Concrete Savior (12 page)

She stepped back and smiled at him, then her hands slipped away from his wrists and she merged into the line of people headed out the door. Casey stared after her, still frozen in place, until someone finally broke him out of his daze by saying, “Hey, man—are you leaving? Can I have this booth?”

He blinked, then focused on the speaker, a guy about Casey’s own age who was wearing a shirt and tie, just another face among Chicago’s millions of white-collar workers. A young woman peered over his shoulder, waiting for Casey’s answer. Girlfriend? Maybe, and Casey wondered briefly if through the eyes of someone else he and Gina looked like these two.

“Uh, yeah. Sorry—let me get my stuff.” He wadded up his lunch debris and tossed it in the trash as he left. He was almost all the way back to his building before he realized he’d never asked Gina why she’d called him from a pay phone.

AH, THAT KISS. THAT
handy and oh-so-damning kiss.

Jashire sat on the toilet and looked at her prisoner. After a couple of days of contemplation, she’d settled on calling him her “little monkey” rather than “knight.” He just wasn’t worthy of that kind of title, and even “pawn” would have been exaggerating. At this point, most of what he did was grunt inarticulately—and never mind that she had a rag tied all the way around his head—and occasionally jerk around in a vain attempt to free himself. She supposed it wasn’t his fault that his capabilities were limited right now, being as he was thoroughly tied to a chair in the bathtub and the gag made it possible only for him to take in liquids. Still, somehow she had expected better, humans being so prized and everything by God Himself. She certainly wasn’t seeing anything notable here.

He had perked up after she’d stuck him and his chair in the tub and given him a good cold shower. The day before yesterday, she’d gone to the corner store, a dark little Mexican place that smelled of bad meat and pine cleaner, and come back with a couple of chicken tamales. By the time she’d gotten back, his teeth had been chattering and his toes were almost blue. This was in the ninety-degree heat in the apartment—Jashire had forgotten just how cold the tap water, supplied by the chilly waters of Lake Michigan, could be. Hey, at least she’d given him a drink, and he hadn’t complained when she’d shut off the water, yanked off his gag, and impatiently stuffed big bites of tamale into his mouth.

If she’d had a heart for it, she might’ve felt a little sympathy for this cold, hungry human she’d snaed up and held captive for the past ten or eleven days. Compassion, however, was not one of her qualities—she had no such thing, period. At least not for the humans. Someone else might point out the red lines of blood poisoning that had spread upward from the stump of his missing finger and note that he was barely breathing; Jashire thought that if points were being counted, she’d get a big bonus for not just killing him outright. After all, he wasn’t a nephilim or an angel, or even a demon. He wasn’t special at all. He was just kind of a . . . talking monkey. And he wasn’t even very good at the talking part.

As she sat there staring at him, she saw his eyes open just a bit. “Oh, excellent!” she said, delighted. “I wanted to talk to you, and here you are, acting like such a good little boy.” She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees so that she could look at him more closely. “I want to tell you all about what happened at lunch today. And then I want to describe to you how it ended, in detail.

“With a kiss.”

“
B
ird,” Danielle said. She
pointed to the pigeon on the other side of the Clark Street Bridge railing. “Over there.”

“That’s nice,” Miss Anthony said, but she didn’t look in Danielle’s direction. She was too busy rounding up the kids, five of them—Danielle could count that many because that’s how many fingers she had on one hand—before they could be bad and run off down the sidewalk. “You’re supposed to be helping me with the children, Danielle,” Miss Anthony called. “It’s a workday and that’s why I brought you along.”

“Okay,” Danielle said, but she made no move to go and do anything. She didn’t like working, and she didn’t particularly like Miss Anthony, who, Danielle thought, bullied her too much because she’d had more birthdays than the other kids and was bigger. That wasn’t her fault, and even though it wasn’t a pretty day like yesterday—it was too cold—she could still think of a whole lot of things she’d rather be doing than working. Like eating ice cream, or playing with a doll—

“Danielle,” Miss Anthony said again, more sharply this time. “If you don’t get over here, I won’t bring you out on field trips anymore.”

—or trying to catch that bird.

“Okay,” Danielle said again. “I’m coming.”

It sounded like Miss Anthony was getting mad but Danielle didn’t care. Miss Anthony got mad all the time but she never did much about it; there might be a lot that Danielle didn’t understand, but she
did
know that Miss Anthony couldn’t hit her, not like her dad sometimes did when she threw a tantrum. Danielle didn’t do that so much anymore at school although lots of times she wanted to because Miss Anthony wouldn’t give her stuff. Miss Anthony said that Danielle was supposed to act like a grown-up and be a good example to the other kids, but Danielle didn’t actually want to do that. Miss Anthony and her mom and dad said she was older than she had fingers enough to count, but Danielle knew that wasn’t possible. That made the three of them liars, and that was
not
a good thing. She knew this because they’d all told her that lying wasn’t good, and yet here they were, doing exactly that.

One of the smaller kids—Danielle couldn’t remember his name even though it seemed like he had been in the class with her for a really long time—tried to run away, shrieking about a bee trying to sting him. Miss Anthony forgot about Danielle as she chased after the boy, shooting furtive glances over her shoulder at the other four kids to make sure they were staying where they were supposed to. Danielle was the biggest (and supposedly the oldest), so she should probably go back and stand there or something, but again, she didn’t want to. They were brats and they made a lot of noise, and sometimes, like she used to do when she was their size, they hit and kicked and bit. The last time one of them had kicked her, she had kicked back. That night at home Daddy had said he didn’t care how big she was, and he had spanked her really hard. Mom had cried but had drunk her beer and let him do it, so Danielle figured he was supposed to. She wasn’t so stupid she didn’t understand that if she hurt someone smaller than her, someone bigger than her would hurt
her
.

