,” he repeats, bringing a handheld device to the mouth of the T-shirted man. “Scream or die.”

  T-shirted man loses his smile. He lowers his head, swallows a deep breath.

  He screams. Screams so loud the guttural shriek bounces off the side of the gym and rattles Jude’s bones.

  He screams directly into the hand-held device. A device that by now, Jude is certain is an iPhone.

  “Thank you,” says Long-Haired man, when the scream is finished.

  That’s when two muzzle flashes light the dark sky for two brief instances.

  Longhair takes a step back.

  T-Shirt falls face first. French kisses a rain puddle.

  “My God,” Jude whispers to himself. “My God almighty.”

  But there’s nothing God Almighty can do now.

  Longhair slides the automatic into a shoulder holster and pockets the iPhone. Sensing another presence, he turns, laser beams a gaze in the ex-cop’s direction.

  That’s when Jude’s body becomes the suddenly pinpricked balloon.

  All strength bleeds out of his feet.

  He drops down onto the wet lot, rolls his body behind the BFI dumpster, hides himself behind stacks of cardboard and rain-drenched newspapers.

  Heart beats a berserk rhythm. Hand
s tremble. Adrenalin filled brain becomes an orchestral symphony warming up inside the skull until the roar of a car engine and burning rubber kills the music.

  Longhair is getting away.

  What’s the ex-cop gonna do?

  Ex-cop is gonna listen to the demon inside his chest, and he’s going to sit still, play dead.

  The car approaches, downshifts to a crawl, then brakes to a hard stop some fifteen or twenty feet away. As soon as the passenger window goes down, Jude can’t miss it: gunmetal death staring him in the face.

  Longhair’s got an unobstructed shot.

  When the hammer comes down the ex-cop never sees the flash. Never feels the pain.

  What’s it like to die?

  It’s like the lights in a room being turned out. It’s about silence and stillness and darkness. It’s freedom from the demon. It’s like falling . . .

  . . . falling into a deep and painless sleep.

  Sweeney’s Boxing Gym

  Tuesday, 6:30 A.M.

  But Jude is not dead.

  Instead, he’s jarred awake to the voices that belong to the handful of boxing students who’ve arrived at the gym for their early morning, pre-work workouts, two of whom promptly assist him off the damp pavement.

  Standing awkward, out of balance, eyesight blurred to the point of blindness, he’s become the crippled sum total of his fear. He begins to realize that there is both good and bad news in his situation.

  First the good news: the bullet discharged from the killer’s silenced automatic only grazed the right side of his skull. The bullet, while knocking him cold, did not penetrate the brain pan.

  As for the bad news: his skull feels like it’s been rammed into the block wall.

  His head rings and throbs with jolts of pain. His swelled brain feeling like it’s about to explode out the ears, eyes, and nostrils. Something is bothering Jude, too. Something that only a former cop can’t help but acknowledge: if the longhaired killer finds out he missed his target, he’ll have no choice but to hunt Jude down, destroy the eyewitness to a murder.

  The Lake George summer tourist paradise is gearing up for another beautiful, beach ball-cotton candy day. The newly risen sun has already burned off the predawn rain. Maybe Jude has no way of seeing them clearly, but he can feel the ray’s warmth on his face. Sweatpants and sweatshirt are heavy with the rainwater that’s saturated them; sneakers damp, squishy, his feet itching.

  His fellow boxing students do their best to hold him upright and steady, one on each arm. He tries with all his power to regain his equilibrium while big, iron bells relentlessly toll inside his bruised skull. But the imaginary bells are not loud enough to drown out the distressed voices of the boxing students.

  Managing to free himself from their grips, Jude stumbles a step forward, gently touches his head wound with the tips of his fingers, comes away with sticky blood. From where he’s standing, he’s able to make out one student crying inconsolably, another student ordering the distraught woman, “Don’t look at it!” referring no doubt to the assassinated T-shirted man. Yet a third student—this one a man—asks him if he’s going to be okay.

  “I’m having trouble seeing,” he whispers. “But it’ll pass.”

  “Police are on their way,” the same man adds in a shaky voice. “So is Jimmy Mack and an ambulance.”

  At the mention of his stepfather and former L.G.P.D. boss, Jude feels a knot begin to twist itself around his intestines. Not only did he witness a murder, but he froze up, allowed the murderer to get away. That clearly in mind, he isn’t sure if he can bear to look into Mack’s face when the old Captain finds out about it. Maybe he has no idea how Mack will react. But already, he can taste the top cop’s disappointment on his tongue as if he’s just swallowed a mouthful of sour milk.

  By the time the first emergency siren can be heard blaring out from the near distance, the sight is already returning to his eyes.

  Wooded knoll behind Sweeney’s Boxing Gym

  Tuesday, 6:37 A.M.

  Bright blue eyes peer through the narrow tree branch openings.

  Eyes focused not on all the people scattered behind the boxing gym, but instead on one man. A man the people sometimes refer to as Jude and at other times as Parish. A former Lake George policeman turned best-selling author. Or so the people whisper to one another.

