Nightjack (6 page)

Even imaginary friends could be a little insulting. “Is that what I’m doing? Feigning madness?”

“He eventually complied and, the greatest of all heroes, was cast out upon the ocean. He spent decades on the water with his men, hurled away from Troy by typhoons. I did what I could to help, but my magic failed. It wasn’t possible to alter the thread of his destiny. I fear I cannot amend yours.”

“Odysseus wouldn’t show proper deference to Poseidon,” Pace said. “That’s why the gods wouldn’t let him return home. I have no home to go back to.”

“You would if you set aside your blood oath.”

“If I could set it aside, it wouldn’t be a blood oath.”

Eirrin leaned in closer, and he saw himself reflected in the black, prehistoric eyes. “Your vengeance has already been fulfilled.”

“Not entirely, Princess.”

Crumble barked and licked Pace’s face happily. He petted the dog and said, “Good boy, that’s a boy.” He knew what was really happening—that Hayden was on the bed with his tongue hanging out, grunting and slobbering. But Pace patted the dog’s head and felt only fur, the wet cold nose, the fleshy pug wrinkles.

That was his talent, the real genius of his madness. He not only saw the other alternates, he could interact with them. They were as real to him as anyone else in the world.

The door opened again.

Daedalus, with his wings folded, entered. The father who knew not to fly too close to the sun when wearing wax. What your humanities teacher would call a “masculine solar deity” even though Daedalus wasn’t a god. Just a poor architect in ancient Greece trying to pay homage to his mad king who saw treason in every act of grandeur.

He said nothing, only wept for his dead son smashed into the sea. The leather straps crossing his muscular chest creaked as he came closer to the bed, the tears running into his knotted beard. The lost father was an alternate of Faust’s.

The three of them ringing Pace on the mattress.

This hallowed ceremony meant solely for lunatics, shared only by the damned.

~ * ~

Dr. Maureen Brandt sat on the couch smoking a cigarette. Pace stepped into the small living room and the three faceless figures followed. He sat in the leather chair. She glanced at him once with shamed eyes.

“I’m sorry, Will.”

“Don’t be.

“You’re my patient. Your health and well-being are paramount to me. At least they should be.”

“You just got tangled up with us. You can’t straighten out our kind of sick.”

“With your meds you’ll be—”

“They just hold back the storm for a while. But they can’t stop it.”

A voice from above said, “Do you remember us?”

Pace looked up.

Stuck to the ceiling were three faces staring down at him.

Pia, only twenty, a pale blue-eyed next-door cutie-pie. You took one look at her and you wanted her to care for your fevers when the rains came, cuddle with you under an afghan while the snow piled high against the windows. Elfin, that might be the right word, and she tugged at every heart. Lower lip cocked in a half-grin. Like she knew something you didn’t, and she was never going to tell you.

Hayden, always with that expression you just wanted to smack. Sharp nose, chin, and lips, the thrust of thinning black hair knifing down to a widow’s peak, everything on the man like a razor, especially his teeth. Only the eyes were misleading, set about a half-inch too far apart. It was understandable why the doctors thought he might be mentally impaired. He was, just not the way they thought.

Faust with the blazing glare of a holy man who wills himself to see God everywhere. Like somebody who’d gone into the desert and eaten honeyed locusts for forty nights, meeting strangers on empty roads, seeing through lies to the heart of every matter. His blue-black beard was flecked with silver. The thick, raised scar on his forehead stood out like a badge of honor. He’d never told anyone how he got it, but the injury brought on temporal lobe epilepsy.

The faces dislodged from the ceiling and gently floated down as if on a breeze, rocking, swirling. Pace kept staring and wondered, If one lands on me, will I become somebody else? Would they possess me even more than they already do now?

“What is it, Will?” Dr. Brandt asked. “What do you see?”

“A hell of a show.”

The three faces swept against each other in a ballet of form and ritual. Mischievously they settled on the wrong bodies momentarily before peeling off, twisting in mid-air, and settling squarely onto the proper heads of the three shadowy figures. They affixed themselves there.

And with those features fastened in place now Pace felt himself returning from the faraway place he’d been.

The sense of unbearable speed and insane distances was incredible. He had to tighten his grip on the arms of the chair and champ his teeth on his tongue to keep from crying out. A rush of disjointed memories flooded back into his head.

Dr. Brandt took a long draw on her cigarette and blew smoke toward the floor. She used to do the same thing when she ate lunch by herself, seated on the canopied patio outside the ward, looking lovely and a little pitiful.

Pace looked and saw the cigarette pack in her purse, alongside a paperback copy of
Psychoneurotic Disorders—The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma
.

He said, “Got another?”

“No, this is the last one.”

It was more than a white lie. She was testing him, pushing to see which him was going to respond. Like so many other minor temptations, this one had become a dare. No matter how many hoops you jumped through, there were always more to go.

Something happened so fast then that no one saw anything but a smear of motion. The cigarette was gone from her lips and Pace had it between his own.

Faust walked forward but stopped out of arm’s reach. ”Our father who art incessant.”

Pia stepped up and kneeled at the side of the chair, pressed her cheek to his thigh. She let out a wracked sob.

“So,” Hayden said. “You’re back.”

“Most of me,” Pace told him. “There’s still a lot absent.”

“We’ve missed you, Will.”

“I’m not Will.”

The cigarette tasted magnificent. It was the first one he’d had in years. He looked at the fiery tip and thought of Jane again, screaming as flames swarmed and swept over her. He nodded. He’d returned from purgatory, right back into hell.

Kaltzas would be watching and now he would know. His men would have had the hospital staked out. They’d have followed behind the Chevy. They’d have parked on the street with high-powered binoculars. That’s what the agents of a furious shipping tycoon would do. You weren’t going to hide from a magnate with a mad-on, not even in Alphabet City. Now they’d be in the building. Up the steps. Pace heard footsteps in the hallway.

