He must have started sending pictures because she forgot about me and stared intently at her little screen. Then she said, “HQ to Nathan
— see that tall man in black? He’s got a black and red scarf on. Yes. That’s the evil doctor Proctor.”
“Skye?” I put my hand on her arm but she shook me off, got up and moved a couple of steps away.
I got up too and heard her say, “… to the men’s room. Wayne will be there. He’ll give you the goods. Can you handle that?”
“No he can’t handle that,” I shouted, grabbing for the phone. “What’re you doing, Skye?”
She twisted out of my grasp. “Let go, stupid, or you’ll wreck everything. You’ll put your kid in trouble.”
I took off, sprinting down the mall, dodging families, crowds, balloons and Santas, cracking my shins on push chairs, bikes and brand new tricycles.
I arrived, out of breath and nearly sobbing with anxiety, at one of the exits. There was no Nathan, no tall man in black, no Wayne. I saw a security uniform and rushed at him. “Have you seen my son? He’s wearing the England strip, red and white boots and a black hoodie. He’s nine. His name’s Nathan.” I was jumping up and down. “I think he might’ve gone into the Gents with a tall man in black and a black and red scarf.” Terror gripped the centre of my being. “I don’t know where the Gents is.”
“Kids do wander off this time of year” the security man said. “Me, I think it’s the excitement and the greed. I wouldn’t worry. I’ll go look for him in the toilets, shall I? You stay here in case he comes back.”
But I couldn’t wait.
He said tiredly, “Do you know how many kids there are in England strips this season? Wait here; you aren’t allowed in the men’s facility.” I couldn’t wait there either. I pushed in behind him, calling my son’s name. There were several boys of various ages — several men
too — but no Nathan, no Wayne and no man in black.
“Don’t worry,” the security man said, although he was himself beginning to look concerned. “I’ll call this in. Natty …”
“Nathan.”
“We’ll find your boy in no time. Wait here and …”
But I was off and running back to the food court to find Skye. She had the other phone. She knew where Nathan was.
Except, of course, there was no sign of her.
I found our table. No one had cleared it. Under my seat was the carrier bag containing Nathan’s old shoes, his ordinary clothes, his gel pens and my CD. I lifted his sweater to my nose as if I were a bloodhound who could track him by scent alone.
My heart was thudding like heavy metal in my throat. I couldn’t swallow.
Sweat dripped off my frozen face.
The most fundamental rule in all the world is to keep your child safe — to protect him from predators. I’d failed. My family history of abuse and neglect was showing itself in my nature too.Whatever made me think I could make a better job of family life than my mother? Neglect was bred into me like brown eyes and mad hair. There could be no salvation for Nathan or me.
I was fifteen when I lost Skye.
* * *
“We’ll start again in the Land of Opportunity,” said ex-jailbird, Mr. Bo. “But we’ll go via the Caribbean where I know a guy who can delete a prison record.” Skye sat on his lap, cuddled, with her head tucked under his chin.
“But my exams,” I said. “Skye, I’m going to pass in nine subjects.
Then I can get a good job and look after us.”
“You do that.” She barely glanced at me. “I’ll stay with Mr. Bo.”
“Looks like it’s just you and me, kid,” he said to her, without even
a show of regret.
I was forced to borrow money from Skye for the bus fare back to Crack House. I had a nosebleed on the way and I thought, she’ll come back — she won’t go without me. But I never saw her again.
* * *
I sat in a stuffy little office amongst that morning’s lost property and shivered. They brought me sweet tea in a paper cup.
Skye lent Nathan her sexy phone and I’d watched him excitedly walk away with it. It looked so innocent.
She was my sister but I knew nothing about her except that childhood had so damaged her that she experienced the control and abuse of an older man as an adventure, a love story. Why would she see sending my lovely boy into a public lavatory with a strange man as anything other than expedient? She’d been trained to think that using a child for gain was not only normal but smart.
