Later, if I get it down enough, I think I’ll be able to astral project myself to you. At least that’s what I . . . sense.
“Sense?”
Yeah. It’s an ability that can grow in capacity. Just like the blue, which I know you saw The Gray Man use.
“And you, too, now.”
Klink and his wife were locked in a battle over a half point in interest as they continued their drive to White Memorial Medical Center.
Napoleon answered. A little. Nowhere as much, either in power or accuracy. More like a shock wave than a targeted beam or orb. But, again, I sense I can grow that ability, too. Yesterday, I was able to catch a dragonfly in it. Earlier today, outside Roland’s parents’ home, I caught a hummingbird.
“I’m assuming catch and release?”
Yes. Of course. The blue cannot harm the innocent. And from what I’ve garnered, the key to using its full power is counterintuitive; you have to first learn how to use it as gently as possible.
“Anything you sense you can’t improve on so far?”
Well. I’m limited in where I can go. New Mexico almost wiped me out.
“What’s that feel like?”
I . . . fade. More and more. My body, then my mind, my ability to focus and concentrate? It begins to go numb; I see things fading, and then I blink off.
“Shit. You do that all the time . . . just disappear and . . .”
No. Not away. Off. I simply cease to be, until I’m back.
“You mean . . .”
Yep. Pure darkness. A comforting, safe darkness . . . nothing sinister . . . but I am unable to do anything until I come back to . . . this new state of consciousness.
“Hmm. Good to know.” Parker remembered the adobe house in Mexico, how The Gray Man levitated and froze hundreds of bullets in mid-air, then whisked them away through individual slivers in space, right before his eyes. Then just disappeared. That must’ve been what happened when he looked spent and just blinked . . . like Napoleon just said . . . off.
Parker worked his way down Third Street and took a shortcut down an alley to the back entrance of the hospital. He pulled into a parking space between an ambulance and paramedics truck. Klink was now kissing ass for yelling at his wife, so Parker turned off the ignition, motioned at him and whispered, “I’ll wait at the entrance. And for the record?”
Klink covered the receiver of the phone and made a “what” gesture at him.
“Not getting laid for three months isn’t worth a half point on the loan, ya douche bag.”
As he walked to the entrance, Napoleon fell in step next to him. So?
Parker stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared at the ground. “I’m not sure I like the idea of you just going dark on me in a key situation.”
The hospital was quiet for the time being. No arriving or departing ambulances. No paramedics. The double doors behind them were trigged by a passing janitor in baggy pants who was working a mop across the slick gray linoleum floor.
No one says I will.
“But you can’t guarantee me you won’t . . .”
Napoleon’s face turned grim. No. I guess not.
“Great. I’ll be happy when your training’s done, I’ll tell ya that.”
Yeah, well, I’ve been saying the same about you since day one.
The car door flung open and Klink got out.
“Well?” Parker said.
“She wants to close on the house no matter what the rate is.”
“And?”
Klink walked up to Parker and shrugged. “I didn’t want to wait three months to get laid.”
Parker smiled. “Wise man.”
Chapter 23
They went into the hospital and then made their way to Joey De La Cruz’s floor. A nurse with lightly graying brown hair and piercing green eyes greeted them at the front desk. They identified themselves and were directed to Room 4455. The hospital floor was quietly busy in the way that most hospitals were. Taking care of the sick was a methodical business where routines and procedures met headlong with the unique suffering and worry of each patient. Nobody wanted to be there, not even those that worked there, but it was a necessary place for everyone at some point in their lives.
But not at the age of eleven.
The door to Joey’s room was closed. Klink knocked gently and Ms. Herrera opened it, looking all the bit like a mother completely on the edge. Large dark bags were under her eyes, which were swollen from crying, and her hair was a mess. She offered them a faint smile and motioned for them to come in.
Joey was lying in bed, sound asleep, looking small and vulnerable. Gone was the anger and rebellion of a grown man squeezed into the body of a frustrated boy. In its place was a child, beneath a blue blanket, with a face absent anything but innocence. In the corner of the room was an elderly couple and a woman about Ms. Herrera’s age. “This is Joey’s grandparents and my friend Lara,” Ms. Herrera whispered.
