Greenmantle (32 page)

“Hey, what about Howie?” Lisa asked as she followed Sherry.

“Fuck him.”

“I thought
you
were going to.”

Sherry didn’t bother to answer as she opened the door and got in. Bannon waited until Lisa was inside as well and the engine had turned over before he took Frankie’s arm. The car’s head beams stabbed the darkness, lighting up Frankie’s car and the side of the house near the lane.

“C’mon,” Bannon said.

He led her down the steps and started for the back of the house, waving to Sherry and Lisa as their car backed out of the lane. They were plunged into darkness when the car headed down the road, but Bannon knew where he was going. He’d been this way in the daylight already and he had an eye for detail. He’d automatically filed a picture of the area away in his head, so he had no trouble leading Frankie across the backyard to the road that would take them up to Valenti’s.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Frankie said as they neared the road. Her voice was quiet, almost natural, but Bannon could hear the tension in it. It sounded huskier than usual, too. “I thought Earl was bad enough, but this…”

“Everything’s going to work out,” he replied. “You’ll see.” But he wasn’t looking forward to telling her about Ali’s disappearance.

“God, I hope so. Because right now…” She turned to look at him, but the darkness hid his features. “It’s like winning all that money included a one-way ticket into a soap opera. Thank God Ali was staying with you and Tony. If she’d been at home by herself… That guy was just waiting for me in the driveway, Tom. And he was crazy. He started off telling me he wanted his dog back—as though I’d stolen it or something—and then he just… Then he just jumped me.” Bannon felt her shudder. “And there was nothing I could do. Nothing! He was so strong…”

“He’s dead meat if he shows his face around here again.”

“Are you…?” She hesitated. “This business that Tony used to be in—are you a part of it, too?”

“What kind of business is that?”

“Some kind of study group on the mob.”

“Tony told you that?”

“No, Ali did.”

Bannon nodded to himself. Smart kid. “You could say so, though I didn’t have the same connections that Tony did.”

“He’s pretty hard on himself, isn’t he?”

“Who—Tony?”

“I know the look—God knows, I’ve worn it often enough myself. There’s things he’s done that he’s not too proud of now. That’s how I felt when I first realized what I’d gotten myself into with Earl.”

“What do you mean?” Bannon asked, happy to keep the conversation going in the direction it was. If it kept her mind off what had happened tonight, if it helped to distance her a little bit from the immediacy of it, it could only help.

“I found out he was dealing drugs,” Frankie said. “Not just a little bit of weed like everybody was into smoking back in those days, but hard stuff. I thought he was cleaning offices at night—can you believe it? Talk about innocence. Instead, he was setting up these parties where they’d turn on kids who were twelve or thirteen—Ali’s age—selling dope, selling sex…”

“But you weren’t a part of it.”

“No. I thought I was pretty together, but I found out I didn’t know a thing.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Why do I feel so bad about it?” she said before he could ask. “How about the fact that everybody knew it was going on but me. People I thought were my friends—I couldn’t figure out why they were all drifting away. It got so I never left the apartment because I didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“Still,” Bannon said, “that’s all in the past now.”

Frankie shook her head. “It doesn’t feel like that—not with Earl being back.”

“You don’t have to worry about Earl,” Bannon said. “He’s going to be taken care of.”

“Maybe—but not by you, blondie.”

Bannon and Frankie froze at the new voice. Bannon started to reach into his pocket, but the barrel of a gun was thrust roughly against his back. Jesus, he thought. How goddamn stupid could you get? He should have realized when Sherry told him who Howie was that Howie wouldn’t just take off.

The lights of Valenti’s house could be seen in the distance, but they could just as well have been on the other side of the world for all the good they were going to do. A hand went into his jacket pocket and came out with his automatic.

“Well, look at this,” Howie said. “What a pretty little gun.”

Bannon felt Frankie trembling beside him. “Tom,” she asked. “What does he want?”

Howie grinned, feeling strong. “Maybe I just want you, babe.”

The words were just too close to those of the man who’d attacked her earlier this evening. The tension that had been slowly draining from her caught her with a snap. Her chest felt so tight she couldn’t breathe. She smelled the other man’s stale breath again. Felt his hands on her. Heard his voice.

Want you
…
want you
…

Tearing free of Bannon’s arm, she bolted.

“No!” Bannon cried and turned, striking at the gun.

The .38 bucked in Howie’s hand. Its discharge sounded like an explosion as it went off. Shrill against the echoes of the gunshot, Frankie screamed.

16

Riding the stag.

It was the most glorious thing that Ali had ever experienced…and the most frightening. The wind rushed by her ears, making a sound like music; hooves drummed its rhythm. She could feel the stag’s powerful muscles moving under her legs. Mally held on to her, laughing, while she clung to the stag’s neck, wanting to laugh, but wanting to cry as well.

There had been that moment of shock when Mally threw her up onto the creature’s back, the look on Tony and Tom’s faces as the stag pranced in front of them, and then it was off and running and the shock gave way to wonder. The stag moved in long graceful leaps and bounds, never jarring them when it landed, never throwing them from its back when its powerful leg muscles bunched and then lifted them all into the air again.

The old stone was gone, Tommy’s pipes and the dancing villagers with it. The night seemed to belong only to the three of them, and that was when the shock wore off and Ali’s fears rose front and center in her mind. She was alone in the night with some mythic creature and a wild girl. Abducted. And she—

For the first time she realized that they’d been running for too far and too long without crossing a highway or seeing the lights of a cabin or a house. The trees they were moving through seemed different from those of the forest behind Tony’s house. The pines were almost like redwoods, impossibly tall. Between each pine stand was a wild jumbled bush land of cedar, oak, maple, birch and elm. The air had grown colder. If Ali turned her head, she could see her breath frosting in the air.

