Jack looked out the glass doors of the emergency room waiting area at the fury of the storm that had come up as the EMTs were loading Ariel into the ambulance.
He felt Andi beside him and reached out to put his arm around her shoulders and pull her to him. The way the child melted into his side brought a tightness to his chest and he hugged her tenderly.
“It’s really dark out there,” she said.
Jack wasn’t sure if she was referring to the storm or the pall that hung over the whole county, a darkness of evil so profound that even Jack imagined he could see it now.
Thunder crashed so loud the glass in the windows rattled. Sheriff Lincoln stepped up beside him and stared with him and Andi sightlessly out into the maelstrom.
“STAT Flight helicopter lifted off from University Hospital in Louisville half an hour ago—the same crew that took Ed.” Deputy Blackwell, killed by a little boy—no, by a demon. But what would happen to the little boy who’d been its host? “The chopper had to turn back, though, because of the storm. And driving an ambulance through a downpour like this.” He shook his head. “It could get washed off the road into a ditch. That little girl’s stuck here until this storm passes.” His voice grew soft, but Jack could still hear the awe and fear in it. “Caverna County is the only place in the whole state of Kentucky where it’s raining.”
He and Jack exchanged a long look. Then Jack spoke to the little girl he held tight against his side. “I say we get some hot chocolate.”
“You don’t want hot chocolate, you want coffee,” Andi said. “Major Crocker says you’re an addict.”
“And you believed him?” He took her hand and led her toward the cafeteria. “The man’s a pathological liar. Can’t trust a word he says.”
Jack had sat with the injured child in the woods for what seemed like forever, and it’d been chilly with no shirt on. He’d talked to her, even sang to her! Told her the only story he knew—the three bears, but he’d mixed it all together with the three little pigs and it ended with a big bad wolf eating Goldilocks. It didn’t matter. He knew she wasn’t listening. He only wanted to fill the silence around the child with the sound of a human voice.
When the sheriff, Andi and the EMTs showed up, he stood back with his hands on Andi’s shoulders as they worked feverishly to stabilize the child so they could move her. They said she was too badly injured to be treated at the local hospital. Bradford’s Ridge Regional Hospital would be a pit stop on her way to University Hospital in Louisville.
But then the storm hit.
Jack settled himself in a plastic hospital cafeteria chair, nursing a cup of coffee from a machine. Andi went to the window there and continued to stare sightlessly out into the rain.
“Ariel’s mother was passed out, dead drunk, when we went to tell her about the child. Her daddy’s somewhere in New Mexico on his way home. I’ve got deputies out trying to find her grandparents—her father’s folks still live here—or maybe one of her aunts. She needs family around her when she wakes up.”
“When does the doctor think that will be?”
The sheriff shrugged. “They filled her full of pain meds, packed her leg in ice and put it in a sling to keep down the swelling, but she needs an orthopedic surgeon to put the pieces back together.” He paused. “The little girl who pulled up my daughter’s rosebushes isn’t strong enough anymore to pick a single flower. That…demon thing…it’s gone, isn’t it?”
“Appears so.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Beats me.” Jack glanced at the chestnut-haired little girl. “But Andi knows. I think Andi had something to do with getting rid of it.”
The sheriff spoke the thoughts that had been chasing themselves around in circles in Jack’s head ever since he’d knelt beside the blue-eyed child in the woods.
“With that thing gone, the little girl’s just a kid again—”
“And that kid knows where to find the efreet,” Jack finished for him. “She knows, and there’s no reason anymore for her not to tell us.”
Rusty Willis and now Ariel Murphy. Rusty was under restraint and heavily sedated.
“Any news on Cassidy Davenport?”
“Nope. Last anybody saw her was this morning at Sunday school. She left the room to go to the bathroom and never came back.”
“What do her parents think of all this?”
“They’re good people, in denial. They’re convinced she wouldn’t have run away—not their sweet little girl—so somebody must have taken her. It’s not going to do any good, but I put out an Amber Alert.”
“Wouldn’t want to be the person who spotted her.”
The sheriff nodded, then looked over Jack’s shoulder at Crock limping into the cafeteria. He wasn’t using the crutch. Andi turned from the window and raced to meet him, but stopped before she got there, didn’t bowl him over, just spread her arms in the air to encircle something imaginary.
