Daddy's Gone a Hunting (26 page)

T
he red satin shoes. Mommy was dancing in them. Around and around the room. Then Mommy was bending over her, kissing her cheek.

No, it was Hannah.

I’m the one who looks like Mommy, Kate thought, still deep in the abyss of her coma. Hannah looks like Daddy. Daddy, in a small package. I hurt so much. Everything hurts . . .

“The fever is a serious problem.” A man’s voice, nearby . . .

I can hear you, Kate thought. You just don’t understand but I can hear you. Hannah, little sister, don’t worry. Something happened to me but I’m going to get better . . .

Daddy was singing to her. “Bye Baby Bunting” . . .

And they were kissing her good-bye . . .

Someone was touching her forehead. “I forgive you . . .”

Someone was praying over her.

I am going to be all right, Kate thought. If only I could tell Hannah . . . and then she felt herself slipping deeper and deeper into sleep . . .

And Mommy stopped dancing and Daddy stopped singing and . . . he never . . .

Her fever finally diminished, she slipped into a deep, restful sleep before she was able to complete her thought.

59

J
ack Worth did not sleep well on Tuesday night. The combination of suddenly having time on his hands, coupled with the skeptical attitude of the fire marshals when he’d tried to explain the lack of security on the plant and the presence of the wrecked van, had made him both irritable and nervous.

What am I supposed to do now? he asked himself as the first sign of the dawn became visible in the bedroom windows. Jump every time the phone rings in case it’s those marshals wanting to drop in again?

At 5:30
A.M.
, Wednesday morning, he threw back the covers and got up. I wonder how much that cleanup crew got done yesterday? he asked himself. If the insurance guys gave them the go-ahead, they must be satisfied they don’t have anything more to find. And that crew arriving means that the security that the cops and the firemen were providing is finished. I’m going to take a ride and see what’s going on over there before anyone shows up.

The decision made, Jack got dressed, rapidly pulling on a running suit, heavy socks, and sneakers. If I take time to shower and shave, I might run into someone getting there early, he thought. I don’t need that.

What I need, he decided, is to go down to Florida and hang out
there for the winter. And I need to get back in shape. I’m a good ten pounds more than I should be.

Really more like twenty pounds. He pushed back that thought.

Lately he had been seeing the dismissive expression in the eyes of some of the women he’d started to chat up at the bars. He’d never let his barber, Dom, touch up his hair but maybe it was time. Dom had been pushing him to do it. “Jack, I know the ladies love to run their fingers through your strawberry-blond hair. You told me. Well, it’s still thick but it’s not so strawberry-blond anymore.”

Nothing is what it was anymore, Jack Worth thought.

He turned on the light over the staircase, went downstairs, and walked through the living room and kitchen, barely noticing his surroundings. For Jack Worth, the home that he had once shared with his wife was, for the most part, the place where he slept. His job at the Connelly complex had paid him well. His housekeeper came in once a week, which was enough. He was basically neat in his daily routine.

In the summer, an off-the-books landscaper did the mowing and trimming of the outside property, and the same guy shoveled the snow off the sidewalk and driveway in the winter.

Jack Worth valued his freedom. There wouldn’t be another “Mrs. Jack Worth.” And there would never be another child to put through college.

When Jack got into that kind of thinking, he always got angry. His kid didn’t even have his name anymore. And when they did that name change in court, his ex had told him that her husband, the big-shot doctor, would be happy to pay for Johnny’s college when he graduated from high school.

I told them that no one else is paying for my kid to go to college, Jack thought, as he slammed the door between the kitchen and garage and opened the driver’s door of his BMW. I knew that they just
wanted me out of their lives. Stupid. And now I’ll be stuck with the tuition next year.

But who knows? Maybe knowing what is going on and that he was out of a job, Doctor Big Shot would say, “I insist . . .”

Insist, Jack Worth thought sarcastically, as he pressed the button that opened the garage door and backed the car out. Yeah. Maybe.

It was only a few minutes past six and the early-morning traffic was just beginning to appear on the road. Give it another hour and every block turns into a parking lot, Jack thought. Welcome to the city.

Even though the explosion had been not even a week ago, the familiar drive to the complex seemed odd and even frightening to him. Something else was going to happen. Something more than what had already happened.

If it had been an ordinary workday, he would have driven to what had been the front entrance of the complex. Jack chose not to do that. His BMW was a familiar sight to watchmen and security cameras in the nearby warehouses, and he did not want it to be noticed that he had made an early-morning visit. Instead, he decided to get in through the service delivery entrance. A temporary fence had been erected since the explosion to keep out intruders. Jack parked his car and easily hopped over it. And they talk to me about security, he fumed.