She looked up as they went speeding through a clearing. A swollen moon hung low in the sky. The stars seemed too close—the sky too dark, the stars too bright. She had only a moment for this to register before they were in the forest again.

The ground was no longer on an even keel. The stag took them up a gradual incline that was spotted with the stone fists and gnarly knees of stone outcrops. The sound of the stag’s hooves was louder, as though the ground had become the resonating skin of a huge earthen drum. Where were they? Ali wanted to ask someone, but there was no one to hear her. Mally was still laughing and shouting something that was either in a foreign language or made up of nonsense words, for it didn’t make any sense. And how did you talk to a stag? She leaned closer against its neck.

“Stop!” she cried. She tried to make her voice as loud as she could so that it would ring above the sound of the stag’s hooves and the noise Mally was making, but all that came out was a soft whisper. “Please stop.”

The stag turned its head slightly and Ali stared into one large liquid eye before her mount looked ahead once more.

“I’m scared,” she said.

She knew this wasn’t Lanark County. She didn’t know where it was, but it wasn’t any place she knew of. They didn’t have trees this big anywhere in the Ottawa Valley. They didn’t have this kind of a forest. It was too…primal. This wasn’t a place for mankind—or for girls, either, she thought. It was a wild place.

The ground inclined sharply now and suddenly they burst out of the forest. The stag’s hooves clattered on rock, but it never slowed its pace. The huge moon was very close now, like the stars. This wasn’t the night sky she knew, Ali thought. Oh, jeez. What was happening to her?

As they continued to climb at a breakneck pace, she could see the countryside for miles around. There were no lights, no sign of houses or people anywhere. Just that big moon shining down, the stars hanging so low she felt she could reach out and catch them, and the dark forests stretching out as far as she could see, off into invisible horizons that were swallowed by the night.

She couldn’t look anymore. Instead, she burrowed her face against the neck of the stag. The clattering of its hooves and Mally’s wild singing combined with the pounding of her heart until she got so dizzy she knew that any moment now she was going to fall off the stag’s back. She was going to fall and smash her head open on those rocks. She’d roll and bump and spin all the way back down the steep incline that the stag had so effortlessly climbed. But then the stag slowed and Mally suddenly broke off her singing.

Ali opened her eyes to see that they were approaching a summit. Her teeth chattered from the cold and the stag’s breath billowed around her like clouds. She was thankful now for the warmth of it on one side, Mally behind her. The stag slowed to a walk. There were shapes outlined against the sky before them. Ali thought of pictures she’d seen in travelogues of Ireland and Britain, and then they were in among the stone formations and the stag came to a halt. Mally slid down from its back and landed sure-footed on the ground.

“Come on, then!” she called to Ali.

Ali just stared around herself. The formations of the stones were like some primal Stonehenge—not raised by men, but by some freak of nature. Or by the gods. Is
that
what the gods are? she wondered. Are they what’s responsible for all the oddities and impossibilities to be found in nature? Maybe those things were their signatures. The stones towered three times Ali’s height—and she was still sitting on the stag. The big moon appeared to be impaled on their peaks.

“Ali, Ali, in free!” Mally sang.

Ali turned to look down at the wild girl. Mally had lost her hat and her hair was a bewildering thicket that stuck up every-which-way all around her head. She was hopping about from foot to foot, dancing to her own inner music, and for a moment the chorus from Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” ran through Ali’s head.

Mally held up her arms to Ali. Praying to whatever god who would listen that she wouldn’t fall and crack her head on the stones, Ali slid down from the stag’s back. Mally caught her.

The stag immediately paced away from them. It stood between two tall rock formations and stared eastward, its antlers like the bare limbs of a tree thrusting up into the night sky. Ali moved carefully to see what it was looking at, her legs feeling a little rubbery. Before she reached the stones, Mally bounded ahead of her. The wild girl scrambled carelessly right up to what Ali discovered was a sheer drop of hundreds of feet when she finally stood beside her.

“What a night,” Mally murmured. “What a magic night!”

Ali shivered. Her breath was wreathing around her face, and while she was wearing jeans and a windbreaker, they weren’t enough for the chill that the night air held.

“Here,” Mally said, offering her own jacket.

“But you—”

“Can run naked in a snowstorm and not be cold. Don’t you know me yet?”

Ali shook her head. “A secret,” she muttered under her breath. But she took the proffered jacket and did feel warmer with it on. “What are we doing here, Mally? Where
is
here?”

The wild girl shrugged. “Don’t really know.”

“But we must be somewhere.”

“Maybe we’re inside the old stone,” Mally said with a grin. “I really don’t know, Ali. This is a place that Old Hornie comes to when he wants to be close to what he used to be a part of.”

“I want to go back,” Ali said.

Mally turned slowly and studied her face. “Truly?” she asked.

“Well…” Her mother’s face reared in Ali’s mind. Frankie would be worried sick when she found out. And Tony, too. And she was scared anyway, though not so much, maybe, now that the wild ride was over. Did she really want to go back? Because this was it. This was her big chance—her big adventure. This was what she’d always wished would happen to her. Going through the wardrobe into Narnia. Down a rabbit hole.
Doing
something, like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. She’d devoured tales of adventures and the fantastic, from Joy Chant to Caitlin Midhir, and had always longed to be the kid that that kind of thing happened to. To hold the Weirdstone of Brisingamen like Alan Garner’s Susan…

“Can…
can
we go back?”

“Go back?” Mally laughed. “It’s easy to go back. The getting here’s the hard thing. I can only come when I ride the stag and then I always mean to stay forever, or at least a week, but I’m always drawn back. To my own forests, I suppose, thin as they are. Or maybe it’s Tommy’s piping…”