Everyone waved a weak hand at them and Parker and Klink returned the gesture in kind.
“Would you prefer to speak outside?” Parker whispered back.
Ms. Herrera instantly shook her head and her face filled with a paranoid-looking panic. “No. I . . . I can’t leave his side,” she said. Her eyes immediately began to pool with tears. “I just can’t. I’m sorry. I hope you understand.”
“Of course, we do,” Klink whispered in reply.
“We don’t want to disturb you, but we heard you called and asked for us. Something about Joey wanting to tell us something.”
“Yes. Thanks for coming. He just fell asleep again, I’m sorry, he goes in and out with the fever. Can you wait? He’ll be so upset if he misses you.”
Parker nodded gently. “We’re not going anywhere, then.”
“Any idea what he wants to tell us?” Klink asked.
“No. He won’t say. At first, I thought it was just a stubborn kid thing, ya know?”
Neither Klink nor Parker had any children, and the blank looks on their faces must’ve betrayed that fact to her. She shrugged. “When they get feverish or sick they start making all sorts of demands. Extra cheese in the mac and cheese. A softer pillow.”
“They get fussy,” the grandmother added.
“Yeah,” Ms. Herrera said, “that’s it. And needy.”
“It’s what moms are for,” the grandmother added.
Joey’s grandfather cleared his throat. “And fathers . . . when the father’s around.” And this last bit he added with a voice of stern disapproval.
“Dad, don’t start,” Ms. Herrera said, whispering a little louder this time.
“Married a damn convict, which puts everything on you—”
“Dad!” Ms. Herrera said, before she dabbed her eyes and shot a glance at Lara, who took her cue perfectly.
“Mr. and Mrs. Herrera? Why don’t we go downstairs to the cafeteria and grab some snacks.”
“I am a little hungry,” Joey’s grandfather said.
The room grew uncomfortably quiet.
“You’re always hungry,” his wife snapped under her breath. She gave a knowing glance at Ms. Herrera. “But I can use a banana or something to settle my stomach. Let’s go.”
They all shuffled quietly out of the room. Once they were out, Ms. Herrera wiped at her eyes again. “We’re all a little stressed.”
“Understandable,” Parker said.
“I just . . . I dunno . . . you guys saw for yourselves—I’ve got a lot of kids.”
“Yeah,” Klink replied.
“So, I’ve dealt with a lot of colds. A lot of bouts of the flu, too. Plus, the exotic crap. Hand, foot and mouth. Chicken pox. Bronchitis and the damn nebulizers. You know.”
Except for chicken pox, Parker did not understand a word of most she had just said, but he nodded anyway.
“I’ve seen fevers come on, but this was insane and . . . and . . .” Her breath kept catching in her throat. She tried again. “And . . .” She lost it again. Balling up her fists, she used them to c
over her eyes and began to outright cry this time.
Parker put a hand on her shoulder. “Ms. Herrera, if . . .”
Then it felt as if Ms. Herrera opened a trapdoor right beneath their feet. “He kept talking to . . . someone. In the room. Like there was someone in there with him.”
Chills rose first on the top of Parker’s wrist, then up his forearms and across his triceps.
“What do you mean?”
“The first time I heard it? I had just left his room with a bowl of half-finished chicken soup. I’d forgotten to get his glass to refill it with water and when I turned to go back in, I heard it.”
“Heard . . . what?” Klink asked, his eyebrows curving downward.
“Joey. And he said, ‘Promise me you won’t hurt her’ and I was like, was that the TV or his voice? But I was kidding myself because I knew the TV was off. I’d turned it off to make him eat something.”
“Was he . . .”
She pushed on as if Klink weren’t there with the gaze that people get when the curtain of the past falls over their eyes. “I knew his phone was in the living room and he wasn’t playing Xbox so . . .”
Parker tried to help. “Well. Maybe the fever . . .”
