TITLE: "Basilisk" (1/1)
AUTHOR:  CDS218
EMAIL:  CDS218@geocities.com
DISTRIBUTION:  Do what you like, just give me credit.
SPOILERS:  Nada
RATING:  R  (Allusions to violence and bad language)
CLASSIFICATION:  I have no idea what that means
KEYWORDS:  Ditto
SUMMARY:  Mulder and Scully investigate a series of murders in Spanish
Harlem. Takes place whenever. It's just a fun little monster story.
DISCLAIMER:  They don't belong to me, I'm not making money off this. etc.
WEBSITE: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Hollow/1547/index.html



Joey Dino ran down Pleasant Avenue, fuck the suit, fuck the Gucci loafers,
fuck the extra eighty el-be-es he hauled around his gut and in his ass, and
fuck whatever natives might be watching the palace guard lose his cool.

 And especially fuck the positively monstrous .45 H&K he packed under the
silk suit coat--which he was currently pitting out.
 Fuck it all, 'cause there was one badass motherfucker bearing down on him.
As Joey hoofed it down the uneven concrete sidewalk past the fences and
gates and grimy concrete walls of the dead buildings, gritting his teeth
against his straining bladder, he cursed himself out because the whole
situation was his own fucking fault. He knew the risks, heard the stories,
had done all the stuff that brought this shit down on him.

 Only problem was, he never believed the risks were real.

 His own fucking fault.

 The real controller of this neighborhood was on him, he could hear the
fucker. Could feel the wind of his pursuit tickle his sweat-stained, greased
hair. Joey Dino's will broke and he turned, pulling the .45 from his coat.

 The world disappeared in a vibrant orange.

 And then resurfaced slowly, a hundred feet below him.

********
Taino Towers
1123 3rd Avenue
New York City

 The suit had once been expensive, Mulder noted as he squinted up at the
body impaled on the antennae, like an insect on an entomologist's specimen's
board fifty feet above the roof of the thirty-three story housing project.
Yes, the suit had been expensive, but it was rags now, fluttering in the
light October breeze like bloodstained pennants.

 "Mr. Joseph Dinatelli," Detective Torres said, "aka Joey Dino. A bad joke.
The real Joey Dino got blown away in front of Umberto's Clamhouse down on
Mulberry back in the seventies. Guy who they say called the hit was Vinnie
'the chin' Gigante. Self-same Chin that runs this neighborhood. Get the
joke?" She smiled sideways at Mulder and adjusted her sunglasses. "Get the
joke?"

 "Gigante," Mulder nodded. "He's crazy, isn't he? Walks around Little Italy
in a paperboy cap and bathrobe, talking to himself?"
 Detective Torres smiled acidly, "'Cept for the hat, I do the same thing on
Sunday mornings. Maybe Vinnie does, too, but he really acts up when he's
under indictment, follow?"

 "Anyplace," Mulder responded, looking up at the body again, but not eluding
Scully's exasperated stare.

 "He couldn't have gotten up there very easily," she said. "He would have
had to have been dropped from a considerable distance, unless that antennae
is sharper than I think it is."

 "Like to see that," Torres scoffed, folding her long, strong arms.
Actually, Mulder noticed, her whole body was long and strong. "Maybe our
perp carried him up there with, what? His handy-dandy Buck Rogers
jet-backpack?"

 Scully threw an equally poisonous glance at Torres, who definitely missed
it, since she was looking up at Joey Dino's trapped body and had about four
inches on Scully. "He could have been eviscerated and placed there. Or it
could be a very elaborate hoax. A cadaver or a well-made-up mannequin."

 Torres snorted. "We should be so lucky."

 "Is that a hint at why we were called in?" Mulder asked. Detective Torres
smiled at him as the wind from a hovering Flight for Life chopper suddenly
caught them and tousselled her dark, short hair.

