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 class, 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.
God, 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 shell 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 nonparticipant 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 her instead of at 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 godawful 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.
And then, last night, when she'd finally fallen asleep... visions of the mysterious little girl she'd seen in the Kenton house drifted through her dreams. Her eyes... Gia had caught only the briefest glimpse of them as the child had glanced back over her shoulder, but their deep blue need haunted Gia, in her dreams, and even here and now in her waking hours.
Who was she? And why such longing in those eyes? It seemed a need Gia might fill if she only knew how.
No question about it, she had to go back to that house.
2
"Got it," Jack said, tapping his finger on a story in the newspaper.
He'd grabbed the Daily News from Abe's counter as soon as he'd walked in and thumbed through it, looking for stories about the little Asian kid and the wounded Bellitto.
He'd found a two-inch column reporting that a Mr. Eli Bellitto of Soho had been stabbed and a companion, Adrian Minkin-so that was Gorilla Arms's name-had been bludgeoned by an unknown assailant last night. Both were admitted to St. Vincent's.
Predators playing victims, Jack thought. Smart.
But the story about the recovery of a kidnapped Vietnamese boy got big play, with a picture of little Due Ngo and another of his mother.
"Nu?" Abe said as he arranged-with surprising delicacy for his pudgy fingers-strips of lox across the inner surface of a sliced bagel. "Got what?"
"A story about the kid those pervs snatched last night. He's okay."
"What kid?"
Abe didn't look up. He was busily smearing the other half of the bagel with cream cheese-the lowfat kind. Although, considering the amount he was slathering on, he wasn't sparing himself any calories or fat.
"Hey, leave some for me," Jack told him.
He'd brought breakfast, as usual, splurging on lox-not Nova, because Abe liked the saltier kind-but trying to help Abe in the calorie department with the lowfat Philly.
"What kid?" Abe repeated, ignoring him. "What pervs?"
Jack gave him a quick rundown of last night's events, then ended by quoting from the News story.
"Listen to his mother: ' "I was so worried," said Ms. Ngo. "Little Due insists on going out every night to buy ice cream. He has gone a hundred times and never had trouble. It is so terrible that children are not safe in this city." ' " Furious, Jack slammed his hand on the paper-and winced as he felt a tug on his wound. "Can you believe that? What a load of crap!"
"What's not to believe?"
"He's seven years old! It was ten o'clock and pouring! Like hell he wanted to go out. The real deal is she and her boyfriend send that little kid out every night so they can get it on while he's down on the street. But she's not going to tell that to the News, is she!"
He hit the paper again, harder this time-resulting in another painful yank on his wound-his fist landing on the picture of the kid's mother. He hoped she felt it, wherever she was.
"You saved him from death, maybe worse." Abe chomped into his freshly constructed bagel-and-lox sandwich and spoke around the bite. "You performed a mitzvah. You should be happy instead of angry."
Jack knew Abe was right but as he stared at the grainy black-and-white photo of little Due-taken at school, most likely-all he could see was his limp body wrapped in a soggy blanket.
"She calls herself a parent? She should be protecting her kid instead of putting him in harm's way. Oughta be an exam you have to take before they let you become a parent. Guy shoots a couple million sperm and one of them hits an egg and bam!-a baby. But are either of the two adults capable of bringing up a child? Who knows? Children are a big responsibility. They should only be entrusted to people who can be responsible parents."
Listen to yourself, he thought. You're ranting. Stop.
He looked up and found Abe staring at him.
"Wu? Is there some part of this story I'm missing? What's all this tumel about parents?"
Jack wondered if he should tell Abe, then instantly decided he had to. How could he not? He knew it would go no further. Abe was as tightlipped as a clam.
"I'm going to be one."
"You? A father?" Abe grinned and wiped his right hand on his shirt before thrusting it across the counter. "Mazel tovl When did you find out?"
Jack gripped the hand, still slightly slick with salmon oil. "Yesterday afternoon."
"And Gia, she's comfortable with the prospect of saddling the world with a child who has half your genes?"
"She's fine with the child part. It's what kind of a father I can be that's causing problems for us."
"You as a good father? There's a question about this? Look at the training you're getting already with Vicky. Like a daughter she is."
"Yeah, but there are, you know, legal issues I'm going to have to deal with."
He explained those while Abe finished his bagel and began preparing another.
"She makes sense, that Gia," Abe said when Jack finished. "I have to give her that. But what I think I'm hearing here is the end of Repairman Jack."
Jack winced inwardly at hearing it so starkly put, but...
"I guess that pretty well sums it up."
"Citizen Jack," Abe said, shaking his head. "Doesn't have quite the same ring as Repairman Jack."
Jack shrugged. "The name wasn't my idea anyway. You're the one who started calling me that."
"And now I'll have to stop. So when do you become Citizen Jack?"
"First I have to figure out how. Any ideas?"
Abe shook his head. "A tough one, that. To make you a newborn citizen with no illegal baggage... this will take some thought."
He cut the second lox-and-bagel combo in half and gave part to Jack.
Jack took a bite, relishing the mixture of flavors and textures. He relaxed a little. Knowing that someone else was working with him on this eased some of the weight from his shoulders.
"While you're thinking," he said, "I'm going to call Eli Bellitto's brother and give him some hell."
