She wasn’t joking. She wasn’t smiling. She just looked at me, waiting to see if I’d flinch.
I did. Hell, who wouldn’t?
But I still made my way toward the front door. When it came down to a choice of facing a gunman or my boss, it would be the gunman every time.
One of the two mechanics had ushered the old ladies out of their booth and led them into the kitchen. The other mechanic and the waitress crouched beside the door, peering out into the street from the dubious cover of a foam-padded wooden bench. The cook left the relative safety of the kitchen and joined them.
The waitress swore under her breath. “Old Harlan has finally gone round the bend.”
The mechanic dared a glance into the street. “I thought Emmett Dubois confiscated his guns.”
The waitress let out a contemptuous grunt. She didn’t think much of Emmett Dubois.
“Whose guns?” I asked as I crouched beside them. We were all keeping our voices low.
“Harlan’s,” the waitress said. I glanced out the window. Harlan sighted along his rifle, slowly turning toward us. I ducked back down before he saw me.
“This Harlan guy,” I said. “I take it he’s local color?”
The mechanic snorted. “You could put it that way.”
The cook came up behind me. “He fell off a ladder in ’97 putting up Christmas lights. Hit his head. He ain’t been right since.”
“He was never a bad guy, though,” the mechanic said.
The cook scowled at him. “Tell that to my window, and these customers he nearly killed.”
“What was he shouting about?” the waitress asked.
“His daughters,” I answered her. “He wants to know who took his daughters away.”
“Why, that’s just crazy,” she said. “He doesn’t have any little girls. He never has.”
“What the hell?” the cook said. His sour breath was right next to my ear. “Your girlfriend is just sitting in her booth like a duck in a shooting range. Don’t she care about her own life?” He scrambled across the dirty floor toward her.
“Care about her own life?” I said. “Where’s the fun in that?” Before anyone could stop me, I opened the front door and bolted into the street.
I didn’t look at Harlan. I looked at the Corolla I was planning to use as cover.
I hit the pavement and rolled behind the wheel. I heard a shot and more glass breaking in the diner behind me. Someone cursed up a storm, which I’m sure was directed as much at me as at old Harlan.
I scuttled across a patch of grass and put my head right against the hubcap. There was a tree beside me, but the trunk was no wider than my hand. I wasn’t counting on it for protection. “Stop shooting!” I shouted. “I’m trying to help you!”
“Can you tell me where my girls are?” There was a dangerous edge to his voice.
“No,” I said. “I’m—”
“Then butt the hell out!”
I heard another rifle shot. The bullet punched a hole through the car door beside me and tore bark off the skinny tree. I hunkered down lower.
“I can help you,” I shouted. I looked back at the diner and saw Annalise sitting by the window. She stared at me blankly. My situation meant no more to her than a dull television show. I saw the top of the cook’s head as he beckoned her to safety.
“I can help you!” I shouted again, louder this time. If Harlan came toward me, I’d be screwed. My tattoos only protected part of me. I wasn’t sure how well they’d hold up against a rifle.
“How?” he answered.
“Look, let me stand up and talk to you. My name is Ray. I came here to find out what’s happening to the kids in this town.”
“You did?”
“I’m standing up now. Hear me out before you shoot me, okay?”
I stood. Harlan had moved toward me into the street. He aimed his rifle at me.
No matter how hard you try, there’s really no steeling yourself to see a brain-damaged redneck point a gun at your face.
He saw my hands were empty, and he started glancing from side to side as if he suspected I was a decoy.
“Harlan, my name is Ray.”
“You said that already.”
I had, but I hoped he would be reluctant to shoot me if he had a name to go with my face.
Harlan was younger than I expected, barely into his mid-thirties. His face was narrow and gleaming with sweat. His long nose curved over a thin, unhappy mouth. His clothes looked like they hadn’t been washed in weeks. He’d have been scary without a gun.
“Harlan, do you know who Justin Benton is?”
