Repairman Jack [05]-Hosts (8 page)

"Why not? If you've got a problem you should call family."

"Family?" Kate's eyes blazed to life as she turned back to him. "What would you know about family, Jackie? You vanished from our lives without even saying good-bye! Just a note saying you were leaving and not to worry! As if that was possible. For a while we didn't know if you were dead or alive. Do you have any idea what that was like for Dad? First he loses Mom, then you drop out of college and disappear. He almost lost it!"

"I'd already lost it, Kate."

Her eyes softened, but only a little. "I know how Mom's death—"

"Murder."

"Yes, you always insisted on calling it that, didn't you. It hit us all hard, and you the hardest perhaps, but Dad—"

"I've been back to see him."

"Only rarely, and only after he tracked you down. And I sent you all those letters, invited you to christenings and graduations and anniversaries, but you never responded. Not even to say no. Not once."

Jack's turn to look away, focus on a painting of a Manhattan street scene, but viewed at a crazy angle. Kate was right. She'd made a major effort to keep in touch, tried hard to bring him back into the family, and he'd snubbed her.

"Jackie, you've got a niece and a nephew you've never even met. They used to look at the wedding pictures and point to this young stranger who was one of the ushers and ask who he was."

"Kevin and Elizabeth," he said. "How are they?"

He knew them only from their photos. Kate was one of those people who sent out an annual here's-what-we've-been-doing-all-year letters with her Christmas card, usually accompanied by a family photo. At least she used to. Nothing at all from her for the last few years. Since the divorce.

"They're wonderful. Kevin's eighteen, Liz is sixteen, as if you give a damn."

Jack closed his eyes. Okay. Deserved that. He'd seen her kids grow up long distance, on Kodak paper.

But after he'd cut himself off and reinvented himself here in New York, how could he go back? He could never explain who he'd become. Tom, Kate, Dad especially—they'd never get it. Be horrified, in fact. Took enough to live his own life; didn't want to have to invent another life just for their approval.

"Look, Kate," he said. "I know I hurt people, and I'm sorry. I was just starting my twenties and coming apart at the seams. I can't change the past but maybe I can make up just a tiny bit of it to you now. Your friend and this cult you mentioned… maybe I can help."

"I don't think this is in your field."

"And what field would that be?"

"Appliance repairs, right?"

He laughed. "Who told you that?"

"Dad."

"Figures."

His father had called one of Jack's numbers years ago and heard an outgoing message that went:
This is Repairman Jack. Describe the problem and leave a number and Ml get back to you
. Naturally he'd assumed his son was some sort of appliance fixer.

"He's wrong?"

"I make my living fixing other things."

"I don't understand."

"No reason you should. Let's go someplace where we can sit and talk."

"No, Jackie. This won't work."

"Please, Kate?"

He reached out and gently gripped her wrist. He felt at the mercy of the vortex of emotions swirling around him. This was Kate, his big sister Kate, one of the best people he'd ever known, who'd been so good to him and who was still smarting from the awful way he'd treated her. She thought badly of him. He had to fix that.

She shook her head, seemed almost… afraid.

Afraid of him? That couldn't be. What then?

"Look. This is my city. If I can't help out your friend, I'll bet I know someone who can. And if that doesn't work out, at least we can talk. Come on, Kate. For old times' sake?"

Maybe his touch did it, but he felt a change in her muscle tone as some of the resistance seeped out of her.

"All right. Just for a little while."

"Great. What are you up for—coffee or a drink?"

"Normally I'd say coffee, but right now I think I could do with a drink."

"I hear you. Let's hunt up a place without music."

He took his sister by the elbow and guided her out to the street, then up along Seventh Avenue, wondering how much he dared tell her about himself, his life. He'd play it by ear. The important thing was he had her with him now, and he wasn't letting her go until he'd done something to make up for the hurt he'd caused.

8

Kate stared at the man sitting across the table from her. Jackie… her little brother… though he was hardly little anymore. She supposed she should start calling him Jack now.

They'd come upon a place called The Three Crowns that Jack had said looked good. A fifty-foot bar ran down the right side, a row of booths with green upholstery along the left, all of it oak. Oak everywhere. But not too crowded. The patrons seemed a mix of straight couples and gay males of varying ages, par for the course in Chelsea. The lights and the sound from the TVs over the bar were low and they'd found an empty booth in the rear. No table service, so Jack had made the trip to the bar and just returned with a gin and tonic for her and a pint of Harp for himself.

She quickly downed half her drink, hoping it would help dull the shock still vibrating through her. Jackie! Of all people! And worse, she'd mentioned "my friend" and the cult on his voice mail. She couldn't let him know about her and Jeanette. Nobody could know. Not yet.

Jackie… Jack. A part of her wanted to hate him for the pain he'd caused everyone. Well, not everyone. Tom was too self-involved to worry much about anyone a few inches beyond his own skin. But damn, she and Dad had gone half crazy with worry over Jack.

Yet she looked at him now and felt an urge to smile, to laugh aloud. This might be a terrible time to run into him, but despite everything that had happened—
not
happened, actually—between them, she couldn't deny this heart-swelling joy at seeing him again. Jackie… she'd helped feed him and change him when he was an infant, read him stories and baby-sat for him into her teens. And look at him now. Lord, how he'd changed. He'd been a boy the last time she'd seen him—a senior at Rutgers, one semester to go, but still a boy. A dark and brooding boy after Mom's death.

