Nightjack (12 page)

When Pace looked at P.I. Sam Smith again, the man had blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. Sam didn’t seem to be in any pain as he coughed and brought up black fluid that dripped down his chin. He gasped twice, his lungs bubbling, and then his head sank back against the edge of the couch and the little plastic wrapper around his hat flopped off.

Pace reached over and put a hand to Sam Smith’s chest but there was no movement.

Then Pace was alone on the love seat, with the laptop on his knees.

That’s right, he thought, Sam Smith had been murdered three weeks after taking the job from William Pacella. He was found shot to death in his office, a couple of months after he started investigating the Ganucci family’s possible connection to the death of Jane Pacella.

The screen had more information about Pythos and Pace scanned it quickly, learning a little more about the archeological digs that had gone on, what might be expected at Greek shrines. It felt as if time was running out, and he tried to absorb what he could, even though the facts kept skittering away from him.

Pace glanced up and saw Pia gliding down the stairs, pixie arms out and waving as if she might fly. Hayden slid along the rail in perfect time with her. Dr. Brandt was making her angry mama face as she followed, stomping down stair by stair.

Faust stepped from the shadows at the bottom of the stairwell, there the whole time.

“A laptop, Will? Where did you get that?” Dr. Brandt asked.

“I found it.”

He looked over at the embroidered pillows
.

Abide with me: fast falls the eventide.

“You’ve been on the Internet?”

“Yes.”

“Doing what?”

“Putting together the pieces.”

“Good, I’m glad. Which pieces?”

That stopped him.

Which pieces. It was a good question. Were they big ones or small, when you got right down to it? Important or merely more subterfuge that, in the end, despite all the effort and struggle, would mean nothing to anyone? Pace didn’t know.

“There’s six hundred pounds on a barbell up there,” Pia said. “Can you really bench that much?”

“No,” Pace told her. “Not a chance.”

Hayden let out a high-pitched titter. It sounded near-hysterical and he knew it did so he snapped his jaws shut. He waited a second and said, “I think you can. I think Jack can do almost anything.”

“Our father who art invincible,” Faust said.

You didn’t invoke the names of the dark gods unless you were willing to pay a price.

Dr. Brandt stepped in close, her lips almost at Pace’s ear. It wasn’t a whisper, but something softer and more luxurious, throaty with a heavy hint of promise. The muscles in his belly rippled.

“Vindi said we’d been lovers,” he told her.

“Ooooh,” Pia said, jumping onto the couch, legs crossed, arm braced on her knee with her hand up like she was holding a glass of champagne. “Do tell.”

“Is it true?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Pia chimed. “Is it?”

Hayden and Faust and everybody else, all the ghosts hiding in the house, were eager for an answer.

Maureen Brandt glared at a point somewhere far behind Pace. A lot of patients used to do this sort of thing on the ward, staring so deeply into something that they went all the way into its atomic structure, watching molecular chains, electron clouds, and quarks leaping across higher quantum energy states.

Why so pale and wan, fond lover? Prithee, why so pale
?

She had found photos upstairs. There were Jane and Pacella sitting out on the beach, the camera on a timer and going off two seconds before they were ready. Both of them starting to smile but not quite there yet. In the next photo they’d been grinning two seconds too long, happy expressions frozen and unnatural. The one after that, Pacella had said, Forget the camera, and him and Jane were beginning to kiss, lips about a half inch away. Pacella’s eyes shut and Jane’s open, adoring.

“Who is this?” Maureen asked.

“Jane.”

“And the man?”

Another trick question. He could say, It’s me, though it really wasn’t. It didn’t seem to matter that much because Jane was always the best part of Pacella anyway. Seeing the two of them together, you really wanted to be that cocoa-drinking, Chaucer-reading, wimpy son of bitch.

“It’s me,” he said.

“That’s right. William Pacella.”

All of those degrees, probably twenty of them on the walls of her office, and she’d never learned that you can’t use logic to win out over a psychotic.

Really, she just had to be fucking crazy.

She drew out a photo of Pacella and Jane seated on a boardwalk sharing an ice cream cone while the waves rolled in behind them.

“And this?”

“Me and Jane.”

“Yes.”

But that wasn’t good enough. Maureen Brandt needed to drive home her point, spearing it in there so it would skewer him. She pulled out a folded up newspaper, dated six months after Jane died. Had it been here in the house or had she carried the damn thing all the way from the hospital? His face was spread across the fifth page. It was the first time Pacella had been brought in by the cops in connection with the Ganooch hits. He looked calm and a little tired, but very amenable and incapable of even winning at arm wrestling. You had to know what to look for. Pace saw that Pacella’s eyes were no more than twin blazing fissures of agony and fury.

“And this is you, Will.”

“No,” Pace said. “That’s Jack.”

Thursday’s Child tells the lie that causes Friday’s Child to die.

She let out an exhausted sigh. It had been a long day.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

“Fess up,” Pia said. “Come on, this I want to hear.”

“No,” Dr. Brandt said. “We were never lovers.”

Pia laid back on the couch in a sultry pose, smiling with pride in herself, like she’d caught the cat with the headless canary. “You’re a lying bitch.”

Pace faced Dr. Brandt, feeling a little twitchy. He thought she was lying too. Had she hopped up on top of him while he was in that full body straitjacket, suspended in mid-air, weightless? Like one of those sex chairs with the ropes and chains, you get in and even if you can’t figure the thing out it’s still got to be pretty good. Was there some easy way to expose his crank in the jacket? Some kind of ripcord—she walks into the room horny as hell, yanks on a string and out falls his package.

