Blunt Impact (11 page)

‘Uh-huh.’

He could have simply kicked both of them out, but Leo’s style of management had always been to retain all power without ever actually making any decisions. ‘She has to go. Now.’

‘I know.’ Theresa sipped, the hot liquid coursing down her throat, and watched Ghost move on to another slide, the tiny fingers moving the piece of glass around as gently as humanly possible, working with a concentration that pierced Theresa’s heart. ‘You know about my dad.’

‘Yeah,’ Leo said. ‘But you weren’t
that
young.’

‘Fourteen. Only three years older. And he wasn’t murdered, he died of a brain aneurysm, and I wasn’t there when it happened. But I still remember pacing through my house, walking from corner to corner, from the bedroom to the kitchen to the basement . . . just wanting to be able to
do
something to fix what had happened or at least to understand it. To find something that would make me comprehend why the day couldn’t start over and take a different course. No one had any answers. No one even had any questions.’

The day hadn’t started over, which was why her ex-cop grandfather had more or less taken over the role, which was probably why, relatives often sighed, Theresa and Frank had wound up in their respective lines of work.

From the edge of her line of vision her boss watched her. Then he said, ‘You can’t run a day care here just because you feel sorry for the kid.’

‘I know.’

‘Get her out of here.’

‘All right.’

She returned to the main lab, where Ghost held a slide in her flat palm as if it were a live butterfly. ‘I think I found something.’

Theresa promptly decided to ignore Leo a while longer. ‘Let’s take a look. I think you could be right.’ The reference slide had been labeled
asbestos
.

‘What’s that?’ Ghost asked. ‘I thought that was bad.’

‘It’s something to make stuff fire-resistant, so it’s not bad in certain conditions. It was probably around the job site, or left on her tools or car from a previous job.’

Eyes on the prize, Ghost asked: ‘Will that help us find the shadow man?’

‘I don’t know yet. It might. Even if it doesn’t help us
find
him, it might help us prove he’s the shadow man once we do find him.’

The girl had cornflower blue eyes, something like her grandmother’s, and she rubbed one of them. Fatigue had begun to catch up. Briskly, Theresa explained that she would drive Ghost home now.

The girl offered some half-hearted protests and then gave up. ‘You are going to catch him. Right?’

Theresa had hoped to avoid that question. ‘I’m not going to lie to you, Ghost. There are no guarantees. But I can promise that we’re going to do our best. We – I am going to do everything I possibly can.’

The girl’s expression said it all:

Not. Acceptable.

‘H
ow’s it going?’ the boss asked Damon upon his arrival at the motel off of I-90. The boss’s name was Leroy Whitman, but no one ever called him that. He sat in a folding chair outside the open door of room twenty-three. The motel had been closed for a year and still didn’t have a new owner, which made it a handy place for temporary storage.

‘Good. Took seventeen minutes to get here.’

‘No cops?’

The boss was large and black and deceptively mild looking, with a moon-like face and short wavy hair that Damon always thought looked more Italian than black. As with all his opinions, Damon kept this one to himself, speaking only of business and only when spoken to. ‘Ain’t seen any.’

‘Good.’ The stretched-out plastic weave of the lawn chair strained under the boss’s ample girth as he fished a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, diamonds glinting from thick fingers. He always had at least three other guys with him: his bodyguard, his right-hand man, and a third guy to take care of errands, phone calls, meal runs and enforcement, in order to keep the first two free for the really vital things. ‘This will be a very productive piece of undercover work. Maybe I should put somebody on all major construction projects.’

‘Don’t know if I’m cut out for an honest day’s laboring.’

The boss chuckled. ‘Some labors be worth it.’

‘You think this one will be worth it?’