Jack had gone straight to Gia's last night after Doc Hargus had finished stitching him up. He'd stopped by his apartment this morning and picked up Edward Bellitto's number on the way to Abe's. He wormed his Tracfone and the slip of paper out of his jeans, started to dial, then...
"What the...?"
"What now?"
"He only wrote down nine digits."
Jack stared at the paper. Edward hadn't used hyphens, putting all the numbers in a straight string. Jack hadn't noticed till now that he'd been shortchanged one digit.
Abe leaned forward and looked at the paper. "A two-one-two area code-that means he's here in the city. Maybe he was in such a hurry or maybe he was a 'ti'tx'tefarblondzhet from worrying about his brother so he left off the last digit. If that's the case, you can try all the possibilities. Only ten."
"But what if he left off a number in the middle? How many calls will that take?"
"Millions, you're talking."
"Swell."
Jack wondered if the missing digit was an accident at all. Maybe Edward didn't want Jack contacting him. Maybe he'd planned a vanishing act all along. If so, there went the second half of Jack's fee.
Very few of his customers ever tried to stiff him, and none of those had succeeded. Edward might be the first.
Abe pointed to Jack's cell phone. "Your new Tracfone, it's working out?"
"So far, so good. They should call it the Untraceable-fone."
Jack had picked up his at a Radio Shack along with a prepaid airtime card. He'd activated his phone online from a computer terminal in the Public Library without giving his name, address, or any credit information. Per-minute charges were higher than calling plans from Verizon and the like, but you had to sign contracts and go through credit checks for those. For Jack, the Tracfone's anonymity was priceless.
"I should maybe get one. For when I call you. You gave me that number, right?"
"You, Julio, and Gia have it, and that's it."
An idea struck Jack as he finished his bagel. He picked up his phone.
"You know, maybe I don't have to make a million calls to track down Edward Bellitto. Maybe I can simply ask his brother Eli."
"You think he'll tell you?"
"Can't hurt to try."
After information gave him St. Vincent's main number, Jack called and asked for Eli Bellitto's room.
A hoarse voice answered. "Hello?"
"Mr. Bellitto? This is Lorenzo Fullerton from the St. Vincent's accounting office. How are you this morning?"
Abe raised his eyebrows, rippling the bare expanse of his scalp, and mouthed the name: Lorenzo Fullerton?
Jack shrugged. It was a name he'd come up with years ago and used whenever he was pretending to represent officialdom.
"What do you want?" The voice sounded weak as well as hoarse.
Good. In pain too, Jack hoped.
"Well, your intake form isn't clear. We can't make out the name and address of your brother Edward. We'd all be terribly grateful if you could please clarify this little matter for us."
"Brother? I don't have a brother named Edward or anything else. I'm an only child."
3
Eli Bellitto slammed the receiver back onto its cradle. The abrupt movement evoked a jab of pain from his heavily bandaged groin. He groaned and looked at his doctor.
"You have idiots in your administration."
Dr. Najam Sadiq smiled. "You will hear no argument from me," he said in decent English.
Dr. Sadiq had been making
late rounds in St. Vincent's when Eli arrived in the emergency department; as the most immediately available urologist, he'd been assigned to Eli's case.
Eli tried to shift his position in the bed and that ignited another bonfire of pain. He glanced at the morphine pump attached to the pole next to his bed. A PCA pump, the nurse had called it. Patient Controlled Analgesia. A button clipped to the bed rail allowed him to self-medicate-within limits-but he'd been holding off because the drug made him foggy and he feared saying the wrong thing. He didn't think he could hold off much longer though.
At least he'd had the presence of mind last night to demand a private room. He didn't care how much it cost. The last thing in the world he needed now was a nosy roommate.
"As I was saying," Dr. Sadiq said, "you are a lucky man, Mr. Bellitto. Very lucky. If that knife had sliced but a quarter of an inch further to the left, we would have had a much bigger problem."
Eli thought, I've got oxygen running into my nose, morphine hooked into my left arm, an IV running into my right, and a tube in my bladder draining bloody urine into a bag hanging near the floor. This is not lucky.
Dr. Sadiq went on. "The knife sliced into the base of your penis, just missing your urethra. We saved your penis without much trouble, but we could not save the right testicle, I'm afraid. It was too badly lacerated. I had to remove it."
The room seemed to darken around Eli as he listened. Not so much the details-that he had been sexually maimed and mutilated, that a piece of him had been amputated-but that it had occurred at all. What had happened to his invulnerability? Why had it failed him?
More importantly, who was that man last night? Had it been a chance encounter, or could he have been following him and Adrian? Could he know about the Circle?
Eli forced a smile. "I'm not thinking about starting a family. Not at my age."
"But you do not have to worry too much about sexual function. There will be scarring, of course, and that may interfere with erections, but with proper care and therapy, you should be able to resume normal sexual function within a couple of months."
Eli didn't care about sexual function. Last night had not been about sex, although the man who had attacked them seemed to think so. Not that Eli could blame him. Two men in the dark with an unconscious boy... the prosaic, untutored mind would naturally leap to such a conclusion. But the Circle was devoted to concerns far more profound than mere sex.
Haunted Air rj-6 Page 21
