“Come on,” he said.
Samantha stood and they walked out to the landing. The shouts and screams of the neighbors seemed muted and dull, reduced to incoherent babbling. Hayes heard himself telling her to tell Garvey, to give him the letter and tell him the address. Garvey would want to come and look. Garvey was better at those sorts of things. Better than most.
As they reached the bottom floor a filthy child peeked out at them from beneath the stairs and reached out to touch Hayes’s trousers. Hayes stopped to see what it wanted but the child did no more than rub the fabric of his pants between its fingers, slowly and lovingly, as if it was savoring something. Its eyes opened wide and it cooed and Hayes realized it had never seen or felt fabric like that before. He turned away and passed on.
I am tired, he thought. I am so very tired.
They came to the front walk. All the men outside had left except for three of them. One looked up and watched them keenly, thin-eyed and soft-chinned. The others joined in and Hayes felt that animal sense ripple through him, cold like a night breeze, that feeling like somewhere in the whisper of trees they were being hunted. He was not surprised. After all, to most it would just seem like two dumb townies had wandered into the Shanties, ripe for the picking. It had been just a matter of time until someone tried something.
They walked down the steps. Samantha was not paying attention. Hayes took care to look not at the men but several feet before them. He reached inside his coat and gripped the little three-inch flick knife he kept there. He slipped it in his sleeve up against his wrist, then disguised the movement with a cough and started counting. They would make their move in twelve seconds, he gauged.
They sat up in eleven and began to move. He knew the positions immediately, saw the one on the right wander away to block the street east and the one on the left sauntering forward, pretending to walk into the building. The soft-chinned one waited, placing ten feet of space between himself and the one on the left. When the man on the left passed Hayes the soft-chinned one got up and followed, sandwiching them between him and his partner.
Hayes guessed it would happen in seven seconds. He wasn’t sure how but he was already picking up their positions, unconsciously aware of their exact placement around him. It never happened so fast, usually it took minutes, even hours.
“Samantha?” he said softly.
“Yes?” she said.
“Listen.”
“What?”
“Listen, you-” But the soft-chinned one was already pulling a strip of iron from his pants pocket. Hayes heard the man behind them spinning around and sprinting back at them, moving for the backstab.
Hayes shoved Samantha to the ground hard and the little knife popped out of his sleeve and into his palm. He stabbed it down and felt it sink into the thigh of the man behind him before he could make contact. The shock of the impact shook Hayes’s wrist. Their attacker cried out and stumbled, and instead of tackling Hayes he crashed into him. The flick knife stayed deep, grinding through gristle and tendons, and as the man tumbled to the ground the blade was ripped from Hayes’s hands. He collapsed beside the wounded man and saw the leader and the one on the right rushing forward.
Samantha reacted much faster than Hayes ever would have imagined. She got up and drew close to him, clutching her briefcase before her and backing away from them. Then she knelt and ripped the knife from the wounded man’s leg. He screamed and a flash of blood marked her shoulder, and then she stood and held the knife out before her. She licked her lips and shouted to stay back, stay away. Hayes dimly felt like applauding her. The remaining attackers faltered, uncertain as to exactly how many knives their prey had hidden on them. Then without any warning the one on the right froze, looked across the intersection of the street, and gaped at something before screaming wildly and running away.
Hayes, Samantha, and the remaining two assailants all watched him go, each of them confused. Then they stupidly turned to look at what he had seen.
When Hayes saw it he was not sure what it was. At first it looked like no more than a blur, like some error of the light hovering on the sidewalk. But it was not, as the fluttering thing began to move toward them.
He realized it looked something like a person, pale and ghostly like a dying light. Hayes saw arms and fingers and legs and a mouth somewhere in the blur, just flashes of each as if they were there for a fragment of a second before dissolving into nothing. It staggered forward toward them, and then there was a sound like all the metal and steel in the world squalling and screeching under enormous stress, high-pitched and furious. Hayes and Samantha and their attackers all clutched their ears and cried out. They could barely hear themselves. Hayes’s eyes watered and he struggled to look through the tears, but he swore he could see a face somewhere in the advancing blur, wild and crazed.
