The Hidden Man (24 page)

When a bully realizes that you are actually prepared to die fighting him, he can be counted on to fill his pants, scream random accusations of unfairness, and vacate the premises. Randall had often claimed, laughing, that half his ability to survive years of walking a rough beat lay in that sole piece of knowledge.

The thought of Shane’s adoptive father flushed enough guilt through him to push away the rest of his fear. The effect was immediate. Anger rushed in to fill the void. He could almost feel himself stepping out of the huddled little body back in that kitchen pantry, facing the attacker today on far better terms.

They were up on the stage by then, the three of them, front and center. Shane did not know that he was smack in the middle of the focal point of the giant bowl-shaped cyclorama on the back wall. But he noticed that he could clearly hear the breathing of both the other men. His own breathing suddenly seemed abnormally loud and clear. It was a sensation he had never experienced before, and it only added to the aura of unreality that hovered over everything.

And then there was the smoke itself. Things were still spiraling out of control. He had to go back to work now, whether Sonny was ready to play or not. “Hey!” he shouted. “Am I the only one who smells smoke in here?”

In response, the bastard stepped directly to him and swung his thick right arm in an overhead hammer blow that exploded against the right side of Shane’s head. He felt something hit him hard on both of his knees, and then vaguely realized that he had just rammed them into the floor in the process of falling. Instinct twisted his torso to the left, away from the direction of impact, just enough so that the left side of his body, shoulder, and arm took most of the force of the fall before his head banged on the ground.

The shock wave blasted through him so hard that he immediately forgot where he was and lost track of his senses. His vision crumbled into flashes of light and shadow. The insistent ringing in his head drowned out everything else, even the well-focused sounds from the cyclorama.

Half-baked orders from his brain caused his muscles to raise his arms in self-defense, strike back with his fists, kick with his feet, and run away, all at the same time. The result was that he lay twitching on the floor, half conscious. A tiny part of him was aware of the sound of hysterical laughter. He was clear enough to realize that his attacker was enjoying Shane’s convulsions and savoring his victory. There was no way to fight back. His brain was caught in a lightning storm and his spasmodic limbs were otherwise engaged.

IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING

THE PACIFIC MAJESTIC THEATRE—SAN FRANCISCO’S FINEST

J.D.
’S FIRST CLEAR CLUE
was the smell of smoke. His second was the sudden and sharp awareness that the smoke was coming up from the floor beneath him. His third was the realization that he and Shane Nightingale were in the midst of a pointless and fully preventable confrontation that he would have already concluded by now, if he had been playing with anything more than half of a deck before this moment.

This moment! What just happened?

Like electrical lights that suddenly flare up to illumination, full awareness returned to James “J.D.” Duncan, Master Mesmerist. It arrived without warning, and it was exactly as Dr. Alzheimer had cautioned him: a sudden reappearance of his full, true, and sterling self. It could not have been more of a shock if he had looked into a mirror and seen his own young face.

He knew, with clear recall of the doctor’s words, tone of voice, facial expressions, and the small gravy stain smeared on the man’s lab coat, that the effect was temporary. It was rare, utterly mysterious, and seemed to have no other purpose than to taunt the victim with all the differences between their normal selves and the impaired imitations of themselves that they had become.

In that brightly shining moment, J.D. saw with complete acuity that this nightmare of a disease had been pulling him deep into its grip for some time. It was only now that he could comprehend the difference. He could not imagine a better gift. He leaped at the chance to drink as deeply as possible of his magically restored ability to perceive and comprehend.

Since there was no way to know how long it would last, he knew that there were actions to be taken, and they had to happen soon. If not, what sort of evil would the bastard have committed by the time J.D. spontaneously got his clarity back again?

If he ever did.

He took a deep breath, making it a point not to reveal that he realized the deranged unfortunate in front of him was his own monstrous creation. J.D. would no longer give even a tiny gesture of affirmation to that destroyer of helpless women. What could his mother have ever done to him, if she caused his madness? And if she had not, how many insufferable and useless nights had she paced the floor over this abomination before he finally ran off and disappeared from her life?

To J.D., his demon seed existed in this world to haunt him for every sin that he had ever committed. So it seemed. And now of course it was clear that the bastard had not ceased shadowing him as he had promised to do, after the last big payment.

The feeling of sickness and insanity that circled around the bastard was powerful. J.D. knew that there must be a trail of bodies leading to this night.

