“Keep us off there, Rudy.” Muffled voices and the purr of a boat engine. “Sorry about that, we were drifting toward Hell’s Half Acre.”

  Alex and Lilly had reached the edge of the crowd encircling the emergency vehicles scattered around the small parking lot and in the woods along the river’s edge. A knot of marine vessels—one with Katelyn aboard—were offshore, lights flashing as they floated downstream. Three ambulances were on the scene, despite there being only one reported victim. He figured there were many pitter-pattering hearts in need of blood and oxygen, or pulsing nerves requiring muscle relaxers. Alex started when he saw Agents Dixon and Perry questioning someone, both of the agents easy to see under the harsh light spilling from the rear of an ambulance.

  Dixon’s radar was excellent, and the agent’s head snapped up and he looked in Alex’s direction.

  Alex pulled Lilly deeper into the crowd and headed for the taxi stand.

  “You believe me now, Kat?” Alex said. He winced as he glanced at his wife, the use of the pet name another familiarity she’d been unaware of, another secret from a time before she existed in Alex’s world. He felt his cheeks getting hot, and the moisture in his mouth leaked to his armpits.

  Katelyn took her time responding, as if she’d also been thrown by his use of the nickname. When she spoke, her voice was halting and hesitant. “I never said I didn’t believe you. I knew you weren’t lying. It was just… My mind is trained not to accept things at face value. Always has been.”

  “Will what happened here tonight change anything?” Alex asked.

  “Maybe, but I doubt it. If we’re lucky and the cell footage is good, that might be something,” she said. “People believe what they can see, and the descriptions of the creature from eyewitnesses are inconsistent and sketchy. Size descriptions range wildly.”

  “Not a surprise, right?” Alex said. “Perspective and all that. Especially with the beast growing.”

  “What worries me is what the hell is… this thing doing upriver?” Katelyn said.

  Alex waited for her to put it together.

  “I mean, someone would have seen the thing if it crawled over Prospect Point? How could it get upriver without being spotted? There’s ju—oh, shit. The water control system.”

  “Maybe,” Alex said.

  “There’s miles of tunnel and pipes. No way we could search every part of the system, even if we could get help and permission. The system runs under the city, and I can’t see the city engineers allowing us to poke around down there without a good reason—that we can prove,” Katelyn said.

  “At this point I don’t think they’ll have many choices. Especially if the feds take control of everything.”

  Katelyn sighed. “I don’t think we’re far from that.”

  “There’s a spot next to the reservoir that can provide easy access to the tunnels. Especially for a Park Police Officer,” Alex said.

  Lilly sighed and Alex put up a finger. He was on a date night with his wife, at the scene of what was most likely a grisly murder, and he was on the phone with his ex-girlfriend. All that added up to Alex and Lilly’s streak being extended another night.

  “I get I’m the park police, but where’s the spot?”

  “There’s a pump station and a tunnel maintenance access pit in the park close to Gabe’s. It’s across the street from the winter pavilion.”

  “Not familiar,” she said.

  “You can use your influence to get a power plant employee to take you in there,” Alex said.

  “It’s close to where you saw the creature?” Katelyn said.

  “So you do believe me!” he said.

  Katelyn said nothing.

  “We go down and take a look. Retreat at the first sign of danger.”

  “Assuming I could get access for myself, what excuse should I use for you?”

  “I could meet you there. Surprise, surprise.”

  He could almost see her shaking her head. “No. My contact will recognize you for sure, so I’ll say you’re working with the staties on a special river project.”

  “Works for me.”

  “Let me do some checking and I’ll get back to you,” Katelyn said.

  Alex glanced at Lilly, smiled, and said, “10-4.”

  An ambulance ripped past, sirens wailing as it raced toward Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center. The knot of boats on the river was breaking up, one boat floating downstream toward the falls, the others powering upstream.

  Alex stopped walking and pulled Lilly into his arms. She made a small show of struggling as she stared at the red lights of the retreating boats, leaving no doubts about who and what she was thinking about.