Then it hit him. Hit him like a meteor, like an artillery shell. A sense of such powerful grief and madness that it overwhelmed him. It boiled in his heart and ate his throat from the inside out and he suddenly saw the world as a cruel, vicious place where no act was just and all that lived in it deserved to die, and to die horribly, to die screaming.
He screamed with it. The noise was like a needle in his mind and he doubled up and the world faded around him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hayes awoke to the sting of alcohol in his nostrils. Everything around him was a muted roar, throbbing and pulsing. There was a cold ache where his sinuses met his throat. Then he moaned and he heard his voice faintly as though it were coming from the next room and he opened his eyes.
He was lying on a bed, surrounded by white curtains. Clean white daylight fell in rays upon the bedsheets in his lap. Through the cracks in the curtains he could see people darting past, wearing white. He guessed he was in the Hamilton, the big, well-trafficked hospital on the edge of the Shanties. It was a hospital of fairly low repute, as it saw more than its fair share of questionable wounds and the staff could be paid to keep quiet about them. It was also rumored they ran a small drug trade, though Hayes had once been personally frustrated to learn those rumors were not true.
He held his hand up in front of his face and snapped his fingers. He could hear it, very faintly. Then he checked his joints, his hands, his elbows, his knees and ankles. They seemed to be working. He checked his face and couldn’t feel any lacerations, but the linen bandages around his ears were troubling. Then he surreptitiously eased a hand down toward his crotch, found that everything familiar was still there, and lay back.
The curtain twitched. A nurse stuck her head through and said something to him but he couldn’t catch much of it. Then she checked his bandages. She nodded and leaned close and said, “You probably can’t hear well right now. One of your eardrums burst, you’ll have diminished hearing for a while but it should come back eventually.”
Hayes let loose a long string of swears. They must have been louder than he intended because the nurse recoiled slightly. Then she asked, “Is there anything you need?”
“A fucking cigarette,” he told her. She made a soundless sigh and walked away.
He lay in bed for a few more minutes before the curtain opened again and Garvey sidled in. He looked at Hayes’s head and grimaced.
“Your bedside manners are terrible,” said Hayes.
“Not so loud,” said Garvey. “Can you hear me?”
“Somewhat. Where am I? The Hamilton?”
“Yeah. You’ve been here nearly a day. You should get good treatment, they know me here. They’ll be surprised I’m not here to see some weasel or a denner with five rounds in his legs.”
“Cigarette?” asked Hayes hopefully.
Garvey reached in his pocket and took two out of his tin. First he lit Hayes’s, then his own.
“What’s going on?” Hayes asked, exhaling. “Where’s Samantha? Is she all right?”
Garvey was silent a while, thinking. Then he said, “She’s fine. That’s what they told me, at least. I missed her. They let her out before you
, about a day ago.” He coughed. “You had some sort of… I don’t know. It looked like you were in a coma. It wasn’t the ear thing. You were attacked, you know, but Samantha didn’t see you catch any blows to the head. Did you fall and hit it on something?”
“I fell. Didn’t hit it on anything. I think…”
“Think what?”
That it was almost like an attack, thought Hayes, but he waved the question away. “Never mind. What was that thing? That thing we saw?”
Garvey pulled up a chair. He sat down beside Hayes and pulled his tie loose and took off his hat. “Why don’t you tell me what happened.”
Hayes described it, word for word. From Peggy in the jewelry shop to when they saw the twitching thing walking toward them in the street. He even described the attack he’d had, the sense of grief and sadness and fury that brought him to his knees. Garvey nodded along, his face growing wearier and wearier as he listened. At the end he said, “You shouldn’t have gone there. Once you had the name and address you should have come straight to me.”
“I should have,” Hayes said. “Probably. Yes.”
