Repairman Jack [05]-Hosts (27 page)

The longer Joe talked and the longer Stan looked, the more familiar this guy at the wall became. Stan was almost afraid to believe it
was
him, afraid he'd fool himself because he so very much
wanted
it to be him. Not as much as Joe, maybe, but still, some heavy debts cried out for payment—with tons of vig.

"You know, Joe… I think you might be right."

Joe was still staring. A heat-seeking missile that had found its target.

"Course I'm right." He reached into his jacket pocket. "I'm doin' him, Stan. Gonna splatter his IQ all the way to the river then take his head home as a souvenir! Make a soup bowl out of his skull and eat from it every fucking night!"

Stan gripped his brother's arm before he could pull his .38. The area was crawling with people.

"Too many witnesses, Joe," he said quickly. "What good's doing him if it's going to land us in the joint? Like you said before, we've got to send a message here. This is the guy that blew up our stash, our cash, and our reps. We got to do him in kind. Blow him to hell. A public blow. And then we can say, remember that guy who got blown to chili con carne back in June? That was the guy who blew our farm and wrecked Joe's hand. We found him and did him. Did him good."

He felt Joe's arm relax as he nodded, still staring at the guy.

"Yeah. All right. And not just him, but him and everything he owns and everyone around him. You don't mess with the K Brothers."

Stan knew it would never be the same. They'd never completely salvage their reps, but at least they'd have evened some of the score. That counted for something.

"How you want to handle this?"

"He's looking for someone tailing the reporter. But we'll be tailing him. We find out where he lives, then we do him. And no waitin' around, Stan. We do him tonight!"

8

Sandy checked his watch: 12:30. He'd been wandering around the park for half an hour now. The message had said same place, noon. The noon was clear enough. And Sandy had assumed "same place" meant same bench. So he'd waited there for a while, but
no
Savior. He wondered if he should call the Savior "Jack." He didn't know if that was his real name, but it was better than the Savior.

After fifteen minutes on the bench he'd got up and wandered around. Maybe "same place" had meant the park in general. But another fifteen minutes of trudging up and down a ten-block length had yielded no sign of the man.

Looked like he'd been stood up. What now? He'd threatened the Savior with the drawing, told him he hadn't got rid of them. Not true. He'd torn them up and flushed them down a toilet in one of
The Light's
men's rooms. But he could print out another from the computer in minutes if he wanted to. But did he want to?

He remembered what Beth had said about
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Did he have a right to drag Boo Radley into the spotlight just for a story?

But the analogy didn't hold. He was here to do the Savior a favor—the biggest favor of his life.

Sandy checked his watch again. He'd give him another fifteen minutes, then—

"Hey!"

Sandy jumped, looked up, looked around—the Savior stood by a tree twenty feet away. He cocked his head down the slope toward the highway.

"Wait a minute or two," he said, "then meet me in the underpass."

Sandy watched him walk off, waited the requisite time, then followed. He found him waiting in the shadows of a concrete arch that supported a short span of the West Side Highway. Noise from the traffic above rumbled through the space.

"Look," Sandy said, approaching him, "before we go any further I just want to say—"

The Savior held up his hand for silence and scanned the park behind Sandy.

"If you're worried about my being followed, I wasn't."

"Probably right," he said. "Didn't see anyone tail you into the park, but you can never be sure about these things."

After a moment of narrow-lidded surveillance, he turned to Sandy. "What's the story, Palmer? We gonna play games, is that it? I thought we had an understanding: you get your interview, I never hear from you again."

He sounded pissed, and had a right to be, but Sandy had figured the best way to play this was not to allow himself to be put on the defensive.

"No games," he said. "I just don't think you were playing straight with me. I don't think you're working for the government, and I'm not so sure you were ever a Navy SEAL, either."

"True or not, what's the difference? You got your story, the paper's selling out—"

"How do you know that?"

His mouth twisted. "Had to go to three newsstands before I found a copy. Which means your bosses must be happy. You're a big shot now. Where's your gripe?"

Sandy resisted the urge to wipe his moist palms on his pants. This was a dangerous man and he had to be careful how he spun this. He'd mentally rehearsed his spiel for the last hour. Now it was show time.

"No gripe at all. It's just that I figured out the real reason you don't want your face in the papers, why you don't want anyone to know your name: you're a wanted man."

Bingo. The Savior had been scanning the park again, but when he blinked and stared at Sandy, he knew he'd struck pay dirt.

"You're nuts."

"Hear me out. I figure it had to be a felony. A misdemeanor wouldn't put you into hiding. So you're either wanted for a crime or you've jumped bail or escaped prison."

"Got it all figured out, don't you."

Sandy shrugged. "What else can it be?"

"Should have
known
I couldn't fool you." The Savior shook his head and looked away. "The orphan part is true, but I made up the part about the cop telling me to join the army or go to jail. I've been in and out of trouble most of my life. Got picked up after knocking over a liquor store."

"A liquor store…" Sandy was afraid to ask the next question. "No one was shot, were they?"

"Nah. I just flashed a starter pistol. But that didn't matter; got charged with armed robbery. Couldn't plea down. I was only nineteen at the time. I wasn't going up for that, so I jumped bail and I've been on the run ever since."

"Are you wanted for anything else?"

The Savior didn't answer immediately. He was staring past Sandy again. Finally he pursed his lips and said, "Shit. Move back."

"What?"

He shoved him against the sloping concrete wall of the underpass.

