Lost Echoes (25 page)

“It’s a lot to ask—”

“More than a lot.”

“—and I don’t want you to think it’s the only reason I’m glad to see you, but…it’s important, Harry. Don’t you think? Solving a murder? My father’s murder?”

“Jesus, Kayla. You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“I know what I’m asking. I’m asking for you to help me know what happened. He was murdered. I’m sure of it.”

Harry sat and thought for a long time. When he looked up, Kayla was watching him intently.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

She looked as if she had just been pushed off a cliff. She nodded. “All right…I’ll give you a ride home.”

45

Lying on his couch in his undershorts, Harry listened to the afternoon wind wrap itself around the apartment. He wondered why wind didn’t carry all manner of messages. Seemed as if all the horrors and terrors and bad things of the world would be on the wind. Was it just too flexible to hold it all?

He wondered why the big, bad sounds hid in rocks and wood and plastic and stone. He wondered why people his age liked rap music. He wondered why cats were popular pets. He wondered why in the middle of the day, even when he felt tired, like now, he couldn’t go to sleep. He wondered if Jimmy was beating someone up right now, or if McGuire might be in on some kind of kill. He thought about all manner of shit to keep from wondering about Kayla.

She didn’t know what she was asking. Not really.

If she did, she wouldn’t ask.

Or maybe she would.

If it were his dad died that way, would he put himself through this business? Would he?

Course he would.

Harry sat up in bed and looked around his room. His prison cell.

Shit. I’m gonna be sick and scared and miserable and keep telling myself how goddamn good I’m doing, I might as well turn it all into something positive.

He got up and found his pants and pulled his wallet out and got Kayla’s number out of it. He called. She answered right away.

“One condition.”

“Name it.”

“I might ask for your body.”

“I might give it to you.”

“What I want is to bring a friend along. Someone I trust and who can sort of help you watch after me, because I may need it.”

“That’s not saying much for my body.”

“Your body is just fine, and, frankly, I wouldn’t mind having designs on it. But not for a favor.”

“Not really offering, Harry.”

“Got to understand, this is some scary shit to me, Kayla, and I don’t want to do it, but I think maybe I should. Think it’s the way I can find my way out of all this, or at least find some kind of goddamn point to it all. Understand?”

“Mostly.”

“About the friend?”

“Bring him.”

Harry called Tad and drove over to Kayla’s place.

When Tad arrived, Kayla opened the door. Tad said, “There’s a goddamn dog standing on my car. That your dog?”

“Nope. That’s Winston. He belongs next door.”

“He’s on my Mercedes.”

“He doesn’t stay long.”

“Damn well better not. Sorry. You must be Kayla.”

“Yep.”

“Nice perfume. Plenty of it, but nice.”

Tad looked back over his shoulder. “Now he’s on the roof,” he said.

“He’ll do that,” Kayla said.

“He’s lucky I like dogs.”

Tad came inside and shook Kayla’s hand. “You are just as pretty as Harry said you were.”

“He said that?”

“If he didn’t, he should have. He also said you smell nice.”

Kayla closed the door and looked at Harry, who stood embarrassed nearby. After more formal introductions were made and more coffee was prepared, Tad wandered nervously about, said, “I see you play darts. Mostly you miss. Your door looks like Swiss cheese.”

“Do you play?”

“With others not so well, but darts, some. My guess is, though, you didn’t bring me here to play darts. Am I right?”

“No,” Harry said. “We didn’t.”

Tad strolled over to the bear with the block of darts between its ears. He pulled the darts out, swiftly tossed them at the target. He rapidly shifted the darts from his left hand to his right. He seemed to merely flex his wrist. The darts crowded the bull’s-eye.

“Good grief,” Kayla said.

“Martial arts,” Harry said. “This guy is good.”

“Thank you,” Tad said.

“He doesn’t just know how to whip your ass, he knows how to throw things at you. Incidental weapons, he calls it. Isn’t that right, Tad? Darts. Rings. Blades.”

“That’s right. And I do a pretty good Jimmy Durante impression.”

“Who?” Kayla asked.

“Well, one thing,” Tad said, “I don’t do a good one, you wouldn’t know…. Before your time, gal. Almost before mine. Forget it.”

