Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (32 page)

—

THE TV NEWS LADY SAID
, “And now for coverage of a limousine parade in a SoHo police precinct.”

“Just a sec. I gotta tape this.” But then Cigarette Man turned off the sound, wanting only pictures. After the remote control clattered to the coffee table, he continued their disturbing little talk on the theme of things that Jonah had never done.

A bucket list?

Uncle Harry had the DVD of a film with that title, a story of two
characters fulfilling a list of last wishes. One of them had also played movie roles as the Almighty, so true to Jonah’s idea of God—an
actor.

“C’mon, kid. There’s gotta be
somethin’
you always wanted to do. Somethin’ like—”

“Aunt Angie said she’d let me drive the car when I could reach the pedals. But I was only six or seven at the time.”

“She had a
car?
What kind?”

“A two-seater, low to the ground. It wasn’t hers. Sometimes she’d borrow it, and we’d go driving up the Henry Hudson Parkway. She liked the lights on the river. I liked the speed. The wind. Top down. Music blasting.”

—

IGGY GRABBED THE BOY
by one arm and yanked him off the sofa to walk him through a kitchen door and into the garage, a generous space with room enough to hold his white van, a sports car and a workshop. Beyond another door, hidden in the false back wall, was a table laid out with tools for modifying pistols and rifles. The walls were racked with an array of knives and other items for a murder kit. A cabinet held his drugstore of potions for sleep and forgetfulness. And there were paralytics for the dart gun that he favored above all other weapons.

But out here in the garage area, in plain sight, there were only tools for working on the old engine of his car, his first love. He ripped the canvas tarp from a restored 1960 ragtop Jaguar. He had taught Angie how to drive in this car.

When she left him, she had ridden out of his life on a bus.

If this was the car the boy remembered, then Angie had taken it for joyrides while he was out of town. But she only had a house key. How would she have gotten past the premium locks on this garage? What else could she have gotten into? The hidden room? His murder kit? And how many people could tie that damn whore to his car?

Iggy placed the boy’s hands on the classic hood ornament of a lunging cat. “That car you rode around in—did it have one a these?” Not waiting for his answer, he opened the door and guided the boy into the front seat on the driver’s side, where curious fingertips explored the dashboard. Iggy turned the ignition key, and the engine came to life with the purr of maniacal maintenance. “Did it sound like that? And what about
this?”
He reached past the boy, turned on the radio and pushed a button for the customized iPod dock.

Yeah!

The kid’s face lit up when he heard the song at the top of Angie’s play list. The music boomed and bounced off the walls. The boy’s hands slapped the steering wheel, keeping time to drums and a keyboard and the beat of a bass guitar.

—

THE ABANDONED AIRSTRIP
was ten car-lengths wide and flanked by green fields of scrub grass. The sky was so big out here, all smeared with sunset pinks and gold. And there was no one for miles around to hear the music screaming, drums banging, rocking out heavy metal. Iggy could hear wheels churning in the rhythm of old road songs.

God bless rock ’n’ roll.

The boy in the driver’s seat had mastered the configurations of the stick shift and the pedals. Smart kid. The engine was idling when Iggy said, “Okay, you’re good to go.” And off they went. “Open ’er up! Knock yourself out!”

Pedal close to the mat, the fast straightaway tuned into zigzag patterns. Maybe the kid just liked the feel of the curves, but the last one put them close to the grass. And now they made a circle. Any tighter on the next loop and it would roll the car.

“
Easy,
Jonah!”
Jonah.
When had he ever called the meat by name? Talked to it? Or taken it out for a spin?

“Was I going to hit something?” The boy corrected the wheel in
time to keep them on the asphalt, and he yelled to be heard above the crash of drums and cymbals. “Tell me where stuff is! I’ll know to go around it!”

Iggy had a good instinct for all the off notes and the cracked ones. Was the kid scared? Oh, yeah. Sweaty scared. “There’s an airplane hangar up ahead! A slow count to ten and you’re there! So you wanna turn the—”

The boy gunned the engine, opening it up to the limit of the speedometer, not changing direction by a hair. And when he had passed that ten count twice and realized there would be no crash, the car slowed. The boy had a stunned look about him.