But this only made it worse. Her face grew stern. “No. The fever babbles? I know them. This was clear speech. And then he said it a second time, this time almost pleadingly. ‘Promise me. Promise me you won’t hurt her.’ And now I’m thinking, oh shit, did someone get into his bedroom through the window? Do I need to go grab the gun?” She looked at them sheepishly. “We have a .38 that his dad makes us keep in the house. For safety. But I keep it well out of reach of the children.”
If only you knew how many times we’ve heard that one, Parker thought. But he let it be. Because whatever Ms. Herrera was remembering, it was coming back over her again.
“The bedroom door was only three-quarters closed, so I crept up to it to peek in. Something told me to. And there he was, my little boy . . .”
The gaze of the past went from a look of pure remembrance to one now bordering on vicious denial.
“What?” Parker pushed.
She looked at them both and shook her head. “You’ll never believe me.”
“It’s okay. Tell us,” Klink said in a comforting tone.
“His sheets and covers were off and his body . . .” Denial was gone, and her pupils pooled with horror. “He was floating. On his back, but floating, a foot off the bed.”
Klink grew quiet but snuck Parker a skeptical look. Parker ignored it. Because Parker knew better than to dismiss what they were hearing.
“You both think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“No. Of course not,” Klink said. “Maybe you were tired or—”
“No!” Ms. Herrera said in a whispered shout. “I saw what I saw. It’s why I won’t leave his bedside now. I mean, I don’t know how I’ll ever leave his bedside again after what I saw. He was floating and talking to something.”
“Some . . . thing? Don’t you mean some . . . one?”
“No. It wasn’t a person. It took me a while to recognize it. We use it for his homework, you see. He struggles badly in Math, it helps to be able to work on it and easily erase the mistakes, and he has sensitivity issues to the sound a whiteboard makes, you know, when the markers squeak?”
Parker nodded as he felt his stomach drop. Don’t say it, he thought.
“So,” Ms. Herrera continued, “when I saw him holding his chalkboard I thought, what in the world . . .”
She froze.
“Ms. Herrera?” Parker said softly.
“And then I saw it. God help me, I saw it. I know I did. Again, you’re gonna think I’m crazy, but I did.”
“What, Ms. Herrera? What did you see?”
She looked at them sternly. “No. You’ll call child services. You’ll take him away from me!”
“We’ll do no such thing,” Parker said. “You have my word.”
Klink cast a sideways glance of disapproval at him as they waited for Ms. Herrera to gather herself together. “Okay. Fine,” she said, seemingly as much to herself as to them. “My son. I know my son. A mother knows her son. And I’ve never seen that look on his face.” She stifled a sob, then continued, “He was in a trance of some kind, staring off at something, right next to his bed. I crept in and looked around, but nobody was there, and that’s when I looked at his hand. It was bleeding.”
Klink frowned. “Bleeding?”
Parker stole a glance at Joey’s hands. One was wrapped tight with gauze.
Her eyes darted back and forth between them like a wild animal for a moment, before she replied, “Yeah. But it wasn’t his hand—it was his fingers. He’d used his chalk stick to write on the board, over and over, so hard that he’d ground it down to the nub. It was covered with the same words, written in a mix of chalk and . . .” She wavered as another sob stuttered up her throat and she trapped it in her mouth. When she looked at Parker next it was with utter sadness. “Blood. Chalk and blood, Detective. My little boy had practically peeled the nails off his little fingers writing those words.”
Parker squeezed her shoulder gently. “What did he write?”
She looked up. “They were so written on top of one another that they were practically unreadable. But once I called 911 and sat Joey up in bed, I took a good look at the board. It said “Shut up” over and over. And there was someone in that room. I’m telling you both. I felt them leave when I came in. And I’m telling you . . . he was writing what he was being told to write, I could see it in his face. The fear. As if he were under command.”
“Okay. But who, Ms. Herrera? Who do you think was in the room?” Parker asked, feeling Klink’s disapproving gaze. You normally didn’t ask someone to talk about ghosts during a police interview. It was not a logical question.