“Nope,” he answered. He shifted his grip on his rifle and looked up the street. He was getting antsy. Where were the police sirens? It had been more than two minutes since that first shot.
“He was a little boy who lived in this town. Earlier today, I saw him burn up.”
Harlan burst into tears. The barrel of his gun wavered, then angled toward the asphalt. “My girls,” he said, his voice small and broken with pain. “My girls.”
“Is that what happened to them?” I asked.
“I don’t know. The Monday after Thanksgiving, Lorelei didn’t come home from school. I went nuts looking for her. But … but …”
“But the people in this town acted as though they’d never heard of her. They acted as though she didn’t exist.”
“They’re liars!” he shouted, his grief flaring into anger. He didn’t point his gun at me. “And the next week, my little Marie disappeared from her bed. Right in the middle of the night. And …”
He couldn’t go on. I helped. “And there was a black mark on the floor. A long, scary mark. It led to the door—”
“The window.” He approached me slowly. There was no threat in the way he moved.
“And it disappeared into the dirt. Now no one in town remembers either of your girls.”
“They don’t remember any of the kids! Not even their own!” His face was slack with astonishment. He’d apparently forgotten that he’d just accused the whole town of lying to him. Maybe he’d never really believed it. “Even after they saw it happen with their own two eyes! They still have tricycles sitting in their front yards and Happy Meal wrappers on their dashboards, but it’s like they can’t see them!”
“You saw it, though, didn’t you? You saw it happen right here in town.”
“Five times.”
“Is it always kids? Does it happen to adults, too?”
“Only kids. Never adults. My God, every single person in this town must have seen it, but I’m the only one who remembers.” His eyes welled up with tears. The rifle hung loose in his hand. “Why am I the only one who remembers? And why do I feel this pressure in my head! It’s been there for months, since before my Lorelei vanished. It’s driving me wild!”
“Harlan, I’m new in town but I came here to find out what’s happening in Hammer Bay. I can’t promise that I can get your girls back, but I’m going to find out what’s going on.”
I saw hope in his expression. He was a tired man, with a heavy load of grief. He’d been carrying it for nearly half a year, but he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t recognize a helping hand when it was offered.
“Can you do that?”
“Man, I don’t know,” I told him. “But I intend to try. I have some questions for you, and I’m going to want to check out the black mark in your house, but I’m not going to be able to do any of that if you shoot me.”
Harlan looked down at the gun in his hand and blinked.
I kept my voice low. “Can I have that gun, please?” That was when we heard the sirens.
Harlan backed away and lifted the rifle. “I’m not crazy,” he yelled. “I was married. I had two little kids!”
Goose bumps prickled on my neck. “I know, Harlan. I believe you.”
“Someone in this town is going to tell me where they are. Someone knows what’s happened to them.”
“Harlan,” I said. His expression had become hard and distant. “You’re that someone. None of these people can remember. Only you.”
A police car turned the corner and stopped in the road, lights flashing.
Harlan looked at it like a man nearing the end of a big job. Suddenly, I understood. He was done. His kids were gone, and he was going to commit suicide by cop.
“Harlan, don’t do it. There are other kids in town,” I said, thinking of the two kids at the gas station. “You could help me put a stop to this. You might be the only one who—”
He leveled the gun at my chest. His face was calm. “Why don’t you go back into the diner now,” he said in a resigned voice. “Before something bad happens to you.”
He was aiming at my chest. Would the tattoos there protect me if he squeezed the trigger?
I had no idea how to talk him down. I imagine cops and paramedics are trained in that sort of thing, but I was just an ex–car thief.
I laid my hand against the pocket containing my ghost knife. I could feel it there, thrumming with life. If talking wouldn’t work …
Harlan turned away from the flashing lights on the patrol car and looked up the street. His eyes narrowed. I followed his gaze.
A wolf stood in the road. I’d never seen one outside a zoo before, but I recognized it immediately. The fur along its back was tinged with red, and it stared at us, standing sideways as though it wanted to present the largest possible target.