I was no heroine—I couldn’t find him or save him. I was just a desperate mother who could only sit in a stuffy room, drinking tea and beating herself up. My nose started to bleed.
“Hi Mum—did someone hit you?” Nathan stood in the doorway staring at me curiously.
“Car park C, level 5,” the security man said triumphantly. “I told you we’d find him. Although what he was doing in the bowels of the earth I’ll never know.”
“Get off,” Nathan said crossly. “You’re dripping blood on my England strip.”
“Nathan — what happened? Where have you been?”
“Don’t screech,” he said. “Remember the black Jeep — Sierra, Charlie, Delta? Well, I found it.”
“Safe and sound,” the security man said, “no harm done, eh? Sign here.”
Numbly I signed for Nathan as if he was a missing parcel and we went out into the cold windy weather to find a bus to take us home. There would be no limo this time, but Nathan didn’t seem to expect it.
On the bus, in the privacy of the back seat, Nathan said, “That was awesome, Mum. It was like being inside of Xbox. I was, like, the operative except I didn’t have a gun but we made him pay for his crime anyway.”
“Who? What crime?”
“Doctor Proctor — he hurts boys and gives them bad injections that make them his slaves.”
“Do you believe that?” I asked, terrified all over again.
“I thought you knew,” he said, ignorant of terror. “Skye said you hated men who hurt children.”
“I do,” I began carefully. “But I didn’t know she was going to put you in danger.”
“There hardly wasn’t any,” said the nine-year-old superhero. “All I had to do was identify the bad doctor and then go up to him and say, ‘I’ve got what you want. Follow me.’ It was easy.”
I looked out of the window and used my bed-time voice so that he wouldn’t guess how close I was to hysteria. “Then what happened?”
“Then I gave him the hard-drive and he gave me the money.”
“The what? Hard …”
“The important bit from the inside of computers where all your secrets go. Didn’t you know either? You’ve got to destroy it. It was the one big mistake the bad doctor made. He thought he’d erased all his secrets by deleting them. Then he sold his computer on eBay but he forgot that deleting secrets isn’t good enough if you’ve got enemies like me and Skye. She’s a genius with hard drives.”
“I’ll remember to destroy mine,” I said. “What happened next?”
“You haven’t got any secrets, Mum,” Nathan Bond said. “After
that I gave the money to Skye and hid in the bookshop till she and Wayne went away. Then I followed them.”
“What bookshop?” When I ran after Nathan to the end of the mall there had been shops for clothes, cosmetics, shoes and computer games. There had not been a bookshop. I explained this to him. He was thrilled.
“You didn’t see me. Nobody saw me,” he crowed. “I did what spies do — I went off in the wrong direction and then doubled back to make sure no one was following. You went to the wrong end of the mall.”
“Is that what Skye told you to do?”
“No,” he said, although his eyes said yes. He turned sulky so I shut up. I was ready to explode but I wanted to hear the full story first.
When the silence was too much for him he said enticingly, “I know about Sierra, Charlie, Delta.”
“What abou
t it?” I sounded carefully bored.
“You know I was supposed to look for it but I never saw it? That must’ve been a test. You know how I know?”
“How do you know?”
“‘Cos Skye knew where it was all along. She and Wayne went down to level 5 in the lift, and I ran down the stairs just like they do on telly.You know, Mum, they get it right on telly. It works.”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Only sometimes.”
“Well anyway, there they were — her and Wayne — and they got into the Jeep and the other driver drove them away. I looked everywhere for the limo, but I couldn’t find it. I thought maybe it was part of the game — if I found it we could keep it. I wish we had a car.”
“We couldn’t keep someone else’s car.” I put my arm round him but he shrugged me off. He was becoming irritable and I could see he was tired. All the same I said, “Describe the man who drove the Jeep.”
I was shocked and horrified when he described Mr. Bo. But I wasn’t surprised.