When the bastard had first hunted him down, common sense would have had J.D. hand the lad some cash and send him on his way. But no. He was the all-powerful mesmerist who would fix the damaged orphan with a job and an income. This was going to compensate him for a life of existing on garbage.

In truth, he had plainly seen the rage on that too-familiar face. If he had been honest with himself, he would have realized that so much compacted anger could not go without an explosion. He pretended to stare into space and was glad not to have to look at the ruined hulk speaking to him. He pretended not to hear, not to understand, and waited for this curse of consciousness to deliver him to a workable moment of attack.

He ordered himself to shut up and wait for something to happen. To his genuine surprise, instead of doing that, he noticed himself standing up quite without thinking about it, and he heard his voice declare, “By God, I look at you and pray to be forgiven!”

J.D. was taken aback by his own outburst. Fear shot into him and lodged like a freezing bullet. It lay defrosting inside of him, radiating its icy message—he was not in control. There was no denying it. Even his reclaimed clarity was unable to stop him from shouting things that he had not planned to say.

And yet…his rejuvenated mental powers combined with the youthful speed of his thoughts and allowed him to grasp effortlessly the depth of the troubles to which he had been abandoned by his own less capable self.

After doing nothing more than appearing in J.D.’s life and asking for a handout—the bastard repaid him by using his new job as a cover for murder. They said that his first known victim was “only an alcoholic prostitute,” and for no better reason than that, he had been sentenced to the imminently escapable prison hospital. Nothing good ever came from anything that the bastard put into motion.

Time slowed down another level. J.D. was astounded to realize that he was now thinking so fast and comprehending so powerfully, the others nearly appeared to be standing still.

He glanced over at young Shane Nightingale, who looked as if he might get his legs back if he could just recuperate for a minute. In the same instant, it became clear that J.D. had to take control of the situation and stall the bastard until Shane came around enough to pitch in and help.

He stood up to his full height and turned to face him full on, keeping his chin up so that it would not quiver and betray him. “Do you intend to explain what you are doing?” he demanded. “Explain why you were following me?”

“Boss! Good morning! Nice to see you all shiny-faced! Are you surprised to see me?”

“Frankly, yes. If you are alive, it almost certainly means that others are not, because of you.”

J.D.’s bastard son leaped onto Shane Nightingale while he was still down, slipped the glass to his neck, and carved in a second long cut. This one was shallow enough, but it was a second source of bleeding.

“You show me one of your patented sneers and I will slice his head right off his body!”

J.D. met his stare and held it. “I believe you.”

“Good.” He stood up again. “What did you do, work out some kind of cheap after-hours rehearsal arrangement with the management?”

“I was summoned here.”

“I’m
asking
if that’s why you two were here! I imagine you were taking a break, stretching the legs, when I found you, eh?”

“We haven’t been in here at all, tonight. We just came down the hill from the Fairmont Hotel.”

“The door was already open, here!”

“Yes. I assume you saw us coming, ran ahead to jimmy the lock, then back to ambush us.”

“Fine idea, Boss, if I’d thought of it. But I followed you all the way down Nob Hill, so I guess it was just Fate that had me stake out your hotel.”

J.D. snorted. “Fate got you to
this
point? You need a new invisible force.”

The bastard’s face darkened. “I’m improvising here, Boss! Improvising! Latching on to whatever the circumstances may be and dancing along! I learned it from you!”

“You learned nothing from me.”

“Then maybe it was Fate after all, that left the door open for us, eh, Boss?”

“I never told you to call me that.”

“Liar!” The bastard’s face went purple again. “I finally track you down—you give me a job, following you around?”

“An opportunity that you squandered. Ruined your reputation there and mine for knowing you.”

“Knowing me? God damn you to Hell! Say my name. You never say my name. Sure I call you Boss. You never say my name!”

“And never will again, you miserable excuse for a man.”

The bastard froze at that and stared at J.D. for one densely packed second. His posture shifted. His face went dead of expression.

The overall effect made it look as though he simply dropped one persona and became another, except for the eyes, which did not change at all. They remained emotionless, predatory perceivers. J.D. realized then that the change in the bastard was not a real change at all. It was merely the dropping of a mask in favor of a more bluntly truthful expression of the cruelty waiting behind those eyes.