 "There were two others," she had to shout to be heard over the gathering
roar of the chopper. "One on the underside of a Metro overpass. One in the
hollow dome of the Academy of Math and Sci. All in the past two weeks. Guy
at the local Bureau office tells me you're the guy to call." She extended
her hand. "Detective Ada Torres."

 He returned the smile and the handshake, but habit made him stop short on
the introduction. "Agent Mulder."

 Beyond Ada Torres's willowy form, creased with a look of bemusement, Mulder
could see the rest of the low, flat neighborhood, marred with graffiti and
fire-gutted buildings.

********
Office of the Medical Examiner
Bellvue Hospital
112 East 30th St.

  "You were undressing her with your eyes," Scully said as she gingerly
probed the gaping cavity that yawned from the middle of the cadaver's
sternum through the lower abdomen. "Which is bad enough itself, but to do it
at a crime scene, while Mr. Dino dangles from a kink in the antennae..."

 "I was not undressing her with my eyes. I was trying to assess her
capabilities as a Homicide detective." Mulder peered into the hole in the
middle of the body. "Did the fall kill him?"

 Scully shrugged, wrinkling the shoulders of her filmy OR gown. "Unless the
toxicology says differently, he did. Smell the sewage? The lower intestine
was punctured, but the absence of bleeding in the lower region indicates, it
happened about the same time he was being run through."

 "He doesn't have much of a cardio-respiratory system left," Mulder
observed.

 "The heart is gone," Scully said, "but the lungs just compressed against
the chest wall."

 Mulder looked for the first time at the corpse's face. It was limp, having
lost the animation of life, but the eyes bulged and the mouth was frozen in
a wide, gummy scream. "What's your guess?"

 "Thrown out of a helicopter?" From behind her protective eyewear, her gaze
was uncertain. Mulder returned the expression.

 "That or an awfully big Perigrine falcon."

********

 "This is Carlito Delvalle the way we found him," Detective Ada Torres said,
handing the CS photo to Mulder with her free hand. The other held a thick
sandwich--roast beef on a Cuban roll. Mulder fumbled with a loosely-rolled
chicken taco. He'd never lived in New York and knew of no other city where
people walked and ate at the same time. He waited until he swallowed before
looking at the picture and was glad he'd done so. Delvalle had been
eviscerated with long, sweeping slashes that had opened him from his
collarbone to his groin, allowing most of his entrails to spill out like
fresh calimari. Mulder felt the familiar coldness start at the back of his
neck and spread throughout his body. It had already taken his
sensibilities--a normal people would have retched at the CS photo, but being
a cop didn't come without its side-effects. Detective Torres had taken great
delight in ordering carry-out from the Mexican restaurant which not
forty-eight hours earlier, had been the scene of a homicide she'd caught as
a man had dragged his girlfriend in front of the place, beaten her, thrown
her to the ground, kicked her savagely and then pulled out a pistol and shot
her in the head. "Food's still good there," she'd said with a shrug. Mulder
hoped he never became that warped.

 "He was found in the support beams of the Metro line," she explained. "In a
corner, where there was a web of beams and girders. Didn't think much of it
at the time. Delvalle was a medium-weight pusher with some connections to
the Italian trade here--made him a cut above the usual dealer. Anyway, we
just figured one of his business associates eighty-sixed him in a way that
would leave a message for others. You know, head on a pike and all that. We
pretty much figured this one was going to stay in the red, and no one was
going to give a damn, you know?" Torres took a bite of her sandwich and used
the heel of her hand to brush a strand of hair away from her forehead.

 "But then there was the next one, right?" Mulder asked, juggling the CS pic
and the taco.

 "That's right," Torres said and swallowed. "Ira Lechshin, a slum landlord
who owned some property on a hundred and fifteenth. The janitor at the
Academy of Math and Science found him stuffed in the dome there. I got the
picture, but not enough  hands to pull it out. Wait 'til I'm done eating.
Janitor spent the better part of the questioning in the bathroom puking his
guts out. Poor Ira, the miserable shit, looked like the mouse your cat
brings home and stuffs in the couch cushions. Whoever did it damn near tore
his head off. The academy's an elite high school on one-one-five and
Pleasant. Brand new building, got a fence, security system, and its very own
security force that watches over the place."