  “You know I love you, right?” he said.

  She nodded and hugged him. “I love you too.”

  They walked on through the sticky night, passing the taxi stand.

  “Suddenly I’m up for a walk. You?” Alex asked.

  “I am.” As they walked, Lilly said, “I feel like we’re missing some critical piece to the puzzle. Some clue that will put things together.”

  “I know the feeling, but I don’t know where to get more pieces.”

  “Maybe there are more clues buried in the past?”

  He waited.

  “You haven’t seen Dominic in what, six months?”

  Alex sighed. It was more like a year. He hated visiting his father's old friend at Lazy Oaks, the place was depressing as hell, but Lilly was right. He had to cover all the bases, and maybe there was something Dom could tell him that hadn’t made it into his father’s shoebox.

  “I’ll go see him in the morning,” Alex said. “More importantly, do you want ice cream?”

  Lilly looked over her shoulder, and said, “I don’t think I could keep it down at the moment.”

  15

  “Took you long enough. You waiting for the town to get squashed before you come to see me?” Dom said. His father’s longtime friend and work partner was frail and bent, liver spots dotting the sagging skin draped over his skull, all hints of hair gone. His olive skin had red blotches speckled with blood blisters, and his lips were chapped raw, but his obsidian snake-like eyes still gleamed with vigor. He wore a ratty sweater, despite the recreation room being a balmy seventy degrees. Alex didn’t know much about getting old, other than it sucked, but it did seem that once a person passed the age of seventy there was no such thing as a warm place.

  “Hey, Dom,” Alex said as he took a seat, a chess board sitting on the table between them.

  Dom held a juice box, and he sucked on the thin white straw. “So why today? You know I got bingo soon.”

  “That slipped my mind.”

  Dom pointed at the chess board. “You up for a game?”

  “Sure.” Dom was a good player, much better than Alex, but it gave the old guy a thrill to beat ‘a youngster’ and Alex never tried very hard.

  “Smoke or fire?”

  “Fire,” Alex said, and he moved a white pawn forward two spaces.

  Dom met his pawn, and said, “So you finally believe?”

  Alex moved another pawn. “You’ve been reading the news? You hear what happened last night?”

  Dom looked around the room as if Alex and he were conspirators. Four other people sat at tables playing games or pecking at their datapads. Alex hated the smell of the joint; antiseptic, grease, rotting grass, and that odd old person smell that was a body odor concoction of dust, skin oils, and Nonenal, a chemical compound people develop as they age. It was death’s waiting room, and sorrow leaked through Alex.

  “I keep up on stuff.” Dom tapped the closed iPad case that sat next to the chess board. “Especially this year.” He eyeballed Alex.

  “That’s why I’m here… Other than to see you, of course.”

  Dom smiled thinly. The expression revealed no mirth. “Of course.”

  “We’re kind of at a dead-end, and I thought talking to you might jar some fact or clue that might help us move forward,” Alex said.

  “We? Us? Who be we and us?”

  Alex rolled his shoulders. “Katelyn, for one. You remember her, right?”

  “Your first love. How could I forget?”

  “Don’t say that, O.K.?”

  “It’s not true?”

  Alex sighed. “Just don’t say it.”

  Dom did what Alex assumed was his best mocking teenager whine. “Whatever.”

  “She’s park police now, and there’s Dr. Silverfish from the university, Lilly of course, Gabe.”

  “A very unimpressive crew.” The old guy waited for a response, but when Alex didn’t provide one, he continued. “Why haven’t you done what I’m sure Wahanu has told you to do?” Alex’s surprise must have shown on his face, because Dom laughed. “Your father gave me the same speech. Told me to reach out to you if he wasn’t alive.”

  Alex felt his father’s shadow looming over his shoulder. “And what was that?”

  “Make the authorities believe. Set up a tent outside the Niagara police station. Make them arrest you. Make a scene and don’t let them ignore you.”