He turned to walk over to the car park where the delivery vans had been kept and where someone had been staying in the van that had been wrecked. That was when he saw the orange
DANGER
signs and realized that a section of the pavement had collapsed into a sinkhole. Breaking into a run, he rushed to see how deep it was.

He stepped over the strip of orange tape and looked down. It was the eastern section of the property and by now the early sun was
strong and bright, penetrating the secret of what had been long concealed under the broken pavement.

“No!” Jack Worth whispered. “No!”

He was staring down at the medallion on the grimy chain around the neck of the skeleton of the young woman who had once been Tracey Sloane. The medallion that inextricably tied her to him.

60

C
lyde woke up early Wednesday morning, blinking against the glare of the sun that was blinding his eyes. He felt awful, hot and cold at the same time, but mostly hot.

Where am I? Sometimes when he hadn’t had too much wine, he would ask himself another question: Where am I going?

Clyde shook his head and began to piece together everything that had been happening to him. The shelter. The hospital. His picture on the television in the room there.

Suppose Peggy and Skippy saw it? By now Peggy had probably married someone else, and Skippy had grown up thinking that guy was his father. And all those Vietnam medals were probably buried in a box in the attic. That’s if they hadn’t already been thrown out.

He forced himself to think even though his head was splitting. If they could trace that picture to him and find out who he was, then even if Peggy and Skippy decided to run for the hills, the cops would still be looking for him. What if they decided that he had set off that explosion?

That Shirley woman. Nice lady. She really was worried about him. But she thought I’d stay in that dump. Clyde pulled himself up on one elbow. He began to laugh, a raspy laugh that turned into a racking cough. Where were those pills she gave me? One hand,
then the other, fumbled into the pockets of the poncho he had been given in the hospital. It had deep pockets and he guessed that was good. He could put stuff in them. But the jacket they hadn’t given back to him was the one he really wanted.

When the tourists saw that crummy old jacket, they felt sorry for him. The dollars they would drop in his cap added up. He had to get rid of the poncho and cut holes in those new warm, heavy pants. He felt like a baby seal in them, a nice, warm, contented baby seal. People liked baby seals but they didn’t feel sorry for them.

I need a drink, Clyde thought. And where did I sleep?

He looked around and grunted in surprise. Somehow he had made his way to Chelsea Piers, right off the Hudson River, close to the Village. He began to have a little more memory about yesterday. Shirley-do-good had said good-bye at the hotel.

He had waited fifteen or twenty minutes or something like that.

The woman at the desk in that excuse for a lobby had asked if he’d be coming back. And he said that he would come back for sure.

When he had coughed so hard on the street, someone had dropped ten bucks in his cap and someone else had dropped a couple of bucks and he had gotten a couple of bottles of wine. So it had been a good night. The trouble was that he couldn’t keep up the coughing so that more people would feel sorry for him. He needed to look cold and hungry and not like a baby seal.

Clyde dropped his head back onto the newspapers. Last night had worked out. He had slept with no one around him, with the good sounds of New York filling his ears. The traffic on the West Side Highway, and now and then a plane flying overhead, and the early-morning ferries beginning to cross the Hudson. He had settled down here with his newspapers around him, and the warm clothes he didn’t want had made him feel like a baby in his mama’s arms when he was falling asleep.

But now he was scared. The picture. The girl. He knew he had hurt her. He had punched her real hard. But he didn’t know what happened after that.

I started to go after her. I was mad. I was afraid she’d tell on me and I wouldn’t be able to come back to my van. And then . . .

He began to cough again. He pulled himself up as his body shook and trembled with the force of the deep, rattling protest from his lungs. It was harder and harder to breathe. He couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t stop coughing.

“Are you all right? Do you need help?”

Clyde tried to say, “Go away. Leave me alone.” He swung his fist up but it didn’t hit anything. He fell back on the newspapers and couldn’t pull himself up again even though he was clawing for breath.

Three minutes later, he did not hear the screech of the siren as a patrol car pulled off the West Side Drive to answer a 911 call from a young woman jogger pleading for help.

She pointed to the crumpled figure on the ground. “Be careful, Officer. I think that man is dying but when I asked if I could help him he tried to punch me.”

“All right, ma’am. Please stand back. I’ll send for an ambulance.” The young police officer walked over to look at Clyde. Observing his deep, frantic efforts to breathe, the officer’s first thought was that this guy would be lucky to still be alive when the ambulance arrived.

61

S
al Damiano, the foreman of the cleanup crew, made an early decision on Wednesday morning that fixing the sinkhole in the pavement would wait until the job of hauling off the rubble of the complex was completed.

Once again, broken slabs that had once formed walls, chunks of machines that had fashioned fine-grained mahogany and maple into furniture, battered cans of oil that had been used to keep the museum antiques from drying out, were systematically lifted by forklifts and dropped into Dumpsters.