 "Which makes it a very hard place to drag a body." Mulder ate a little more
of his taco. It was coming apart quickly. "I didn't know they only served
soft tacos," he said ruefully. Ada Torres laughed.

 "You're in Spanish Harlem, Mulder. All tacos are soft tacos. You want a
crumbly kind, go down thirty blocks to Yorkville. Maybe the Germans got
some."

 Mulder was going to come back with something, but they passed a
hollowed-out storefront that served as a body shop where pneumatic wrenches
and drills whined and stuttered. He felt awkward, wading through the tight
group of greasy coveralls and not understanding the machine gun-fire Spanish
that was all around him. He wore a suit and, as near he could see, it was
probably the only one in this neighborhood of liquor stores, bodegas, and
Chinese food stands. Ada Torres, who walked beside him, wore a skirtsuit and
tennis shoes, but managed to fit into the landscape as naturally as the
meringue that blared from scratchy radios every couple of blocks.

 "So I call the FBI and see if maybe they got anything on this sort of
thing, and I come up with your name. So, give it to me." She sandblasted him
with her almond-colored eyes. Mulder choked on his taco.

 "Pardon?"

 "What do you know about this kind of murder? Locked-room murders?"

 "Oh," Mulder said, that wasn't at all what he'd been thinking. "Well in the
course of my investigations, I've encountered quite a few extremely unlikely
murder sites."

 "Like what?"

 "Locked-room murders, like you said. In the end they were committed by a
violent genetic mutant."

 Ada Torres snorted. "Sounds like my last date. Look, now we got Joey Dino
doing his impression of a flag, and I know there can't be any easy way to
have pulled that off--not at Taino. Those towers are the fuckin' Mecca of
drugs in the neighborhood. Pot, smack, crack, crystal meth, ice...shit they
got people lining up outside the building to hit the different dealers, and
the dealers got people to watch the lines and make sure everybody waits in
an orderly fashion and nobody skips someone else and maybe starts a fight or
precipitates a shooting or shanking or anything else that'll draw more than
the usual attention. That shit goes on from six o'clock at night to six in
the morning. Every day with no holidays. But somebody plopped Joey's
sack-of-shit carcass onto that antennae in such a way that nobody saw. Or
talked."

 "There were indications of a struggle..."

 "Somebody wanted to run a fucking yardarm through me, I'd sure as shit
struggle."

 "A few perforations in the lower abdomen," Mulder went on.
"Maybe it's nothing."

 "That partner of yours gonna have the autopsy reports done by the time we
get back?"

 "Most likely."

 Detective Torres nodded appreciatively. "She works fast."

 Mulder gave her a what-can-I-say look. "She enjoys her work."

********

Squadroom
25th Precinct
1192 Lexington Avenue

 "So what have we got, doc?"

 Scully raised an eyebrow. She obviously had never been called that before.
Mulder stepped a little closer to the small desk, now cluttered with a slick
of photos of bodies in varying degrees of desiccation. In part, the move was
to hear better over the cacophony of police-station sounds: ringing phones,
hollering children and adults, shouting cops; it was also a way to put a
diffusing element between the pretty, hard-boiled detective and his perhaps
over-sensitive partner.

 "Is that the autopsy report?" he asked, pointing the loose sheaf of white
papers fluttering in her hand like a large, anemic moth.

 "Uh-huh," Scully answered coquettishly, then deliberately placed the report
on the desk. "The gist is this: Dino was killed by being impaled on that
antennae. The profusion of blood in the chest cavity shows that he was
killed in a horizontal position, and the arterial spray around the body and
antennae indicate that the blood was in motion when he was...dropped."