“You can have the darts and the board, you want them,” Kayla said. “Me, I’m just sticking them in the door. I’m serious, you leave, take them with you. They just tempt me.”

“Thanks,” Tad said, and dropped the darts into his coat pocket. “So now do we discuss dominoes or tiddlywinks?”

Harry shook his head. “What I need, Tad, is a little favor.”

“Name it, kid.”

46

Darkness was creeping along the edge of the skyline, sliding shadows through the trees, when they arrived at the garage in Tad’s Mercedes.

It wasn’t much. Just a big tin building. There weren’t even any electric wires attached to it. It sagged on one side.

When they got to the door, breathing cold air out in white blasts, Kayla gave Harry her flashlight, used a key to open the padlock, and, with Tad’s help, slid the door back.

It was dark inside and very cold and it smelled like dried grease and dust. The last of the day’s light dropped inside like a dead man falling. Kayla took the flashlight back and flashed it around.

There were long tables with car parts and fan belts and rubber hoses on it, a grease rack to the right, and a pit beneath it. The beam filled with dust motes. She poked it at the grease pit. It was as Harry expected it would be: dark and greasy. Roaches scattered.

“You’re asking a lot, lady,” Tad said. “The kid’s got enough bugs in his head without you helping to put more there.”

“I realize what I’m asking,” Kayla said.

“Yeah,” Tad said. “I’m not so sure.”

“It’s okay, Tad,” Harry said. “Got this problem, ought to do something with it besides be afraid all the time. Turn it into a gift if I can. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Gives me some kind of meaning.”

“Your call, kid,” Tad said. “Just think Kayla ought to know what she’s asking.”

“I know
why
I’m asking,” Kayla said.

Tad took a deep breath and let it out, and, made a little mushroom cloud that floated off and broke apart.

“How does this work?” Tad said. “This vision business. You’ve told me about how you got to get some kind of noise out of things. But I don’t know that I really get it. Not totally.”

“Have to find the sound,” Harry said. “Kayla’s dad died, and it was violent, most likely he raised a ruckus. That leaves an imprint, and I’m the conduit. Show me the door where he was hanged, Kayla.”

Kayla took his hand. He liked that part. She pulled him into the darkness and flashed the light on a door. It was open and led into a small office that had a glass front. The glass was cracked.

They didn’t go inside.

“Here’s another thing,” Kayla said, letting go of his hand. “Look down low on the door.”

Harry looked. It had dents in the wood.

“That’s where he was kicking his heels,” she said. Then she swallowed big, adding, “Shit.”

“Kayla,” Harry said, “I do this, tell you what happened, it might not be what you want.”

“I know.”

“Kid,” Tad said, “you sure you want to do this? You nearly shit your pants just worrying about running your car into potholes where there might have been an airbag went off.”

“I’m not as bad as I used to be.”

“Yeah, but this is the big time here.”

“Just want the two of you to watch me, make sure I’m okay.”

“You got it, kid.”

“What I’m gonna do, is I’m gonna pull this door back, slam it, see that does anything. It does, I’ll be gone. Just make sure I don’t hurt myself. I might not be able to stand up. Sometimes it’s like getting hit by a train full of emotions. Runs me over, drags me down the track. After a minute, Tad, pick up something, start beating around the parts table in different places, smack the walls—there’s a rubber hose, a fan belt on the table. Use one of those.”

“Hit stuff?” Tad asked, as Kayla played the light on the table.

“Yeah.”

Tad found a rubber hose, slapped it gently in his palm. “I’m ready, kid.”

“Good. Kayla, you keep the light on me. Make sure I’m all right. Gets too much, you two pick me up and carry me out of here. Farther away I am from the event, quicker I’ll get over it. Understood?”

“Got you,” Kayla said.

“Just start whacking shit?” Tad asked again.

“Yeah.”

“This reminds me of that time in the honky-tonk,” Kayla said. “Looking for ghosts.”

“Thing that was different then, I didn’t really think we’d find one…. I need to concentrate a moment.”

Kayla squeezed Harry’s hand, let it go.

