The Haunted Air (2 page)

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Authors: F. Paul Wilson

BOOK: The Haunted Air
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Gia nudged her. “Why so glum? This party's for you.”
“Yeah, I'd better enjoy it now.” She took a gulp of her cosmopolitan. “My fifteen minutes are so over.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My lucky bracelet. It's gone. It's the whole reason for my success.”
“You think it was stolen?” Jack said, glancing at her bare wrists and then at the partygoers. No shortage of jealousy here, he'd bet. “When did you last see it?”
“Tuesday. I remember taking it off after finishing a painting. I took a shower, then went out shopping. Next morning I went to put it on before starting a new work, and it was gone.”
“Anything else missing?” Jack said.
“Not a thing.” She tossed back the rest of her drink. “And it's not valuable. It's an old piece of junk jewelry I picked up at a secondhand store. It looks homemade—I mean, it's set with a cat's eye marble, of all things—but I liked it. And as soon as I started wearing it, my paintings began to sell. The bracelet made it happen.”
“Is that so?” Jack said. He felt Gia's hand grip the top of his thigh and begin to squeeze, trying to head off what she knew he was going to say, but he spoke anyway. “So it's got nothing to do with talent.”
Junie shook her head and shrugged. “I never changed my style, but I started wearing the bracelet while I worked, and the first painting I finished with it was the one Nathan Lane bought. After that, everything started happening for me. It changed my luck. I've so got to find it.”
“You've looked for it, I presume,” Gia said.
“Turned my place upside down. But tomorrow I'm getting professional help.”
“A bloodhound?” Jack offered, which earned him another squeeze.
“No. I've got an appointment with my psycho.” She giggled. “I mean my psychic.”
Gia's fingers became a vise, so Jack decided to heed her. “I'm sure he'll be a big help.”
“Oh, I know he will! He's wonderful! I left my old seer for Ifasen a couple of months ago and am I ever glad. The man's absolutely incredible.”
“Ifasen?” Jack knew most of the major players in the local psychic racket, if not personally, at least by rep, and the name Ifasen didn't ring a bell.
“He's new. Just moved into Astoria and—oh, my God! I just realized! That's just up the road from here! Maybe I can see him tonight!”
“It's pretty late, Junie. Will he—?”
“This is an emergency! He's got to see me!”
She pulled out her cell phone and speed-dialed a number, listened for a moment, then snapped it closed.
“Damn! His answering service! So what. I'm going up there anyway.” She pushed herself up from the couch and staggered a step. “Gotta find a cab.”
Gia glanced at Jack, concern in her eyes, then back to Junie. “You'll never get one around here.”
She grinned and hiked her miniskirt from mid-thigh to her hip. “Sure I will. Just like what's-her-name in that movie.”
“Claudette Colbert in
It Happened One Night,
” Jack said automatically as he wondered when the last time was a cab had cruised the Brooklyn Army Terminal area at this hour. “And someone'll think you're looking for more than a ride if you do that. We'll call you a cab.”
“They never come,” she said, heading for the door.
Again that concerned look from Gia. “Jack, we can't let her go. She's in no condition—”
“She's a grown-up.”
“Only nominally. Jack?”
She cocked her head and looked at him with big, Girl Scout cookie-selling eyes. Refusing Gia anything was difficult, but when she did that …
“Oh, all right.” Donning a put-upon expression, he rose and offered a hand to help Gia to her feet; in truth he was delighted for an excuse to bail this party. “I'll give her a ride. But it's not ‘just up the road.' It's on the upper end of Queens.”
Gia smiled, and it touched Jack right down to the base of his spine.
Somehow, between saying good-bye to the hostess bride and reaching the sidewalk, they picked up two extra passengers: Karyn—the Bride of Frankenstein—and her friend Claude, an anorexic-looking six footer with a flattop haircut that jutted out over his forehead, making his head look like
an anvil from the side. They both thought a jaunt to a psychic's house would be moby cool.
Plenty of room in Jack's Crown Vic. If he'd come alone, he probably would have traveled by subway. But Gia's presence demanded the security of a car. With Gia in the passenger seat, and the other three in the back, Jack wheeled the big black Ford up a ramp onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and headed north along the elevated roadway. He said he hoped no one minded but he was opening all the windows, and he did, without waiting for answers. His car; they didn't like it, they could walk.
This kind of summer night, not too humid, not terribly hot, brought him back to his teens when he drove a beat-up old Corvair convertible that he got for a song because too many people had listened to Ralph Nader and dumped one of the best cars ever made. On nights like this he'd drive with no destination, always with the top down, letting the wind swirl around him.
Not much swirling tonight. Even at this hour the BQE was crowded, but Junie made the creeping traffic seem even slower by rattling on and on about her psychic guru: Ifasen talked to the dead, and Ifasen let the dead talk to you, and Ifasen knew your deepest, darkest secrets and could do the most amazing, impossible,
incredible
things.
Not amazing or impossible to Jack. He was familiar with all the amazing, impossible,
incredible
things Ifasen did, and even had a pretty good idea how the man was going to get back Junie's bracelet for her.
Yeah, Junie was a ditz, but a lovable ditz.
Maybe some music would slow her Ifasen chatter. He stuck one of his homemade CDs in the player. John Lennon's voice filled the car.
“This happened once before …”
“The Beatles?” Claude said from the back. “I didn't think anyone listened to them anymore.”
