"You sure?"
"Never better."
The old farmer sighed. "Okay, kid."
"See you tomorrow?"
"Yeah. That'd be nice. Hon?"
"Yes?"
He took a deep drag of air, a man about to cram a lot of words into the small space of a single breath. Karen heard it whistle in his nostrils. "I know you want to grow up,'' he said hoarsely. "God knows, you already have, don't get me wrong. I'm so proud of you I could bust. What I mean is, I understand that you want to. . . get away. Be on your own. It's only natural." The breath was almost gone now, but the sentiment, perceived by Karen before her father had spoken it, hung sweetly between them. "But I'm here for you, kid. Nothing's too much."
"Thanks, Dad,” Karen said softly. And this time the lie surfaced like a bloated carcass. "But everything's fine."
By midnight, Karen appeared to be sleeping peacefully.
Cass, exhausted herself, switched off the lamp and nestled in under the covers. For the past hour or so she'd been half reading a paperback novel, one of Karen's she'd snitched off a shelf downstairs. But the story was disturbing, full of horrific images of hell and damnation, and each time Karen even twitched Cass nearly jumped out of bed, fearful that her friend might wake up shrieking again.
Earlier, she’d considered trying to discuss things with Karen, perhaps even coax her into seeing her psychiatrist again. Following a quick assessment of Karen's capacity for further stress, however, she decided to table the discussion for another time. She did not tell her about the freaky crank call that had come for her earlier that day.
Cass tossed fitfully for awhile, her mind slipping into a swift-moving stream of grisly images. Visions of Karen folding back from the kitchen table with blood fountaining through the top of her skull were superimposed on blurred transparencies of Derek, roaring his Harley full-throttle toward a power pole, intent on crushing himself in the angst of lost love. And she saw herself, bent over his broken body, kissing his bloodied lips, barely flinching when one dead hand came up to her throat, tightened, and a gravel-laced voice accused, You should never have left me. Now look what you’ve done.
Then there was nothing, only darkness, the soft thick mud that was the bed of that stream. Into its depths she sank willingly, her body scarcely responding when Karen's began to quiver and jerk beside her.
Chapter 29
”Come to bed, honey."
Wearing only a nightshirt, Wendy Hall stood behind her husband’s easy chair, where the detective sat sipping scotch and listening to the late-night chatter of his CB radio. She massaged his temples in small gentle circles.
"I'll be along soon" he said, resting his head against her chest.
She leaned over and kissed his forehead. "You want to talk about it?"
"No."
Which of course meant yes.
"It was horrible, babe." He took another stiff belt of scotch. "Maybe the worst I've seen yet, when you consider—" Jim stopped himself short, having almost told his wife how the murder had been done. He flicked off the CB and guided Wendy onto his lap, a plain, petite girl just over half his height.
"Any leads?"
"Not a one. Unless there's a tribe of cannibals around that I haven't heard about.” Wendy regarded his questioningly. "The dirty bastard took her kidney, Wendy. A transplanted kidney. It's just vanished. The M.E. couldn't find it in the body, and it wasn't in the kid's room, or anywhere around the house."
Wendy shuddered, her eyes turning momentarily upward, as if to confirm that Billy was safely asleep in his bed. "What are you going to do?"
He shrugged. "I wish I knew."
"Billy really missed you tonight," Wendy said, trying to lead him away from the brink she had found him dangling over ten years before. Why should Jim Hall hold himself personally responsible for all of the sickos in the world when apparently even God had given them up? "You’ve hardly missed a night on that CB since you brought it home."
Jim grinned. It was true.
"He had a new friend over from school," Wendy told him. "A girl, if you're ready for that."
He slipped a hand under Wendy's nightshirt. "A looker?"
"Cute as a button. Name's Candace. She even spelled it out for me." Wendy laughed. "And while Billy was down here warming up the radio, she confided her plans to marry him."
Jim hugged her. "Guess I'll have to let him in on the old and peerless Jim Hall Formula—"
"Put it out of your mind," Wendy said with mock sternness. "That's our little secret." She stood, bending enticingly forward. "Come on. Let's go put that formula to work."
