Nightjack (13 page)

Maureen Brandt, so effortlessly calm, her slender arm out to him, the wrist so delicate and pale you could see the map of her lifeblood.

“Will—”

Jack an extension of Pacella, the blade an extension of Jack. It was a different world now than when he’d stalked the black chilly streets looking for the wet, soft places of women. Those carefully turned-away bodies facing walls while he rutted them from behind, the arcing blood against the brick.

“Will—”

He’d spin them slowly as a final heaving breath blew in his face and those eyes—sometimes blue, sometimes green—began to dim.

“Let him go, Will.”

A moment of darkness and then intense, swirling light. Pace blinked twice hearing Dr. Brandt’s voice in his ear, a demanding but soothing tone. The same kind used by the whores in the East End as they called to the carriages, muddy skirts twirling,
muddy skirts hiding their dirty cunts
—

“Please listen to me. Stop it now. Let him go now!”

Flashing his sharp teeth, Hayden lay on the floor with the knife pressed lengthwise against his throat.

Sam Smith was also talking now, in an equally firm voice, telling him, Never try to cut a throat the way they do it in movies, there’s too much cartilage. You gotta saw back and forth way too hard before you do any serious damage. Stick to the easy tricks. Nothing fancy needed. Go for the carotid artery. The tiniest flick of the wrist and they’ll never get the blood to stop.

“Will, let him go. Now.”

Pace let Hayden go.

He sheathed the Trident, and put it back under glass in the case. He reached down and grabbed Hayden by the shirtfront and hauled him to his feet. Then onto his tippy-toes. Pace dragged him forward through the air until he saw his reflection looming in Hayden’s eyes.

“Why’d you do that?” Pace asked.

“You’re still holding it.”

“What?”

“The knife. You acted like you were putting it away, but you’ve got it tucked in your belt.”

Pace checked and saw it was true. He hadn’t put the Trident back at all, it was right there at the small of his back, where he could pull it with either his right or left hand.

The rafters groaned. The little room had a small window and the glass was covered with throbbing rain ignited by lightning. He wondered what the weather was like in Greece. He thought of Kaltzas’s jet at JFK, waiting for them.

Hayden picked himself up and rubbed his throat. “I wanted to make sure Dr. Brandt wasn’t right. We all needed to know if Jack was still there.”

“Feel better now?”

“Christ, no.”

“You play a game like that again and you might die.”

“It’s not a game,” Maureen Brandt said.

Still in the corner, Pia looked sexy and a little sad. Faust’s scar seemed to be watching Pace very intently, making up its own mind about him. Dr. Brandt appeared defeated, and she was even more beautiful for it.

“I’m going to sleep for a while in the master bedroom. Don’t anyone bother me.”

“Wouldn’t think of doing it,” Pia said, her eyes full of deadly mischief, thinking about doing it.

~ * ~

Pace woke with a start, heard someone crying.

He reached over and turned on the light, looked around the room.

William Pacella sat there at the foot of the bed, crying.

Pacella twisted his head side to side, his eyes clenched as the tears boiled out beneath them.

Pace laid back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. “You did the right thing, moving aside. We all have to do it. It’ll be my turn soon.”

Pacella said nothing. The dead either talked your ear off or they just sat there silently.

“Just leave. There’s no place for you here anymore. You did what you could. We all do. None of this was your fault.”

Ineffective white-bread weakass that he was, the guy sure hung in there.

Waves lashed the rocks at the shore, sending a pleasant booming staccato through the house. A contrapuntal to his heartbeat. The rain whipped at the glass and formed vivid designs. You were always this close to figuring your life out, but you just never quite got there.

Pacella must’ve felt the same way.

“Why don’t you go to her?” Pace asked. “She’s been waiting for you for almost three years. She needs you. Go join her.”

A scuffling under the bed made Pace roll over and peer over the edge of the mattress.

There was a lot going on under there. He saw a bloody hand flash out, and several thrashing legs, the stock of a rifle, a copy of
A Separate Peace
, a girl’s forehead with strawberry blonde hair sliding aside.

Pacella turned his face and opened his eyes. In him remained all the fury and heartache of a man incapable of doing what must be done. It wasn’t much different than the way Pacella’s father had looked a couple of weeks before the old man had died. Frail, ambivalent with disappointment. Broken by the large and small injustices done to him over his life, with the unfairness of his mediocrity.

William Pacella remained at a puzzled loss to understand what had gone wrong and when and where, with Jane’s death or long before. He looked like someone chained to an anchor tossed in the shallows, an inch away from the surface but unable to get his nose above water.

Scraping sounds erupted beneath the bed. Fists were jammed up into the box spring so the mattress jumped. Pace laid there, the calming presence of the blade tight against his back. He’d slept with it on his belt.

Pacella looked away again and then, going slack, drifted forward and fell to the shadowy floor.

The noises continued. Squeaks, murmurs, and more sobbing punctuated by whispered requests and occasional guffaws. They knew how to have fun, that was for sure. Pace glanced over the edge again and saw that a woman with tightly curled gray hair was looking up at him.

She focused and said, You’re not my boy. Where’s William? What have you done with my son?

~ * ~

It was midnight. He went downstairs and Hayden and Faust were on the couch watching a repeat of the ten o’clock news, passing a bowl of potato chips back and forth. Hayden was also scrawling on his notepad, writing out tremendous looping words. They were both drinking beer and had a couple of empty six-packs stacked on the coffee table. He couldn’t tell if they were drunk. He didn’t know if they could ever get drunk.

“You went shopping?”

“Pia did,” Faust said. “Map told her about a small shopping area a few miles up the road. She made a very passable lobster bisque while you were sleeping.”

He stepped into the kitchen and saw the bisque in a huge pot on the stove. He retreated and asked, “Where’s Dr. Brandt?”