"Back!"

Sandy turned to see this guy about his own age in cut-offs and a T-shirt and a scraggly attempt at a beard racing a crummy looking bike full tilt down the slope toward the underpass. He clutched a gray handbag and kept looking over his shoulder.

His eyes widened as he entered the underpass and saw that it was occupied, but the Savior gave him a friendly, reassuring wave and said, "Hey, how's it goin'?"

"Not bad," the guy panted.

Then a lot of things happened quickly, too quickly for Sandy to process fully. Suddenly the Savior was moving, taking a quick step forward and kicking the bike's rear wheel. The guy lost control, hit the curb, and went flying over the handle bars. Sandy watched in shock as the Savior kept moving, following the man as he sailed toward the pavement, leaping as he landed chest first, and landing with his heels driving into the guy's upper back. The muffled crunch of breaking bones turned Sandy's stomach, as did the man's scream of pain.

What
the fuck
? Sandy thought.

"That was my mother back there!" the Savior shouted. He crouched beside the writhing man who was trying to rise but couldn't seem to get his arms to work. "You just rolled my
mother
!"

"Aw, shit!" the guy said, his voice a faint wheeze.

"My
mother
!" he screamed, his face reddening.

"Didn't know, man!" he groaned, every syllable wrapped in pain. "Didn't mean nothin'!"

The Savior turned to Sandy, his eyes wild. "Your turn to be a hero," he said, pointing to the gray handbag beside the man. "Take that back to the old lady he knocked down back near the top of the slope. Tell her you found it on the grass."

Sandy could only stare, stunned.

"Come on, Palmer. Move! I'll meet you over by the basketball courts." He bent again over the fallen man and screamed, "My
mother
!"

"I know, man," the purse snatcher grunted. "I'm sorry… like really… sorry."

He gave Sandy another look, then trotted out the opposite end of the underpass, leaving Sandy alone with the stranger. Gingerly he stepped closer, picked up the handbag, then beat it back to the sunlight and the park.

The Savior's mother? Was she in the park? Was this her bag?

He spotted a cluster of people near the top of the slope and jogged toward them. An old woman sat on a bench in the center of the cluster, sobbing. Her knees and hands were scraped, her stockings torn.

"… just pushed me," she was saying. "I don't know where he went. I never saw him."

The Savior's mother… Sandy shook his head. Not likely. The old woman was black.

"Did you lose this?" Sandy said, edging into the circle around her.

She looked up and her tear-filled eyes widened. "My bag!"

"Where'd you get that?" said a beefy guy, eyeing Sandy suspiciously.

Sandy handed the bag to the woman, then jerked a thumb over his shoulder and stuck to the story.

"I was walking down by the highway and found it."

"Everything's here!" the woman said, opening her wallet. "Oh, thank you, young man! Thank you ever so much!" She pulled out a couple of twenties. "Let me reward you."

Sandy waved her off. "Absolutely not. No way."

The beefy guy slapped him on the back. "Good man."

Sandy made a show of checking his watch. "Look, I've got a meeting," he said to the man. "Will she be all right?"

"We called the cops. EMTs are on their way."

"Great." To the old woman he said, "Good luck to you, ma'am. I'm sorry this happened."

She thanked him again and then he was on his way down the sloping path toward the basketball courts, trying to process the events of the past few minutes. He'd led a sheltered life, he knew. His exposure to violence while growing up had been limited to a few schoolyard shoving matches. But all that had changed with the bloodbath on the train. His baptism of fire.

But in some strange way he found this new incident even more disturbing. The Savior had acted so quickly, with such decisiveness—one moment the purse snatcher had been cycling by, Sandy had blinked, and next thing he knew the man was flat on his face with two broken or dislocated shoulders and the Savior screaming at him about his mother.

What was
that
all about?

And more frightening had been the terrible dark joy in the Savior's eyes as he'd hovered over the downed man. He'd
enjoyed
hurting him. And he'd done it without the slightest hesitation. That was very, very scary. And even scarier was the thought now of dealing with him one on one.

Sandy began to sense that he might be in over his head, but he brushed it off. He wasn't here to threaten this man; he wanted to do him a favor.

But would that matter if he was dealing with a psycho? In an instant the Savior had changed from regular guy to mad dog. And why had he even bothered with the purse snatcher? If the Savior was a wanted felon, why would he interfere with a fellow criminal?

None of this made any sense.

He found the man leaning against the high chain link fence bordering the asphalt basketball courts. He started moving away as Sandy approached, motioning him to follow. Sandy caught up with him in a small grove of trees.

"Why here?"' he said, looking around and noticing that they were partially hidden from the rest of the park. He was uneasy now being alone with this man.

"Because your picture's been in the paper twice this week. Who knows when someone will recognize you?"

"Yeah?" Sandy said, suddenly aglow. Someone recognizing him on the street. How totally cool would that be. "I mean, yeah, sure, I see what you mean."

Sandy sensed that Mr. Hyde had disappeared. The Savior seemed to have returned to Dr. Jekyll mode.

"So tell me," the Savior said. "How are you going to change my lowly criminal life?"

Sandy held up a hand. "Wait. You tell me something first: What was all that business about your mother? She wasn't your mother."

"She could have been. My mother would be about her age if she'd survived."

"Survived what?"

"Death."

Sandy sensed a big sign saying PROCEED NO FURTHER, so he switched to the other question that was bothering him.