“Virtual hug,” she said.
Crock smiled, but it was a pained smile. It had only taken a couple of stitches to close the stab wound Rusty Willis had inflicted with the scissors. But the wound was deep. Another inch to the left and the blade would have severed the femoral artery and he would have bled to death in minutes.
Crock fished in his pocket and pulled out his wallet, extracted two bills and held them out to Andi, then intoned: “Your mission, should you choose to accept it.” He stopped. “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
She shook her head.
“Just roll with it,” he said. “Your mission is to find two Dr. Peppers. Cold ones. This tape will self-destruct in three seconds.”
Andi looked at him quizzically, then snatched the bills out of his hand and raced out of the cafeteria. Crock hobbled up to Jack and the sheriff.
“Got your phone turned off?” he asked Jack.
Jack pulled it out of his pocket and groaned. “Not turned off. Dead. Had it plugged in by the bed, but it didn’t get a full charge before I went dashing out into the night.”
“Figured it was that or the storm,” Crock said. “Becca tried to reach you, and when she couldn’t, she called me. She and Theresa had company tonight.”
Jack felt the bottom drop out of the pit of his stomach. “Anybody I know?”
“Probably not on your Christmas card list. It was company of the slithering variety. Rattlesnake.”
The storm outside seemed to intensify as Crock described what had happened to Becca and Theresa. It battered the walls of the building, a lighthouse on a rocky promontory with waves crashing over it. Lightning torched the sky. Thunder rumbled on its heels.
“And the dog?” Jack asked.
Crock shook his head as Andi came through the double doors. She carried no soft drinks and was still clinging to the one-dollar bills Crock’d given her.
“I saw it again,” she said, with no preamble. “The vision.”
“The same one as before?”
“No…well, yes, the same. But it’s bigger.” She paused, struggling to come up with the right words. “Like at the airport. You can see the planes that are about to land from a long way off. They look like toys, but the closer they get, the bigger they look. This vision is like that. It’s big now because it’s very close.”
Jack reached into his pocket for his cell phone, then remembered it was out of juice. “Borrow your phone?” he asked Crock.
Jack dialed Theresa’s number. Becca answered and he told her to get Theresa. Bishop had put the new FaceTime app on the iPhone he’d gotten Theresa for her birthday, but she had absolutely no idea how to use it—how to do anything at all on the phone except make a phone call. Becca knew how, though.
They all gathered around Crock’s iPhone in the hospital cafeteria—Andi, Crock, Jack and the sheriff. On the other end, Becca and Theresa sat in her kitchen.
“You guys need to hear this,” Jack said. Then he turned to Andi. “Tell them what you saw, sweetheart.”
When Andi was finished, Jack asked, “Any of you know what this could possibly mean?”
No one spoke.
“I think I…might have an idea,” he said. “It’s only a thought, but…the terrorist acts in the past few days, the Mall of America bombing and the restaurant in Phoenix. Front-page news, which means all the politicians are talking about it. But have you noticed—Chapman Whitworth is the only candidate crying ‘domestic terrorism.’ He’s hanging his campaign on it—so what if it is homegrown terrorism and our scar-faced friend is the farmer planting the seeds.”
“Which means Andi’s vision is of some act of terrorism Whitworth’s planning,” Crock continued Jack’s train of thought. “If we could understand the vision, maybe we could stop it.”
“It seems clear the vision’s about an explosion—but where?” Jack said. “There’s no clue where.”
They were quiet for a moment and then Becca changed the subject.
“You know what happened here earlier tonight…” she said and Jack knew she was being vague to keep from upsetting Andi further. “Our ‘visitor’ showed me what we have to do when we find the efreet.”
“Yes!” he said and let out a big sigh as relief loosened some knot he hadn’t even realized had been tied in his guts. He’d been prepared to go after the efreet as soon as Ariel told them where to find it even though he had no idea how to fight it once he got there. Now, they could go armed. “Okay, we’ll come back to Cincinnati in the morning so we can sit down together and study—”
“There’s nothing to study,” Becca said. “It’s not complicated. It’s actually very simple.”