"Soon," Jim promised, reaching for his scotch. "I'll be up soon."
Wendy kissed him and then padded back upstairs, knowing that in all probability she would not see him again until morning. When he got like this over a case, he kept pretty much to himself.
Behind her Jim switched on the radio again, keeping the volume down to a low murmur. The cheerful, almost chanting voices of the deep-night CBers never failed to relax him. They were faceless, these couriers, truckers, and basement hobbyists, and seemed to have not a care in the world—beyond probing the spectral static in search of yet another soulmate. Their upbeat chatter, a language in itself, made good company for the troubled mind. And tonight, Jim's mind was troubled. Deeply so.
He sat rigidly, inwardly clambering for a thread, however flimsy, something he could follow back along its length to an answer.
What did he have?
What he didn't have was easier to list. He didn't have prints, he didn't have a witness (outside of the child's mind-frozen mother) or a suspect, and he didn't have a motive. And what he did have was more horrifying than helpful—a seven-year-old corpse with a missing kidney.
Jim's notebook lay closed on the end table beside him. He flipped it open and scanned his jottings, sorting things through in his mind. It seemed apparent from the autopsy findings that the purpose of the slaying had been to remove that kidney. In this view, the child's death became almost secondary.
But why? Why take a kidney? The killer was obviously insane—but purposeful, that was the key. Behind any purposeful act, however hideous, lurked a definable motive.
Once more, haltingly, Jim tried to reconstruct the crime in his mind, to see it through the eyes of the killer. . .
He bursts in through the back door, a big man, leaving no fingerprints but trailing muddy skidmarks from the soles of his badly worn shoes. Unafraid, he strides straight to the sleeping child's room, head-butting the mother with her own bedroom door as she swings it open to see what is happening.
(Why didn't he kill her?)
And then he goes inside and tears the kid in two, claiming his grisly trophy. . .
But again, Jim was unable to picture this part, his mind refusing to even acknowledge it.
Afterward and here Jim did get a clear impression: whoever had done this had been totally dispassionate, had felt no more regret than a cheetah bringing down a gazelle—he turns and goes back out the way he came in, the still-warm organ clasped in his hand.
Or did he tuck it neatly away in a baggie? Jim asked himself angrily. There had been no blood tracked down the hallway.
What was in that bastard's head?
Jim closed his eyes, descending a set of dark, unseeable steps in his mind. . .
It should have been mine, he thought coldly, striving again to be the killer. It should have gone into my little girl.
The hairs on his arms prickled.
She was supposed to be next in line. Not you.
And now she's dead. . .
Jim opened his eyes and grabbed the phone. He called the station and asked for Terri Miles, a research technician attached to Criminal Investigation.
"Listen, Terri," he said when the girl came on the line. "I want you to find out who else was due for a kidney transplant around the same time as the Bleeker child. There's a central registry someplace. . . Toronto, I think."
"That's an internatio
nal registry, Sergeant," Tern cautioned. "That could mean hundreds of names."
"Start with the local ones, say within a fifty-mile radius."
"I'll get right on it, sir."
Jim hung up.
It was a possibility. . . a good possibility. What else fit?
The more he thought about it the more conceivable it became. A guy's kid needs a kidney. She's sick, maybe dying. He's distraught, not sleeping, virtually living at his child's bedside. Then somebody else, maybe as close as the next bed over, gets a transplant kidney. And gets better. Goes home.
And his kid dies.
He wallows for weeks in remorse, doing drugs maybe, or boozing. And the whole time a demented plan takes slow and hideous shape in his brain.
Until one day he breaks. . .
Feeling cold, Jim hunched back wearily in his plush old chair, willing his mind to cease. It was time to sleep. There was nothing to do now but wait. . .
It was past three when Jim thought he heard his son cry out. He had slid away into a fitful doze, the dark copier of his memory churning out ream after ream of grotesque glossies, each of them showing the child's body from some new and more hideous angle.
Now, he took the carpeted stairs two at a go. . .
But the house was soundly sleeping. It had been only his mind, that mutinous machine he could not shut down.