 "Dropped?" Detective Torres had donned a pair of stylish glasses with
frames that made her narrow face look positively cat-like. With some
reluctance, Mulder pulled his attention back to Scully.

 "Yes, barring any better idea of what could have impaled him on the
antennae. My best guess would be that he was dropped or fell from a distance
of approximately fifty yards--taking into consideration the subject's
weight, the tensile strength of the human body and various acceleration
factors, the distance would have to be at least fifty yards to acquire the
necessary velocity to run him through."


"Sounds like a lot of math," Torres observed.

 "It was," Scully answered crisply.

 Mulder cocked a thumb. "She's the brains, I'm the brawn."

 "There was also this," Scully produced a small vial filled with a clear
liquid which suspended a small, brownish nugget. Mulder took it from her and
examined it in the harsh light of a dented desk lamp.

 "Implant?" he asked.

 "Garlic," Scully answered tartly. "Found in the vicinity of the puncture
wounds that dotted the lower abdomen and left pectoral region."

 "Maybe it was the fuckin' spaghetti-heads," Torres muttered.
"Wouldn't surprise me if they took this guy up in their own private chopper
and dumped him. All while they ate their linguini and clam sauce."

 Mulder scratched his cheek, rolling things over in his head. "Well, it's a
lead."

 "You call that a lead?" Ada Torres recoiled as if from a snake.

Mulder peered at her bent image through the vial. "Well, how many Italian
restaurants can there be in New York?"

********

La Marqueta
116th St. and Park Ave.

 Scully stepped aside to make room for a young woman towing a goat. "Is
there any reason you couldn't have brought your hot tamale detective with
you for this?" she asked wearily as the goat nudged her thigh a few times
with its short, blunt horns. All around them, Spanish buzzed and chattered
as sellers and buyers haggled over prices of goods and livestock. Behind
Mulder, a cheap, card table, teetering like high-wire acrobat, was stocked
with bootleg videos. Beside it, stacked on the ground, were full chicken
coops.

 "She has to follow some leads on a different homicide. Besides, your
Spanish isn't that bad."

 "Uh-huh," Scully muttered skeptically, the latter syllable getting lost in
the rush/squeal/scream of a breaking train on the metrorail above them. They
sidled through the tight crowds of people shopping, bartering, or buying
until Mulder saw what appeared to be a promising sight: a long table covered
with vegetables. It was the only one he saw in the whole marqueta. There
were videos, wallets, fake Rolex watches, lighters, tools, knives, and old,
yellowed paperbacks. What there was not--with the exception of this
table--were vegetables. Since there were bodegas and stands on every block,
Mulder could see why one wouldn't come out here to buy them. Unless they
needed something relatively rare in the neighborhood.

 Like garlic.

 The table was strewn with an assortment of oddities. Arugala, coconuts,
artichokes were lined up like armies on display beside things Mulder had
never seen before: brown, curled, root-like lumps; flat, wide cactus fronds,
their spines a full inch long; brown shoots of what looked like green
bamboo. Along the edge of the table were small, forlorn cloves of garlic.
Mulder picked one up and looked it over.

 Behind the table, a short, woman with Indian features and bad teeth spoke
mushy Spanish to Scully.

 "She asked if you were interested," Scully said over the sudden cackle of
roosters. "That she had the only garlic on the upper east side and its
cheap. Muy barato."

 "Ask her why she carries them. Tell her nobody seems interested in buying
them."

 There was a quick exchange of the foreign language--Scully's stilted,
American accented, and the woman's toothless slang--and Scully looked over
at him. "She says she's got one customer. An old Italian woman named Baldi.
Tessi Baldi. Apparently this neighborhood used to be little Italy a couple
decades ago and This Baldi woman is an old holdout."

 "Does she know where she lives?"