Disappointed?

Iggy reached over, turned the key and cut the engine. The car rolled to a stop, and then he stopped the music. “No, kid, you didn’t miss it. . . . If there’d been a wall there, you would’ve smashed right into it,” at a hundred and eighty miles per hour. And now they sat there, man and boy, in the quiet of the middle of nowhere. There was no need to talk about what they both knew. Jonah had tried to kill him—at the cost of his own young life.

Life-for-a-life revenge, and the boy had given it his all.

Iggy’s head lolled back. The sun had set, but the light still held at the close of this summer day, and he watched a blackbird circle in the air above. The wind was warm. His voice was calm. “Good try, kid. . . . Good for you.”

—

THE SPRINKLER SYSTEM
took care of thirsty roses for most of the garden, but Iggy favored a hose for the ones lining the patio. “Up till today, my only enemies were weeds and aphids.” He trained the nozzle’s spray on plants growing near the boy’s chair. “It’s a big mistake to water flowers when the sun’s up. Water drops act like tiny magnifyin’
glasses. They make the sunlight hot enough to burn holes in the petals. If you spritz ’em after sundown, you get the bugs off, but you don’t cook the flowers.”

The boy’s eyes moved as if they were not broken, as if they could take in all the roses. “It’s a big garden, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Iggy twisted the nozzle to cut off the stream of water, and he laid down his hose. “Whadda
you
care?” He knew the boy was frightened and just filling in the silences until it was time to die. “What’s roses to you?”

“Soft petals. Ragged leaves. Skinny stems. The thorns are sharp. . . . What do
you
see?”

Iggy carried a can of beer to the edge of the patio. “I see red. You prick your finger on a thorn, and that’s the color. It jumps out at you. Grabs you by the eyes. Blood-red . . . fresh blood. It’s alive. It’s a color with a pulse.”

The kid shifted in his chair, lips pressed together, his head turning this way and that.

Lookin’ for somethin’ to say? Afraid I’ll kill you in the space between the words?

“You t-
told
me,” said Jonah, “there was a story behind the roses.”

“I don’t tell it no more.”

The boy’s body sagged.

In a pity offering, Iggy said, “It’s hard to raise roses from scratch. I know all the shit that goes into it. All the time, the
work.”
He saw Jonah coming back to life—a touch of hope in the lift of his head. “There’s a garden shop up the road. This old guy who owns it, he knows everything in the world about roses. So I tell him the story. Well, he gives me this smirk . . . and I know he takes me for a liar.”

But the boy might believe him.

Iggy popped the tab on his beer can and tipped it back for a long swig. “Five years ago, it was just a patch a flowers alongside the house.
Then one day, I come out here and killed all the roses.”
Her
roses. “Pulled ’em up by the roots and stomped ’em to death. There was a bag a seeds in a box by the back door. Not the store-bought kind—they was cut from the garden flowers. I ripped that bag to shreds, and the wind took the seeds. Come next summer, hottest one on record, there was rosebushes all over the damn place, a dozen of ’em. It was a drought year, too. I never gave ’em any water. Just left ’em to the heat and the weeds and the bugs. . . . But they wouldn’t die. . . . I got me some more seeds.”

 
19

Cigarette Man yawned. Tired. The laundry-room door closed, and then came the familiar slide of the bolt—only the slide. It had not been shot all the way home to its slot, no click to the metal.

And that changes everything,
said Aunt Angie.

Jonah had no plan to test the bolt, not while the dog was awake out there. The man was climbing stairs, so heavy on his feet. Then footsteps crossed the floor overhead. Another door opened and closed. Did he leave the house?

Soon the pit bull would be asleep. The old dog liked its naps.

The boy crouched beside the bucket in the corner, the source of a mildew smell. His fingers explored the strands of the mop inside, seeking that place where it attached to a pole, and he found the lip of a seam. This would be easy. He ran one hand up the length of the mop handle. A flick of one finger and the answering ping told him this rod was hollow. With a twist, he loosened it, and then unscrewed it from the mop, freeing it to heft the length of metal twixt fingers and thumb.

