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Authors: Tom Piccirilli

Nightjack (9 page)

BOOK: Nightjack
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“Go inside and order enough for everybody,” Pace told her. “We’ll eat out here.”

She did as he said, wandering into the neon glare in a kind of puzzled daze. He wondered why none of the other psychiatrists at the hospital had seen how close to cracking she actually was.

She returned with the food and Pia squealed with delight and everyone ate in silence, the car growing more and more crowded by the second until Pace had to lean his head out the window to breathe. There were kids in the backseat singing and playing with their french fries, old men having a tough time eating the hamburger because of their poorly-fitted dentures.

Pace ate little and finished quickly, the way Jack used to do on stakeout in Brooklyn keeping an eye on the Ganooch and his people. No liquids so you didn’t have to take a piss break. He waited and watched while the others finished their food.

It took seventy minutes before Kaltzas’s men arrived. Pace saw the white Jaguar slowly turn into the rest stop. It wasn’t exactly the most inconspicuous car, but Kaltzas seemed willing to trade guile for grandeur. Perhaps impression meant everything. The Jag circled the area and spotted the Chevy almost immediately. They parked in a far-off corner, engine humming. The windows were tinted black.

“You all stay here,” Pace said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“You can’t, Will.” Dr. Brandt touched him on the chest, smoothing her hand across him in a lover’s intimate gesture. His scars began to heat. What had he done with this woman?

“Hold on,” Faust said. “It might be Kaltzas himself. There might be several armed men in that car. Do you want help?”

“No,” Pace said, his fear and hatred taking on a thousand forms within him. “I’ve got plenty.”

 

eight

 

Sometimes you just stepped right up.

Pace walked across the parking lot and knocked on the driver’s window of the Jag. He backed off a couple of feet and stood there with his arms crossed over his chest.

Mist rose up from the lowland grass edging the rest stop. The storm would be blowing in from the west soon. It wanted him. He could feel the desire on the wind. He could taste salt on his lips and caught a flash of Jane again. The two of them stepping across the sand, somewhere out here on the east end, down at one of the private beaches. She’d take a mouthful of wine and kiss him, passing the wine to him. He hated the taste but remembered laughing.

The engine of the Jag hummed quietly.

Maybe this cat had all day to sit around playing games, but Pace felt the need to get on with it. He cocked his head and raised his eyebrows, held his hands open in a gesture of geniality. He got in close and tapped his fingers on the hood.

Still nothing happened.

You could take a lot, but you really hated when they fucking ignored you.

“Okay,” he said, smiling, and came around the front of the car.

Pace took out the small screwdriver and touched it to the center of the driver’s window. He hardly had to apply any pressure at all before the glass shattered.

The door opened.

Out came one hell of an ugly bastard. Short bowed legs, thick stubby arms, wild tangle of beard, and a barrel chest. Coarse black hair twisted across his huge head that protruded like a chunk of rock breaking from the shallows. He had a large nose with permanently flared nostrils, giving him a brutish, bullish appearance. The Minotaur.

He gave off an artificial milieu of refinement. It was something he’d worked at for a long time but still didn’t come naturally to him. He moved slowly, the way wealthy snobs often did, as if they refused to lower themselves to the same constraints as the rest of the world. He looked like someone who might spend the day listening to Brahms, visiting art galleries, dining on quails’ eggs before kicking in the door of a retirement home and strangling an old lady in her bed.

The Minotaur, coming at you.

Wearing a three thousand-dollar suit and a huge diamond stickpin that caught a flare of headlights and sent a rainbow pinwheeling into darkness. He brushed shards of glass from his wide shoulders and shook it from his hair.

“It’s a neat trick,” Pace said. “Most people don’t realize how easily safety glass breaks. It’s designed that way in case a car ever goes off a pier and sinks underwater. There’s no way to open the door or roll down the window then, because of the water pressure, so you just tap the glass with a screwdriver or nail file and it gives way.”

“I shall remember,” the bull said with a slight Greek accent, “if I ever drive off a pier.”

“You’re Vindi?”

“You do not recall?” The voice had a certain heavy resonance with the hint of a growl, a touch of implied menace.

“We’ve met before?”

“Yes, several times. We were quite friendly. On that ward, in the institution.”

“You were there?”

“Visiting.” Vindi shoved his huge nose forward and peered into Pace’s eyes. His beard drifted in the breeze. “I see you have not been taking your medication. You seem as ill now as when we last met. You do not react well to treatment.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know everything about you, Mr. Pacella.”

Inside him, a few different people were yelling and trying to grab his attention, but they drowned each other out. Maybe Pacella was still around despite Jack’s best efforts to kill him. The schoolteacher hiding somewhere deep, grading papers, preparing exam questions. Reading Renaissance poetry, maybe drinking cocoa. The fucker actually used to drink cocoa. Jane bringing it to him on a tray, with a dish of almond cookies. She wanted to kiss him with a mouth full of wine and he wanted to sit there and drink frickin’ hot chocolate. He’d hold the cookie with just the tips of two fingers, so afraid to get stains on his books. Seated in front of a small fireplace in a leather chair that cost him half a year’s salary, in a room covered with dark cherry paneling because it made him think of England, a place he’d never been. Learning how to smoke a pipe but never really enjoying it, as he paged through Browning, Keats, Burns. Sipping the cocoa, wiping those two fingers on a silk napkin.

It was no wonder the guy had to go.

Pace shifted the handle of the screwdriver in his fist, holding it the way he would grip the handle of a blade. All these wise guys packed big guns loaded with hollow-tipped and mercury-filled hotshot shells that exploded on impact and chopped a guy up to pieces inside. The bodyguards carrying oily paper bags full of zeppoles, cannolli, and Napoleons for their bosses. You never drop the zeppoles. Trying to juggle the bags and get their guns out at the same time. They liked to show off their .45’s and .357 Magnums with barrels so long it took like eight seconds to draw them fully out of their holsters.