“God usually makes things simple so simple folks can understand,” Theresa said. “It’s people who make everything all complex, adding this thing and that thing the Lord never did intend to be in there. We’ve spent two thousand years complicatin’ a simple message, tangling it up ’til you got to have a seminary degree to figure it out.”
“How can it possibly be easy?” Jack protested.
“I didn’t say it was easy,” Becca said. “I said it was simple.”
It occurred to Jack then, in a forehead-slapping duh, that the doing of it, whatever it was, couldn’t have involved all manner of erudite information, secret incantations and the like because somehow he, Daniel and Becca had pulled it off all by themselves when they were twelve years old.
“What do we have to do?” he asked.
The voice that answered the question didn’t come from the speaker of the phone on the table. It came from the little girl standing beside him, her face so solemn no dimples dinted her freckled cheeks.
“You have to tell it to go,” Andi said.
The silence that followed her words was palpable.
“How do you know that, sugar?” Theresa asked.
“That’s what I did…what Princess Buttercup told me to do and the demon left Ariel and went away.”
“We’d have figured this out a whole lot sooner if I’d listened to my own self complain ’bout folks complicating simple things,” Theresa said. “I s’posed Bishop was in that study diggin’ words in some dead language out of some book that he had the only copy of…somethin’ like that. He told me, but I didn’t have ears to hear, didn’t realize when he said he’d ‘Post-it’ clear, he meant he’d written the whole thing down on a Post-it note.”
“Let me get this straight,” Crock said, fumbling. “You’re saying all we have to do to send a demon back to hell is to tell it to go away?”
“’Parently it’s that simple, but that don’t mean it’s easy. Bishop said doin’ that would be the hardest thing he’d ever have to do.”
“Hard how?” Crock asked.
“I been thinking about how you’d do it ever since Becca found that Post-it note, putting it together with other things Bishop told me over the years. You gone have to set your will against the will of the demon. And the bigger the demon, the harder that’ll be. You got to demand that it do what you say—in the name of God. You can’t flinch. You can’t back down. You can’t even blink. You can’t let it confuse you or trick you with all the things it knows to do to trip you up, all the things it knows about you that it’ll throw in your face. You got to stand rock solid and make the demon back down.” She paused, then added in a soft voice, “And if you try and fail…the demon will destroy you.”
“It doesn’t want to go,” Andi said. “It says things, terrible things. Princess Buttercup warned me, though. She said ‘Satan is the father of lies,’ so I wasn’t to believe anything this demon said to me, even if it made sense.”
She dropped her chin on her chest and her next words were only a whisper. “It talked about Daddy. About what it was going to do to Daddy. And I was so scared, but it was a lie! It had to be a lie!”
Jack reached out and drew Andi into a hug again, holding her close. “What did it say, sweetheart?”
“It said”—the rest was so soft, nobody heard her but Jack—“it was going to chop off his head.”
“And you stood your ground against the…thing inside Ariel?” the sheriff asked. The sheriff’s voice had a trembly quality Jack hadn’t heard before. His face was ashen. Welcome to the real world.
“Uh-huh. Princess Buttercup was there and she must have been shining like a spotlight because the demon couldn’t even look at us. And Ariel helped, too. She was fighting as hard as we were.”
“It’s one thing to kick out a demon only powerful enough to possess a little girl—with the child helping you do it,” Theresa said. “It’s something else altogether to impose your will on a mighty prince of demons, an immortal Lord from the dark realm that has totally melded with the heart, mind and soul of a human being. We talking the difference ’tween fightin’ a kitten ain’t got its eyes open yet and a rabid Bengal tiger with a sinus infection.”
“But you did it once,” Crock said, looking at Jack. “You and Daniel and Becca—you defeated it. How—?”
“I don’t know!” Jack said, louder than he meant to. Then he added in a softer, resigned voice, “I don’t remember.”
“I do,” Becca said.
“You remember?” Jack was incredulous.
“A little. The things in Bishop’s office—reading about…must have knocked something loose, and all sorts of things, pieces of things have come back. I remember what it said to me.” But she didn’t elaborate and Jack didn’t press the point.
“So now we know what it is you’re going to have to do,” Crock said. “We have to find that thing so you can go there and do it.”