Not as light as a fiberglass cane.

Rising to a stand, Jonah grazed the floor with the tip of the mop handle, guiding it, side to side, from the wall to the mattress, and
metallic vibrations traveling along tendon and muscle told him the difference between rock hard and rubber soft.

It would do the cane’s job.

When the dog went to sleep—

No! No! No!
Cigarette Man was
still here!
Upstairs there was banging, metal-crunching, glass-breaking anger. And the pit bull came wide awake with a yelp. Agitated. Nails clipping on cement, moving back and forth just beyond the door. Lungs wheezing in distress. Howling now. It was like listening in on the thoughts of the dog’s master.

Dark, insane thoughts.

The banging went on and on. The dog wailed. Crying now. Almost human.

—

REPORTERS WERE STILL
camped out on East End Avenue, and so Samuel Tucker walked along the riverside promenade. Carl Schurz Park was in sight when he answered the ringtone assigned to his boss’s cell phone. The mayor had a few questions.

Tuck walked as he talked. “Yes, sir. It’s exactly like the others.” He was mildly distracted, seeing every pedestrian on the promenade as a potential threat. He decided on the parkland route to Gracie Mansion, seeking the cover of foliage. “Yes, sir, almost there.”

A uniformed officer appeared beside him on the tree-lined path. “Evening, Mr. Tucker. Just hold up a minute.” The officer spoke into a handheld radio, announcing the visit from the mayor’s aide, and Detective Brogan’s deep voice said, “Let him through.”

Grinning, Tuck ran down the path.

The officer called after him, “Use the back gate!”

As if he needed to be told that this was the after-dark entry for
all
the mayor’s whores. He was approaching the water fountain in the
clearing, half the way there, when he caught a movement in sidelong vision, lamp-lit blond hair, a woman moving through the trees. Where did she—

Tuck stumbled. And stopped.

Detective Mallory stood on the path up ahead, blocking his way.

What a crap surprise. Awkward, too.

There was no salutation, no sign from her that they had ever met before, that she had ever arrested him,
handcuffed
him. The woman was looking in his direction, if not exactly looking
at
him. It appeared that he had no significance at all, not for her. So,
thank you, God,
she had not come to arrest him again.

Yet she stood in his way. What for? The detective could not possibly know what he was carrying, not unless she could read minds.

She smiled, but not at him. No, this was an
aha
expression. Meaning what?

Oh,
God,
he must look guilty as hell.
That
was it. But why would—

And now, time out for a frightened flight of fancy. Might this cop have X-ray eyes to see beneath his clothing—or, more rationally, did something show through his shirt in stick-out fashion? He glanced down at that place of concealment, but his shirtfront revealed nothing and—

The path was clear.

The detective had vanished.

—

IT WAS LIKE A DEATH
.

Every car window was smashed, all the metal dented, and the beauty of the classic Jaguar destroyed.

Sweating, eyes closing, so tired, Iggy touched a pressure lock, and a panel opened in the garage’s false back wall. The hidden room needed preparation before he cut out the boy’s heart. Moving slowly, he knelt
down on the gray cement to lay out a plastic sheet. It covered enough of the floor to catch the blood fly.

Christ!

Out in the garage, the wrecked Jag came back to life with the boom of a rock band on the radio. Iggy stood up ramrod straight, his heart pounding out a million beats a second.

The song stopped.

He sighed. The music was put down to frayed connections and wires crossed. Iggy turned to look at his collection of wall-mounted weapons. First, he pulled down the serrated knife for the deep cut. Now a hammer for the boy’s rib cage.

MUSIC!
Fucking music!

The radio was alive again with drumbeats and piano rolls. Frenzied, furious, Iggy ran back to the car and attacked it with the hammer’s claw side, prying the radio from the ruined dashboard. When he had ripped out every wire, when all was quiet, he turned his back on the Jag.

Steady now.
Deep
breath.

And—
BANG!
—went the drums. The guitar screamed in high-pitched electric chords.

Hammer raised, he leaned down to the front seat littered with broken shards of window glass. His eyes fixed on a small rectangle of white plastic sitting in the dock that connected it to the radio speakers.