  Blue eyes see that Parish stands a bit unsteady, wobbly. The ex-cop is holding his head in his heads. When finally Parish raises his head, blue eyes spot the small but noticeable gash between the temple and right ear lobe. It’s where the .22 caliber round from the silenced automatic must have grazed him instead of killing him.

  Blaring from out of the distance, sirens.

  The police are coming . . .

  Black Dragon studies the face of Jude Parish, commits it to memory. Black Dragon wants to hear Jude Parish scream.

  In his right hand, he grips the iPhone. He turns on the scream catcher app he created himself. He presses play, puts the phone to his ear. He listens to the scream the T-shirted man made just before his death. The scream sends shivers up and down his backbone.

  When the first cop car hard-turns the corner into Sweeney’s back lot, Hector “the Black Dragon” Lennox is already bushwhacking back through the woods towards his silver sedan.

  “Scream for me,” chants the blue-eyed beast. “Scream. For. Me.”

  Sweeney’s Boxing Gym

  Tuesday, 7:01 A.M.

  Shock.

  It’s how the demon fucks with him, tainting his blood with a numbing poison.

  With his shoulder pressed against the gym’s rear block wall and the sweat-suited boxing students keeping a strange and careful distance, as if they can smell the demon rotting inside his ribs. He’s come to see what he fully expected: the arrival of a blaze-orange and white EMS van and its two-person crew of blue-uniformed emergency technicians—one male, the other female.

  Right on their tail, arriving in a Jeep cruiser is his stepfather, L.G.P.D. Captain Jimmy Mack, slate gray eyes locking onto his own through the windshield.

  Mack exits the Jeep, leaving the driver’s side door wide open, radio spitting out a popping mix of static and voices. The stocky, gray-haired man nervously pulls on the ball-knot of his tie and approaches his son.

  “You’re hurt.” It’s a question.

  “Hurting, Mack. But not hurt.”

  Mack bites down on his lip, squints his eyes to get a better look at the cut on the right side of Jude’s head.

  “Just a graze,” he says. “Butterfly clamp will do the trick.” Clearing his throat, he shifts the subject. “Think you can give me a halfway decent picture of the perp?”

  Jude does it. No hesitation. Right from where he’s standing in the back lot.

  A killer has gotten away with murder. Maybe his head feels like it’s about to split down the center; spill his brains all over the lot, but the very least he can do now is shove the demon aside and play the role of old reliable.

  He can provide the old Captain with a decent I.D. of the killer he let get away.

  When it’s done, Mack returns to his perch behind the wheel of the Jeep.

  He leaves the door wide open, short, tree trunk legs hanging out, black cop shoes planted flat on the blacktop. Jude sees the old Captain pull the radio transmitter from the console, with which he begins issuing an A.P.B. on a “single male, Caucasian, six-feet to six-feet-four, long blond and/or dreadlocked hair, possibly dressed in black pants, matching long-sleeved T-shirt and lace-up boots. Suspect is between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five and was last seen driving a sedan, probably foreign made, color silver or platinum. He is armed and must be approached with extreme caution.”

  The E.M.T.’s approach Jude, one on either side.

  They make him take an awkward seat on the van’s rear fender.

  “Please be still,” orders the short, dark-haired woman while applying a bandage and butterfly clip to the flesh wound on his head. The dressing completed, she then poi
nts a penlight flashlight into his open eyes.

  The light makes Jude dizzy, lightheaded, causing him to abruptly pull away from it.

  While her partner wraps a thick strap around his arm for a blood pressure reading, she suggests that an immediate E.R. visit to be followed up by a C.A.T. scan precedes any police assistance that might be required of him now.

  “My father will take me directly to Glens Falls Medical,” he white lies.

  Once more, he catches sight of Mack in the near distance. The old Captain has left the Jeep cruiser. Now he’s climbing up the gravel pit embankment, eyes beaming down at the tops of his shoes. From Jude’s perch on the E.M.S. van’s fender, he watches his father disappear over the side of the wooded embankment, down into the pit. He can’t help but wonder if the old Captain might uncover a clue that will lead to the dreadlocked killer.

  A set of car keys maybe; a wallet; a calling card!

  But when Mack returns from the gravel pit, Jude can’t help but notice the resignation that paints his hard face. Mack doesn’t have to say a word for Jude to know what’s happening. It’s just as he thought: no visible clues left behind inside the pit.

  The pouring rain, it will have erased even footprints.

  One of the half-dozen uniformed cops assigned to the crime scene escorts Jude directly to the back seat of Mack’s Jeep. Mack makes his way around the front of the vehicle, opens the passenger-side door, sets himself down. Reaching into his jacket pocket he hands over his cell phone.

  “Call your wife,” he orders. “She’ll be worried.”

  Jude breathes, calmly dials the number for his lakeside home. When Rosie answers, he begins telling her why he didn’t make it back immediately after the morning workout. Using a soft controlled tone, he reveals everything he can under the circumstances—that he is with Mack; that something’s happened that requires his complete attention and “Yes, don’t worry, I’m okay.”