It was big. I don’t know much about wolves, but it looked much bigger than I’d have expected. Then again, when Harlan had pointed his rifle at me, it looked like a .90 caliber. Fear can do that.
Harlan swung the rifle to his shoulder and fired. I saw the bullet chip the asphalt between the animal’s legs. The wolf bolted, running down the street and out of sight.
Harlan worked the bolt of his rifle. I slid my hand into my pocket and took out my ghost knife.
Harlan saw me out of the corner of his eye. He spun and slammed the butt of his rifle against my hand, smashing it against my hip. The ghost knife fell onto the street, and I staggered a few feet away from it.
He aimed the rifle at my face. I didn’t have any tattoos to protect me there.
“It was just a piece of paper,” I said.
Harlan glanced at the ghost knife and confirmed that what I was saying was true. Without a word, he swung his weapon around and sighted down the street, looking for the wolf.
I had cast the spell that created the ghost knife, and I could sense it there on the asphalt. I opened my hand and reached for it. The laminated paper flew into my hand, and in one motion, I threw it at Harlan like an oversized playing card.
According to the spell book I’d copied it from, a ghost knife cuts “ghosts, magic, and dead things.” The wood and metal locks of the Bentons’ front door were dead things, and the ghost knife cut through them easily. It could also destroy magic spells like my tattoos or the sigil on Annalise’s scrap of wood; the results weren’t always pretty.
But every living person has a ghost in them. At least, the spell thinks so, because when I use it on people, it passes through their bodies as though they aren’t there and cuts at their “spirit.”
And that’s all I know about it. Even though I cast the spell myself from an old book I’d acquired under less-than-honest circumstances, and even though I’d used it a few times against people who were trying to kill me, I had no idea how it worked or what it truly did. As with so much else having to do with magic, Annalise, and her society, I was in the dark.
The ghost knife zipped across the few feet separating us and entered Harlan’s body just below his armpit. His shirt fell open where the ghost knife sliced through it, but the laminated paper plunged into his body without leaving a visible mark. A moment later, the spell exited through the other side as if he wasn’t even there.
Harlan sagged. His eyes dulled, and what ever was driving him to shoot up the town dwindled away. That’s what the ghost knife did; it stole away aggression and vitality for a while. The effects of the spell were temporary—at least, they seemed to be.
Harlan lowered his rifle. I stepped toward him, ready to take the weapon away. The left side of Harlan’s rib cage burst open. I never heard the gunshot. I only saw the exit wound. Blood splattered my left hand, and I felt the bullet whiz past me.
Harlan collapsed, falling onto his face on the street.
I looked up and saw a cop moving toward us, his revolver pointed at Harlan. “Move away!” the cop yelled. “Move away from the body!”
I was frozen in place. The cop pointed the gun at my face. He asked me who I was, and I told him.
He told me to move back again. I took a step back. The cop kicked the rifle just like they do on TV. It slid away up the street.
I heard a faint sucking noise and looked down.
“He’s alive,” I said.
“An ambulance is coming,” the cop said. “Don’t move.”
The cop was in his mid-fifties, with a good bit of muscle and a little paunch. He had long, slightly graying hair, which he combed back like a European movie star. His face, though, was scarred and rounded as though it had been punched too many times. His jaw was long and heavy, and the look in his eyes was slightly feral.
He looked down at Harlan and smiled slightly, as though the dying man was a nifty bit of entertainment.
“Where’s that ambulance?” I asked. I couldn’t hear sirens.
He looked at me as though he thought I might be his next fun project. “On its way, I said. Who are you again?”
“Raymond Lilly,” I said again. “Harlan has a punctured lung. He needs help right now.”
Someone said: “Did you get him?” I looked up and saw two more officers approaching. One bore a close resemblance to the first cop—a younger brother, I assumed. Except this new arrival hadn’t shaved in about a week and was chewing the ragged end of a burning cigar. The other cop had too much flab pressing down on his belt, and his face was red and shiny with exertion.