“You should have given me everything you had on Skiller the second you knew anything.”
“I was trying to help.”
“Damn it, Hayes,” he said angrily. “We could have jumped on this. I could have jumped on this. Time matters in these things, damn you.”
Hayes frowned as he looked Garvey over. The skin under his eyes was dark, like little smears of coal. His hair was oily and unbrushed and his collar was a faint yellow.
“What’s going on?” Hayes asked. “What’s wrong?”
Garvey sighed again and rubbed his face. Then he stood and took off his coat, moving slowly and unsteadily. He sat back down and stared into the linens on the bed and said, “It’s surfaced.”
“What has?”
“Our killer,” he said. “There’s been two more murders. In a jailhouse this time. Northeastern District Jailhouse.”
“Oh, God,” said Hayes, and lay back.
“Yeah. In Newton.”
It had happened two nights ago, he said. The very night Hayes and Samantha had been attacked outside Skiller’s tenement. He had gotten the call at three in the morning, just as the aching swirls of a hangover were beginning to settle in. He had woken and pulled on whichever clothes he could find, not knowing he’d be wearing them for the next forty hours, and dragged himself down to Newton, where a crowd was already forming.
Charles Denton and Michael Huffy. Two scummy little tennie weasels from deep in Dockland. Both had a long record of breaking and entering and one charge of assault. Put most of an ice pick in a cornerstore shopkeeper who had walked in on them filching cigarettes. Spent a few years in the Hill, got out for good behavior. That night they’d hopped a trolley down to Newton for the high and righteous purpose of throwing rocks and bottles at the cars and passersby, chivalrous gentlemen indeed. Then they were caught, roughed up a little after they stoutly resisted arrest, and tossed in the drunk tank at around midnight.
That was the last anyone ever saw of them. By two-thirty a.m. they were dead and no longer recognizable. Only way to tell it was them was from the front desk log books.
Garvey had walked into the jailhouse to find it was in a shape similar to that of the Bridgedale trolley. Two of the on-duty officers were completely deaf, a third partially. Garvey had followed the trail of destruction back to where the jail cell was blown in. This time a paperweight had been used to hammer off the lock. Inside had been the two winners of the evening, the lucky boys who had gone out looking to hassle some townies and instead had gotten a few worlds of hurt for their troubles.
A tin plate had been the weapon of choice for the occasion. Used the edge like an axe and bent the damn thing like it had been chewed up by a machine. Huffy and Denton didn’t have much in the way of faces afterwards, just the backs and bases of their skulls and a bit of their ears, just a bit. Garvey probably would never forget the moment when he had been slowly walking up the hall to the jail cell, making a note of each of the items found disturbed along the way, and had spotted something twinkling and golden and squatted to look carefully at the object before realizing it was a golden tooth, still stuck in the remains of most of a man’s jaw, a quarter-inch of lip smiling right below its shine.
Garvey had kept hope at first, which was dumb of him. Huffy and Denton both had unsavory records, but nothing in the way of legitimate employment. Just some idiots who had never developed brains past the delinquent days of seventeen or so. But then he had spoken to some known associates of the fellows and learned with a sinking heart that why yes, they had recently found steady work, and where else but at the McNaughton Vulcanization Plant as loaders? And most certainly, they had come into contact with the burgeoning union movement, and had become reformed, passionate men, suddenly reinvigorated and moralized upon realizing the strife of the lower classes.
“No tattoo, though,” said Garvey to Hayes. “So that’s something. Or maybe it’s nothing, at this hour I don’t know shit.”
“So the policemen in the jail didn’t see anything?”
“Same thing as the conductor. They heard a noise, blacked out. Woke up an indeterminate time later to find the place in ruins. Whatever it was, it tore the jailhouse up something fierce.” He sniffed. “There was one more thing, though. There was blood on the outside of the cell door that was broken into.”
“Not Huffy’s or Denton’s?”