J.D. felt the predatory gaze. It radiated a fundamental truth more subtle than waves of body heat: Any trace of willpower would be seized as a provocation.

Another tick of the second hand passed. Years of habit propelled him to take control. “Did you follow me here from New York?”

The bastard laughed. Even his voice came out as a flattened version of itself. It was not there to help him to express himself; it was merely a function of delivering information with the minimum necessary effort. “Nah. I got here weeks before you. To get things ready.”

“It took you weeks to get things ready? What things? You followed me in the dark.”

“Hey!” the bastard bellowed, purple veins mapping his face. “
I! Am! Improvising!
” He turned toward Shane and saw that he was just climbing back to unsteady feet. So he stepped close enough to menace him with the blade and shouted at the younger man, “Your head’s still ringing pretty bad, eh? Can’t get your balance back into the legs, right? I don’t care if I have to kill you, but you really ought to see this. Just stand right there. You’ll be a witness to career history for the Great Mesmerist!”

He gestured to J.D. and added, “Duncan here is going to give us a show. He’s going to tell the entire audience why he had me arrested and stuck inside of a little brick box, a place for…I thought I’d never get out.”

“You broke out. There’s no show to be made of that,” J.D. replied. Try as he might, he could not keep the disgust from his voice. “The answer is too short to make a show out of it: I called them because you don’t belong anywhere else.”

In the next instant, J.D.’s olfactory nerves finally got their message to his beleaguered brain. He visualized thin wisps of smoke that his eyes could not see—warning ghosts rising up around his pant cuffs.

The bastard must have been here. He broke in when he saw them coming this way. He had set the fire going. Started it small, to give him time.
No wonder he wanted us all up here.

The fire had been artificially restrained, so far—the stage had no good air source below it. It would burn without great flames, more like fast-moving rust, until it heated everything under the stage to the combustion point. Then it would require nothing more than the chance to take one good, deep inhale. It would scream flames into the air.

J.D. was beginning to hate his crisp senses and crystal-clear thoughts.
This
was what he had been fighting so hard to preserve? Why? It had seemed so important to regain it all. Yet he had awakened into a situation that perfectly demonstrated one undeniable fact—consciousness was hardly worth the trouble. All it really did was make you aware of an ever-growing list of dangers and threats.

He saw a flash in Shane’s eyes and realized that the skinny kid was finally coming around after having
his
brain rattled, fighting off a plague of doughnut holes where
his
memory was supposed to be. Young Nightingale had saved J.D.’s life, but it cost the kid a real skull-buster of a head blow and a quick trip to the floor.

J.D. was cheered to think that after all this was over, they would be able to sit down together and he could tell him all about his memory struggles, knowing that Shane would understand him perfectly well. Maybe the two of them could work something into the act, since Shane and Blackburn were going to be around backstage anyway.

In the next heartbeat, he was struck by the absurdity of thinking about a future, a reflex that could not help him now. He ran his gaze across the center stage area, knowing what had to be there, and spotted the telltale small iron ring lying flat in a carved-out circle that allowed it to lie flush with the floor. He could barely make them out, in the semidarkness, but there were the clean lines of the large rectangle cut into the floor. This one was well done, invisible from the audience perspective.

He had used trapdoors for trick entrances and exits a thousand times, sometimes assisted by smoke, but sometimes daring to use them even when he was covered by nothing more than shifts of light to distract the eye. This trap was a good size, maybe four feet long and three feet wide, lifting up on the upstage end and hinged on the downstage side.

The bastard’s back was to Shane, so that he did not yet realize that Shane was again among them. He leaped in shock when Shane called out, “No matter how many I kill, it never comes out right!”

The bastard spun to Shane, confused about hearing his own thoughts narrated to him. Shane hurried on without giving him the chance to interrupt.

“They don’t act the way they’re supposed to! I need them there, I need them to watch me kill them. But they die out from under me before they do anything right!”

J.D. was so close to being telepathic in that moment that he could practically converse with Shane over the plan. He knew that Shane had just bought him a few precious seconds, and that he would have to act inside that small margin.

He bent forward and grabbed on to the recessed iron ring, then pulled hard. The trapdoor smoothly rose on well-oiled hinges until it stood perpendicular to the stage.

The bastard let out a scream of frustrated rage and crouched to leap at Shane, except that in the next instant J.D. had him from behind with his arms pinned back.