  Alex looked at the floor. “I didn’t realize you were such a believer.”

  “I never really was, but recent events can’t be denied.”

  “Yeah, well, they are being denied. I’m not messing with tourist season and ending up on the town’s nut shelf with my dad.”

  Dom bristled as he leaned forward and took Alex’s queen with one of his bishops, then leaned back as a smile cut across his face. “Well, that’s my advice to you. I’ll be dead soon one way or the other, so it’s your Niagara now. Do what you think is best.”

  Alex moved one of his rooks and said, “Don’t talk like that.”

  Dom hiked his shoulders and looked around as his eyes went wide.

  Alex studied the chess board.

  “Look, I don’t know what I can add. Do you know how many times me and your pa talked about that day? All the days running up to it and after?”

  Alex waited.

  Dom took one of Alex’s pawns and said, “All the time. It’s all we ever talked about. It was really the only thing that bound us together, except the job, of course.”

  Alex moved his king to avoid Dom’s attack. Alex was losing badly, and there were only six white pieces on the board along with twelve black.

  “I guess what I’m saying is if any information I provided didn’t make it into your father’s grail book, then it wasn’t relevant.”

  “Run through it again. For me.”

  “The day?”

  “Start there.”

  Dom sighed long and hard and broke into a coughing fit. He blew into a stained handkerchief, examined its contents, and said, “I was hungover, clueless, preoccupied and young, but the older I got the more I thought your dad might be onto something. And now…” He nodded, his sagging jowls jiggling as he took Alex’s last bishop.

  Alex waited.

  The old guy told the tale, how he arrived at work, went down in the cage and chipped rock. “Then we see all these soldiers, a bunch of suits down there. We knew that wasn’t right.” He went on to tell of the smell, the primal roar, the explosion. “Then we were jerked topside, but it was a little late.”

  The story was exactly how Alex had heard his father tell it a hundred times. “What about the weeks leading up to the day, and after?”

  “Before that day we saw all kinds of covered crates, large bundles being carried away and loaded onto a hoist that took the stuff topside where it was loaded into trucks,” Dom said.

  “You ever see any of the stuff up close?” He knew the answer, which was no.

  Dom shook his head as he scanned the chess board, then moved his queen.

  Alex eyed the board. The end was near. “What about after?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean nothing?”

  “I mean, after the day, we didn’t see any activity on the talus. Our part was done before the bigheads started their review of the scree pile. They were trying to think of ways to remove some of the large boulders in hopes of making the falls better.” Dom waved his hand at an invisible fly. “Crazy talk that never amounted to much.”

  Alex said nothing. He had to make a move, but anything he did would play right into Dom’s hands. “What about…” he inched a pawn forward one space, prolonging the inevitable. “What about how my dad felt? Did you sense something? He described the feeling as knowing a storm is on the way without seeing it.”

  The old guy sat back and looked around, pain tightening his sagging skin as he frowned. “If you’d asked me that the day all this happened, I would have said no.”

  “And now?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve run everything through my mind so many times it's hard sometimes to separate fact from feelings, but yeah, I do think I felt something. Like how people get jumpy before a storm is a good way to describe it, or how your stomach burns when you get pulled over by the cops.”

  “You were scared?”

  “Not scared… I can’t explain it.”

  Alex cracked his neck and leaned back as he studied the chess board. “Story of my life.”

  Dom moved one of his rooks and said, “Checkmate.”

  Alex was no private eye, but he was certain he was being followed as he rolled out of Lazy Oaks retirement facility onto River Road. The vehicle was a black Chevy Tahoe, and if Alex was a betting man, he’d guess Dixon and Perry were tailing him. He’d forgotten to ask Dom about the feds, but Alex figured they hadn’t visited the old man, or he would’ve said something.

  He pulled into Bean Boy, a gourmet coffee stand fighting with the mega coffee corps for an ever-growing market. He shut off the engine, jumped from the Jeep, and waited.