Jack could have a liver on a plate in eight seconds. By the time the goombas got their weapons free they had five inches of stainless steel in the throat or between the ribs. The Ganooch boys too stupid to know they were dead, still holding the zeppoles while a river of red froth sluiced across the floor.

“You know everything about me?” Pace repeated. “Good. Then you’re the one I want to talk to. I’m a little mixed up on some things, and my psychiatrist isn’t helping. She’s got her own problems.”

“Yes, she is ineffectual. And deeply repressed.”

“Okay, so give me the details.”

It tickled the Minotaur so much that he let out a snort. Vindi displayed an uneven row of thick, yellow teeth. All this effort to affect elegance and style, yet the guy wouldn’t get his teeth capped or trim the beard. He was totally gratified that he could get away with being so repulsive.

“I’m serious,” Pace said.

“Oh, I know you are. That has always been your most dire ailment. How uncompromising and Spartan you are. It is ultimately what led to your initial mental collapse. The first breakdown, and all those that followed.”

“Stop with the compliments.”

Vindi’s eyes took in everything. He was aware of the screwdriver in Pace’s fist, and kept himself just out of range. His arms were loose at his sides, huge hands slightly raised so he could block or attack as needed. The bull neck bulged with corded muscle. He wouldn’t be easy.

“So let me hear it.”

“You are William Pacella,” Vindi said. “Former high school English teacher. Schizophrenic with dissociative identity disorder, better known in most circles as multiple-personality disorder. You went mad when your wife died in a restaurant fire.”

Pace couldn’t get his mouth wrapped around the name of the place though. He tried a couple of times and couldn’t quite get it. He said, “Emily’s? Emeel’s?”


Emilio’s
, yes. Named after the owner, Emilio Cavallo.”

“Cavallo,” Pace said, nodding. “Yeah.”

“The local syndicate, run by Joseph Ganucci, also known as ‘the Ganooch,’”—he had to stop and grin—“these Italians and their ludicrous nomenclature.”

“Get on with it.”

“Ganucci’s crew had apparently been trying to drive Cavallo out of business. Your wife, Jane, the restaurant manager, was caught in the blaze along with three other employees, one of whom you saved. You had a psychotic break and hunted down several of the mobsters responsible, known collectively as the Ganucci Family. In the guise of an alternate persona called Nightjack, you killed each of them with either a knife or your bare hands. This is rather common knowledge although the police agencies never acquired enough formal evidence against you. Your alternate identities confused them greatly. After you finally dispatched Joseph Ganucci, you voluntarily admitted yourself into the Garden Falls Psychiatric Facility. You were eventually state committed after you carried out acts of violence in the hospital. Today you were released.”

So there it was, laid out front to back in a few simple sentences. Pace gritted his teeth and gave a rictus grin, thinking about Jane in flames. Now he understood why it was so clear in his mind. Pacella had been there, in the restaurant, and had watched her die. Why hadn’t he been able to save her?

“That sounds about right,” he whispered.

“Would you like to hear more?” Vindi asked. “There is a good deal more to cover.”

“No,” Pace told him. You didn’t go willingly to your reckoning, you let it come to you, inch by inch. “Not right now.”

“As you wish.”

“You’re quite amenable.”

The great shoulders shrugging, the mouth shifting into a brief, curious smile. “We were once friends.”

“You and me? So what happened?”

“I cannot discuss that with you at this time.”

“Why not?”

“It would not be in your best interest, I think. Nor that of my employer.”

A family walked past them in the lot. Man and wife, five-year-old daughter holding a melting ice cream cone. The three of them tired from a long drive and moving slowly. The father perceived the situation and drew his wife and kid close, skirting away trying to get to his minivan that the Jag had almost blocked in. Pace watched them, knowing there were a half-dozen men inside him who could relate to the father, a group of children who wanted to go play with the little girl.

The guy pulled his minivan out and barely missed clipping the Jag’s rear quarter panel. He kept his face down and refused to look over as he gunned it out of the lot and hit the highway, heading for one of the beach motels.

“It was stupid to send Rollo Carpie after me,” Pace said.

Vindi seemed almost embarrassed. “He was no real threat to you. It was meant to gain your attention, nothing more.”

“You’ve got it.”

“Yes.”

The need to do something was building up, thrashing within him, a black ocean filled with drowning people. All of them reaching up, asking to be saved. How many of them could take Vindi? How many could get him alive, and how many would need to kill him? The hinges of Pace’s jaw began to throb. The kids in his head shouted for ice cream.

“But you could’ve just sent a fruit basket, you know.”

“My employer wishes to see you. And your associates. The others from the
asylum
.” Saying the word with a certain amount of veneration. Not as insane asylum, but as sanctuary.

“Say his name, damn it.”

But Vindi wouldn’t, as if afraid that saying the man’s name would somehow invoke him, awaken the ancient gods.

Images without context filled Pace’s mind. He saw a large silhouetted figure standing before a bright window, a flash of polished marble. Grim eyes ignited with undivided purpose. The kids stopped asking for ice cream and started crying, running for the corners. The dizzying stink of blood filled Pace’s head, and he felt a tiny burst of pain in his throat—a love bite where teeth nipped him. The tactile presence of a hand on his chest pressed him back one step, then another.

“Where is Cassandra?” he asked.

“It is quite fascinating that you have suppressed so much,” Vindi said. “How fearful you are of yourself. It saddens me greatly to see you in this state.”

“I’ll bear up.”

“Yes, but for how long? You have trials still ahead of you.”

“Everyone does.”

BOOK: Nightjack
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