He crept silently into Billy's bedroom, fearing for an irrational moment what he might find. But the little guy was fine, scrunched into his usual snoozing position—doggy style, with his knees folded under him and his round, pajama-clad butt stuck high in the air. How he was able to sleep that way was an ongoing mystery to Jim.
Negotiating his way through a clutter of toys, Jim moved to Billy's bedside and kissed him. Gently, he gathered the kicked-off covers and pulled them over his child.
Wendy, too, was asleep. She stirred as Jim crawled in beside her, but she did not waken. He sidled in close, feeling her warmth, and gazed at the moon-dappled walls.
He lay that way until the phone rang, two hours later.
Chapter 30
Bella LeGuin could scarcely believe her eyes. In the smoky dim of the Albion Lounge Tommy Kelly looked dreadful, like a man twice his age and preparing to meet his maker. She approached the corner table where he sat brooding over his beer, trepidation flowering coldly in her heart.
"Christ in Kentucky," Bella said as lightly as she was able. "Ain't you a sorry sight, Tommy Kelly."
Tommy gazed up distractedly, his sunken eyes seeming not to recognize her.
"And you still smell bad," he mumbled after a listless sigh.
Bella set her bags down carefully and sat in the opposite chair, the yeasty odor of beer wafting up at her from the tacky tabletop. In a far corner, lit from above by a floodlight, a Chinese guy keyed out nameless tunes on a piano.
"What in the Divil's-name's happened ya?" Bella said, her leathery brow pinched with concern. "And where've you been? Haven't seen you about since they sprung you outa hospital."
Tommy cradled his beer in an unsteady hand. He started to lift it, then changed his mind. His eyes scanned nervously about the bar before he leaned closer to Bella and whispered.
"Don't know what's eatin' me, Bella. I'm tuckered. Tuckered right out."
Bella waved the waitress away. "Is it your heart?"
Tommy shook his head. "No. It ain't my heart. That's just it. It's that other bastard's heart." He clasped Bella's hand across the table, startling her. "I've given up tryin' to sleep nights, Bella. That's why you don't see me around no more. I do whatever sleepin' I can by daylight now."
Bella tugged her hand away. "And why would that be, Tommy Kelly?"
He drew out a tinful of half-smoked butts and chose one, firing it up with a bookmatch. "It's the pounding, Bella. The infernal pounding of the thing inside me, like to bust. Racin' and hammerin' and buckin' like a livin' thing." His eyes were wide with bewilderment and fear. "I'm near crazy with it, lass, I don't mind tellin' you."
"Have ya been back to see your doctor?"
"Three times," Tommy said with exasperation. "But in the daytime it's just fine, tickin' along like a wallclock. I told him it only happens at night, but he just grins and says somethin' like, ‘Well it's still pretty cool out there at night, ain't it Tommy?' thinkin' that all I want is to get back inside for a few free squares and a bed. Smug bastard." He coughed, eyeing his fag as he might a traitor.
"Well, you ought to kick his arse," Bella suggested sincerely. "Take it from me, Tommy—you look like shit. Any jackass could see that."
"Thank you, Bella, for those kind words." He guzzled the dregs of his beer and stood. "Where you walking to?"
"Think I'll just laze about here awhile," Bella replied, and cackled. "I'm judgin' it's maybe not safe breathin' the same air as you, Tommy Kelly. What if you're contagious?"
Tommy managed a rather wet beer fart for the bag lady's approval. Then, he turned and left the bar, the heat already pounding inside of him.
Outside, Tommy veered left into the alleyway flanking the hotel. The alley led to a series of similar alleyways honeycombing the entire Market area. Tommy planned to come out by the canal, and from there make his way to his room on MacLaren. But after just a few steps he had to sit on a stoop and fight for his breath.
He stayed there awhile, the thing in his chest trip-hammering furiously, his rheumy eyes slung wearily heavenward. There was a pin-sharp slash of night sky up there, star studded and deep, and it made him wonder about God.
Tommy jumped when he heard the grit of shoe leather against pavement. Fear took him when the sound crept stealthily nearer, its creator lost in a wedge of black shadow. He called out lamely, his throat trying to seal itself off, and demanded that whoever it was step into the light, a thin yellow glover from a nearby delivery ramp.
