Sacrifice (6 page)

Josie had long blonde hair that reached down to the waist of her pint-sized, knock-off Sassoon jeans. Her feet stuck just a bit over the edge of last year’s flip flops.

Her mother lay next to her on the old, scratchy, wool blanket recently demoted to picnic duties. Through oversized sunglasses she studied a romance paperback that had a couple in Renaissance garb kissing on the cover. She had on shorts and a tank top to start nurturing her summer tan.

“Mommy, look at all the bubbles,” Josie said. She exhaled a long string towards her mother. They floated over in a loose formation. One larger bubble descended and tapped her mother’s glasses for a slimy explosion.

“Josie!” her mother said. “I told you about those bubbles!” She made a sweeping motion with her hand. “Go over there to blow those.”

There were a few other people scattered around the green this afternoon. Two teens tossed a Frisbee. A woman walked her poodle on a short leash. Several couples shared picnic lunches. Josie held her wand over her head and ran across the green. Bubbles streamed out behind her and she laughed. She thought if she made a bubble big enough, she could float away on it.

“Josie!” someone called from the edge of the green.

Josie saw a little boy with a brilliant smile. He wore a purple shirt (her favorite color), blue jeans and PF Flyers sneakers. His eyes were strange, green with a reddish hue around the edges, but her focus went elsewhere before that detail concerned her. The boy carried a tennis racquet-sized bubble wand in his hand. With a flick of the wrist he made a bubble the size of a soccer ball. It hovered in the air and then burst into dozens of smaller bubbles like a Fourth of July firework.

“Pretty!” Josie said. Mother’s admonitions about not talking to strangers were forgotten in the face of something so amazing. She trotted towards the boy.

He gave the wand a spin, and a spiral of multicolored bubbles rose through the air. Josie broke into a run.

At the far edge of the green, a red, late-model Mustang Mach I sped away from a stoplight with a screech. It closed on the crosswalk.

The laughing boy trotted to the edge of the road, a trail of bubbles behind him. “It’s yours, Josie,” he said. His voice sounded sweet as syrup on pancakes. “Come get it, and it’s yours to keep.”

Josie stopped seeing the boy or the rest of the world around her. All she saw were the bubbles, entrancing markers leading her forward, obliterating all details from the world around her. No grass, no trees, no approaching roar of the Mustang’s exhaust. There was just a trail of shiny silver spheres leading her to something wonderful.

The boy dashed across the road. He twirled the wand like a baton and left a vapor trail of floating soap.

Josie sprinted. Bubbles burst against her face like giggles as she crossed from the cool green grass to the hot, hard pavement.

A warning shout came from the green. Brakes squealed. The Mustang’s rear drifted right as the driver swerved to miss the girl that darted in front of him. The car swept sideways across the sidewalk. A sickening, hollow thump echoed as Josie’s head slammed against the passenger door. She rolled under the car and out the other side.

A scream rose from the green. The wail’s pitch rose to a height only one person could sustain—a mother who had just lost her child.

Chapter Fourteen

Ken Scott saw it all.

He and Jeff went down to the green Sunday afternoon to kill some time. Jeff had parked his older white Pinto close by. He’d invested more than the car was worth in a killer sound system and a CB radio. Most of every paycheck from his after school job at Radio Shack went straight into the vehicle, and he loathed allowing her to be parked unattended. It also wasn’t wise to stray too far from a car parked at a Village parking meter. They had a tendency to expire early, and parking tickets were a Sagebrook Constable specialty.

The Sagebrook Constable was a holdover from the 1800s, the first law enforcement the area had. The town council vigorously resisted incorporating them into the county force, despite the cost savings and the puny jurisdiction the constables had been reduced to. The availability of a private police force was too good a thing to give up. Their main mission was parking tickets around the green and muscle at the town council meetings.