The sounds always surrounded him, ready to swoop in and take hold and twist him into a knot, but he told himself what he had been telling himself over and over with mixed results for some time. He found he could keep the sounds pretty much at bay. At least they didn’t leap at him pantherlike anymore if he disturbed one of those imbedded rumbles. They reverberated gently, and the images they held fluttered at the corners of his mind like vampire bats in the shadowy edges of a poorly lit tunnel. He could feel them and almost see them in the creaking sounds that the wind made in the old building, in the shifting of the aluminum siding.

There was something here, all right.

Waiting.

Harry took hold of the door, moved it gently at first to make sure there was play. It moved creaky on its hinges, but it moved. He swung it back and forth a few more times, then pulled it forward quick, slammed it toward the wall—

—sound vaulted out of it and with it came all the colors of the world, and then some, and they felt wet and heavy and they jetted into his head and made it swell until it exploded with—

Darkness flapped through his skull, dragging damp wings.

Thud, thud, thud
.

A man formed out of the darkness and hung from the door Harry had slammed. It was Kayla’s father, dangling there in bra and fishnet stockings, pink panties with lace, his heels beating a tattoo against the door, his tongue, thick and dark, thrashing like a snake tongue tasting air. The wire around his neck bit deep into his flesh. His hands were tied. So were his ankles. He kept kicking back with his legs, striking the door hard with his heels.

The dark tunnel view broke down, widened.

Another man stood to the side of the door, his head tossed back as he observed. He had on a thick coat and hat. White puffs of cold came out of his mouth in what seemed like slow motion, looked like wads of cotton being pulled skyward on an invisible string.

As the man hung there, another man stood in the shadows, by the worktable that contained the parts. He was in darkness, his face not clear.

The man in the hat slowly took a cigarette out of his coat pocket and put it in his mouth. He produced a lighter from another pocket, lit the cigarette, and there was a snap as the sound of the lighter came alive. Harry could hear Jones’s heels beating big-time; he could even hear the hatted man let out his breath as he released his first drag of smoke. And this time, Harry clearly saw his face.

It wasn’t anyone he recognized.

Slap
.

Slap
.

Slap
.

Harry couldn’t figure where it all came from, the slapping sounds, and the slaps kept coming, the sound slightly different after the first three, as if something different had been struck.

And then it came to him.

Tad.

With the hose.

And the vision wadded up into a black ball and went away, and Harry was facing the office now, and he saw Tad bring the hose up, strike the side of the office, just under the glass front—

Slap
.

—the redheaded guy he’d seen before, one in the shelter, it was him, and he was being thrown against the glass by the hatted man, the back of his skull hitting it, cracking it, spiderwebbing it, and he was twisting free of the hatted man’s grasp—

Slap
.

—a pocketknife flashing open in the redhead’s hand, cutting at the hatted man’s face. A little dark line of blood spat out of the hatted man’s cheek, hit the glass in beads. The redhead broke free, darted—

—all of it wadded up again, and—

Slap
.

Slap
.

—leaping images, some of them ghostly and overlapping, not entirely discernible.

The redhead hit the back door with his hands and it flew open. A rectangle of silver light burst into the garage and the redhead ran into it, out the back, up the hill and—

—faded.

His last vision was of the hatted man grabbing at a phone in the office, popping his own knife out of his pocket with a flick, cutting at the phone wire…and then—

Nausea, pain, a twisting of emotions, a crumpling of darkness, a flash of light and the most horrible sensations he had ever experienced, then he was rushing along some bat-ass dark corridor, things reaching out to touch him. He saw light at the end of it all. The light was not very bright, and it was punctuated by little silver dots, and after a moment Harry realized he was lying on his back at the rear of the garage looking up at the stars, gasping in cold air, and then the moon—

—no, Tad’s face dropped down over him, and Tad said, “Kid, you went someplace fucked-up, real quick and real bad. You stopped breathing. Kayla gave you mouth-to-mouth. Just consider, it could have been me, and I need a breath mint.”

Thank goodness for small favors, Harry thought. Then he realized that he was not lying on the ground, but on Kayla. She had his head in her lap. He had been here before. Years before. He liked it then and he liked it now.