“I surely did,” the older cop said.
They stood around Harlan’s body, looking down at him as if he was about to turn into candy. I still couldn’t hear ambulance sirens. The fat one licked his lips in a way that gave me chills. None of them moved to help him.
So I did. The three cops jumped back and trained their weapons on me, but I didn’t look at them. I laid my hand over the wound on Harlan’s back, then slid my other hand under him, searching for the exit. When I found it, I covered it with my palm. I tried to seal the wounds with my hands. Harlan seemed to be breathing a little better. Maybe it was my imagination.
“What are you doing there, son?”
I wasn’t sure which of them was talking to me. “Trying to save his life.”
“Why?”
“I thought you might want to shoot him again later.”
I heard chuckling behind me. Someone thought that was funny. Ambulance sirens came next, finally.
Harlan tried to say something but couldn’t manage it. Kneeling in the street, I tried not to think about what I was doing. A crazy man who hadn’t bathed in weeks was bleeding all over my hands, and three cops were pointing their guns at me.
I heard more voices. The folks in the diner had come out into the street to gawk, and the sports bar up the street was emptying, too.
Annalise came near. “Boss,” I said, catching her attention. “I think I dropped a piece of paper around here somewhere. Would you find it? It might be our map.”
She understood immediately. We couldn’t leave a spell lying out on the street for anyone to pick up. I could have called it to me again, but an awful lot of people were watching.
She moved off toward the far side of the street. The older cop followed her. They talked, but I couldn’t hear them. The waitress and the mechanic were loudly telling the fat cop what I had done, and how I had almost talked Harlan into giving up his rifle. They were split over whether that meant I was brave, stupid, or both; their voices drowned out what ever the older officer was saying to Annalise.
The ambulance finally arrived and the EMTs gently shouldered me out of the way. I scuttled toward the curb, happy to sit and watch professionals at work. A chubby little guy with too much beard taped plastic over the gunshot wound. Beside him, his lean and hairless partner snipped the finger from a latex glove and then slid a long needle through the fingertip. They rolled Harlan onto his back. The bearded guy covered the exit wound with more plastic while his partner searched Harlan’s ribs for a place to insert the needle.
I didn’t watch. Weariness washed over me as my adrenaline ebbed. I was tempted to lie back in the street and go to sleep.
I wondered if I was going to be sleeping in jail to night. I hoped not. It was too soon.
The older cop with the movie-star hair and the road-house face crouched beside me. “Your, uh, companion there tells me you came out to talk old Harlan out of shooting up the town.”
“That’s right,” I said. I wanted to stand, but I didn’t want to smear my bloody hands against the street. It was a weird impulse, but it was a day for weird.
I glanced at the man’s badge. He was the chief of police. The name tag beneath read E. DUBOIS. This was Emmett, I guessed, who hadn’t confiscated all of Harlan’s guns.
“Hold on there a moment,” the cop said. He stepped over and conferred with the fat cop standing just a few feet away. The fat cop walked away, and the older one came back. “That wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to do,” he said. “Why did you do it?”
“I didn’t think about it, really,” I lied.
“Good Samaritan?”
I didn’t respond to that. The fat cop returned with a plastic squeeze bottle and a wad of paper towels. The bottle was labeled “waterless cleaner.” I thanked him, squeezed the bottle over my hands, and started washing the blood away. The cleaner felt like jelly and smelled like rubbing alcohol.
“Witnesses said you’d just about talked him down when we showed up.”
I understood where this was going. He didn’t want people saying that I’d almost handled the situation diplomatically when he’d come in with guns blazing.
“I hadn’t talked him down from anything,” I said. “I had the impression that he was planning a suicide by cop.”
“That’s better. Much better than a smart mouth. I didn’t much care for your remark about shooting Harlan again. I didn’t like having to shoot him.”