 "No, but that should be a relatively simple matter to ascertain. A simple
run down of her Con Ed bills..." Scully broke off abruptly and screamed as a
boa constrictor the color of orange sorbet wound over her shoulder and
around her neck. She spun, grasping at the snake and reaching for her gun.
Behind her a kid of maybe seventeen grinned widely and nodded his head
enthusiastically.
 "You like, lady? fify dolla's!"

 Mulder grinned at the collection of expressions that crossed Scully's face
as she detangled herself from the snake--which, for its part was showing a
certain reluctance to part with her. "I think he likes you."

 Scully gave him a poisonous look.

********

 According to Con Ed, Tessi Baldi lived at 442 E. 115th St. Between First
and Pleasant. Mulder shuffled this fact into the deck of information he
already had.

 Ira Lechshin had owned buildings on that same block.

 Carlito Delvalle had ben spotted dealing on that block.

 And Joey Dino...

 Mulder didn't know yet.

********

 The terminal block of 115th Street was lined to the south with apartment
buildings in varying degrees of dilapidation. Some were new, their bricks
still smooth and unblemished. Other looked like ancient, many animals. The
north side was lined with new apartment projects, ending at an old, stone
church that reached to the sky with turrets and belfries. The face of it was
dominated by a stained-glass dial, planted in which was a scene from the
crucifixion. The entrance to the church was blocked by a black, wrought-iron
fence of the type that yuppies paid thousands of dollars to have built.
Behind it, on the steps up to the heavy, wooden entrance doors, were at
least a half-dozen, skinny alley cats. Crouching at the gate, caught in the
glare of a streetlight, was an old woman. From behind, she looked like a
lump of blankets. Mulder quietly walked toward her, straining to hear her
low tones. "'Ere Guiseppe..you like? Eh, Dominica, you hongry, no? Yeah, we
go'...special foo' for you! It go' tuna in it..."
 When Mulder as close enough, he could see the small tins of catfood the
woman was setting out for the animals, her bone-thin arms fitting easily
between the spaces between the bars. "Nice cats," he said casually.

 "Eh?" the old woman turned and looked up at him. Her face was little more
than a skull barely covered in flesh. Her eyes seemed two holes poked in her
head. "Yeah, I feed 'em. I say 'whya not? They keep the church safe froma
rats an' mice. Why no' do a li'l some'ing for them, too?'"

 "Nice of you. What's the garlic for?" he pointed to the mixing bowl of
diced garlic in liquid.

 "They for someone else. Cats, they no' like garlic. Basilisk, he like
garlic."

 "Who's Basilisk?"

 "He live in the church," she gestured with one arthritic claw at the
expanse of the towers. "He take care a' the bigger rats, you know what I
mean. He keep 'is church safe. Basilisk. He like his garlic wi' a little bi'
of olive oil."

 "Well, is this Basilisk a person? A caretaker or something?"

 "No! Basilisk, he come here when they bring th' church over from Italy. He
been here almos' hundred years now. Once there was a man...a boy, he no'
that old...he sella th' drugs, he beat up his girlfrien', shout at her in
the street. One day, he kill a man. Kill him righ' in fron' of the church.
Boom, sho' him right there. Ev'rbo'y see it happen, nobody talk to police.
We all scared. Few days later, this man get snatched off th' street. They
find him in the factory ov'r by the river. Basilisk, he took the man for
doin' that in fron' his church. He took him and killt him in tha' factory so
we no have to see it. He keep us safe."

 "When was this?" Mulder asked.

 "Forty year ago maybe. Maybe a li'l less."

 Mulder's phone bleated. He straightened up and answered it.

 "Mulder, this is Torres. I'm in the Washburn Wire Factory. There's been
another. Your partner's already here looking over the body. You know where
this place is?"

  "Yeah, yeah. Which entrance are you near?"

 "One-one-eight. Better get here quick, it's a dozy."

 He was only a matter of blocks from the factory. He ran.

