The Haunted Air Part 29

"Really."

"Yes!"

He tried to knee Jack in the groin, but Jack had his own knees locked against him. He tried to angle the blade toward Jack, grunting with the effort, his breath rasping in Jack's face.

Jack was stronger, turned the angle back toward Bellitto as he forced the knife downward. Between them.

Bellitto struggled more violently but sagged back when Jack headb.u.t.ted him again. G.o.dd.a.m.n that felt good. Wished he had a steel plate in his head so he could keep that up. Smash his face to creep jelly.

The knife was now between their chests but Jack kept forcing the blade lower. Bellitto's half-dazed eyes grew large as he realized where the point was headed.

"No!"

"'Fraid so," Jack said.

... lower...

"No, please! You can't!"

"Watch me."

"This isn't happening!"

"Not like dealing with little boys, is it. That's what you prefer, right. Little boys... someone you can have total control over?"

"No, you don't understand."

... lower...

Bellitto tried to release the knife but Jack squeezed his fingers, keeping them wrapped around the handle.

"Oh, but I do," Jack cooed. "I do, I do, I do. And now the control's on the other side. And how does that feel, you piece of s.h.i.t?"

"It's not like that! Not like that at all!"

... lower...

"Then call for help. Go ahead. Scream at the top of your lungs."

Bellitto shook his head. The rain had plastered strands of his thin hair over his forehead.

"Right," Jack said. "Because the cops would want to know about the kid, how he got here, what you did to him."

Jack knew the cops could already be on their way. Had to wrap this up and move.

Tightened his grip on Bellitto's knife hand. "I just hope you didn't do something like this this."

Drove the blade downward into Bellitto's groin, deep, felt it slice through fabric and flesh, then broke free, taking the knife with him.

Bellitto's eyes bulged as his jaw dropped open. With a long, high-pitched gasp of agony he doubled over, knees knocked, hands clutching his crotch.

"Next time you look at a kid-every time you look at a kid-remember that." time you look at a kid-remember that."

Jack folded the b.l.o.o.d.y knife and stuck it in his pocket. Some of that blood was his and he didn't want his DNA profile ticking like a time bomb in some computer criminal database for all eternity. His right flank stung as he turned. Looked and saw a dark stain spreading through his rain-soaked shirt.

d.a.m.n. How had he let that happen?

Moved to the blanket bundle draped across the still unconscious Gorilla Arms. Loosened some of the folds and exposed the kid's round face. His eyes were closed. Looked like he was sleeping. Touched the forehead. Still warm. Placed his cheek over the slack little mouth. Warm breath flowed. Caught a sweet chemical smell. Chloroform?

Relief flooded through Jack. Still alive. Drugged up until Bellitto and Gorilla Arms could get him inside for whatever sick games they had planned.

No games tonight.

But now what? Instincts screamed to take off and call 911 as soon as he reached his car. But that meant leaving the kid alone with these two oxygen wasters. One of them might decide that dead kids tell no tales. Gorilla Arms was out cold and a whimpering Bellitto lay doubled over in the fetal position on the stoop; neither seemed in much condition to harm anyone at the moment, but Jack didn't want to risk it.

He picked up the kid. The movement caused a jab of pain in his flank. Checked the street for cars. One coming. Waited for that to pa.s.s, then dashed through the rain around the corner; keeping low behind the parked cars, he carried him one block east, then up toward Houston. When he got within half a block of the lights and traffic there, he found a sheltered doorway and gently placed his burden on the dry steps. The kid stirred, then went limp again.

Jack ran the three blocks back to his car. As soon as he got it rolling he picked his cell phone off the front seat and dialed 911.

"Listen," he told the woman who answered. "I just found an unconscious kid. I don't know what's wrong with him. You better get here fast." He rattled off the address, then hung up.

He drove to a spot around the corner from the kid's street where he double-parked again. He left the engine running and hurried back to the corner where he found another doorway that offered a view of the kid. Exactly twelve long minutes before he heard the sirens. As soon as the howling EMS rig flashed into view, Jack scooted back to his car.

Just as he was turning the ignition, he heard another siren and saw an ambulance flash by, heading in the direction of the Shurio Coppe. Bellitto must have called for help on his own cell phone. Should have thought of confiscating that as well as his knife. Let him lie there and bleed a little longer.

Speaking of bleeding...

Jack pressed his hand against his side and it came away red. He didn't have to take off his shirt to know a few b.u.t.terflies weren't going to do the job. He needed st.i.tches. That meant a visit to Doc Hargus.

Jack reached for the phone and hoped Hargus was on the wagon this week. Doc could probably sew up a cut like this in his sleep, but still...

Jack didn't insist that his doctor have a license. Hargus's had been revoked, and that was fine; it meant that the rules about reporting certain kinds of wounds would be ignored. But he also preferred that the person pa.s.sing needle and thread through his flesh be reasonably sober.

After Doc did his work, Jack intended to go straight home, find Bellitto's brother's phone number, and give him a call. He had a bone to pick with Edward Bellitto.

IN THE IN-BETWEEN.

Finally, she knows her name. Stray bits and pieces of her life are floating back, but not enough. Not nearly enough.

She yearned for these memories in the hope they would tell her why she is here, and why this boundless rage suffuses her. But these bits of flotsam on the featureless sea of her existence yield no answers.

And no comfort. The flashes from her past life and memories of the joy she took in day-to-day existence only emphasize the enormity of what she has lost.

