The Last Nightingale Read online

  TO SHARLY

  for the magic of believing

  Acknowledgments

  I am most grateful for The Last Nightingale to be among the works that Mortalis, as a new imprint, has selected for its publication list. The work done there in preparing this book for publication has proved their intention to make Mortalis a house of distinction. Editor Paul Taunton brought his eye for logic and detail to the honing of the manuscript, and the finished book is a better one for his involvement.

  Agent Sharlene Martin took my early manuscript to this emerging group, so I thank her for the opportunity to work with such a smart, energetic, and creative publishing team. She and they make for delightful colleagues, because of their shared enthusiasm for building something to be proud of in the publishing world, and their intelligence and dedication in doing so.

  Fair mention must be made of my local favorites among the next generation, approaching fast in the rearview mirror and therefore offering me constant inspiration to get it done sooner rather than later: Scott and Jill in Seattle, Nicole in Los Angeles, brave Jordan far at sea, with Matthew and Daniel in San Diego, not far from Drasco and Nikola. These are the good ones. You know the kind I mean, just a few of the many reasons why all the future doomsay-ers may yet turn out to be wrong.

  Even if The Last Nightingale could be revived,

  How would it tolerate the cure?

  Knowing that Life merely awaits

  To devour it again.

  —PRESUMED SUICIDE NOTE IN THE POCKET OF

  TOMMIE KIMBROUGH’S LAST VICTIM,

  WASHED ASHORE NEAR THE GOLDEN GATE.

  CHAPTER ONE

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 1906 5:12 AM

  THE FIRST SHOCK WAVE

  RANDALL BLACKBURN’S MUSCLED FRAME did not strain at the long uphill hike, even though the route led from his policeman’s beat in the waterfront district all the way back to the City Hall Station. At thirty-two years of age, he was able to power his long legs up the steep terrain with such speed that he could leave his beat at five in the morning, traverse more than a dozen blocks uphill, plus a few short connecting streets, and still be at his desk with enough time to jot down a brief nightly report and quit the shift by six.

  The strenuous hiking routine usually helped to calm him down after a long night. This morning, it barely had any effect. He was coming off of an unusually rough beat patrolling the “Barbary Coast” district, whose grand name was a façade for a strip of bottom-feeder saloons and dead-end flophouses down near the waterfront. The whole night had been filled with more violent rampage and general disturbance than he had ever seen on a single shift. He spent most of his shift dodging punches from drunken gamblers and avoiding knife blades flashed by syphilitic whores. Their mania was contagious among them all night long and more so with every passing hour.

  He had never gotten used to the place, even though the dangerous foot patrol assignment was routinely meted out to him by his station chief. Blackburn realized that the continual Barbary Coast beat was intended as some sort of an ongoing affront to him, and that it was being done for the benefit of the rank-and-file officers. He just didn’t have any good ideas as to what to do about it. His reputation as a widower who was far too obsessive in his police work naturally pleased the upper brass, but it also placed a lot of pressure on fellow officers: men with families, lives away from the job.

  Then some bright soul up in the command office figured out that with Blackburn’s overactive code of ethics, he would work just as hard in the dangerous district as he did anywhere else. And so week after week, the dreaded assignments sent a morale-soothing message to the rank and file:

  Don’t worry about Sergeant Blackburn,

  no matter how much of a fanatic he might be.

  Look at where he is.

  Nothing matters unless the right people

  like you.

  While he strode along the sidewalk, Blackburn tried to tell himself that the real reason he constantly drew the graveyard shift and the Barbary Coast assignments was because of his superior physical capability. But a voice in his head accused him of being the author of his own predicament. The back of his neck tightened at the unwelcome truth of it.

  On any night, it was a relief to leave the district behind at the end of a shift. That was especially true this morning; it had been a real “ladies’ night” along the Barbary Coast, and between the women and the men, the street corner hags were by far the most dangerous. Those bottom-rung females lived in a drunken haze, battered by lives of nonstop torment. He approached every one of them knowing that they would eagerly offer sex to a policeman to buy his tolerance, or just as eagerly snatch away his sidearm and shoot him in the face. Most were prepared to either live or die in the attempt, and it was all the same to them.

  Lately while he kept a sharp eye out for their flurries of random rage, he also knew that the Department strongly suspected that at least one of these doomed women had somehow become highly skilled at throwing heavy-bladed knives. Blackburn himself had seen the grim products of the mysterious killer's work. Each of her victims had almost certainly fallen to the same knife, which left identically deep and wide cuts. The crime was always committed as a fast kill, always under cover of darkness. The consistent knifepoint entry at the back of the neck indicated surprise or ambush. The victim's spinal cord was usually split by the thick blade.

  Over a dozen such victims had turned up in less than nine months, with never a clue beyond a couple of reported glimpses of a "small-framed woman" seen hurrying away. No one even knew if this woman had any actual involvement in the crimes. That's how thin the evidence remained, after all this time and all those victims.