********

 The massive Washburn Wire Factory was the largest free-standing space in
Manhattan. It was an abandoned, burned-out, shell. A haven for the area's
drug trafficking, prostitution, and murders. Mulder slid through the
rusted-out fence at the 118th street entrance and found himself in a
cavernous space, two stories high, ringed with empty windows. There were no
squad cars, no CSU technicians, no bright lights. "Scully?" he called.

 "Here!" A flashlight split the darkness from fifty feet away from him,
illuminating Detective Torres's lithe form and a rumpled mass on the ground
before her. Mulder walked over the crunching, broken concrete until he stood
atop the shape on the ground. It was Scully.

 "What happened?" he demanded, crouching to check her pulse. It was strong
and steady.

 "She hit her head," Torres answered.

 "On what?" Mulder straightened up.

 "My sap." And suddenly he was staring at Scully's compact 9mm clutched in
Detective Ada Torres's fist. "Slowly, Agent Mulder, put your hands on your
head. No, leave the gun where it is. You'll need that later."

 "What do you think you're doing?"

 "Getting rid of a problem. Just like I got rid of Joey and Carlito and
Ira."

 Mulder's spine went cold. "You killed them?"

 "Well, I hired out. Couple of Guats from the South Bronx actually did it.
They thought they could screw me over, cut me out of the deal. Ira swings
the permits for the renovation of his shithole apartments on one-one-five,
Joey gets his cousins to do the work for a song and Carlito runs his
business out of it. Carlito opens his own crack department store and shovels
twenty percent to me to keep me from busting up his action. Problem is, last
week they say Ira can't get the permit. Everything goes south. OK, happens
some times. Only problem is, I find they're doing the same thing on
one-one-seven street. Carlito gets out from under, jacks up his kickback to
Ira and Joey and everyone gets richer. Except me. Goddamn disrespectful, and
that can't just go unanswered."

 "What are you going to do now?" Mulder asked, thinking furiously of his
next move. In the peripheral light of the flashlight, Ada Torres' feline
features looked demonic.

 "I shoot your partner in the head with your gun and shoot you in the
stomach with hers and leave you here. By the time they find you, you're rat
food. Way it looks to the investigating officer--me--a couple of feds
tracking down a lead end up accidentally shooting one another. Nice and
easy. I walk away. Nobody suspects me, because I brought in the feds to
assist, and what kind of murderer would do that?"

 "Torres..."

 "No more words, Agent Mulder..." the gun dropped to gut-level and Mulder
flinched, felt a hot wind, and then heard the gunshot.  There was no pain.
Mulder saw the flashlight swinging in neon arcs, illuminating something huge
and leathery with long, intricately-boned wings, the face of a crocodile,
and eyes as red as freshly-spilled blood. Ada Torres screamed, snared in its
claws, unable to bring her gunarm up. Mulder drew his Sig/Saur and fired,
bathing the thing in orange light from the muzzle flare, but doing little
else.

 A second later it was gone, a contrail of wind following it up into the
mysteries of the upper regions of the factory. Mulder heard Torres scream
once more, and then her flashlight plummeted to the ground to shatter at his
feet and leave him in darkness.

********

Agent's Report: Case #11239873-8
Agent of record: Dana Scully

Aside from Agent Mulder's explanation of the events that transpired on
10-19-98, there is no official record of the cause of death for Detective
Second Grade Ada Inez Torres. Her body was recovered from the Harlem River
twelve hours later in an advanced state of bloating, having shown signs of
evisceration not dissimilar to those detailed in the attached autopsy report
(R1).

The Guatemalan hit team contracted by Detective Torres to kill Messes.
Delvalle, Lechshin, and Dinatelli was identified as being part of a group of
illegal immigrants killed in a tenement fire in the South Bronx two days
before the first murder making the body count belonging to the UNSUB four.

While Agent Mulder's account seems highly unlikely, it has yet to be
explained precisely how my weapon (Sig/Saur Compact Model P-228 serial
number BB988765676) came to be found in the rafters of Mt. Carmel Church.

The X-Files
BASILISK