Prowlers - 1 (26 page)

'Anytime."

The pub was about three-quarters full, which was not at all bad for after eight o'clock on a Sunday night. The weather had obviously inspired people to stay out later than usual on the night before the work week began again. It might not have been the best time to break Molly in to the job, but he knew it could have been a hell of a lot worse. And she seemed to be doing

just fine, all things considered. Another of the waitresses, a thirty-something single mom named Elaine who'd been with them for two years, was training Molly.

Jack glanced around but did not see either Elaine or Molly. They were probably back in the kitchen, he reasoned.

He was about to return there to see if he could be of any more help, but first he shot a quick look up at the front. Neither of the regular hostesses was on tonight, so he had been performing that function, among others, since about five o'clock. Even as he glanced up, the heavy door was pulled open and a young couple came in.

They were sparklingly good-looking, maybe thirty. Just from a quick glance it was clear that both of them worked out regularly. He had brown hair, a deep tan despite the time of year, a thousand-watt smile that said he was used to getting what he asked for, and his khakis and shirt looked as if they'd been ironed with him still in them. The pleats on his pants were sharp enough to cut someone. She wore an almost identical uniform, save for the bristly olive-green sweater pulled over her blouse. No one could possibly have mistaken her for a man, however. Her long blond hair was swept back over her shoulders, and her blue eyes gleamed even from across the restaurant. She was also tan, and her skin radiated with a health that came from plenty of free time and exercise.

They couldn't have been more out of place.

While Bridget's got all kinds of customers, most of them were tourists or locals or hard-core Irish who wouldn't have dreamed of going anywhere else. Most were middle class folks at best, but the couple who had just walked in the front door looked like they had been unwrapped on Christmas morning and were fresh from the plastic packaging. Ken and Barbie. Walking wealth. Jack did not have a problem with wealthy people as a rule, but on those rare occasions when those who could have bought and sold the Four Seasons or Morton's found themselves at Bridget's Irish Rose Pub, they often had an air about them that said they were slumming. Ken and Barbie had that air.

Look, honey, he expected her to say at any moment. Isn't this quaint? An Irish place. Let's get a Guinness and shepherd's pie, oh, can we?

But they were customers and at Bridget's they all got the same hospitality until they proved they didn't deserve it. So when Jack walked up to Ken and Barbie where they waited by the front door, he put on the nicest smile he could muster. "Can I help you folks?"

Ken grinned. Lots of teeth. A Tom Cruise grin. "I'm beyond help," he said warmly. "My wife could use a steak, though. Red meat cravings."

Surprised, Jack blinked. Then he laughed softly to himself. "Right this way," he told them as he grabbed a pair of menus. As he led them to a table he marveled at how completely wrong he'd read them. That'll teach you to judge just from appearance, he thought.

The couple kidded each other about their appetites as they passed through the middle of the restaurant, surrounded by brass and oak.

"Nice place," Ken said suddenly.

"Thanks," Jack said.

"I don't guess you're Bridget," Barbie said.

"No. That was my morn. She passed ten years ago."

Genuine sympathy etched the woman's face. "I'm so sorry."

"I appreciate it," he told her. Then he gestured around the restaurant. "It's still her place, though."

Neither of them seemed at all aloof the way wealthy people normally acted. And if Barbie had really dragged him out because she was in the mood for a steak, all the better. Most women who had that trophy-wife, all-day-at-the-gym look would never confess to a desire for a thick steak, let alone joke about it with their husbands.

Ken and Barbie slid into a booth and Jack laid the menus on the table. "I'm Jack Dwyer. Your waitress will be with you in just a minute. In the meantime, if you need anything, give me a shout."

"We'll do that, Jack. Thanks." Ken shot him another grin, then leaned over to kiss his wife's cheek even as he reached for a menu.

There were no more customers waiting to be seated so Jack headed back toward the kitchen. He spotted Molly dropping entrees off at table seventeen and adjusted his course toward her. Her hair was pinned up in a way that was both planned and haphazard at the same time. Earlier in the evening she had seemed pretty

harried, but he could tell that she had calmed down some.

When she moved away from table seventeen he fell into step behind her.