The boss stilled, and Damon wondered if he’d misspoken. He hadn’t meant to question the boss’s judgment – just the opposite, he wanted to keep him talking so Damon could listen and learn. Show respect. It was all about respect. ‘I mean—’

The man waved around the cigarette to discourage the mosquitoes. ‘Sometimes you have to invest without being one-hundred-percent sure that you’re going to have a pay day. Maybe having a diagram of all the hallways and doors and plumbing and electrical work in a jail will come in handy some day. Maybe it won’t. Maybe this precious metal will make up for the income lost if your crew ain’t running so well without you there, ’cause business is down anyway. Maybe it won’t. Maybe, as some colleagues of mine suggested, that pretty new building will all fall down before they can cage up a single brother, and maybe it won’t. Long as you get paid either way, it’s all good, innit?’

‘Long as I get out of the way first,’ Damon joked, but he wondered about that. His boss was a profit man, not a political one.

‘I’m not a political man,’ the boss went on, scaring Damon practically out of his skin. ‘But when my great-great-great grandaddy, I’m sure, came to this country, he came with a chain around his neck. Like a dog. Put up on a block and sold like a dog. Now they want to put us in kennels, like dogs. Are we going to sit back and let our brothers be treated like dogs?’

‘No, sir.’

‘No,’ said the boss, taking a thoughtful puff, ‘
suh
!’

Damon considered this all the way back to the construction site. He had been in a group home. He had been in juvenile detention. He had been in jail twice. And between the beatings, the dramas, the constant and at times overpowering fear, he wondered if he wouldn’t have preferred the kennel. At least he could have slept like a normal person instead of the hyper-vigilant, hyper-aware animal you had to turn into in order to survive. Especially with his second cell-mate . . . Damon still had the occasional nightmare about that guy. So a cage all his own might be better, in its way. He couldn’t get out, but at least no one else could get in.

Of course, that all depended on who had the key.

He had crossed the site three times – slowly, unobtrusively, careful to look as if he had a legitimate purpose – and had not found it. Now he stood in, roughly, the center of the southern half of the building, replaying the previous night in his mind. For a purpose, this time, a purpose other than the simple joy of it, other than to create the pleasant stirrings in his chest and groin whenever he flashed back to that body flailing two hundred feet through space.

He had caught up with Samantha at the bar across the street, one of her favorite haunts. She liked to snag a place near the window if she could, so she could down a Cosmo made with cheap vodka and stare at the building, pick up guys with the line, ‘You see that skyscraper going up? I’m building that.’

As if.

Usually she had either settled on a catch for the evening or had a circle of two or three other women who needed to pretend to be there to enjoy each other’s company when instead they would abandon their own gender in the blink of an eye if something with a penis came along. But for once she sat alone, chin propped by one hand. In a booth – plenty of seats available that time of the night – so he could slide right in across from her. She had just smiled at him, quickly and not sincerely, before turning back to the window. She said nothing, as if he’d merely returned from a trip to the men’s room.

He said
hello
and
how are you doing tonight
.

‘I’ve been thinking about my daughter,’ she said without preamble, again as if continuing a previous encounter briefly interrupted. ‘I don’t want her to repeat my life. I don’t have any complaints, but still. She needs more opportunities.’

Like he wanted to hear about her kid, but then pretty girls did that. They could spout any sort of crap because they knew you’d hang on their every word no matter how dull or inane it got. He just let her talk, let her stare at the window instead of him.

‘I need to start a savings plan. I’m finally making decent money; I could sock some away and move us out to the suburbs. Someplace where she could play outside and have some friends. Get into a decent high school, you know? Get some tutoring.’

‘Great idea. This is a high-profile job; it should help you get good gigs from now on.’ He didn’t glance once at the building that she couldn’t take her eyes off of, not wanting to waste this opportunity to gaze at her breasts straining against the material in her top. He imagined touching them. Then he imagined squeezing them. Then he imagined cutting them.

‘I thought I had heard of a program where the city bought houses. Gave you a good price, then tore them down trying to rout out the drug dealers, but I called city hall and they had never heard of it. It would just push the dealers out into the suburbs anyway. Stupid idea.’

‘Lots of those around.’ He moved his gaze to her throat, to the pulsing tubes that swallowed liquid and pushed blood along. He imagined them broken open, disgorging their contents to the open air. Blood was blue until it hit the air, right? Or just really dark red?

