Repairman Jack [07]-Gateways (12 page)

“She could have been from housecleaning, but then she would have been in gray instead of white—and she’d still have to have a badge.” She picked up a phone. “I’ll call security.”

Jack wished she wouldn’t—he didn’t want rent-a-cops messing into this—but couldn’t think of a reason he could tell Schoch.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll be back in my father’s room.”

He’d been keeping an eye on the door, making sure no one else went in there. When he returned, he checked his father to see if he’d moved—he hadn’t—then went to the window and looked out at the parking lot. He saw a slim woman in white walking away through the lot. Heat from the late-morning sun made her shimmer like a mirage.

It was her. Couldn’t mistake that long braid. And now she was climbing into the passenger side of a battered old red pickup.

Jack dashed into the hall in time to see the elevator doors closing. Too slow anyway. He found the stairs and raced down to the first floor. By the time he hit the parking lot, the pickup was gone. But he kept moving, running to his Buick and gunning out to the street. He flipped a mental coin and turned right, telling himself he’d give this ten minutes and then call it quits.

He’d traveled about half a mile when he spotted the truck, stopped at a red light two blocks ahead.

“Gotcha,” he said.

When the light changed he followed the truck out of town and into the swamps. Somewhere along the way the pavement ended, replaced by a couple of sandy ruts flanked by tall, waving reeds. He lost sight of the truck for a while but wasn’t going to worry about that unless he came to a fork. Better to stay out of sight. Luckily there were no forks, and before too long he was pulling into a clearing at the edge of a small, slow-moving stream.

The red pickup sat there, idling, while the woman in white rode downstream in a small, flat-bottomed motor boat piloted by a hulking man in a red, long-sleeved shirt. Jack jumped out of his car and ran to the bank, waving his arms, calling after them.

“Hey! Come back! I want to ask you something!”

The woman and the man turned and stared at him, surprise evident on their faces. The woman said something to the man, who nodded, then they both turned away and kept moving. He saw the name on the stern:
Chicken-ship
.

“Hey!” Jack shouted.

“Whatchoo wanner for?” said a voice from behind.

Jack turned and saw a man with a misshapen head leaning out the driver window of the pickup. With his bulbous forehead, off-center eyes, and almost non-existent nose he reminded Jack of Leo G. Carroll from the opening scenes of
Tarantula
. This guy made Rondo Hatton look handsome.

“I want to talk to her, ask her a few questions.”

“Looks to me like she don’t wanna talk to you.” His voice was high and nasal.

“Where does she live?”

“In the Glades.”

“How do I find her?”

“You don’t. Whatever it is, mister, leave it be.”

Suddenly another guy, thinner and only marginally better looking, jumped into the pickup’s passenger seat.

Where’d he come from?

The new guy slapped the driver on the shoulder and nodded. Neither looked too bright. If someone suggested playing Russian roulette with a semiautomatic, they’d probably say, “Cool!”

The driver gave Jack a little two-finger salute. “Welp, nice talkin’ to ya. Gotta go now.”

Before Jack could say anything the guy threw the truck into gear and roared off. Jack raced back to his car. If he couldn’t follow the girl, then he’d tail these two. Sooner or later they had to—

He skidded to a halt when he saw the Buick’s flat front tire, and the gash in its side wall.

“Swell,” he muttered. “Just swell.”

5

“I don’t get it,” Luke said as he piloted the
Chicken-ship
deeper into the swamp. “Who was that guy?”

Semelee pulled off the black wig and shook out her silver white hair. She didn’t feel like talkin’. Her stomach still wasn’t right.

“He saw me in the room. I think he might be the old guy’s kin.”

“That why he was trailin’ you?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. All I know is I felt so strange in that room. It started as soon as I stepped through the door and got worse and worse the closer I got to the old man’s bed. I started feeling sick and weak, and the air got so thick I could barely breathe. I tell you, Luke, all I wanted to do was get out of there and get far, far away as fast I could.”

“Think it was the guy?”

“Could’ve been, but I don’t think so.”

This man wasn’t just a guy, wasn’t just one of the old man’s kin. This man was the one she’d sensed coming for the past two days, and he was special. She sensed something about him…a destiny, maybe. She didn’t know exactly what, she just knew he was special.

So am I, she thought. But in a different way.

Maybe she and this new man was destined to be together. That would be wonderful. She liked the way he looked, liked his hair, his build—not too beefy, not too slight—liked his brown eyes and hair. She especially liked his face, his regular, normal face. Hangin’ round the clan like she did, she didn’t see too many of those.

Maybe he’d been sent to her. Maybe he was here
for
her. Maybe they was meant to share their destinies. She sure hoped so. She needed someone.

“Well, if you don’t think it’s him made you sick,” Luke said, “what was it?”

Semelee pulled the white dress off over her head, leaving her wearing nothin’ but a pair of white panties. She looked down at her small, dark-nippled breasts. Losers in the size sweepstakes, maybe, but at least they didn’t sag. One of the guys she’d screwed in high school had called them “perky.” They were that, she guessed.

Keepin’ her back to Luke—she didn’t want him gettin’ all hot and bothered out here on the water—she slipped into her cutoffs and a green T-shirt.

“I don’t know. It was like…” She shuddered as she remembered that awful sick feelin’ runnin’ through her body, like she was being turned inside out…“like nothin’ I ever felt before. And I hope I don’t never feel it again.”

She turned and whacked Luke on the leg as hard as she could.

He jumped. “Hey, what—?”

“And I wouldna had to feel it in the first place if you and Corley had done the job you was upposed to!”

“Hey, we did just what we was upposed to. You was there.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“Well, you was watchin’. You saw what happened. The sacrifice was goin’ exactly accordin’ to plan when that cop showed up outta nowhere. I said all along we shoulda just flattened the old guy inside his car and have done with it.”