She still sensed a darkness in him, but he seemed comfortable in his skin now. And how he'd filled out that skin. Jackie had been so skinny as a kid, now she could sense sleek muscles coiling under his shirt. But was that a healing laceration running from the edge of his hairline into his right frontal scalp? Yes, definitely. It looked about four weeks old. She wondered how he'd got it.

He'd said this was his city and she could believe that. He seemed to belong here, moved so easily down its streets. She couldn't tell whether it had adopted him, or he'd adopted it. Whatever the case, they seemed made for each other.

Little brother or not, she had to keep this brief. One drink, promise to keep in touch, then get out of here. Keep the talk on the family, the good old days when Mom was still ruling the roost, keep it off Jeanette and the cult. Kate would find another way, sans little brother, to deal with that.

So they talked.

Actually Kate found herself doing most of it. Mostly about Kevin and Lizzie; she touched—a very glancing touch—on her divorce from Ron, mentioned a few details about her pediatric group, and then ran out of steam.

"See much of Tom?" Jack asked after a lull.

She shook her head. "No. He's a judge in Philly now, you know."

"I'd heard."

"He's on his third wife now. Saw him briefly over Christmas. I didn't see it when you were younger, but you and he look amazingly alike. Put on ten years and twenty pounds, add a little gray to your hair, and you could be twins."

"My big brother," Jack said, frowning as he shook his head. "Of all things, a judge."

Wondering at Jack's tone of chagrin, she raised her glass for another sip but found only ice cubes.

"Time for another," Jack said, taking it from her.

Before she could protest he was up and moving away from the table.

Moves like a cat, she thought as she watched him go.

Time to change the subject. So far the conversation had been pretty much a one-way street. Now it was his turn.

"So," she said as he set the second drink before her. "Enough about me. I need some answers from you. Most of all, I want to know why you simply disappeared from our lives. Was it what happened to Mom?"

Jack nodded. "Indirectly."

I knew it! Kate thought. Knew it, knew it, knew it!

"We were all devastated, Jack, but why—?"

"You weren't there in the car when that cinderblock came through the windshield, Kate. You didn't see the life seep out of her, see the light fade from her eyes."

"Okay. I wasn't there. Neither was Tom. But Dad was and he—"

"Dad didn't do anything about it. I did."

"I don't understand," she said, baffled. "Did what?"

He stared at her a long moment, as if weighing an important decision. Finally he spoke.

"I found him," he said softly. "Took me a while, but I found the guy who did it."

"Who did what?"

"Who threw the cinderblock off the overpass."

The words jolted her. Jackie had gone out looking… hunting… by himself?

"How come you never said anything? Did you tell the police?"

He shook his head. "No. I took care of it myself."

"What… what did you…?"

Suddenly it was as if a mask had dropped from Jack's face. She looked into his eyes now and for an instant, the span of a single agonized heartbeat, she felt as if she were peering into an abyss.

His voice remained low, flat, as cold as that abyss. "I fixed it."

And then the mask was back in place and an old memory flashed though Kate's brain… a newspaper article about a dead man, battered beyond recognition, found hanging upside down from a Turnpike overpass not too long after Mom's death, and she remembered wondering if it might be the same overpass, and if so it should be torn down because it must be cursed.

Could that have been the "guy" Jack said he'd tracked down? Was that why the body had been hung from that particular overpass?

No… not Jackie… not her little brother. He'd never… he couldn't kill. It had been someone else hanging from the overpass. And this man he'd mentioned… Jack had simply beaten him up.

Kate wanted very much to believe that. She turned her mind from the other possibility, but it lingered like a shadow across the table.

"Did… what you did solve anything? Did it make you feel better?"

"No," he said. "I'd thought it would, I was so sure it would, but it didn't do a damn thing for me. And after I… afterward nothing seemed to make much sense. College seemed particularly pointless. I had to get away before I exploded. I dropped out, Kate—
way
out. Spent years in- a blind rage, and by the time I'd blown off some of it and locked up the rest, I'd burned too many bridges to go back."

"Maybe you told yourself that. Maybe that made it easier for you, but it wasn't true."

"It was. And is. My life and your life… they're different worlds. No way you'd understand."

"Understand what? This repair business of yours? Just what is it you fix?"

"Hard to say. Situations, I guess."

"I don't get it."

"Sometimes people have problems or get themselves into situations where the legal and judicial system can't help, or they're involved in something they can't bring to the system. They pay me to fix it for them."

An appalling thought struck her. "You're not some kind of… of hitman, are you?"

He laughed—a real laugh, the kind you can't fake—and that reassured her. A little.

"No. Nothing so melodramatic as that."

"Do you pay people off?"

"No, I just sort of… it's hard to explain. And not the sort of thing I can advertise on a billboard."

"Is it legal?"

A shrug. "Sometimes yes, sometimes no."

Kate leaned back and stared. Who was this man across from her? He'd said he lived on a different world, one she'd never understand, and she was beginning to believe him. He was like a stranger from a faraway planet, and yet in many ways he was undeniably still her little brother Jackie.

First Jeanette, now Jack… her own world, never a comfortable place these past few years, now seemed to be crumbling. She felt unmoored from her life. Wasn't there anything left she could rely on?

Jack said, "Now can you see why I thought it best for all concerned that I keep to myself?"

"I don't know." Earlier tonight Kate would have said no—nothing you could have done would have changed the way we felt about you. She wasn't so sure anymore. "Maybe."

"I think Dad has scoped that I'm hiding something. Know what he asked me last time we talked?" Jack grinned. "Wanted to know if I was gay."