“Will—”

“Vindi also said that Kaltzas and I had once been friends. He told me I’d met him before.”

“It’s not true. His daughter was in Garden Falls, but he never saw her. No one did.”

“Not even Vindi?”

“Not so far as I know. A lot of reporters pretending to be friends of the family showed up, but we screened them out.”

“He said he bribed people on the ward. For information. Maybe the guards let him in and out.”

“Possibly. But I find it more likely that if you did know Kaltzas or this Vindi, you knew them before the hospital. Your selective amnesia allows you to remember significant amounts of your core personality’s history, as well as that of your alternates.”

“I am an alternate,” he said. The fact didn’t bother him much.

“A very highly developed provisional surrogate identity. You’re William Pacella’s stronger half, devoid of suffering. Without his need for revenge. You must allow those repressed memories forward.”

“Fuck no!” shouted the other three as one.

It got Pace smiling. “They’re right. You don’t want that. The memories are what drove Pacella insane in the first place. If they come back, you get Jack.”

“He’s gone, Will. He had no reason to exist after Joseph Ganucci...died.”

“You’re wrong. He’s still there, Maureen. Besides, didn’t you throw in with us because you trusted Jack’s skills?”

“I trust Jack’s skills,” Hayden said loudly at Pace’s chest. “You hear me in there, Jack? I trust you, buddy. You’re a-okay in my book, seriously!”

“Mine too!” Faust said, shouting.

“We love you, Jack!” Pia called.

Dr. Brandt said, “I trust you, Will.”

Home is Where your Love Burned.

The embroidery everywhere you looked.

My Baby, Where Are You? Why Am I
Still Alive Without You?

Pace went to the window. He checked his watch. It was only nine o’clock, less than twelve hours since he walked out of the hospital. He didn’t have enough fingers and toes to count how many lifetimes ago. He pressed his temple against the cold glass and kept his eyes on the water, knowing there was a much longer trip ahead, a lot more lives about to come and go.

There was movement. People walking around the house. He heard doors opening and shutting but couldn’t tell where.

He turned his head and looked at another pillow.

Definitely Do NOT eat at Tiny Bob’s Lobster Pavilion. That shit’ll kill you
.

Dr. Brandt wasn’t in the wicker chair, and then she was. Maybe his aphasia was kicking in again. He looked at his watch again and it was almost nine-thirty.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You have to tell me, Will. I need to know.” The urgency in her voice made him frown. She could really put a wifey tone in there when she wanted. Even if they had been lovers, even if she had unsnapped his PJ’s while he was in the jacket, where did this take-charge attitude come from? Like he had to answer because it was his obligation. He searched her eyes and they went from blue to green and back again.

“Hey,” Hayden said, stepping in from the hall. “You might want to see this. I found enough knives back here to stab the whole world.”

eleven

They were out in the open, all these blades, proving that Jack didn’t really give a damn who found them. Maybe he was showing a certain amount of camaraderie and wanted Pace to have access to the weapons. Saving Pace in order to save himself.

Nobody said it was going to be easy, trusting these people inside you.

There was a separate, small back room off the kitchen that might’ve once been used for storing coal or canned fruit and vegetables. There were three long shelves which contained felt-lined, glass-topped cases. The fisherman’s wife had been very dutiful in cleaning the glass and leaving no streaks.

Inside were the knives, laid out in simple patterns.

Not that many, really, considering how obsessive Jack got about them. Only thirty.

A couple were from the kitchen. Butcher knives. Like Jack had been making a point—it’s not the tool, it’s the result. Pace still had the three inch screwdriver in his pocket, and figured he knew some of what Jack had felt. Was still feeling.

Several were antique surgeon’s tools—scalpel, lancet, bone cutter, curette, and a pair of Metzenbaum scissors. Jack looked ready to start operating again.

The longest blade was a standard eight-inch Bowie with a trailing point and a brass guard. There was a 5 1/2 inch hunting knife topped with a gut hook, the handle made out of highly-polished carved antler.

There was the Trident Two, one of the most versatile field knives, used by the Navy SEALS. Powder coated, partially yet deeply serrated. He shook his head and searched on until he found the Trident, the one the cops had been looking for. A Bowie style blade made of high carbon stainless steel married to a stacked micarta handle with a satin finish. The black, self-cleaning scabbard came with its own sharpening stone. You sat there honing your blade and your hate at the same time, until both were razor-sharp.

Hayden reached into the case, grabbed the Trident and tossed it slowly, underhand at Pace, like a father throwing a ball to his kid. He whispered, “Catch.”

Pia said, “Oh God.”

And then—

And then—then—

The knife was in Pace’s hand.

It seemed to pulse with warmth. He was drawn to its silky feel. His throat filled with a weird giggle and Jack started thinking about kidney pie again.

The others scrambled around him, Pia letting out a sharp lament, Faust cutting loose with a plaintive cry. “Forsooth, dear Lord, forget us not!”

Hayden yelled the same thing he’d shouted back in the apartment. “Is he Jack?” This had always been a kind of game to Hayden.

Pia backed herself into the corner and tried to be alluring, sexually overpowering, like that would slow Jack down. It just made him laugh harder. Jack whirled and stared at her, knowing she did this because she wanted to die. She was begging him to kill her.

The angels Rimmon and Sariel raced about in circles. Pace shut his eyes and filled himself with the exquisite balance and profound sharpness of the knife. A total of 12.4 ounces. The grip on the handle so comfortable it was nearly impossible to ever let go.

How had he ever let go.

How could he have ever let go. How could you ever put away the thing that gave you definition and purpose.