  Blackburn had personally found three of the bodies, on three separate occasions. Every one was castrated with precision and skill, postmortem. Not a single victim was robbed. It seemed as though the taking of the victim's life and the removing of his useless manhood were enough to complete the desired experience— one longshoreman's body was even found with a sizeable wad of cash right inside the vest pocket.

  When the press got wind of the story, with macabre humor they dubbed the killer "The Surgeon." The SFPD publicly speculated that The Surgeon was almost certainly a physically fit young woman, probably one who had fallen into ruinous ways. Perhaps she grew up on a farm, where she had learned her skill with the knife. Possibly butchering hogs.

  Since then, on most nights along the Barbary Coast, Blackburn had nothing more for company than the inevitable castration jokes that seemed to come from all directions. The night-beat clientele generally agreed that as long as they weren't the ones being killed, the best thing to do was to laugh it all off. And since Blackburn was under Chief Dinan's orders to keep an ear to the street, he had no choice but to spend his nights asking the same questions about the killings, over and over, and listening to the same handful of jokes in response.

  No one actually voiced open approval, but he couldn't help noticing that the sidewalk ladies were uniformly ignorant of any useful facts, free of any helpful theories. None was inclined to so much as guess who the ghoulish killer might be. And while they never went so far as to openly cheer The Surgeon's grisly work, that extra bit about slicing off the cocks of the dead men usually made them giggle whenever the topic came up.

  As for the killer—Blackburn still hoped that there was only one. But throughout the past night's shift, with that crazed charge hovering in the air, he had half expected to trip over a collection of bled-out corpses at any moment. He kept fearing that a few of the other violence-prone whores might have started to find The Surgeon's behavior personally appealing.

  So tonight he was doubly glad when his shift ended without major trouble. He took extra long strides back
to the station, making good time even though the predawn light was absorbed by the fog. With the gas streetlamps still burning at every corner, he could see just well enough to keep up his pace between the isolated pools of weak yellow light while he moved through the chilled mist. The sound of his heavy boot heels ricocheted off the cobblestones and echoed around the silent brick storefronts.

  The smell of early morning ham and egg breakfasts floated from a number of homes, tempting him to get back home to a meal of his own. He paused to check his silver pocket watch when he passed through a circle of pale gaslight near the corner post office at Mission and Seventh. He was only a few blocks away from the City Hall station, and it was only twelve minutes past five: record time. He liked that. It was as if more of the night's prickly energy had risen up from the ground and soaked through the soles of his boots with every step, filling him up as fast as he burned it away.

  He pocketed the watch and started to take a step outside of the lamplight, but just as he lifted his foot, the entire street jerked sideways and pulled itself out from under him. His footing vanished with such power that, for an instant, he thought that he had stepped on some drunk's sleeping blanket and gotten it snatched out from under his feet.

  Half a second later, the street's cobblestone surface jumped up and hit him with the rude force of a blind-side fist in a bar fight. His body slammed to earth and he took the pavement as a full frontal blow, barely reaching out in time to protect his face from the cold bricks. Spots filled his vision and his head rang with waves of pain that throbbed in time to his heartbeat. He heard his own voice cry out, "It's an earthquake!" even as he fought to avoid blacking out.

  Instinct brought him to his hands and knees, moving his limbs with natural magic while the ground shuddered under him. But he remained in place. After a boyhood in Northern California, Blackburn had enough experience with earthquakes to know that it wasn't time to get up yet. He reassured himself that at least he was awake and knew what was happening—he hadn't been ejected out of a warm bed and onto a cold floor, as most of the city's residents no doubt were. And most of whom were probably now lost to confusion and panic.

  Until the rattling died down, there wasn't any safer place to go. If he moved out of the range of falling bricks or stones from one building, he would only move into range of another. He thought about taking shelter in a doorway, but rejected that. In the heavy stone buildings that lined both sides of this street, a doorway might only prove to be a good place to get buried alive when the keystones gave way. He knew that if any structural damage had taken place during the bigger shock, then a building might only need another little rattle before coming apart.

  He told himself that with any luck, this first shock wave would be the worst of it. But just as he began to rise from his hands and knees, the street began a hard swirl that threw him onto his side. This movement was much stronger, coming not thirty seconds on the heels of the first shock wave. It rolled with such power that the best he could do was to scramble back down onto all fours and remain there on the ground.

  Beyond that, the shuddering earth was already telling him everything he needed to know. That first wave, he now realized with a cold rush, had not been the real earthquake.

  It was only a foreshock. Blackburn did not know if he yelled the words or not.

  And then it was more than just the idea of a major earthquake that leaped into his mind. It was all the dire implications that went along with it for a brittle city of bricks and mortar.

  They quickly became real. The violent rolling motion of the earth was joined by a vertical rise and fall. The ground dropped out from under him, then slammed back up again. Blackburn found himself clutching the back of a lurching beast. It was all so unreal that the first icy shot of mortal fear had not even hit him yet. All he knew, at that moment, was that he had never been through an earthquake like this one.

  Then abruptly, the ground's vertical movements slowed.

  All movement stopped.

  Quiet descended . . .

