Lowland Rider (30 page)

His eyes were alive now. Rags did not want to ask the question, but he had no choice. "What . . . what's that purpose then?"

"To kill Enoch."

"Jesse . . ."

"The evil that comes from him is unbelievable, Rags. I don't know what hold he has over people, but I do know it's incredibly strong. You've just seen it with Baggie, and I've seen it several times. These tunnels stink with his power."

"It ain't no earthly power, Jesse," Rags said.

"I don't know about that, Rags, but if it isn't, then no earthly power sent me down here to deal with him."

"How you gonna find him, Jesse?"

"I can find him. I can do whatever it is that I have to do. And so can you, Rags. Find Baggie. Stop her. With whatever it takes. Bring me the knife."

"Jesse…"

"Rags," Jesse said, laying a hand on his friend's shoulder, "You're going to die soon. Nothing is going to stop that from happening. That growth is going to kill you. If you stop Baggie, that will mean something. It's good you're doing, Rags. Good."

Rags began to raise a hand to his neck, but stopped before he touched the hard swelling beneath the cloths. The hand closed into a fist. "I'd be doing… good?"

"Yes, Rags. Good. Go. Stop her. I'll find Enoch." Jesse walked away.

Rags looked down at his feet. Jesse's words had hurt him, but in a strange way they had also given him hope. Maybe, he thought, Jesse was right. Maybe the way for Rags to redeem himself was to kill Baggie, just as Jesse wanted to redeem himself by killing Enoch.

All right then. All right. If he was going to die, he had nothing to lose. He'd find her then. He'd find Baggie. One thing was sure—it would be a damn sight easier dealing with her than dealing with Enoch. Baggie could take your life, but Rags was all too certain that Enoch could take your soul.

Enoch
. She heard the name echo over and over in her mind. She saw His face before her, filled with love and peace and satisfaction, and she knew that she loved Him too, and that what had passed between them would last her the rest of her life, even if she was never to see Him again.

But she would see Him again. She had brought Him her sacrifice, and He had loved her for it, and she had told Him that there would be more, she would not make Him
ask
for more, oh no, never make Enoch ask again. Now she knew all, now she was one of the blessed, and she looked around her at the teeming thousands who scurried through the tunnels, and knew that they were there whenever she needed them. They were ready for the harvest, ready for Enoch. All she had to do was pick them.

She carried no bags now, nothing but the clothes on her back and the knife buried deep in her pocket, and the ruby that He had given her, that stone as large as the baby's fist, red as the baby's blood. He told her to do what she would with it—sell it and use the money to live on if she liked. But she would never do that. Sell a gift from Enoch? It was unthinkable. She would keep it always, and take it from her pockets when no one was looking, stare into its red depths, and see Enoch's face. That was all she wanted from life now.

To see Enoch's face.

"Son of a
bitch
!" Tony Rodriguez said in English. He had just woken up and flicked on the color TV at the foot of the bed to see a black and white photo of Bob Montcalm on the noon news. Angelina, his most recent lady, was singing a salsa song at the dressing table. "Shut up," he told her in Spanish, and she did, allowing him to hear the rest of the story. When it was over, Rodriguez hit the remote and turned the set off. "Son of a bitch," he said again, more quietly.

"What's wrong?" Angelina asked in Spanish. Her English was poor.

"Guy I know. Transit cop I paid to let me do business on his line. He killed himself this morning. Something about the murder of a janitor. Now what the fuck…" he added in English, shaking his head.

"I bet there was a woman," Angelina said, straightening the straps of her filmy nightgown and cupping her breasts.

"What?"

"A woman. Men always kill themselves over a woman."

Rodriguez frowned, feeling himself grow semi-erect and wondering if maybe they had time to do it again before he hit the street. "Yeah, there was a woman all right. His wife. He shot her too."

"Ah," Angelina said, crossing to the bed and smiling at the bump Rodriguez's spiky penis made under the sheet. "You see? She was cheating on him. Was she beautiful, I wonder?"

"All I know about her was that she was a junkie. I used to give him heroin for her." He reached up and touched a breast. Angelina slid onto the bed and licked his neck.

"And he killed her for love," she said, grasping his penis through the sheet.

"He didn't kill her," Rodriguez said, unmoving. "He . . . paralyzed her."

"What?"

"She can't move, can't speak."

"Poor woman," Angelina said, pulling her nightgown over her head and slipping between the sheets. After a minute of working on him, she looked up, a child's petulant frown on her sixteen-year-old face. "What's wrong?" she asked him.

"I was just thinking," Rodriguez said, looking at the ceiling, "about what she will feel when that first craving hits her. Mother of God, what will she feel?"

His lust was gone. He got dressed and went out onto the street, hoping that the dead man had not mentioned him in any notes, looking for new territories, thinking of tortured Gina Montcalm, hearing her silent screams.

It was rush hour when Rags found Baggie in the 66th Street IRT station. She was standing against a wall, watching the people pass. There was none of the misanthropy that had previously sat on her face like a cloud. She seemed, Rags thought, to be enjoying herself, like a patron of an outdoor cafe, sipping a drink and watching the people pass, in love with life and the city. If her appearance had not been unmistakable, he might have thought she was a different woman.

Everyone was changing—first Jesse, now Baggie, and even himself. Was he really going to kill this woman in cold blood? Even as he asked himself the question, he knew that he was. And why? Because Jesse had told him to do so. And didn't that make him the same as Baggie, with her blind obedience to Enoch?

No. He didn't think so. There was a difference. He was killing something evil to stop the evil from killing more good. That had been done before, in the Bible. God's people had destroyed the people who were evil.

But Rags, said a voice within him, who made you one of God's people?

Jesse did, he answered. Jesse did, and he's enough.