‘That’s why I have to get my kid out of where we are now. There’s a drug house next door, and she’s got this bad habit of sneaking out. I can’t blame her, really – what kid wants to spend her life locked inside? I know she climbs down the tree. She tries to tell us she just left for school early but somehow the door is still locked from the inside. So I can either nail her window shut or move us the hell out of Dodge.’ She swallowed another mouthful of that sickly sweet stuff that pretty girls like to drink. ‘Anyway, that’s what I need to do. Get my life together. I’m going to be thirty next year, unfreakinbelieveable.’

‘You look twenty.’

‘Really?’ That finally got her attention away from the window, as he figured it would. He had only a few no-fail lines, but that was one of them.

‘Really.’ And when her eyes drifted toward the glass, he leapt. ‘You know what? Let’s go over and look at it. Take the zip lift to the top floor and be king of all we survey.’

A delighted smile crossed her face, and when she drained the Martini glass she’d been merely nursing all this time he knew he had won.

He slipped an arm around her waist as they crossed the street, but she giggled and knocked him away with one hip. ‘I suppose you hoped I’d think that was a chivalrous gesture, protecting my delicate body from traffic.’

‘Gave it a shot.’ He hadn’t thought any such thing, figuring that a grab at her flesh wouldn’t need to be disguised as anything but exactly that. But if she wanted to pretend to be a blushing virgin, he’d play along for a while. It would be a short while.

They turned the corner of the fenced area. ‘Hang on a sec,’ she said, and trotted over to her car.

Was she going to jump in and escape? Had he blown his chance, startled her too much – ‘Come on!’

But she didn’t get in the car, merely fumbled around inside for a moment and then backed out of it, slamming the door, trotting back. He had to keep from gasping in relief. Her expression, what he could see of it in the dark, once again seemed flush with excitement and the delight of a misbehaving child. She opened the lockbox, retrieved the key, opened the gate. He kept his hands to himself and closed the swinging panel behind them, so that any passer-by would have to really look to realize the chains were undone.

Then he followed her through the benign minefield of the construction site, keeping his impulses under control until they reached the building proper. Then the sight of that tight ass in her snug jeans as she climbed up the high step of the foundation – he spread his fingers over one cheek.

‘Stop that! Geez, what gave you the impression you could feel me up?’

He laughed again, couldn’t help it. ‘Gee, I don’t know. Maybe the tight pants? The make-up? The fact that you were drinking alone in a bar at nearly three a.m. on a week night? Face it – everything about you gave me the impression that you
live
to be felt up by somebody. Why not me?’

In the near pitch dark her face turned ugly. ‘Because I
said
not you. Just because I happen to be a living human being doesn’t mean my services are at your disposal, asshole. Forget this, I’m going home.’

She turned away from him, just as she’d knocked him away while crossing the street, but she hadn’t hopped in her car and driven away when she had the chance. She thought she could handle him. She still thought she could handle him.

She was wrong.

He grabbed her hair, that long silky stuff, with his left hand and punched her in the face with his right. It stunned her more than hurt her, he thought, because she didn’t shut up.

‘What the – what do you think you’re doing?’

He punched her in the stomach.

That was when she tried to defend herself with that damn screwdriver, which she must have snagged out of her car. Thinking ahead, just in case he didn’t slow down with the grab hands. Smart, he guessed, but not smart enough because Samantha Zebrowski was no Lara Croft when it came to hand to hand combat. He snatched the driver from her fingers, tossed it away, and slammed her a good one right in the eye. That took the fight out of her.

That had been right – here. Just south of the elevator pit. Where he should have walked right over it as he left earlier, but he hadn’t. Because the angel/demon/child had picked it up.

Shit
.

He had to find that kid.

D
riving Ghost home provided an annotated tour of the city Theresa thought she knew. The eleven-year-old pointed out that the cemetery had a faded headstone that seemed to show a little boy sitting on a bench with a sailor’s hat, and there were pretty gardens around the university’s medical education center, and a maze of alleys behind all the fancy restaurants on East Fourth where the wait staff would take their breaks, smoke cigarettes, and explain to you what a sous chef was.