“Sleeping.”

“Where’s Pia now?”

Hayden looked up from the endless letter. “She’s gone. Left about a half-hour ago. She wanted to hit a club. Alone.”

A dull frown crimped Faust’s face. “She was rather rude about it. She demanded that we stay here.”

“Said she’d break our asses if we followed. Not sure how we were supposed to try to follow her, but even if we could’ve we wouldn’t have. The mongoloids knew how to dance but they never taught me.”

“Quite adamant about the breaking of asses part. Even after I praised her bisque. That girl has no manners. Our father who art insulting.”

Pace said, “And you let her go?”

“She’s not a prisoner.” Hayden’s handwriting got worse and worse as he pressed harder into the paper. He was scratching deeply, stabbing his pen in. “None of us are prisoners, right? We didn’t escape the nuthatch just to be locked down by you, eh? Besides, we’re just going to fly to Greece soon to meet with the guy who wants us dead. So where’s the harm?”

“She could hurt herself.”

“You kidding me? She’s nearly as good as Jack with a knife. She’s sliced up a couple of her foster fathers, didn’t you hear her?”

“Which club did she go to?”

Pace heard naked padding footsteps on the steps and looked to see Jane coming down the stairs.

Her red hair was an erotic chaos, disheveled from sleep. Wearing the sleek satin white lingerie he’d bought her for Christmas, the same year she’d bought him the blue bathrobe and slippers. Her freckled cleavage was prominently displayed, one shoulder strap having fallen aside. Pace’s breath caught in his throat and he reached a hand out to the wall to keep from going over—all these things, no matter how small, easily pushing him over—as Jane came to him. He gritted his teeth and shut his eyes and stood there, motionless.

“Will—”

Again with the Will. Always with the Will.

“Will, what’s wrong?”

He had a hundred names and he hated Will the most, even more than Nightjack. He kept his hand on the wall, his other arm pinned at his side. You could do a lot of crazy shit in front of the other loonies, but don’t make a lunge for your dead wife. That would really look bad.

“Will, listen to me—”

He opened his eyes and there she was—Dr. Brandt right there before him, still dressed in her suit, but with the jacket and the shoes off, the blouse unbuttoned one button too far. The hint of her pink bra enough to drive sane men out of their trees and nutcases right out of the forest and down the mountain.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t see you for a second.” After all the thousands of pills, the therapy and treatments and group discussions, she was just another failed mother who couldn’t help her fucked-up kids. “Pia’s gone.”

She said, “I fell asleep.”

Faust chuckled again but this time it came out all wrong. Laced with hysteria and broken up with a series of effeminate burps. Maybe he really was drunk. He said, “I can’t sleep, you know. I haven’t slept in years.” Rimmon and Sariel nodded, so tired that they sagged against their sword hilts. “God doesn’t allow it. I am being punished for my many sins.” He took a long pull on his beer and belched out a whine.

“We need to go after her,” Dr. Brandt said, the pink drawing closer. “Somehow. The storm is much worse. It’s terrible out there.”

“I’ll go alone,” Pace said.

“I should be with you.”

“No, you shouldn’t.” Pace placed his hand over the page where Hayden was going on and on to his mother, shredding the paper. “Where did Pia go?”

“She asked Map for directions to
Le Feu
in Southampton. That place where he said he and his wife used to go.” His eyes were calm now even though his hand flashed in a frenzy. Spelling out very clearly Mama, Mama, they’re going to kill me. Mama, I’m going to die soon. “Pia went out dancing. With her father.”

twelve

Before he went to Nam, P.I. Sam Smith was known to boost a car or two. Him and his best friend Jimmy Lee Clark, who died in Phu Da in ‘72 when
Beaucoup VC
broke through the concertina wire and threw him across his own M-79 grenade launcher, an illumination round exploding in his face.

Sam and Jimmy Lee would cut school and grab a late model Chevrolet off the street in Hell’s Kitchen, drive around for a day or two, and then return it pretty close to where they’d nabbed it from.

It was a skill that occasionally came in handy when Sam was trailing some middle-aged husband stepping out on his wife, heading down to Atlantic City for a night, and Smith’s own ‘87 Datsun wouldn’t start. He’d just boost a car from nearby, tail the husband, get the photographic evidence he needed outside one of the casinos, and then return the car to within a block of where he picked it up. He’d call Triple A and wait for the tow truck to come get his own piece of shit and haul it off.

Sam was drenched after a mile hike in the nor’easter. He hated the cold rain coming down and kept shaking his fist at the ocean. He didn’t have many cars to choose from at the market where Pia had gotten the ingredients to make her bisque. A Civic and an old Buick Skylark that looked like it might float out of the flooded parking lot.

A row of large cabins nearby offered only a Ford Ranger with a horse trailer and a Mercedes that he knew he wouldn’t be able to break into without the proper equipment. He unhitched the horse trailer, slipped into the Ranger, and found the keys already in it. Nice.

Map had given Pace directions to
Le Feu
. He found the club and was surprised at how much action there was, even in the storm.
Le Feu
was on the water, backed up to a raging channel. Fifty or more skiffs, Pro Elite bass boats, 15-footers, outboards, and water taxis were docked at the pier, vessels colliding as the turbulent waves washed over the jetty. Rich kids who didn’t give a shit about safety.

He spotted the Jag parked down on the sand, marooned in three feet of water, scuttled.

The front of the place was crowded with twenty-somethings drinking under the wide overhangs. A bouncer stood framed in the door: clean-cut, muscle-bound guy with no neck. Black T-shirt with a logo emblazoned across it in white. Pace walked up unsure of the procedure. There would be some kind of arcane process to join them, he was sure of it, and was certain he’d fail the trial.