  The Tahoe pulled into the lot and drove right up to Alex, all pretense of stealth gone. The Chevy came to a stop with the passenger side facing Alex. The window rolled down and Dixon stared at him from behind mirrored sunglasses. “What’s up, Mr. Weston?”

  “Mr. Weston?”

  Dixon shrugged. “Supervisor’s been pushing customer service.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said as he looked around expansively.

  “Dominic offer up anything new?”

  Alex shrugged. “Why didn’t you interview him?”

  Dixon hiked his shoulders. “He’s on our list. So, nothing new?”

  Alex filled the agent in, told him everything Dom said.

  “Felt something, huh? Like your dad?” Dixon said.

  “Like I said. He didn’t feel that way on the day of the occurrence, the feeling seems to have developed over time, so I’m thinking it’s a mental thing,” Alex said, discrediting the evidence.

  “You mean like he heard the story so many times he started to believe it?” Dixon asked.

  He nodded.

  “What do you believe, Alex?”

  “You know what I believe. Bring in the cavalry, the bigheads, the military.”

  Dixon chuckled. “Working on it.”

  Alex shook his head. “I’m going to be late for work.” He opened the Jeep’s door. “You and Perry should come by Mists Edge sometime. I’ll give you guys a tour on the house.”

  “We might do just that.” The window rolled up and the Tahoe pulled from the lot.

  Alex arrived early at work to find Celeste huddled in his office watching something on his iMac.

  “Thank Lelawala and He-no you’re here,” she said. “We’ve had a ton of cancelations. I don’t know what to do. Do you think the river is going to be closed?”

  “Slow down. What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t know what happened last night?” Celeste said.

  “I do. I was there.”

  “Have you seen this?” Celeste pointed at the overlarge computer screen.

  Alex moved in behind her so he could look over her shoulder.

  The WGRZ News logo filled the screen and it slid away in a cross dissolve when Celeste tapped the mouse. A male reporter sitting at a news desk filled the screen. Celeste fast-forwarded through most of the newscaster’s opening screed, then let it run.

  The puppet head said, “What you are about to see is disturbing, and you may wish to have children leave the room.”

  Alex and Celeste exchanged glances as the screen filled with wobbly cell phone footage. Darkness and shadows filled the frame, streetlamps creating puddles of light on the pathway that ran along the river’s edge. The rush of the falls could be heard in the background, but louder still was the incessant hum that Alex knew all too well.

  The anchor’s voiceover recited, “What you’re about to see is video obtained by WGRZ that was taken last night by an eyewitness.” There was shouting and screaming, and fleeing tourists flowed around the person filming, the cell footage shaky and blurry, the camera zooming in and out.

  Someone yelled, “There’s something in the water.” More shrieking, people running.

  A woman appeared in the camera’s eye, her blonde hair streaming over her shoulders as she ran. The river undulated and rose as a massive dark shape surged from the water, flopped over the embankment of boulders and dirt, and scuttled onto the walkway. A wave of whitewater washed over the sidewalk, and the person filming went down. The image shifted to bubbling white, then a flash of the dark star-filled sky, and finished on the concrete walkway.

  The witness fumbled with the camera and managed to bring it up, the whitewater washing back into the river, the woman with the blonde hair clinging to a signpost. A shadow loomed above the woman, an absence of light with rows of white teeth at its center, two glowing eyes hanging in the darkness. The beast inched into a cone of light, teeth glinting, the creature’s stinger above its dark carapace, which was slick with water.

  Alex gasped as one of the creature’s forward claws snatched the blonde woman and jerked her back into the darkness.

  A screech pierced the night. The person holding the camera threw up, and something white dotted with dark specks splattered the ground. The witness fell, crying for help, the cell phone getting solid footage of the puke-spattered walkway and a deep crack that needed fixing.

  A sharp buzz rose above the roar of human panic and the murmur of the falls. The camera view jerked up and caught the creature as it disappeared into the inky, churning Niagara River.