“Think again,” Jack said. He turned up the volume. “Listen to that harmony.”
“ … I saw the light! …”
“Lennon and McCartney were born to sing together.”
“You have to realize,” Gia said, “that Jack doesn't like anything modern.”
“How can you say that?”
“How?” She was smiling. “Look at your apartment, your favorite buildings”—she pointed to the CD player—“the music you listen to. You don't own a song recorded after the eighties.”
“Not true.”
Karyn piped up. “What's a current group or singer you listen to?”
Jack didn't want to tell her that he had Tenacious D's last disc in the glove compartment. Time for some fun.
“I like Britney Spears a lot.”
“I'm sure you like to
look
at her at lot,” Gia said, “but name one of her songs. Just one.”
“Well …”
“Got him!” Karyn laughed.
“I like some of Eminem's stuff.”
“Never,” Gia said.
“It's true. I liked that conscience song he did, you know where he's got a good voice talking in one ear and a bad voice in the other. That was neat.”
“Enough to buy it?”
“Well, no …”
“Got him again,” Karyn said. “You want to try the nineties? Can you name one song from the nineties you listened to?”
“Hey, maybe I wasn't exactly a Spice Girls fan, but I was one hell of a nineties kinda guy.”
“Prove it. One nineties group—name one you bought and listened to.”
“Easy. The Traveling Willburys.”
Claude burst out laughing as Karyn groaned. “I give up!”
“Hey, the Willburys formed in the nineties, so that makes them a nineties group. I also liked World Party's ‘Goodbye Jumbo.'”
“Retro!”
“And hey, Counting Crows. I liked that ‘Mr. Jones' song they did.”
“That's because it sounded like Van Morrison!”
“That's not my fault. And you can't say Counting Crows weren't nineties. So there. A nineties guy, that was I.”
“I'm getting a headache.”
“Some Beatles will fix that,” Jack said. “This disc is all pre-Pepper, before they got self-conscious. Good stuff.”
The double-tracked guitar intro from “And Your Bird Can Sing” filled the car as Jack followed the BQE's meandering course along the Brooklyn waterfront, running either two or three stories above or one or two stories below street level. A bumpy ride over pavement with terminal acne. As they ran under the Brooklyn Heights overhang a magnificent vista of lower Manhattan, all lights ablaze, slid into view.
“I feel like I'm in
Moonstruck,”
Karyn said.
“Except in
Moonstruck
the Trade Towers were there,” Claude added.
The car fell silent as they passed under the neighboring on-ramps of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.
Jack had never liked the Trade Towers, had never thought he'd miss those soulless silver-plated Twix bars. But he did, and still felt a stab of fury when he noticed the hole in his sky where they'd been. The terrorists, like most outsiders to the city, probably had viewed the twins as some sort of crown on the skyline, so they'd aimed for the head. But Jack wondered how the city would have reacted if the Empire State and the Chrysler Buildings had been targeted instead. They were more part of the city's heart and soul and history. King Kong—the
real
King Kong—had climbed the Empire State Building.
Brooklyn turned into Queens at the Kosciusko Bridge and the highway wandered past Long Island City, then the equally unspectacular Jackson Heights.
Astoria sits on the northwest shoulder of Queens along the East River. Jack visited frequently, but rarely by car. One of his mail drops was on Steinway Street. As he drove
he debated a side trip to pick up his mail, but canned the idea. His passengers might start asking questions. He'd subway back next week.
Following Junie's somewhat disjointed directions—she usually cabbed here so she wasn't exactly sure of all her landmarks—he jumped off the BQE onto Astoria Boulevard and turned north, running a seamless gauntlet of row houses.
“If this Ifasen's so good,” Jack said, “what's he doing out here in the sticks?”
Junie said, “Queens isn't the sticks!”
“Is to me. Too open. Too much sky. Makes me nervous. Like I'm going to have a panic attack or something.” He swerved the car. “Whoa!”
“What's wrong?” Junie cried.
“Just saw a herd of buffalo. Thought they were going to stampede in front of the car. Told you this was the sticks.”
As the back seat laughed, Gia gave his thigh one of those squeezes.
They passed a massive Greek Orthodox church but the people passing along the sidewalk out front were dressed in billowy pantaloons and skull caps and saris. Astoria used to be almost exclusively Greek; now it housed sizable Indian, Korean, and Bangladeshi populations. A polyglotopolis.
They cruised into the commercial district along Ditmars Boulevard where they passed the usual boutiques, nail salons, travel agencies, pet shops, and pharmacies, plus the ubiquitous KFCs, Dunkin Donuts, and McDonald's, interspersed with gyro, souvlaki, and kabab houses. They passed a Pakistani-Bangladeshi restaurant; its front, like a fair number of others, sported signs written not just in foreign languages but foreign script. The Greek influence was still strong, though—Greek coffee shops, Greek bakeries, even the pizzerias sported the Acropolis or one of the Greek gods on their awnings.
“There!” Junie cried, leaning forward and pointing through the windshield at a produce shop with a yellow
awning inscribed with English and what looked like Sanskrit. “I recognize that place! Make a right at the corner here.”
Jack complied and turned into a quiet residential neighborhood. This street was lined with duplexes, a relief from the row houses. A train rumbled along a trestle looming above them.
“He's number 735,” Junie said. “You can't miss it. It's the only detached single-family home on the block.”
“Might be the only one in Astoria,” Jack said.
“Should be on the right somewhere along—” Her arm lanced ahead again. “Here! Here it is! Awriiight!” Jack heard the slap of a high five somewhere behind him. “Told you I'd get us here!”

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