It was then that the footsteps stopped.
They started again, gritty and slow, when Tommy attempted to bolt. But by now his heart had reached a rate which the doctors who'd sewn it inside him would scarcely believe, and Tommy could only prop himself up and wait.
Wait for whatever was out there.
Chapter 31
In her sleep of dreams Karen shouted incoherently.
"What?" Cass mumbled, jerked into wakefulness beside her. "What'd you say?" She turned in the dark to face Karen.
Karen cried out again—a warning, Cass thought—then flailed her whole body in bed, both feet, drumming the mattress.
Cass switched on the bedside lamp, uttering an involuntary cry at what she saw.
Shiny with sweat, Karen lay curled on her side, long legs scissoring, every muscle drawn bowstring-tight. Pulses thrummed rapidly in her neck, and beneath her lids her eyes darted crazily. The tip of her tongue, caught now between clenched teeth, was a darkening purple.
"Karen!" Cass shouted in alarm. "Karen, wake up!" She sounded angry, but she was deeply afraid.
"Run!" Karen cried suddenly, clapping her hands to her eyes. "Oh, Jesus, run!"
Cass swallowed a pasty lump. "Karen!" she yelled again. "For God's sake wake up!" She clutched Karen's shoulders and shook her.
Flipping onto her chest, Karen shrugged Cass's grip. In the same motion she whipped her head around to face Cass, speckling her with droplets of sweat. . . and for a moment her eyes rolled horridly open, blue discs netted in red. Then her head shot back the other way, mouth agape, guttural noises gurgling wetly out. She clawed feverishly at the sheets.
Repulsed, Cass rolled off the bed and backed away, arms clasped tightly around her. She felt abruptly unable to breathe, and a cramp gouged at her gut like a knife blade.
"Run!" Karen shrieked again. "Get away!"
She rolled convulsively in bed, ensconcing herself in the sheets, then sat up at the waist—sprang up, like a spring-loaded target in a shooting gallery.
"Oh, dear Jesus," Cass breathed—and in a quick, jerky motion made the sign of the cross, the way her grandmother had always done in a storm after eac
h flash of lightning.
Then, biting her lip, she rushed to the bedside and grabbed Karen hard, shaking her with everything she had.
"Karen!" she cried, her voice keen with dread. "Karen, wake up!"
(Karen!)
I can hear you, Cass—
(Wake up!)
But I can't wake up.
Oh, why doesn't he run? He was there in the moon-split alleyway, hunched by the wall, his mouth moving frantically in the infernal silence of the dream. He knew she was there, just out of sight. Knew there was danger.
But he didn't run. Just slouched there, used up, both hands clutching his chest.
Now she was moving again, gliding like a cat on the prowl. As she stepped out of the shadows, her glance grazed six stubby letters stenciled in black above a green-painted door:
A. . . L. . . B. . . I. . . O. . . N.
The man raised a hand to shade his eyes, squinting to see in the dark. . . then he too started to move, dragging himself along the wall as if his body had turned to lead.
Karen tried to call out to him: "Run!" she shouted—
And somewhere above her she heard Cass yell Karen, wake up!
But he didn't run. . . couldn't run. . .
And in four quick strides she was on him.
He whirled to meet her, his white-whiskered face suddenly blank with horror. His eyes, green as quarry water, registered first disbelief, then a kind of snap crossing over, a shift in the moonlight from sanity to madness. His body recoiled, his hands clawing pointlessly behind him, seeking a weapon perhaps, or the hand of God. The front of his trousers grew sodden as he flung out his arms before him, forming a cross, a warding-off gesture as ineffectual as his crumpling legs. At last he spun away, groping and wheeling before pitching heavily frontward. He landed on his face, the breath knocked out of him.
Something dragged him up and turned him over.
He was screaming now, bleating the note of terror's final extremity. . . but there was no sound. No sound at all.
His shirt had fallen open. And in the scant alley light the scar on his chest was livid, a vertical mouth sealed shut over slug-belly skin. He was old, sickly and thin, and the heart inside him squirmed beneath barrel-slat ribs.
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