"How's it going?"

"Good," she said happily. "Really good, actually. I haven't had anyone be rude to me in two hours, and I think I'm getting this. Of course, it could just be exhaustion setting in."

"Wait'll you have to wake up early tomorrow morning and go to the market with me."

Molly's mouth formed a perfect little O of surprise. "I'm sleeping in tomorrow, buddy."

"We'll see," Jack taunted her.

When Molly laughed, he realized that despite the frenzy of the new job she was more relaxed than he had seen her in a while. This would be good for all of them, he diought. He really wanted her to be happy.

At that thought, however, he remembered what Artie had said about the two of them, and he felt guilty. A sudden awkwardness overcame him, and Molly noticed it.

"What's wrong?" she asked, eyes darting around, obviously worried that some new danger had presented itself.

"Nothing," he assured her. "Just... It's good to have you here, Moll."

"Hey," she said tenderly. Then again, "Hey." She embraced him for just a moment. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

"Probably get fired for hugging the boss," he whispered.

Molly feigned insult and whacked his arm. 'All right, all right. I'm getting back to work. Are you this tough with all your new recruits?"

"Nope, just you," Jack told her, and he laughed a little, though more to cover his own discomfort than anything else.

Even as his laughter died, Jack noticed something in his peripheral vision. He glanced toward the bar. Amid the small throng of people waiting for drinks or sipping what they already had, and behind a couple of dockworkers engaged in conversation with a scruffy guy who seemed more college professor than laborer, he saw a black suit and a white Roman collar. A priest.

The ghost of Father Pinsky stared across the pub at Jack. The priest closed bis eyes and crossed himself.

"Oh, shit," Jack muttered.

Molly had begun to turn toward the kitchen but she stopped and stared at him.

"Jack? What's wrong?"

Her voice had a desperate quality to it, but also a kind of resignation, as though she had known it was only a matter of time before the terror began again. Molly had known it was not over. So had Jack. But he wished it could have stayed away a little longer.

When Molly spoke again, it was in a whisper, right beside him. "Is it the ghosts, Jack?"

"One of them," he said, muscles tense, his entire

body on alert now as he kept his eyes on the praying ghost. "A priest."

Father Pinsky stared meaningfully at Jack, then slowly pointed at the three men in front of him at the bar. The one who looked like a college professor frowned and glanced around as if he had sensed something. He batted at the priest's ghostly form as though Father Pinsky were a mosquito buzzing around his head.

The ghost recoiled. These creatures had killed him. He was dead, they could no longer harm him, and yet he was still afraid of them.

'Are the monsters here?" Molly whispered.

Big Bill Cantwell suddenly appeared behind her. Seeing him there reminded Jack just how big the bartender actually was.

"Yeah. They're here," Bill said grimly.

"How did you know?" Jack asked.

He glanced back at the priest. There were other ghosts there now. Phantoms he had never seen before. One of them, he was fairly certain, was the mafia guy who'd been mauled a couple of nights earlier.

"They've had you and Molly scoped out since they walked in," Bill replied. 'And they just don't look right. Take this."

In the space that separated Jack from Bill, a gun suddenly appeared. It was an M9 Beretta, typically used by the U.S. infantry. It held fifteen rounds in the clip. Four years earlier, Bill had taken Jack to a firing range half a dozen times to learn to use the weapon—over Artie's

vehement protests—but Jack had not seen it since. Learning to use it had been a matter of curiosity, something he'd mentioned to Bill just once: "What's it like to fire a gun?"

"Jesus, Bill," Jack whispered. "We've got a lot of customers in here. I... we can't afford to have anyone get hurt."

The burly bartender nervously ran a hand across his bearded chin and glanced past Jack. "I don't think that's up to us. Do you?"

Molly stared at both of them, then stepped in closer. Her voice was barely a whisper. "What are you going to do?"

Bill made no attempt to answer. He looked to Jack.

One deep breath and Jack turned to her. "Go back into the kitchen. Tell Courtney what's up. Then I want you to stay back there. If they're here, they're after both of us."

"My stun gun is in my purse, in the back office."