“Bird,” she said again, but of course Miss Anthony was way out of earshot, and so were the other kids. They were standing around, looking up at all the tall buildings and not doing much of anything else. One boy was picking his nose. Danielle was glad she wasn’t like them anymore. She was bigger and smarter, and if she wanted to go get that bird—she thought it was called a pigeon—then she could. It was just sitting there and looking at her, with its feathers all ruffled up as it cocked its head from side to side.

The metal railing came up to the middle of her rib cage, but that was no big deal. She’d always liked to climb, even though she fell a lot. Everyone—her mother, the doctors and teachers—said she didn’t have good coordination because she had something called “FAS,” but she didn’t know what that meant and she didn’t care. Sometimes she got hurt when she fell (once she even broke her arm), but she didn’t care about that, either. If she wanted to climb on something, or over it, she was going to do it and that was that.

There were metal bars going up and down beneath the railing that made it kind of hard because her shoes kept slipping back down to the concrete. Having to try over and over again made her mad but she kept trying, being what Daddy called “too stupid and stubborn to stop.” She didn’t know what that meant, but he always laughed at her when he said it. Eventually Danielle just hooked her arms around the railing, swung one leg back and forth to get some momentum going, and hurled her lower body up as hard as she could.

Got it! One leg, the knee bruised from banging against the bars, managed to come up high enough so that her foot hooked over the railing. She hung there awkwardly, but she wasn’t about to let go and fall, not after all this effort. She heard Miss Anthony shout something, but the teacher had chased that boy almost to the end of the bridge before catching him, and she was too far away to stop Danielle from doing anything.

It was hard but Danielle dragged herself up—everyone was always saying she was really strong. She wobbled on the railing for just a second like her body was deciding which way it would go, so she leaned the other way until she half fell on the other side. It wasn’t a good landing—she was off balance and there wasn’t much of a ledge to stand on—but she still managed to hang on to the top part of the metal with one hand. Miss Anthony was shouting a lot now, and so were some other people, but she didn’t know who they were. One was some guy running down the bridge’s sidewalk toward her. He was a lot closer than Miss Anthony, who was kind of big and couldn’t run very fast anyway, but Danielle had been taught not to listen to or talk to strangers so she didn’t pay any attention to him.

The bird made a sort of cooing sound at her, and that made Danielle realize it was waiting for her. She didn’t like dogs or cats, but she was good with birds. Always before the birds had been smaller and in cages, like the green one her grandmother had, but Danielle didn’t think it made much of a difference either way. This one was big and kind of dirty gray with spots, but maybe it just needed a bath. When she caught it, she would take it home and give it one.

The man on the bridge was almost to her, and now she could hear him shouting, “Stay there! Don’t move!” Danielle wasn’t sure but he was probably someone Miss Anthony knew, and the teacher had sent him down here to get her. That was great, but it wasn’t going to happen before she got her bird.

Still holding on with one hand, she leaned over and tried to grab at it, but she wasn’t close enough. It didn’t move, so it must be tame and it was just waiting for her. Down below was greenish-brown water—the river—and there wasn’t much room for her feet, which she had to kind of shove between the concrete and the bottom of the fencing along the side of the bridge. She was a little dizzy from being so high above the river, but she wasn’t scared because she was a really good swimmer. Once she’d even swum all the way across the kiddie pool at the school by herself.

The bird cooed at her again, a sure sign it was friendly. Danielle turned her head and saw the man on the sidewalk was almost upon her, just a short distance away. He yelled something at her but she wasn’t listening, and when he lunged forward and tried to seize her hand, she did a quick sideways shuffle to take herself out of range. She was almost there, so she leaned over and grabbed at the pigeon, then jerked backward in surprise when the idiot thing pecked at her.

“Damned bird,” she said. It wasn’t the first time she’d cursed, especially using this particular word. She’d heard Daddy say it many times, and even Mom, although that was usually after she’d had her customary six-pack every night. If the pigeon was going to peck at her, she didn’t want it, and she would let it know that, too, before she climbed back onto the sidewalk.

Still holding on with her left hand, Danielle bent at the waist and swiped at the mean pigeon, intending to give it back what it had given her. Bad idea—instead of just taking off, the bird flew straight up, right into her
face
. She let go of the railing and flailed at it angrily as it blocked her eyesight. Something scraped at her wrist and she registered the feeling of feathers and claws against her cheeks, and then it was gone.

And so was her grip, her tenuous position on the narrow strip of concrete, and everything solid below her feet.

Suddenly the murky green water below her didn’t seem so far away after all.

HE
MISSED
.

He couldn’t believe it, and for a stunned second, Casey froze, staring at his empty fingers and the vacant spot where the dark-haired young woman had been only a moment before. The older woman who’d been running toward them started screaming and there were shouts from other people from both directions on the bridge, someone bellowing about a life preserver. A memory of something Gina said at lunch flashed through his mind—

“You can swim, right?”

—and he vaulted over the railing without thinking about it twice.

It was the longest twenty feet in his life—not that he’d ever previously jumped off anything this high—and the fall seemed like it took forever. The woman had gone under and he couldn’t see her, although the surface of the water was churning madly. Was she trying to come back up? Could she swim? The way she’d been acting made him think she was mentally handicapped or something—