“I don’t think so. Wouldn’t make sense, from that angle. I think he or she or whatever the fuck it is hurt themselves. I sent a few uniforms out to hospitals to see if there were any strange injuries. Something on the hand, probably. Nothing, of course. This bastard case won’t go down that easy, it was dumb of me to think it would.”
“How’s the public handling it?”
“Bad. Bad as hell. We’re under fire and no doubt about it. No one’s paying attention to the deafened officers, no one cares if the two bodies once lived a lifetime of sheer fucking stupidity. No, they just see two union men, dead in Newton, slaughtered under police supervision. Jesus Christ, sometimes I wish America would just shit this city into the ocean and be done with it. Harry Mills over at The Freedom is screaming his head off about it.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Yeah. Saying it’s the beginnings of a blood feud, says that every man in a pair of brogans can barely expect to sleep well tonight. Someone found out that the two men were beaten before their incarceration. Well, of course they got beaten, Denton tried to bite off a patrolman’s fingers. They were lucky they weren’t here in the Hammy, with you. Not that they’re lucky now or anything. But that doesn’t matter. People are throwing rocks at officers out there. Shouting at us as we walk by. The Freedom isn’t alone, Benby in The Times is starting to question us, and the goddamn mayor is starting to listen. Or starting to pretend he’s listening, everyone fucking knows he’s funded by, hell, I don’t know, some suit at the Nail. They say McNaughton’s figured out a way to murder people from miles away. Murder whoever they want.” He looked sideways at Hayes. “They say McNaughton has a monster working for it.”
“It’s not a monster,” said Hayes dismissively. “If it is the killer.”
“Then what was it?”
“I don’t know. Something. But not a monster. What did Samantha say?”
“She says pretty much the same thing as you. It was like a person, a person who couldn’t stop moving. It was spotted again, you know. People said they saw a ghost, way out in Lynn. Shuddering under the moonlight and screaming, or something like screaming. From their testimonies that would have only been a few minutes before the murders.”
“That can’t be right,” said Hayes.
“It’s what they said. It crossed the city in a handful of minutes.”
“They’re wrong. It’s bullshit. You’ve chased bullshit witnesses before, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Of course. Things like that are
n’t real.”
“You both saw it,” Garvey insisted. “You both heard it and were nearly deafened. It’s the same thing, whatever it is. We’re still tracking down the other thugs that tried to beat your head in but if we find them, which I doubt we will, we’ll probably hear the same thing.”
“Are you seriously considering the scenario of a boogeyman running around murdering unioners?”
“No. No boogeyman. Just something. Someone, maybe. How, I don’t know. What, I don’t know.”
“Oh, please, Garvey. Don’t be stupid.”
Garvey clenched a fist and bit the knuckle. Then he took a breath and said, “Listen, you bastard. Look around you for once. We live in a city powered by thunderstorms along with the usual coal and oil and what have you. The things your company makes here are things the entire world fucking wants. Things that can fly and never have to land. Cranes with arms and legs that can build a whole town in a week. And you. They have you, you crazy bastard. Whatever you are. I’ve lived here all my life and by now I’m willing to believe a lot.”
Hayes shook his head. “That doesn’t matter. It can still be explained. Somehow.”
“Then explain it. Explain to me what’s happening.”
“Someone’s mad. Maybe at the unions, maybe just at these men. I know you love the how and not being able to figure this one out is fucking you up but good, Garv-”
“Of course it is!” cried Garvey. “Eleven people, sorry, thirteen people drop dead within a very small space of time, no sign of resistance, no sign of alarm or of a struggle! How does that happen?”
“I don’t know yet, some sort of bomb or gas!” said Hayes.
“That makes this sound planned, and this wasn’t planned. All the evidence points to anger, to a stupid crime.”
“Not all the evidence, just everything you want to look at.”
Garvey fell silent at that. He sat down and buried his face in his hands and breathed deep.
“We have to find the link,” said Hayes. “These people were murdered for a reason, and we need to find out why.”
The Company Man Page 20