“And Ariel Murphy knows where it is,” Jack said.
“Which ones of you…?” The sheriff stopped and looked around the table. “Who’s going to go in after that thing once you find it.”
“Jack and I have unfinished business with that monster,” Becca said without hesitation.
Daniel did, too, of course, but nobody mentioned that. Nobody had to.
“And me,” Theresa said. “Bishop was gone go and he never got the chance. I’ll be taking his place.”
There didn’t seem to be anything left to say. Jack would have to locate the efreet and contact Becca and Theresa. Then they would take up where the Three Musketeers had left off in 1985.
When the phone call was over, Andi looked at the sheriff. “You think maybe I could go sit with Ariel?”
“She’s all drugged up. She won’t know you’re there.”
“I’ll know I’m there. I don’t want her to be alone.” Andi’s voice got soft. “She’s been…alone…and scared for a very long time.”
“She’s not supposed to have any visitors,” the sheriff said. “And even if she could, it’s not visiting hours and they don’t allow children—”
“Please,” Andi begged. “She needs me.”
The sheriff nodded. “She probably does. I’ll see if I can throw my weight around.”
Crock cleared his throat. “Jack, I need to talk to you for a minute.”
Jack nodded and turned to the sheriff. “Would you mind taking Andi to Ariel’s room? I’ll be right up.”
As soon as the elevator doors closed behind the sheriff and Andi, Jack turned to Crock. “What is it?”
“I suspect we got ourselves a problem with Jeff Kendrick,” Crock said. “Becca and Theresa think he’s lost it.”
Jeff sat in the car for a few minutes, composing himself. If he could just get rid of the infernal buzzing in his head, an ugly sound from the low-rent district in a beehive.
He pulled down the visor and checked his appearance. All shined up and ready for the party. New everything, from his skivvies to his tie pin. He’d bought a whole new outfit. Had to. All his clothes were in his condo, and if he went back there, the bugs might…
He slammed the door on the thoughts with a resounding bang!
Time had gotten squirrelly. It expanded sometimes like one of those concertinas clowns used in a circus—so everything took too long, minutes dragged by wearing the shackles of hours. Other times, it squeezed together so tight he couldn’t find it. He was at Theresa’s and then he was in his hotel room, changing clothes, and then he was here. No time in between.
He started to breathe too fast again at the thought of losing hours he couldn’t account for. Hyperventilating. Couldn’t do that, not now, so he clamped down on his diaphragm and willed himself to inhale and exhale regularly.
In. Slowly. Out. Slowly.
He adjusted his tie. A two-hundred-fifty-dollar Charvet silk. Things like that mattered to him once—wearing an Armani suit, Gucci shoes. Now nothing mattered to him except the cold metal in his coat pocket and the cold resolve in his heart.
And then he was in the main dining room of Andolini’s Restaurant. No memory of the walk from the car to the restaurant. Just here, following the maître d’. He’d never been to Andolini’s and he had to stifle a giggle at the image that filled his head—Michael Corleone walking slowly to the table where the crooked cop and the mafia boss had only seconds to live, clutching the gun he’d retrieved from behind the water tank in the bathroom.
Mr. Whitworth was awaiting him in a private dining room on the fourth floor, the maître d’ told him.
Perfect.
A man wearing a suit as expensive as Jeff’s stood outside the elevator door.
“Mr. Kendrick?” he inquired.
Jeff nodded.
The man said something into his shirt cuff—oh, please!—and obviously heard something in the earbud with a cord leading up the left side of his neck because he smiled pleasantly and punched the number four on the elevator light panel.
Jeff stepped inside.
The elevator opened into a small, candlelit dining room with only a handful of white- tableclothed tables. But the room wasn’t alive with diners and servers, music and the subdued clatter of knives and forks on plates. It was empty and silent.
A man stood on the far side of it in front of a huge floor-to-ceiling picture window with a view of the distant Ohio River, where a paddleboat ablaze with bright strings of colored lights carried its dinner guests downstream.
The man turned slowly around and looked at him, and a hatchet of ragged panic hacked into Jeff’s chest. He knew instantly that coming here had been the biggest mistake he’d ever made.