But her abilities have grown. She can manifest herself in the physical world that surrounds her. She did it earlier today. And she can make herself heard, but not in the way she wishes. She cannot speak, but for some strange reason she can sing. Why is that? And why that song? She seems to remember that it was her favorite once, but she cannot understand why. She hates that song now.

She hates everything. Everything, and everyone.

But even more she hates being here, being a shadow among the living. She realizes that she was once alive and is now dead. And she hates that. Hates all the living for having what she does not. For having a past, a present, a future!

That is the worst part. She has no future. At least none that she can see. She is here, she is now, she has a vague, undetermined purpose, but after that is completed, what happens to her? Will she be cast back into the darkness, or must she remain here, forgotten, alone?

She drifts on... waiting...

IN THE WEE HOURS.

Charlie awoke in the dark and listened.

Was that...? Yes. Someone was crying. The sound was echoing down the hall. High-pitched, like a child.

Charlie couldn't be sure if it was a boy or a girl. He sat up and listened more closely. Not so much a sound of sadness as a whimper of terror, and so devoid of hope it tore his heart.

Not a real child, he thought. It's a spirit, a demon sent here to lead us astray.

He pulled the covers over his head and shivered in the warm darkness.

TUESDAY.

1.

Gia wiped a tear from her eye as she hung up the bedside phone.

After hearing from Jack last night about the child he'd saved, Gia had called Vicky's camp first thing this morning, just to make sure everything was okay there. She trusted the camp and its security, trusted the counselors, but she'd had this steamrolling urge to hear her daughter's voice.

The director had told her that Vicky and the other kids were at breakfast. Was it an emergency? No, just ask her to give her mother a ring when she was through.

Gia had spent the next ten minutes thinking about child molesters and how the horrors they subjected their little victims to should be visited upon them a hundred-no, a thousandfold.

The call came while she'd been making the bed. Vicky was fine, great, wonderful, having the time of her life, and wanted to tell her about the hippo she'd made in her clay modeling cla.s.s, rattling on about how she'd started out making a pony but the legs wouldn't hold up because she couldn't get the body right so she'd made the legs thicker and thicker and shorter and shorter until the horse could stand without collapsing or tipping over but by then it looked like the fattest horse in the world so instead of calling it a horse she told everyone she'd made a hippo. Wasn't that the funniest, Mom?

It was. So funny it had been all Gia could do to keep from breaking down and sobbing.

G.o.d, she missed her little girl.

Gia couldn't remember the last time she'd felt lonely, but with Jack out running an errand, and Vicky off in the Catskills, the house seemed more than empty. It was barren, a wasteland, an echoing sh.e.l.l with no heart, no life.

Get a grip, she told herself. It's not that bad. Vicky will be back soon. In just four days and three hours, to be exact. It seemed like forever.

And when Vicky returned, should she tell her about the baby?

No. Too soon.

All right, but if not now, when? And how? How to tell her daughter that Mommy screwed up big time and got pregnant when she hadn't wanted to.

Who's the daddy? Why, Jack of course.

Which meant that the new baby would have a daddy while Vicky didn't. Vicky's father, Richard Westphalen, was missing and officially presumed dead. Gia knew, unofficially, that Vicky would never see her father again.

No big loss. While alive, Richard had been a nonpartic.i.p.ant in his inconvenient daughter's life. Over the past year and a half, Jack had become Vicky's father figure. He doted on her and she loved him fiercely. Partly, Gia was sure, because Jack was in many ways a big kid himself. But he took time with her, talked to to her instead of her instead of at at her, played catch with her, came along and sat with all the other kids' parents to watch her T-ball games. her, played catch with her, came along and sat with all the other kids' parents to watch her T-ball games.

He was everything a good father should be, but his real child was now growing inside Gia. Would Vicky see the new baby as a threat, someone who'd come between her and Jack and usurp his love? Gia knew that would never happen, but at eight years of age, could Vicky grasp that? She'd already had one father abandon her. Why not two?

All excellent reasons for Vicky to hate the new baby.

Gia couldn't bear the thought of that. One possible solution was marrying Jack. A hopelessly mundane, pedestrian, bourgeois solution, she knew, cooked up by a terminally mundane, pedestrian, bourgeois person, but as her husband, Jack could officially adopt Vicky as his daughter. That symbolic cementing would give Vicky the security she needed to accept the new baby as a sister or brother rather than a rival.

The marriage was a problem, though. Not a matter of would Jack marry her, but could he? He'd said he'd find a way. She had to trust that he would... if he lived long enough.

Some G.o.dawful mess I've made.

She yawned as she finished tucking in the sheets and straightening the spread. Little wonder she wasn't sleeping.

Bad enough to be worrying about Vicky and the new baby, but then Jack comes in last night with a thick bandage on his side. Told her he'd been stabbed by the very man he'd been hired to protect, who'd turned out to be some sort of pedophile.

She'd changed his dressing this morning and gasped at the four-inch gash in his flank. Not deep, just long, he'd told her. Doc Hargus had sewn him up. Gia inspected the neat running suture that had closed the wound. She'd never liked the idea of Jack going to an old defrocked physician, but last summer she'd come to trust Hargus after he guided Jack's recovery from other, worse wounds.

She was angry with Jack for getting hurt. Would he ever learn?

But then, if he did learn, did change, would he still be the same Jack? Or would some fire within him go out and leave her with a hollow man, a wraithlike remnant of the Jack she loved?

Add that to the list of things to keep her awake at night.