  And within seconds, everything was shrouded in a deathly silence. The air felt like a thick wet blanket that did not transmit sound. There was nothing reassuring in the absence of noise.

  The silence lasted for eight or nine slow heartbeats.

  And then a deep rumbling began. A pulse throbbed, far beneath the earth's surface. It was indescribably deep, so low on the tonal scale that he felt it in his bones and deep in his chest. For an instant, his memory flashed a boyhood image of putting his ear to a railroad track, listening for the vibrations of a faraway locomotive. Except now there was no track and no train. This rumbling sound was wrong, completely out of place.

  It was then that the first burst of real fear stabbed through him, stronger and colder than anything he had ever felt. It cut through his training, his life experience, and at that moment, if the rolling earth had allowed him to climb to his feet, the fear would have owned him and sent him screaming into the night. His instincts already sensed what the rest of him was about to learn.

  When he glanced down Mission Street, he stared into an impossible sight—a massive surge of energy was running toward him, underneath the surface of the earth. It hurtled through the ground like a wave of curling surf.

  Solid earth was rolling like the sea itself.

  His brain seemed to freeze while the invisible monster shot toward him and trailed upheaval in its wake. Brick storefronts buckled and exploded. Granite paving stones blew upward like kernels of popping corn. By the time the energy wave hit him, Blackburn was a paralyzed statue of astonishment. The wave tossed him into the air. When he landed and the street curb crashed into his ribs, the blow knocked all of the wind out of him. Then he could do nothing more than lie helpless: ten seconds, twenty seconds, fighting the sensation that he was drowning on dry land.

  He rolled onto his hands and knees and managed to take a clear breath, but by then the invisible wave was long gone. The din of destruction overpowered his hearing. Behind him, the roof of the post office was gradually collapsing, and those sounds were only part of a much larger chorus. In all directions, buildings of every size were still shedding their stone exteriors like giant reptiles casting off skin. The ones that collapsed upon themselves expelled thick clouds of dust out the windows and doorways, coughing their guts into the streets before they died.

  He turned his head in a circle and caught shadowy glimpses of Armageddon. Never since losing his wife and child had Blackburn felt the overpowering need to cry. Now the choking sobs took him as if they had only been gone for a day. He cried out in wordless despair. It was several seconds before he regained control and strangled the feelings back down. The noises around him diminished at the same time that he managed to squelch his own outcries. In a self-conscious flash, he felt thankful to know that even if anybody was awake and looking out of their window and right at him, they were certainly far too distracted to have noticed his slip of emotion.

  Meanwhile, another eerie silence was returning to the ruined landscape. It felt especially unnatural, because people should have been calling out, screaming in pain or crying for help. But instead there was a complete absence of voices.

  He realized that survivors had to be out there: random miracles, mixed in with the rubble. They were scattered underneath the ruined buildings all around, just as surely as the silent dead were buried alongside them.

  But still nobody screamed. No voices at all. Only the random sounds of falling debris punctuated a silence that was as deep and cold as the black waters of the bay. Blackburn had no idea how long it took him to stagger a block or so, but it was only then, after that much time, that the sounds from victims finally begin to drift up from the giant piles of rubble. The first cry that he heard was a long, ghastly wail. It started low, then quickly rose in pitch, like the sound of a distant hunting dog.

  That initial outcry triggered a ghoulish chain reaction—other victims quickly sounded out from hidden and entombed places. Their voices carried a ton
e that Blackburn had never heard in his twelve years of hardscrabble police work. He knew the desperate sounds might as well be the wail of graveyard ghosts.

  When a terrible scream sprang up through a rubble pile directly in front of him, he couldn't help himself. He abandoned the trip back to the station and began clawing his way toward the trapped victim.

  Just as he closed in on the anguished sounds, he glanced up from his work and saw the first living person since the earth had attacked—a healthy-looking young man was scrambling across the rubble. He looked like he was running from a rabid dog.

  “Hey! Over here!" Blackburn bellowed to the man. "Police! Help me dig!”

  When the man ignored him, Blackburn bellowed in his strongest voice, "I said police, damn it! Stop right there!”

  The fellow scuffed to a halt. For an instant, the young man swung around and stared straight at Blackburn, eyes like saucers. He paused there, just long enough to adopt an attitude and make a decision. Then he spun on the balls of his feet and disappeared.

  Blackburn swore in frustration. He resumed digging and didn't bother to call for help again. Within a few moments, he managed to pull a large man free. The victim was bleeding from several wounds and seemed too injured to get very far. The man immediately began to wail in a thick Greek accent, "My wife! Where she is? My wife!”

  Blackburn could only holler for him to stay put until someone could carry him out of the area. Then he stumbled away in search of the next buried victim. In the space of a few moments, screams were beginning to rise from everywhere, and there was still no able-bodied help to be seen.

  It only took another couple of steps for him to reach the next source of cries—children, clearly, two of them—their shrill voices penetrated his bones. He abandoned himself to such a fury of digging that he did not feel the skin shredding from his fingers and his palms. Any object that his hands could latch onto was hurled to the side, in movements that he repeated over and over while the dust-filled air seared his lungs.