The two boys planned on splitting their time between tossing a Frisbee and seeing what girls might be sunning themselves. As they flung the plastic disk across the green, Ken had the downhill view of the green and the crosswalk to the stores across the street. As Jeff ran to retrieve a toss that had sailed well over his head, Ken saw the little girl with the blonde hair running across the green to a man near the street.

The man was short and thin. His narrow nose came to an upturned point, and his eyes were just a shade too wide apart. His pronounced jaw finished in a deep cleft.

His clothes were even more bizarre. Shapeless deerskin moccasins tied around his calves. A brown buckskin leather vest covered green pants and an open tan shirt. He wore a hat like a Colonial tri-corner, but with the rear two corners barely extended from the hat, as if the design had been streamlined.

All of this was overshadowed by his horrible injuries. The skin on his face hung in shreds, like he’d been dragged through jagged rocks. Despite the damage, the man’s green eyes sparkled with life, and he flashed the oncoming girl a crooked smile through his mangled lips.

The scene gave Ken a coal-mine deep sense of dread.

The returned Frisbee broke his concentration as it hit him in the chest with a thump.

“Nice catch, spaz,” Jeff said.

Ken pointed at the man by the road. “Who the hell is that?”

Jeff turned and pushed his ever-present Mets hat up on his head. “Holy…”

The red Mustang came into view and barreled down the street. The man in the tri-corner hat dashed across the street, waving one arm up and down as he ran, the little girl in tow. The Mustang didn’t slow.

“Hey! Stop!” Ken shouted.

The screech of rubber. The thud of bone on steel. The unholy wail of maternal grief.

The boys raced to the crosswalk. Ken ran to the driver’s side of the car. Josie lay face up on the pavement. The left side of her head was crushed. Her remaining eye stared glassily at the sky. Bright red blood left only the tips of her hair on that side blonde.

Ken stood in dumb, stunned silence.

The door of the Mustang swung open. A teen looked out at the ground. Ken recognized Vinnie Santini, another senior. He had black hair parted in the middle and wore a dark silk shirt opened at the neck to expose a thick gold chain. His father had restored the Mustang for him at his body shop. Vinnie’s face was white as marble.

“She ran out across the street…” he mumbled. “The light was green…”

On the other side of the car, Jeff rushed to the man in the tri-corner hat. He stood several yards away on the other side of the road, smiling.

“What the hell were you doing?” Jeff yelled as he closed the distance.

The man looked over at Jeff in shock, as it wasn’t possible for anyone to address him. His flayed face looked more hideous the closer Jeff got. The whites of his eyes were tinged blood red, and they narrowed as they focused on Jeff. He pointed a crooked, accusing finger, bared his white teeth and hissed. Then he turned vertical. It was as if he were two dimensional, and someone had spun him sideways so he was less than an inch thick. Then what had been his head and feet contracted to the center, and he disappeared.

At full speed, Jeff could not stop. He passed through where the man had stood. He caught a fleeting whiff of algae. He felt a dark heaviness in the air, but then that disappeared as well. He skidded to a confused stop.

At the Mustang, Josie’s wailing mother threw Ken out of the way and knelt by her daughter. She tucked a few stray hairs away from the undamaged right side of her face.

“Oh, baby, hang on,” she said. “Oh, hang on.”

A siren wailed and a green police car pulled up near the Mustang. The Sagebrook constable scrambled out. He had a head shaped like a block of wood and an overhanging forehead that made him look about as bright. He called for an ambulance on his radio and shooed Ken away from the side of the Mustang.

“I couldn’t stop,” Vinnie said. He still sat in the car, bordering on shock. “She jumped out in the street for no reason.”

“That’s right, officer.” Ken whirled around. One of the picnicking couples had come up behind him. A man had come to Vinnie’s defense. “We saw her just run out into the street.”

“She was chasing a man,” Ken said. “Some freak in a buckskin vest.”

The couple looked at him like he had two heads.

“How could you miss him?” Ken said. “Weird hat? Face like it went through a paper shredder?”

“It was just the girl by the road,” the man said.