* * *
Later that night, when Nathan had been deeply asleep for an hour, I crept into his room and laid his bulging scarlet fur-trimmed stocking at the end of the bed. Then I ran my hand gently under his mattress until I found the shiny new phone. Poor Nathan — he was unpractised in the art of deception, and when he talked about wanting to keep the limo, I saw, flickering at the back of his eyes, the notion that he’d better shut up about the limo or I might guess about the phone. I hoped it wasn’t stolen the way the limo and Jeep almost certainly were.
I rang the number Skye gave him. I didn’t really expect her to answer, but she did.
“Hi, kid,” she said. Her voice sounded affectionate.
“It’s not Nathan. Skye, how could you put him at risk? You’re his only living relative apart from me.”
“Did he have a good time? Did his little eyes sparkle?Yes or no?”
“If you wanted him to have fun, Skye, you could’ve taken him to
the funfair. Don’t tell me this was about anything other than skinning a rabbit.”
“Well, as usual, you’ve missed the point. It was about making a stone bastard pay for what he’d done. Nathan was the perfect lure. He looked just like what the doctor ordered. And he’s smart.”
“If I see you anywhere near him again I’ll call the cops on you — you and Mr. Bo. You’re right Nathan is smart. He followed you too.” That shut her up—for a few seconds.
Then she said, “Tell me, Sis, what present did you buy yourself with my money?”
She’d probably looked in the bag when I went running after Nathan so there was no point in lying. I said, “A CD — The Best of Blondie. What’s so funny?”
She stopped laughing and said, “That was Mr. Bo’s favourite band.
He taught us to dance to Blondie numbers.”
I was struck dumb. How could I have forgotten?
“Don’t worry about it, Sis,” Skye said cheerfully. “On evidence like that, if you never qualify, and you never get to hang out your shingle, you can comfort yourself by knowing you’d have made a lousy psychotherapist. Oh, and Happy Holidays.” She hung up.
Eventually I dried my eyes and went to the kitchen for a glass of wine. I sipped it slowly while I opened my books and turned on the computer. I will be a great psychotherapist — I can learn from the past.
Lastly I put my new CD on the hi-fi. It still made me want to dance. Mr. Bo can’t spoil everything I love.
A BATTLEFIELD REUNION
by Brendan DuBois
I’m afraid I can’t remember the first time I met Doug Greene, but I do remember the first time he made an impact on me. It was probably at the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Milwaukee in 1999, when we chatted, and I remember a smiling bear of a man, who had great enthusiasm for short stories.
As the proverbial red-headed stepchild, short stories don’t really get that much respect. But Doug was an enthusiast of short fiction, and I was impressed — and even honored — to know that he had read my stories.
Then, he tossed a happy grenade in my direction: how would I like his publisher, Crippen & Landru, to put a collection of my best mystery short stories?
Um, yeah, who wouldn’t?
I confess I didn’t know that much about Crippen & Landru, but in talking to other authors and booksellers at Bouchercon, I quickly learned that Crippen & Landru published anthologies of high quality and caliber, and that it was quite the honor to be asked to have them collect your stories.
Over the next months, dealing with Doug was a joy, and I was also found it fun to learn that in every Crippen & Landru anthology, a hangman’s noose is hidden somewhere on the cover.
So when my cover arrived in the mail, I spent a joyful number of minutes studying the cover, until it finally appeared to me. Go online and see if you can find it!
This anthology was published in 2002. As of now, I’ve had nearly 30 novels and collections published, but I’m still so very proud of what Doug did for me, my very first short story collection.
My potential client was waiting for me at the entrance to the MTA station in Scollay Square in Boston, pretty much fitting the description he had given me over the phone: mid-twenties, skinny, black hair, wearing a black suit, white shirt and black tie. But skinny didn’t cover it, the poor guy looked like he hadn’t eaten in a month. He had bulging eyes behind round-rimmed glasses, ears that looked like smooth scallop shells attached to his skull, and his black hair had streaks of white in it.
I went up to him and said, “Ronny Silver?”