I remembered the way he’d smiled at Harlan’s bleeding body and knew he was lying. “Sorry about that,” I told him. “I was all worked up with adrenaline.”
He smiled that same smile. “Fine,” he said. “That’s just fine.”
He asked where I was from and why I was in town, but he seemed distracted and his questions were careless. I managed to avoid saying that I’d been in jail that morning. He didn’t seem to care about me, now that I’d apologized.
I watched the ambulance drive away. “Where are they taking him?”
The cop eyeballed me, as if trying to decide whether answering my question would undermine his authority.
“County hospital,” he said. “You planning to visit?”
“Yep. I’m a Good Samaritan.”
“Fine. That’s fine.” A brown, rusted Dodge Dart parked at the intersection, a little too close to the police car already there. A fourth cop, this one tall and slender, moved out of the shadows to intercept the driver. As he stepped into the light, I saw bright red hair on the top of his head.
“That’s our local paperboy,” the cop said. “You better go now if you don’t want to be here all night answering his questions. But stay in Hammer Bay for a couple days, understand?”
“I intend to.”
Annalise stood on the sidewalk a few yards away, the broken windows of the diner behind her. Her eyes were hooded and her face expressionless.
As I approached her, the cook stepped up to me. “You cost me a door,” he said. “Harlan busted my glass door because you wanted to be a hero. What if one of my customers had been shot, huh? What then?”
“Don’t you pay any attention to him,” the waitress said. “Anytime you want, you come back and have another burger. On me.”
The cook turned on her. “What about my window?”
She told him that’s what insurance was for, and the cook grumbled that all the different kinds of insurance in this town were going to put him in the gutter.
I edged away from them and stepped up to Annalise. I could feel the ghost knife on her somewhere. Good. I didn’t want it to fall into just anyone’s hands, and I didn’t want to stick around here any longer.
She held out her hand. “Keys,” she said. “You’re not driving my van until you wash your hands.”
I hesitated, hoping she would offer me the ghost knife. She didn’t. I could feel that it was nearby, probably right in her pocket. I wondered how long she was going to keep it, because I sure couldn’t take it from her. I dug the keys from my pocket and gave them to her.
There was a change in the noise behind me. I turned back toward the crime scene.
New people had arrived, and Emmett Dubois was speaking with them. They were four men: one was very tall, very lean, and somewhere in his late fifties; beside him was a younger man, also tall, also lean, with a thick head of dark hair. Another was a short man with a shaved head, and the last was a fat man with long, graying hair. Dubois’s body language had altered. He didn’t look imposing. I only caught a glimpse of them before they moved out of view behind a parked van.
Then I felt a twinge under my right collarbone. There was no wave of force this time, but I knew what that twinge meant. Another kid had caught fire somewhere.
One of the men talking to Emmett Dubois fell to the ground and flailed around. My view was partly blocked by the wheels and fender of the van, but I could see he was having a seizure. It was the tall young one with the dark hair.
Dubois bent down to him. “Medic!” he shouted, his voice worried.
“Let’s go,” Annalise said.
“Look,” I told her. “At the same time that I felt the—”
“I know. Let’s move.”
She dragged me toward the van and drove away from the scene. I glanced back and saw the little reporter trying to climb back into the Dart. The officer was blocking his way.
“Well?” Annalise said as we pulled into the street. There was very little traffic. Men walked down the street, guns in their hands. They didn’t look like citizens protecting their own. They swaggered and looked bored.
I told Annalise what I’d learned from Harlan. I mentioned that he had a black mark on the floor of his home, too. Annalise asked a lot of questions I couldn’t answer, like where he lived and how old his kids had been. She didn’t like that I hadn’t gotten those answers, and his punctured lung wasn’t a good enough excuse.
I knew she was just riding me, so I let it pass. I was too tired to be angry anyway.
I said: “Sorry I didn’t get killed.”
“There’s always next time,” she said.