He didn't know how he was going to kill her. He had no weapon, and, though he was big and strong enough to kill her with his hands, he did not know how he could do that with all these people around. Then the thought occurred to him that it worked both ways. How could she do anything to him?

He moved toward her through the crowd, and was soon close enough to reach out and touch her. "Hey," he said, and she turned and looked at him. Her eyes narrowed, but there was none of the hatred that she had shown whenever she had seen him before. There was rather a bland curiosity, and she cocked her head and looked at him as though she recognized him as an old acquaintance, but couldn't be sure, and was afraid of getting his name wrong.

"I
wanta
see you," Rags said, and she cocked her head to the other side. What the hell, Rags wondered. Had she gone simple? Like a kid? "You hear me? I
wanta
see you."

She turned away from him then and walked off. He followed her through the milling mob, pushing aside the owners of the thigh-high forest of briefcases and handbags that struck at him. Baggie didn't look back to see if he was coming, but plowed ahead, her arms hidden by her body and the throng.

At last, near the turnstiles, the crowd began to thin, and he was able to get close to her again. But she walked faster, toward a short passage he had never been down before, with gray, unmarked, closed doors on either side. "You wait a minute," he said, and put out his hand, grabbed her shoulder.

She whirled on him, and he saw that the fury had returned to her face. It was alight with hate as she swung her knife in a savage backhand across his throat.

The rags saved him. He felt a coldness beneath his chin, a sudden shock, but no pain, and he realized that although the knife had cut him, it was now tangled in the layers of cloth that wrapped his neck, and Baggie was tugging at it frantically, the exertion spraying a fine mist of spittle into
Rags's
face.

He brought up his arm and shoved her backward so that she stumbled, losing the grip on the knife. Rags wrenched it from the cloths with his right hand and pressed his throat with the other. He felt wetness, but did not look at his hand. His eyes were on Baggie.

She started to growl, a low, bubbling roar that sounded more to Rags like the approach of a faraway train than anything from a human throat. And; like a train, she came at him, hands in front of her, her white,
twiglike
fingers crooked into claws to tear his eyes. He thrust out the knife and caught her on it.

The breath left her in a cloud of blood as
Rags's
hands, pushed by rock-hard arms, sank into the wound the knife had made and pressed through the woman's ripped flesh, which bathed his forearms in red warmth. Her arms fell to her side, her head rocked back, and the two of them stood there, the man holding the woman in a dance of death. At last he drew a shuddering breath and stepped back, but she fell against him, as if reluctant to break their embrace. He yanked his arms away, leaving the knife deep within the cavern of her torso, and the body fell to the floor with a soft, wet sound. He looked at it for a long time, unable to believe that anything that alive with hatred could die so easily.

But there was no motion, not even the twitch of a finger. Rags raised a hand to his neck and felt where the knife had scored his skin, cutting into the edge of the tumor. He looked at his fingers and saw a darkness deeper than blood.

He was just about to make himself turn, walk away, and seek some help when he remembered Jesse's admonition to bring him the knife. At first he intended to ignore it. Jesse didn't need it, it would prove nothing. But the more he thought, the more he felt that he should do what Jesse asked. So he knelt by the side of the body, and was trying to work up enough nerve to roll it over and look at the ruin he had made, when he heard the gray door behind him open.

He did not turn immediately, for he knew who was standing there, but he realized he could not outwait Enoch, and turned slowly, still on his knees, feeling weak and vulnerable despite the killing he had just done.

Enoch stood framed by the doorway, a blaze of white light against the utter blackness of the room out of which he had come. It did not occur to Rags to wonder why he was here, how he had come to step out of this particular room in this particular station hall. As Rags gazed into those clear eyes, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for Enoch to be here.

"What is it you want?" Enoch asked, and Rags did wonder why he didn't see Enoch's mouth moving, although he heard clearly enough.

"I… I wanted the knife." His words sounded small to him, like a child's.

Enoch smiled at him as if he were indeed a child, and knelt next to Rags so that his warm and fragrant breath coursed in a gentle zephyr over
Rags's
face. "There is no knife," he said, and with surprisingly little effort pushed the body over so that Rags could see the seamless dress, the whole body, free of blood, still, but untouched by any tearing knife. "She died for love."

Enoch leaned over and kissed the woman's face, then straightened up and slowly extended a long-fingered hand toward Rags. The hand touched the cloths around his neck, paused there, then withdrew, the fingers spotless, unstained.

"
Live
for love," Enoch told him, and Rags knew without touching the spot that the bleeding had stopped, and his wound was healed.

Rags began to cry as he had not cried since he was a child. When the tears went away enough to allow him to see again, Enoch was gone. There was only him and Baggie, both of them whole, unmarked by knives, at the end of a short hall with many closed doors.

Claudia looked at her watch. It read nine o'clock, and she wondered where Jesse was. Every other time she had met him he had been there before she arrived, waiting for her. But he was nowhere to be seen now, and it puzzled her. When she had asked him why he always got to their appointments first, he had told her it was because he didn't like her standing around alone in the tunnels, and then had smiled and added, "Besides, what else do I have to do with my time?" If what she thought about him was true, he had a great many other things to do.

She was doubly impatient for him to arrive, because she had news for him. She had heard all about Robert
Montcalm's
suicide on the evening news, and when the announcer said that Virgil Sinclair,
Montcalm's
alleged accomplice in whatever the hell they'd been doing, had also accused one Antonio Rodriguez, now in custody, of being involved in drug trafficking, Claudia fit the pieces together instantly. It had been this Montcalm who Jesse had stolen the money from. But now he was dead, and proven to be crooked besides. So there was no reason that Jesse should not be able to come above to tell his story, to rejoin the human race, and she continued to look around for him anxiously. After all, there was no telling what else might happen once Jesse returned to a state of normality.