He licked his lips, like I was a Boston cop, rousting him for doing something naughty in Scollay Square, where lots of naughty things were available for a cost. “Yes, yes, that’s me,” he said, holding out a hand. “And you’re Billy Sullivan?”
“Yep,” I said, giving him a shake. His hand felt like dry tree branches covered with old leather. “Want to head over to my office?”
“That’d be fine, thank you,” he said.
It was a Friday night, nine months after the surrender documents were signed in Tokyo Bay aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, and there were still lots of guys in Army, Navy, Air Corps and Marine uniforms in the area, ready to raise healthy amounts of hell without worrying they’d get blown up or burnt or shot down in the months and years ahead. There were buses, taxis and trucks crowding the streets, and the noise of the bars and burlesque houses bounced around the brick walls of the near buildings and made talking and listening challenging.
Ronny kept track with me as we walked the block to my office, and I kept track of him as well. He seemed jumpy, eyes flickering around, head scanning, and I knew from personal experience where he had come from. As we approached the crosswalk there was a loud “bang!” as a truck up the street backfired, and Ronny nearly dove to the asphalt, with me right behind me.
I caught his eye. “Hard to shake it off, eh?” Ronny said, “Yeah,” and that was it.
At my building I opened the wooden door that led to a small foyer, and then upstairs, the stairs creaking under our footfalls. At the top of the stairs a narrow hallway led off, three doors on each side, each door with a half-frame of frosted glass. Mine said B. SULLIVAN, INVESTIGATIONS, and two of the windows down the hallway were blank. The other three announced an attorney, a piano teacher, and a press agent.
I unlocked the door and flicked on the light and walked in. There was an old oak desk in the center with my chair, a Remington typewriter on a stand, and two solid wood filing cabinets with locks. In front of the desk were two wooden chairs, and I motioned my guest to the nearest one. A single window that hadn’t been washed since the Roaring Twenties overlooked the square and its flickering neon lights. It was stuffy in the office so I opened the window just a crack, to let in some of Boston’s alleged fresh air.
I hung my fedora and suit jacket on a coat rack, and went around my desk and sat down. My prospective client said, “I thought all guys like you… you know, carried a gun in a shoulder holster. Or li
ke that.”
I stretched out in my chair. “A gat? Heater? Roscoe? No, had my full of weapons when I served. Don’t particularly like them.”
“Where did you serve, then?”
I took a pad of paper from underneath some unpaid bills, slid open the top drawer of my desk and removed a fountain pen. “Here and there. England at first, then France, Belgium… Germany eventually. I was in the Military Police.”
“Oh,” he said. “Snowdrops, right?”
I uncapped the pen, ignoring the nickname he just mentioned, a nickname all of us MPs hated. “And you?”
“Sicily, Italy, France… Germany. I was in the 45th Infantry Division. Typical G.I. Joe, you know?”
Holy crap. “A tough slog.”
“You got it, brother.”
He looked around, eyes flickering, and I felt a stab of sympathy mixed with shame. Sympathy for what he had gone through, fighting through landing beaches, mountains, trails, forests, swamps, villages, fields and across three nations… where nearly every second exposed you to a mine, a sniper’s bullet, an 88-mm German artillery shell, or a strafing Luftwaffe fighter. No wonder he was one jumpy son-of-agun. And I felt shame as well, for while we had both worn the same uniforms, I had been one of those REMFs (real echelon mother-fill-in the-blank), doing a cop’s job in an Army uniform, where I was mostly stuck behind the front lines, rarely ever finding myself in danger.
“Let’s get to it,” I said. “How did you find my name?”
Sounds like a dumb question, but it’s good to know where a potential client is coming from. A recommendation from a Boston cop? One of my old neighbors in Southie? A tip from a bail bondsman?
Ronny shrugged. “Yellow Pages. I’m not from Boston, don’t really know anybody, and I thought I’d just go through the phone book.”
“Good idea,” I said. “But ‘S’ is pretty far along in the alphabet.”
Silver Bullets Page 4