He jumped out of the chair, pressed Maureen Brandt aside and yanked Pia behind him. He had time enough to say, “Down!” before a shotgun went off and the front door exploded.

six

Some of the memories were still there. He knew that the gunner was a kid named Rollo Carpie, a low-level shooter for the no-longer functioning Ganucci syndicate. He’d must’ve gone freelance. Kaltzas was just being insulting now. Telling Pace, You belong to me. Look, you didn’t kill everybody in the organization, there’s more bad boys for you to chase around with your fancy knife with the stacked micarta handle. Telling Pace, I own you.

Rollo stepped in through the smoking wood chips. He looked smooth and a bit smarmy for such second-rate muscle. He had half a bottle of mousse in his short black hair so that it looked like polished sandstone. He could fire his shotgun all day long and a strand wouldn’t flutter.

Pace stood. He didn’t feel rushed at all. The time aphasia struck again, but now it acted in reverse. Everything around him slowed while his thoughts sped up. He plotted the angles and positions and already knew how much force he would need to apply in order to bring Rollo to his knees.

The rage began to take on a familiar shape within him, expanding from the center of his chest and conforming to the contours of his body. Filling and strengthening him. Rollo pumped the shotgun and swung it toward him.

Pace’s mind buzzed and simmered with information as he imagined a carefully choreographed waltz of murder. Icy sweat crawled across the landscape of his scars. Somebody inside him started to cry, and someone else laughed.

Funny to see Rollo again after all this time, dressed down in jeans and a leather coat. None of the Ganooch syndicate’s charm to him anymore. No silk suit or imported Italian shoes. Even with the perfect hair, you could tell he was having trouble with the downturn his life had taken.

Eye contact wasn’t important to most hired muscle. It didn’t have to be when you were using a 12-gauge. Rollo turned in Pace’s direction, holding the shotgun too high because he didn’t want to take the recoil in the gut. Six inches lower and he’d kill everybody in the room. As it was, he was mostly firing toward the ceiling.

Pace covered the distance between them in two steps, grabbing the barrel with his right hand and jerking it hard, yanking Rollo forward.

Being this near to one of the Ganooch boys was like growing closer to his dead wife. A strange, wildly inappropriate warmth filled his groin. He had to squelch the abominable urge to actually hug Rollo Carpie.

Nose to nose, Pace said, “Hello, Rollo. You working on your own now?”

Rollo struggled and gasped, “You know me?”

“I know you.”

“No.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Let go,” Rollo whined, trying to shake Pace free and take the shotgun back. “Hey—” Saying it almost politely, as if it might really happen. Like you tell the guy you’re trying to kill to drop your weapon so you can shoot him with it, and he actually does it.

Pace’s left hand hardly seemed to touch Rollo at all. Even so, the shooter let out a shriek and fell to his knees. Pace whirled the 12-gauge around and whopped Rollo’s forehead with the stock, hard but not hard enough to put him all the way under.

A loud, dull thunk resounded across the room. Rollo fell flat on his face and lay there wheezing, eyes rolling in panic.

“Is he Jack?” Hayden cried, cowering behind the couch.

“No, I don’t think so,” Faust said, stuck somewhere between crouching and rearing. He looked like he was about to start praying against his own better judgment. “Not yet.”

“Thank Christ.”

“Lower your voice.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m understandably nervous, you know!”

“Who’s Jack?” Pace asked.

Pia and Dr. Brandt, together behind the leather chair, neither appearing very alarmed, held their gazes on Pace like they planned on writing all this down later.

He stared at them. “What?”

“Nothing,” Pia said. “Don’t let us stop you. Continue.”

He hauled Rollo to his feet, offended by the hair. He slapped the hair a couple of times and it still didn’t shift at all. He had met the much-debated immovable object and been defeated by it. That hair, it really got on his fucking nerves.

In a daze, Rollo swooned in Pace’s arms so the two of them kind of danced together for a few steps. Reeling, Rollo sagged and made tiny humming noises, sounding like Jane when she and William Pacella went dancing on their first date. It was during a Fourth of July picnic that her whole hometown had come down to the dunes. She’d worn a pleated yellow skirt, and her blonde hair had been like streaming flame in the setting the sun, as they swayed by the shore and the water lapped at their feet.

When he was in Garden Falls he used to dance around with the schizoaffectives this way, remembering his earliest days with Jane. Lost inside their own heads, some of them were much better dancers than Jane ever was. Doing dips and spins, occasionally jitterbugging, hucklebucking, bumping, grinding, hustling, disco ducking, everybody in their bathrobes and slippers.

“Wait, wait,” Rollo said, out of breath. Actually holding his hands out. Like all you had to do was say wait and the guy you were trying to blow away would just stand there. Rollo had a lot of weird ideas on just how much impact his pleading carried. “It’s...it’s you. Isn’t it you?”

“It’s me.”

“You’re the guy who came through a couple of years ago.” Rollo’s eyebrows began squirming all over his forehead. “The psycho.”

“Don’t be rude, Rollo.”

“The one who did them all. The whole top-level Ganucci crew, one after the other.”

“Not all of them.”

“Damn near. The Ganooch, the consigliere, a lot of torpedoes. Hey, hey, I’m not hooked up with them no more!”

“Nobody is.”

Jittery, Rollo started flexing his knees, like he had a nice salsa beat going and wanted to dance some more. “Hey, listen, I didn’t know it was you. I don’t want no trouble—if I’d known, hey—”

The darkness snickered with Pace’s throat, coming from an empty alley full of fog, footsteps echoing along the cobblestones, the whores easing closer. “How much did Kaltzas pay you?”