The ambulance pulled up and EMTs dashed to Josie’s side. The cop stepped over to Ken. He grabbed Ken by the shirt.

“Look kid, this is serious. We don’t need any bullshit here.”

Ken was about to respond when Jeff pulled him back through the growing crowd. Ken gave Jeff a confused look.

“Where did he go?” Ken said. “Did you catch him?”

“He’s gone.”

“You couldn’t catch him?”

Jeff slammed Ken in the shoulder. “You ever see a pitcher beat me when I’m stealing second? I could have caught him, but he vanished. Into thin air. In front of me.”

“He couldn’t.”

“Well he did. And I pulled you out of there because from what the people in the crowd were saying, no one else saw him. When I called to Freak Show, he looked stunned that I could see him. He knew the girl could see him, but I don’t think we were supposed to be able to.”

Jeff dragged Ken back to his car, and they got in. Jeff started the car. Led Zeppelin screamed out of the speakers so loudly that the door glass rattled. He spun the volume dial down.

“So what did we see?” Ken said. “Some kind of ghost? A spirit?”

“I don’t know what it was,” Jeff said. “But I know I didn’t like the look it gave me.”

“Like what?”

“As it flattened into nothing, I swear it looked pissed as hell.”

Chapter Fifteen

By Monday morning, the brick halls of Jesse Whitman High buzzed with the news. Vinnie Santini had killed a girl.

By noon the versions had multiplied, fueled by Vinnie’s absence. Vinnie was in prison. Vinnie had committed suicide. He had been drunk. He had been stoned. He drove down the sidewalk.

None of the versions mentioned a man in a streamlined tri-corner hat with a nose like a sharpened carrot. Because no matter what tale floated by them, Jeff and Ken did not tell theirs. Even the rest of the Dirty Half Dozen didn’t know. The story of the disappearing man wasn’t one to risk on the telephone. Their middle-class families didn’t have the luxury of phone extensions, and there would be no expectation of privacy chatting away on the kitchen wall phone. This story had to wait until after school to be shared.

The boys gathered in the shade of the bleachers at the baseball field. Paul, Dave, Ken, Jeff and Marc waited on Bob.

“Did I ever mention my night with Deirdre beneath these bleachers?” Paul said.

A collective groan rose from the others. Paul’s football player status afforded him a rapid rotation of girlfriends. His tales of them often read like Penthouse Forum letters, with the same level of veracity.

“Hampy,” Marc said, “your stories are unbelievable.”

“Here’s what they all say is unbelievable,” Paul answered. He gave a tug at the crotch of his jeans.

“Here’s a surprise,” Dave said, pulling a long blade of grass from his mouth. “None of us are interested in your dick.”

Bob arrived. He’d already changed into a white T-shirt, bleach-stained jeans and a pair of brown work boots that smelled like last week’s fried chicken.

“All right,” he announced, sticking a cigarette into his mouth. “This better be fucking quick because I need to get to work.” Bob did dishes at the local diner after school.

“Ah. Mr. Armstrong,” Dave said in a high, nasal imitation of their school principal. “Smoking is a filthy habit and not permitted on the athletic fields.”

Bob put a lighter to the tip of the cigarette. “Bite me sideways.”

“Enough of this crap,” Ken said. “You all heard about Vinnie Santini today. There’s lots of stories, but we are going to give you the real one, because Jeff and I were there.”

The four looked over at Jeff. He snapped a half-assed salute from the brim of his Mets cap.

Ken proceeded to tell the whole story, every detail of the accident, including the intervention and disappearance of the one he and Jeff had taken to calling the Woodsman for his homemade deerskin clothes. When Ken was done the others stared at him.

“Well, one thing’s for sure,” Dave said. He pointed a thumb at Paul. “His story’s more believable.”

“Screw you,” Ken said.

Marc had been listening with more intensity than the others. “Jeff, is everything he said true?”

Jeff shrugged and shot him a “What can I say?” look. “Every word, man,” he answered.

“I believe them,” Marc said.