"Who's next?" asked Ian Zachary, called Zack by his fans. The Englishman's voice was deep-throated, and the tenor was seductive. "Come on, all my idiot children, retard bastards every one of you, talk to me. Daddy loves you."
Riker unlocked the door to his apartment, flicked on the light switch and stepped over the notes pushed under his door by well-wishers who could never find him at home or in his favorite cop bar. He spent his evening hours supporting a different saloon in a neighborhood where he would not encounter detectives from Special Crimes Unit. One of the notes on his floor was an invitation in Charles Butler's handwriting. His old friend and new landlord had not yet grasped the fact that Riker preferred to drink his dinner alone, ungrateful as that might seem.
This SoHo apartment was bigger than anything he could afford, and Charles had insisted on chopping off more than half the rent. Riker knew it was a better place than he deserved, and so he compensated for this by turning every surface into a trash magnet. His dirty laundry had been scattered to four corners and the ashtrays filled to overflowing.
He entered the generously proportioned sit-down kitchen, a collection dump for his unopened mail. He had no other use for this room except as an additional storage area for the empty Chinese take-out containers, pizza cartons, crushed beer cans and bottles. With one hand, he swiped a pile of envelopes from the table, then set down his gift from Mallory, a radio. She had accurately guessed that his own had worn out and that this damage had gone unnoticed for years. The television had also been broken, or he had assumed as much since the screen had been cracked by a bullet. The TV set had been left behind in his old apartment in Brooklyn, where he had lain bleeding and shaking, hearing the distant scream of sirens and believing that he would die. He believed it still, though all the bloody holes in his body had been neatly closed and stitched. He walked through the rooms turning on all the lights. It was not yet midnight, and there was still time to catch the last twenty minutes of Ian Zachary's program. He returned to the kitchen and set up the antenna per Mallory's advice for the best reception. She had already tuned in the station for him, and then, distrustful brat, she had fixed the position of the dial with tape. Contrary to her style of complex electronics, this was a very simple appliance, only a few knobs to work. He could tell that a good deal of thought had gone into Mallory's selection of this model; she had wanted something that a drunk could easily operate. Plugging it in was a problem; his hand wavered back and forth, always missing the wall socket. Finally, he rammed the plug home, turned on the radio and recognized the voice of a transplanted Englishman dabbling in American slang. This was the man who had telephoned him six times to request an interview with Jo.
"No, you imbecile!"yelled the talk-show host. "The Reaper is not an escaped mental patient. He only kills on the weekends. That means he's a working stiff with a regular job and a leisure-time avocation of justice."
"You mean murder" This second voice revealed a genuine Bronx pedigree. "I'm tellin' you the guy's a nutcase. So I figure – "
The Reaper's not crazy," said Ian Zachary. "He's a man on a mission to cull the brain dead from the judicial system. And you don't win any prizes for your damn opinion, fool. I want hard information – facts and proof"
Zachary tapped a button to cut off the caller, then lowered his voice to speak to the wider audience. "All right, this is my fault. Too many big words. We'll review the rules one more time, people. While I go to the next commercial break, get out your damn crayons so you can take notes." He looked up at the window separating his dark studio from the well-lit booth of his sound engineer. The young woman behind the glass gave him a cutthroat signal to say he was off the air.
His eyes darted to the next booth window, the one where the light never shone, though he doubted that it was always empty. His producer, an abject coward, had yet to show his face, but that was not to say that the man did not occasionally look in on the radio show. Zachary used the reflective dark glass as a mirror, and his fingers combed back unruly strands of long black hair to expose a widow's peak. This was a sign of the black arts in his grandmother's lexicon. And his ears tapered down to the skin, no lobes, another granny omen that he would turn out badly. Yet he had evolved into God or God the Son. The station manager told him so every day when the man answered each telephone call with the words, Oh, God, it's you, oh, Jesus freaking Christ.
But women liked him.
His full lips and a bad-boy smile promised the ladies a roller-coaster ride of a real bad time. Women were also attracted to the hazel eyes that changed color depending upon ambient light or his mood: dark as bullet holes if he was angry; greenish brown when he was merely sardonic; and sunshine brought out the bits of blue, though he was only awake in the daylight for staff meetings and pretaped interviews. Ian Zachary had a preference for vampire hours, and his skin tone bordered on prison pallor. Slouching deep in his chair, lean and languid, he propped his cowboy boots on the console. His black shirt and jeans had designer chic and the tightness of a second skin. He was that new creature – Cool Goth.
A polar opposite was that lump of girl in the control booth. She obviously cut her own hair over the bathroom sink, and her shapeless clothes were more appropriate to the prairie town she hailed from. This homely youngster with thick ankles and prissy thin lips was his new sound engineer, call screener, personal assistant and whipping girl. Zachary had chosen her from a lineup of less ugly mutts with more experience. He had found her fragile personality… appealing.
His new pet sat in her cage of glass and steel, electronics and blinking ruby call buttons. Each red light represented a fool who actually believed he had a chance of getting on the air, though only one would make the cut in the final segment. On his own side of the window, best described as a cave, darkness was alleviated only by the glow of his control panel and the screen on his laptop computer. In the next room, his engineer sat shell-shocked beneath fluorescent lights that faded her freckles and leached the healthy farm-girl glow from her skin. After hours of being ridiculed on the air, her eyes were no longer bright, and gone was that smile of eagerness to do good on the first day of her brand-new job.
Zachary checked the digital clock on his panel as it counted down the seconds before live air. The commercial break was almost done. "Babe?" All employees of both sexes were called babe. What was the point of remembering names when so many did not last an entire shift? "Prep the next caller. We'll take the moron with the lisp."
She looked down at her phone board, suddenly frightened, and then she shook her head to tell him that the lisping caller's light had gone dark. Zachary left his chair and crossed the room, walking toward her window, saying, "No, babe, don't tell me you lost that one." Ah, but she had. This incompetence was the downside of hiring the tender mental cases. He returned to his panel to check the screen for the most overt flaws of call-in fans. "Okay, babe, we'll take the next one – that guy who squeaks like a girl." And if the next caller did not squeak as promised, he was going to fire the engineer as a finale to the show.
He sat back in his chair, glaring at her until she cued him to pick up line six. The commercial interlude was over. He hit the button for the next caller, saying, "So you're Randy from SoHo."
"Hi," said a small reedy voice almost lost in the dark. "I'm waiting to talk to Zack."