Molly frowned as she said it, a great many things passing between them without words. Chief among them was this clear message: she was not going to hide in the kitchen. And Jack knew his

sister wouldn't either.

Jack nodded. "Go tell Courtney. Both of you keep a distance, give yourselves room to fight or run or whatever."

"We should call the police," Molly argued. "If the cops show up, the Prowlers will be gone."

"But they won't stay gone," Jack responded.

"You're not thinking—"

"Maybe not," he snapped. "Maybe not. But I don't like that the cops are hiding this thing. Maybe costing people's lives by trying not to scare us. Well, hell, we should be scared. If people knew, you can damn well bet these bastards would've been caught sooner. Maybe even before Artie and Kate . .."

"This could ruin your business, everything you and Courtney have worked for," Molly told him, her eyes pleading. "We know where they are. Just call the cops and be done with it."

Jack gently touched her cheek, but there was cold iron in his gut and his jaw was set. "They come into my place, Moll. My place. Trying to kill me. Kill you. Who knows what else? After what they did to Artie I want justice. I don't know if the cops can give them that. Now I just want to tear 'em down."

Bill grunted, a kind of fire in his eyes. "They think they're untouchable."

Molly stared at Jack a moment. Her throat worked as she swallowed hard. Then she nodded. 'All right, then. Let's touch them." "Bill?" Jack asked. "It's your place."

With a nod, Jack untucked his cotton shirt with the pub's logo on the breast, then tucked the Beretta into the waistband of his pants against the small of his back. He turned as he did it so no one would notice but he need not have worried. The only people gazing in their direction were Ken and Barbie, who seemed troubled and a bit annoyed that no one had waited on them yet.

Molly headed for the kitchen. Jack called after her.

"Molly? Tell Jacqui to wait on those people at table six."

She blinked, gave him a bemused sort of look, and went through the swinging doors.

Jack shot Bill a hard look. "Why don't you get back to work?"

The big man nodded. He headed for the bar with a bit more speed than usual. Jack watched him go, then surveyed the restaurant. An older couple had paid their bill and were going out the door, the man moving with that odd shuffle some elderly people used. Conversations combined into a

kind of white noise static, cut occasionally by a high female laugh. At the bar now there were four or five regulars glued to ESPN on the TV bolted to the rear wall.

Bill made his way behind the bar. A couple of guys called out to him good-naturedly as he relieved Silvester, a skinny Croatian kid who worked as a waiter and sometimes covered the bar for Bill. The guy was as out of place at Bridget's as Molly would have been serving cocktails at a Chinese buffet, but everyone loved him, even the old school Boston Irish.

The three animals at the bar stood in a clutch, holding pints of beer and shooting furtive glances around the restaurant. The thick-necked pair Jack had mistaken for dockworkers looked as if they were there to start a fight, but the other guy—the one in the soft brown leather jacket and the celebrity stubble—he pulled off his disguise fine. His eyes tracked the pub from time to

time, but because of his smile and the easy way he held himself, he wasn't obvious.

Jack did see the beast in his face, though. Something about the eyes and the general structure of his features.

As if he sensed Jack's eyes on him, the celebrity glanced over. For a heartbeat, his gaze locked with Jack's. He smiled, then averted his eyes. Jack did not look away, but he saw Bill reach under the bar, grab something, and hold it out of view, just below the long oak bar. Silvester had been shooed away, sent back to the kitchen most likely.

Behind him, Jack sensed someone approaching. He took a quick glance over his shoulder and saw Courtney and Molly moving up on him. Molly had a hand in her pocket, grasping something. Her Taser.

With a tiny smile that was devoid of all humor or amusement, Jack strode across the restaurant and up the two steps into the bar area. A half-wall topped by brass railings separated it from the main restaurant. Molly and Courtney had moved toward the front door.

The ghosts were gone. Or perhaps Jack's focus was so much on the here and now that he could not see them.

The regulars greeted Jack. He nodded at them but did not respond. Tension rippled off him, and several of the regulars snapped to attention as though he had asked for backup. He knew he should tell them to take off, but didn't. Backup couldn't hurt, particularly now that he'd drawn attention to himself. One of the two