That was when Joey De La Cruz spoke in a faint, tiny voice. “Ch-chalk.”
They all looked to him and once again Parker was struck by his diminished body in the hospital bed. His eyes were open, and he looked scared and frail as his mother ran to his side. She began rubbing her hand over his head as Joey struggled to speak again. “It’s okay, honey. Just rest.”
But Joey shook his head, against both her request and her hand of comfort. Instead, he glared right at Parker and said, “Chalk Man.”
“What?” Ms. Herrera said.
“What?” Klink repeated. But he was looking right at Parker, too. As if he was catching on to things he shouldn’t be catching on to.
Joey’s dead-eye stare at Parker was unnerving. His lip quivered. “He made me draw a picture of myself before that.”
Ms. Herrera was stunned. “What?”
But Joey’s focus stayed solely on Parker. “And another one of Charlie.”
“I didn’t see any—” Ms. Herrera tried to interject.
Joey’s voice went flat. “He made me erase them. Draw and erase. Draw and erase. Of a girl, too.”
Parker felt the room shrink around them. “A girl? Like . . . from your class?”
“N-n-no. Not really a girl. She was older.”
Parker didn’t have to ask because he immediately knew. Ava. He was trying to figure out a way to confirm it when Joey spoke up again.
“He wanted me to draw you next, Mr. Parker.”
The room shrunk around them even more. Parker, never one to be claustrophobic, was starting to understand the feeling. His breathing growing shallow, he was startled as the wicked little whispers returned.
They spread around the room like an echo on repeat, and then everything seemed to freeze in place. His body felt as if it were being heavily pressed down upon as he looked around to see that everyone—Joey, his mother, Klink—were locked in suspended animation. Klink’s eyes were in mid-blink, Joey’s mouth was closed and his hand locked in place just over the sheets, and his mother’s face was locked in an expression of confusion.
The drapes over the windows in the corner of the hospital room, though, were moving.
He was not alone in here. Not alone in this frozen liquid existence.
There was a squeaking sound coming from behind the drapes and it took Parker’s mind only a few seconds to recognize it. It was the sound of a finger, drawing on glass.
A sea of tiny shadows with dancing pairs of red eyes came from underneath Joey’s hospital bed and moved across the floor to the drapes, parting them, revealing the words written on the window in the condensed air that had been trapped there somehow.
GO AWAY OR I’LL DRAW YOU NEXT.
Then the room exploded with a loud bang that only he could hear, and to Parker’s awe and amazement absolutely everything disappeared, the words, the feeling of doom that had been brought into the space by whatever had written the words . . . all of it was gone in a flash as the laws of time and space snapped violently back into place.
He jumped. Klink noticed but said nothing. Instead he looked at Joey and said, “Who is Chalk Man, Joey?”
Without missing a beat, Joey replied with two words that dropped to the floor like boulders. “The devil.”
“Madre mia!” Ms. Herrera said forlornly before making the sign of the cross.
The room went quiet for a second and then Joey spoke with as much courage in his eleven-year-old voice as any man Parker had fought alongside of in Afghanistan. “But Mom’s Jesus candle in the living room says not to be afraid. So, we won’t be. Right, Mom?”
Parker’s eyes filled with tears that he was barely able to disguise by making it look like he was rubbing his forehead. Klink shuffled his feet uncomfortably and Ms. Herrera put her hand on her son’s cheek and began to weep.
“Detective Parker?”
Parker didn’t dare look up to answer him.
So, Klink spoke up instead. “What, Joey?”
Joey took a deep breath and added. “We have to help Charlie.”
Chapter 24
Joey took a deep breath and exhaled in a series of staggered, fear-drenched sobs. “He doesn’t want me to tell you. That’s why he kept telling me to shut up.”
Parker quickly rubbed away the tears in his eyes, making as if he’d caught dust in them, and stepped up to the bed. “What doesn’t he want you to tell us, Joey?”
Chalk Man Page 15