She hit him again. “Don’t you never learn? The old man had to be done in by somethin’ from the swamp or else it ain’t a sacrifice, it’s just a killin’. And we ain’t about just killin’. We got a purpose to what we’re doin’, a duty. You know that.”

“Awright, awright. I know that. But I still can’t figure why that cop had to come along just then. We never seen him out there before.”

“Maybe he was sent,” Semelee said as the thought struck her.

“Whatchoo mean?”

“I mean maybe whoever was protectin’ the old man today was protectin’ him the other night as well.”

“How can that be? We was the only ones who knew we’d be out there.”

“I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but someone’s protectin’ that old man.”

“You mean like with magic?”

“Maybe.”

Lotsa people’d see what Semelee could do as magic, so why couldn’t there be someone else out there who could do somethin’ different but just as magical? Might be all sorts of magical people out there no one ever dreamed of.

“I ain’t got no idea who right now, but I’m gonna find out. And when I do…”

She reached down and removed a palm-sized toad from the pocket of the discarded white dress. She held it up and stroked its back. This little feller was a relative to the big African marine toads some fool had brought into Florida sometime in the last century. It had only three legs—its left arm was nothing but a nubbin—but it had these swollen glands startin’ behind each eye and runnin’ down its back in a pair of lines. Those glands was full of poison. Every so often a dog would lick or bite one of its bigger cousins and die. This little guy came from the clan’s lagoon where his family had bathed in the glow of the lights for generations, and he was even more poisonous. Just a little drop on a tongue was enough to stop a grown man’s heart.

That had been Semelee’s plan: sneak into the room, press the toad’s back against the old man’s lips, then get out. A minute or so later he’d be on his way to his maker and the job would be done.

She’d have to think of another plan now.

After she set the toad on the front seat of the boat, where it squatted and watched her with its big black eyes, her hand instinctively went to her breastbone to touch—

She stiffened. What? Where is it?

Then she remembered—the thong had broken in the hospital room. As she’d fled the terrible feelin’, she recalled stuffin’ it into a pocket.

She rummaged in the uniform’s other pocket and heaved a sigh of relief when she felt the slim thong. She pulled it out, expecting to see the pair of black freshwater clam shells she wore around her neck. She gasped when she saw only one.

“What’s wrong?” Luke said.

Semelee didn’t answer him. Instead she lifted the uniform and pawed through one pocket then the other.

“Oh, no! It’s gone!”

“What’s gone?”

“One of my eye-shells is missin’!”

“Check around your feet. Maybe it fell out when you was gettin’ changed.”

She checked, running her fingers along the slimy bottom through the inch or so of water.

“It’s gone!” she cried, feeling panic rising like a tide. “Oh, Luke, what am I gonna do? I need them!”

She’d had the eye-shells ever since she was twelve. She’d never forget that moment. Her mother’d taken her to her daddy’s funeral. That was the first time she’d ever seen him…or at least remembered seein’ him. He’d up and left Momma when Semelee was just a baby, soon after they moved to Tallahassee. He was Miccosukee Indian, banished from the tribe for somethin’ Momma never knew. She’d hooked up with him at the lagoon—lots a people livin’ round the lagoon back then was on the run from somethin’ or other—and the three of them moved outta there along with everyone else shortly after Semelee was born.

Her daddy—or rather the man who’d knocked up her momma—had been killed in a bar fight. Some of his Miccosukee kin had decided to give him a proper Indian send-off and his wife and child was invited.

She’d been scared of the whole idea of lookin’ at a dead man, so she’d hung back, as far away from the body as she could. Just getting her first period the day before and feelin’ sick and tired didn’t help none. That was when she spotted the old Indian woman in a beaded one-piece dress starin’ at her from across the room. She had eyes black as a bird’s and hair like Semelee’s, but also the wrinkles to go with it. She remembered how the old lady’d come close and sniffed her. Semelee’d shrunk back, scared, embarrassed. Did her period smell?

The old woman’d nodded and showed her gums in a toothless smile. “You wait right here, child,” she’d whispered. “I’ve got something for you.”

And then she’d gone away. Semelee’d hoped she wouldn’t come back but she did. And when she did she came carryin’ two black freshwater clam shells. They’d been drilled through near their hinges and was strung on a leather thong.

She took Semelee’s hand, pried open her tight-clenched fingers, and pressed the shells into her palms. “You got the sight, child. But it’s no good without these. You take them and keep them close. Always keep them close. You’ll need them when you’re ready, and you’ll be ready soon.”

Then she’d walked away.

Semelee’s first thought had been to throw them away, but she changed her mind. Nobody hardly ever gave her anything, so she kept them. She didn’t know what the old lady had been talkin’ about—“You got the sight,” and all that—but it made her feel special. Till that time in her life she’d never run into nothin’ that had made her feel special. As for “the sight”…maybe someday she’d find out what that meant.

And one day she did find out. And it had changed her life.

“Now just relax, Semelee,” Luke was sayin’. “It’s got to be somewheres. Probably fell out while you was sittin’ in the truck. We’ll find it.”

“We got to!”

She needed those eye-shells to do her magic. She’d kept them slung around her neck so’s they’d never be away from her. But now…

Those eye-shells’d saved her life…or rather, stopped her from killing herself.

It had been a day, a Tuesday in May in her sixteenth year, when everything that could go wrong did. She’d tried new hair dye the night before. Every other one she’d ever tried in the past—and she’d tried them all—didn’t take. The dye just ran off her hair like water off wax. This one was touted as different, and promised to turn her hair a luxurious chestnut brown. And it looked like it might work. It didn’t run off like the others.